Europe’s summer of humiliation

Europa kan niet ontkennen dat Trump ons tot concessies dwingt die ruiken naar onderwerping. Het machtigste multilaterale vrijhandelsblok ter wereld is er niet in geslaagd op te komen voor vrijhandel wanneer het er het meest toe doet. (Artikel in het Engels)

Europe entered the summer with the prospect of a potential trans-Atlantic divorce, the future of Ukraine, NATO, and trade all up in the air. With their beach holidays beckoning, European leaders can now take a sigh of relief. The US president who called NATO obsolete, promised to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, and declared the EU a foe, has instead taken their side, for now. This diplomatic turnaround saves Europe from the dire fate of having to face – alone, weakened, and divided – an aggressive Russia, an antagonistic America and an opportunistic China at the same time.

Avoiding an existential threat to the European project while ensuring US alignment is worth a great deal. To placate Trump’s instincts, Europe has had to bow down and pay up, no fewer than three times. First for NATO, pledging hundreds of billions to additional defence and security spending. Then for Ukraine, committing to paying the US for the weapons Ukraine needs. Now for trade, allowing the US to unilaterally multiply tariffs even while Europe promises over 1300 billion dollars in purchases of American energy and weaponry, and in new investments on US soil.

European negotiators can point out that US tariffs on many other countries are higher still, that European product and safety standards remain in place, that US energy is a desirable alternative to Russian energy, that weapons purchases are already booked under NATO plans, that European investments into the US economy happen anyway and that the headline figures of EU purchases are really aspirational. The trade deal may well be less one sided than it appears at first sight. Europe’s plan B for tariff retaliation may well have had its desired effect. Even on plain economic terms Europe may be paying an acceptable price for trade stability, provided Trump does not change his mind and provided steel, pharmaceuticals and other grey areas do not lead to punitive tariffs or quotas.

But Europe cannot hide from the fact that the Trump administration has bullied it into concessions that look and smell a lot like submission. The most powerful multilateral free trade block in the world has failed to stand up for trade when it matters most. EU Commission president von der Leyen was even reduced to painting Europe as a trade villain, parroting the false Trump narrative of zero-sum trade. European countries together lack the economic strength, the military power, and the shared world view to collectively stand up for common values and interests. Europe cannot conduct a trade war with the US because it is divided. It cannot afford one because it is weak. It cannot play the art of the Trump trade deal that mixes geopolitics, hard power, and ego, into the bygone technocratic process for which the EU is designed. America knew all this. The rest of the world knows it now. Europe’s relief is born in impotence and made of humiliation.

Psychologically, will this forced appeasement finally push Europe to take itself seriously as a geopolitical power, or will it instead entrench European division and dependence? Signs are not very promising. European countries are committed to spending more on defence and security, but incentivising common national procurement is the most European it gets. In the meantime, three and a half years into a war of invasion, Europe is still uncapable of producing the weapons Ukraine desperately needs. Deepening the European internal market as a gravitational geopolitical force in areas such as energy, defence, communications and finance, has been powerfully advocated in influential reports but is gaining little political traction so far. More internal market also means more transformation for Europe’s key industries that already suffer from global upheaval and an overall lack of competitiveness. Mobilising more common European funds, perhaps the easiest way forward, is still a taboo, as the recent discussions on the next EU budget have once again demonstrated.

The single biggest European development of the year is the reemergence of Germany as a military actor, with a five-year plan to spend over 600 billion euro on defence and security. But tellingly, the Merz government embraces a ‘Made for Germany’ philosophy, forgoing the opportunity to put a new Germany at the heart of a coalition that could form the bedrock of a future European defence union. In the same vein, the recent Lancaster House Agreement between the UK and France is a bilateral ‘entente industrielle’ in the old mould enabling both countries to occupy a position of national strength in a Europe of security and defence, but not a building block in a bigger proto-European project.

Jean Monnet famously said that ‘Europe will be forged in crises and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises’. Paul-Henri Spaak, on the other hand, observed that ‘there are two types of countries in Europe: those that are small and those that do not yet know they are small’. For Europe’s humiliation to end, Europe’s leading nations must remember Spaak and relearn Monnet.

Extended version of an op-ed published in the Financial Times of 31.07.2025