With Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in custody in New York, U.S. President Donald Trump has seemingly shifted his focus northward – towards Greenland. Recent comments from White House Advisor Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have European leaders fretting that Trump has set his sights on “regime” change in Nuuk.
It remains unlikely that the United States would engage in military action against the territory of a NATO member state. But the whole situation has shed light on the increasingly bizarre reality of US-European relations: European nations are increasingly threatened by the Trump administration on Greenland, trade, and even cultural issues, while continuing to rely on the United States in security terms – and even demanding further security guarantees for Ukraine.
Europe’s continued reliance on America goes a long way to explain the contortions of its leaders to find measly-mouthed ways to avoid criticizing the Trump administration’s actions in Venezuela. Indeed, it is ironic that leaders who spend so much time worrying about the consequences of appeasing Russia are apparently unconcerned by the implications of their appeasement of the Trump administration.
In reality, Europe doesn’t have to meekly accept this situation. The continent may well be dependent on American military strength – and the whims of whoever is in the White House – today, but with the right investments and policy choices, that need not always be the case. For European leaders, the correct response to this moment is not weak statements of condemnation; it is to use this moment to spur the defense progress needed to build genuine strategic autonomy.
The idea that Europe isn’t prepared to defend itself shouldn’t come as a surprise to policymakers. European leaders have long relied on institutions like the EU to prevent conflict within Europe – and on American security guarantees to guard against external threats. Emmanuel Macron sounded alarms about the lack of European military capabilities in 2017, telling an audience at the Sorbonne that “our aim needs to be ensuring Europe’s autonomous operating capabilities, in complement to NATO.”
Eight years, two turbulent Trump administrations, and a major war later, however, Europe is only a little closer to strategic autonomy. Progress has certainly been made in growing defense budgets and in identifying and highlighting military capability gaps, particularly since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. European capitals have raised defense spending by 50% in nominal terms since that time, and committed at the Hague Summit in 2025 to go as high as 5% of GDP in defense spending in coming years.
Yet the new spending has, ironically, highlighted Europe’s real problem: a stubborn lack of initiative. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of papers from European and American scholars outlining what Europeans need to do. Without the United States, for example, a key capability European states lack is a multilateral command-and-control system; multinational European troop deployments cannot be commanded on the field of battle without the United States. Today, this problem is addressed only with various minilateral, kludged together solutions.
Likewise, there is no shortage of good ideas in Europe for innovative defense cooperation mechanisms for procurement and research. Through a variety of new EU-led initiatives, including the European Defense Industrial Programme, the Coordinated Annual Review on Defense, and the Permanent Structured Cooperation, European capitals have been able to gather information about where they are overly reliant on the United States, and even create the mechanisms needed to develop and build comparable systems.
These ideas have not been implemented.
One reason for this lack of initiative is a fear among policymakers that actual planning for defense without the United States might serve to push America away. European capitals remain unclear whether bold action – like insisting that a European be named Supreme Allied Commander (SACEUR) – will make Donald Trump happy or simply exacerbate his hostility towards Europe.
It is certainly possible that, in retaliation, a mercurial President Trump could pull forces from Europe, turning rational preparations into a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Europeans should take that risk. If they wait to build capabilities until American troops are enroute back to the United States – or until some other event shatters the NATO alliance – it will be too late.
Europeans are also internally divided on how to handle the president; some capitals believe the most effective strategy is not autonomy, but rather bootlicking. The cringeworthy description of Donald Trump as “Daddy” is just the tip of the iceberg of a “flatter, appease, distract” strategy pursued by some European states, such as the UK, which sought to delight Trump with an elaborate carriage procession and state banquet.
Policymakers in these states may believe that such flattery has worked to stall American troop withdrawals, but there is little evidence yet that they are correct. The U.S. Department of Defense has already begun some small drawdowns: In October 2025,800 troops returned to the United States from Romania, slowly reducing the 4000 troops deployed to Romania in 2022. Recent reports say that the administration has told European counterparts that they should plan on controlling major portions of NATO’s defense planning by as soon as 2027.
There are even those who engage in wishful thinking that the next American president will reverse or curtail any Trump-initiated troop drawdowns. But the election of another Biden-eque transatlantic Democrat is highly unlikely. Europeans seem to have forgotten that it was Obama who lamented what he saw as “free riding” from Europe, and pushed for the initial pivot to Asia. The next President might even be more antagonistic towards Europeans than the current one; it was, after all, Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference that provided the first major shock of this administration.
Ultimately, the problem is one of time. The transformative policy changes necessary for European defense autonomy – like building European-led ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities – will not happen overnight. Even smaller steps like standardizing security clearances for intelligence sharing or repurposing existing capabilities to fill gaps have not yet been taken.
Donald Trump offers European leaders both peril and opportunity. Policymakers may be wary of building defense too quickly, lest they scare off an already-hostile Trump administration or speed U.S. retrenchment.
But a Europe whose domestic and foreign policies remain hitched to an increasingly erratic United States is one that can’t even defend its own interests. As the New York Times reported just this week, “When asked what was his higher priority, obtaining Greenland or preserving NATO, Mr. Trump declined to answer directly, but acknowledged ‘it may be a choice.’”
The silver lining for European leaders is that the absurdity of this new transatlantic rift over Greenland suggests a generational opportunity to build a better common defense that relies less on the United States. They have spent the last decade creating blueprints for an autonomous defense architecture. But unless European leaders stop talking and start executing, they risk squandering a golden opportunity – and entering a dangerous world with insufficient capabilities of their own.