In vowing to impose punishing tariffs on allies who oppose his ambition to acquire Greenland, Donald Trump has dealt European leaders a brutal lesson: their painstaking efforts to appease the US president and protect the transatlantic relationship have failed.
Since Trump returned to power, EU and Nato capitals have bent over backwards to find compromises, swallowing demands to spend more on defence, accepting unbalanced trade deals, changing regulations to suit the White House and ignoring barbs about Europe’s “civilisational erasure”.
Conciliatory officials argued the approach was necessary to protect two priorities they said could not be sacrificed: maintaining US support for Nato and achieving a fair peace deal in Ukraine.
But Trump’s tariff threats against the UK, France, Germany and five other allies crossed a red line that demanded a change in strategy, almost a dozen European diplomats and officials told the FT.
“It looks like the days of trying to appease Trump are finished,” said one senior European official. “The approach on handling Trump 2.0 is not working,” said a second.
Europe’s response should involve strong public and private condemnation of Trump’s threats, serious countermeasures as floated by France, and the acceleration of plans to reduce the continent’s reliance on Washington, the diplomats and officials said.
“He threatens, he questions international law, he blackmails with methods that are unacceptable to us. That has crossed a red line,” said a third senior EU official. “There is a point where the possibilities of dealing with each other sensibly have been exhausted. And he has now reached this point.”
The past year involved what many of the continent’s decision makers now admit resembled cognitive dissonance: arguing that European capitals needed to tolerate Trump’s attacks on them as allies in order to keep him as an ally.
“This is about a lot more than just Greenland,” said a senior EU diplomat. “It’s about security relations, it’s about economic ties: it’s about trust.”
“Can you really trust him to come to your assistance if he’s at the same time attacking you?” they added. “Do you even want him to?”
Nathalie Tocci, director of the Institute of International Affairs in Rome, said Trump’s tariff broadside meant that: “Past agreements are not worth the paper they’re written on, submission has not paid off, and Trump, like any other strongman, only understands the language of raw power.”
“The only rational conclusion to draw from this is that it’s high time to straighten our backs and retaliate,” Tocci added.
Europe has much to lose from a full-blown rupture in the transatlantic alliance. Supplies of US weapons and intelligence to Ukraine are critical to Kyiv’s ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, and European capitals would not be able to immediately augment either at scale.
Europeans “will have to balance any steps they could take against the risks to their own defence capabilities if the US, for example, blocked the sale of weapons and munitions, either destined for Ukraine or for Nato countries themselves, or cut off the supply of US imagery and intelligence,” said Ian Bond, deputy director at the Centre for European Reform.
The White House’s leadership of the Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations also means Europe fears that by upsetting Trump they could doom Kyiv and the wider continent to a pro-Russia resolution to the war.
The US is by far the most important member of Nato, and its European troop deployments, advanced weaponry, intelligence capabilities and nuclear deterrent have provided the irreplaceable foundation of Europe’s security for the past eight decades.
But Trump’s antagonistic attitude towards the alliance and its members has already rapidly advanced once-fringe ideas of Europe developing “strategic autonomy” from Washington, even in the EU’s eastern capitals that see the US as even more indispensable due to its cold war victory that led to their re-entry into the west.
“We’ve tried flattery, distraction, bargaining, hoping the tornado would pass. It was an analytical and political mistake. This is not about rebalancing transatlantic relations or doing ‘deals’. This is about coercion and both ideological and territorial dominance [by the US],” said Steven Everts, director of the European Union Institute for Security Studies.
Former UK trade department official Allie Renison, now at consultancy SEC Newgate, said Trump’s threat to impose specific tariff rates on different EU countries had put the transatlantic trade relationship into “uncharted territory”.
“We are well and truly into economic warfare and brinkmanship now,” she said, noting that Trump’s move appeared to be designed to “divide and conquer” individual EU member states who negotiate as a bloc on trade matters.
The threat to hit eight European Nato countries that have sent troops to Greenland — which they say was in response to Trump’s own assertion that the Danish-controlled Arctic island needed better security — has significantly sped up that approach, officials said.
“This is not a Danish problem . . . Even the Baltic states know that this is about them too,” said the senior EU diplomat.
“We’ve argued for a long time already that the best US policy for Europe is simultaneously the best policy on Europe’s security: we’ve got to stand on our own feet and demonstrate the ability to handle our own affairs,” said a senior Baltic official. “Sovereignty and territorial integrity are not just fancy slogans for us, they’re our core national security interests.”
Espen Barth Eide, Norway’s foreign minister, said that Nato countries “do our utmost to keep that together because it’s important that all allies stand jointly behind Ukraine. But when these other issues occur including this discussion of acquiring Greenland it is also very important that we stand up for the principles” of sovereignty and territorial integrity. “It’s the same principle that makes us support Ukraine against Russia.”
Nato diplomats described the tariff threat as an unprecedented attack directed at critical allies, and a wake-up call for Europe to drastically reduce its reliance on the US for defence.
But time is not on Europe’s side. The EU’s internal defence readiness plan runs to 2030, and most analysts think that’s an optimistic target to develop any form of significant autonomy, particularly around so-called strategic enablers such as heavy-lift aircraft and long-range missiles — not to speak of a continent-wide nuclear deterrent.
Standing up to Trump “will come at a price, without doubt,” said a senior official from German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s CDU party.
Further escalation “could quite easily spill over into the security dimension of the relationship”, the CDU official said, pointing to a possible reduction of US troops in Europe or support to Ukraine.
“We have to consider that [possibility]. But given this massive coercion, against the foundation of the Nato alliance, the damage would be even bigger if we did not react,” they added.
Additional reporting by Barbara Moens in Brussels and Peter Foster in Venice