Since Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the foundations of trust between the United States and Europe have visibly fractured. A striking example came in March, when Vice-President JD Vance told the Munich Security Summit that ‘The biggest security threat facing Europe was not Russia or China…but the “threat from within”.’ This was interpreted by European leaders as an ideologically motivated attack on the liberal democratic values underpinning the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the European Union (EU). Trust works because those who trust do not experience the vulnerability they willingly accept as a source of anxiety. Trust erodes and ultimately breaks down when vulnerability is experienced as anxiety and fear. This is how many European leaders and governments are now feeling in relation to the US security guarantee.
The bedrock conviction of European powers since the founding of NATO in 1949 has been the indivisibility of security between the two sides of the Atlantic. NATO’s Article V guarantee rests on trust among member-states that if one of them is attacked in Europe or North America, the others will come to its defence. At its core, the US security commitment is underpinned by a nuclear guarantee: that in the event of a nuclear attack against NATO Washington would be willing to use nuclear weapons to defend its allies.
However, Trump’s rhetoric and decisions since returning to office are forcing European leaders to confront the unsettling possibility that the US might abandon Europe in the face of an assertive Russia that is willing to use force to pursue its revisionist ambitions.
It would be wrong to think that there have not been previous crises of trust in US-European relations. The Suez Crisis of 1956—when the US used economic coercion to compel the United Kingdom and France to withdraw their military support for Israel’s occupation of Egyptian territory—was a moment when trust broke down on all sides. The transatlantic relationship ruptured again in 2003 when the UK supported the US-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, while other European governments—led by France and Germany—opposed the war. Yet in both cases, trust was eventually repaired.
A breakdown without precedent
However, there are good reasons for thinking that the current crisis of trust in the transatlantic relationship is of a different order of magnitude—one prompting a European response that will fundamentally reshape the nature of its relationship with the US. If Trump’s first presidency unsettled the allies, the second is alarming them. At the root of this alarmism are two key factors. The first is the deepening fear in European capitals that Washington does not believe its security is fundamentally bound up with Europe’s security.
