By Anthony Faiola, Steve Hendrix, Ellen Francis · The Washington Post (c) 2025
ROME – In announcing plans to rebuild post-World War II Europe in 1947, U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall linked security with economics. Without the United States doing whatever it could to promote “normal economic health in the world,” he said, “there can be no political stability and no assured peace.”
Nearly 80 years later, America’s closest allies in Europe see President Donald Trump’s tariffs as another blow to a fast-fracturing Western alliance that had stood as the most successful peace project of modern times – one whose pillars included shared democratic values, a strategic goal to contain Moscow, as well as flourishing flows of trade and investment.
Trump, casting the United States as besieged by friends and foes, has called the European Union a bloc formed largely to “screw” the United States, has threatened to “get” Greenland – a Danish territory – and stoked European fears by signaling warmer ties with the Kremlin. Trump’s announcement Wednesday of sweeping “America First” tariffs is effectively forcing Washington’s closest European allies to bend a knee with everyone else, portraying countries that fought alongside the United States in myriad wars as freeloaders out to milk the world’s largest economy.
“They rip us off very badly,” Trump said of the European Union on Wednesday when announcing the tariffs. “It’s so pathetic.”
Some Europeans have acknowledged a legitimate U.S. grievance over trade and see an opening to patch the damage through negotiation in the weeks ahead. But others wonder whether the Trump administration is truly serious about finding a middle ground and view the tariffs as an ominous pivot point in the transatlantic relationship.
“I think a number of countries see this certainly as the end of the transatlantic relationship as we’ve known it, which is anchored on long-term stable U.S. security guarantees, a strong security and defense partnership, and significant trade flows across the Atlantic,” said Georgina Wright, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund. “I think there is a sense that that has come to an end.”
The rupture over the past few weeks, European observers say, has seemed magnitudes worse than the transatlantic tensions during the first Trump administration. casting a long shadow over European life and raising core questions about the region’s strategic and economic future. The U.S. shift has left Europe scrambling to respond: vowing massive increases in defense spending and seeking to diversify its economic partners by cautiously engaging China on deepening trade and investment while racing to strike a landmark free-trade deal with India.
Brando Benifei noted that Trump was launching his trade war while Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine continued to rage on the European continent. Benifei, a member of the European Parliament and head of the legislative body’s delegation for relations with the United States, said: “The transatlantic relation is strained on many sides, and the tariffs are a further blow to trust.”
The concerns are not just over new U.S. levies on Mercedes-Benzes or French wines. For some Europeans, the U.S. antagonism seems existential, deepening a sense of abandonment by a stalwart partner.Norway has reactivated two military bunkers north of the Arctic Circle that were last used during the Cold War. In Italy, companies are again selling nuclear shelters.
The once-unthinkable standoff with the United States over Greenland has prompted Denmark to accelerate a move to draft women into the military. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has told parliament that in a now-unpredictable world, his country must pursue nuclear weapons.
“I know that many of you feel let down by our oldest ally,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told E.U citizens in an address hours after Trump’s tariff announcement.
‘America First’ begets ‘Europe First’
Trump’s vision of “America First” has stoked economic patriotism in Europe, threatening to further undermine decades of globalization and cross-border efficiencies that sparked innovation and lowered prices for consumer goods. A growing wave of Europeans is calling for boycotts of U.S. products. In a few short weeks, a Reddit community sharing European alternatives to U.S. products and services has expanded into an online directory. The community, Go European, lists more than 1,200 domestic alternatives to U.S. products, such as Coca-Cola and Nike sneakers.
In some European countries, supermarket chains have begun marking European products with a star on price tags. According to a recent YouGov poll in Germany, more than half of respondents said they now support a boycott of U.S. goods – with 53 percent saying they would “definitely not” or “probably not” continue purchasing U.S. products.
“The tension that we feel on the other side of the pond has kind of awakened some kind of consciousness,” said Toon Vos, a 29-year-old Dutch citizen living in Belgium and one of the coordinators of the Go European directory. “Being able to tap into that sense of European-ness and that we’re doing something together has been the driving factor,” he added.
Britain, which is no longer part of the Europe Union, found that its “special relationship” with the United States did not shield it completely from Trump’s tariffs. The 10 percent levy on British exports was half the 20 percent imposed on those from the E.U. But even that rate risks undermining Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s economic recovery plan.
Officials in the E.U. and Britain are calculating that they can strike trade deals with Washington in the weeks ahead. British officials believe they are in a better position, noting that Trump has said that an agreement with Britain could happen “very quickly.”
An alliance in peril
But regardless of what deals may emerge, political experts said no one in London, Paris or Frankfurt should doubt that Trump is determined to remake the Western alliance for good. The president has shown no fealty to decades of norms and niceties that defined the postwar era. And the coterie of younger conservatives that surround Trump and stand to inherit his movement feels even less attachment to Western Europe.
That sentiment was evident most recently in a leaked Signal chat about Yemen among top U.S. officials. In the chat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth expressed his loathing for European “freeloading,” and Vice President JD Vance bemoaned “bailing out” Europe again, according to excerpts published by the Atlantic, whose top editor was accidentally added to the chat.
“It’s a dramatic new reality and likely an enduring one,” said Desmond King, the Mellon professor of American government at Oxford University.
Trump’s first months have felt dizzying for Europeans. Francesco Mutti, chief executive of Italian food maker Mutti, a major tomato exporter, described himself as “shocked” by the U.S. president’s provocations. He said some European companies, including those who have pulled out of Russia, may begin to see the United States as a risky place to do business, too.
“You have this concept of the fantastic U.S. market in which you think and believe that freedom is its essence. You then are a little bit shocked when you see something completely different,” Mutti said in an interview. “We do not need to make any confusion between Russia and the U.S. They are very different. But I think we are looking at a change” in the way European companies see the United States.
Many European officials believe Trump’s entourage in his second administration includes officials who have an ideological bone to pick with Europe. The Trump administration has made clear that European powers will have to take charge of the continent’s conventional security and signaled intentions to pull back troops to some degree.
But shifting U.S. resources elsewhere is one thing, and threatening NATO allies is another, officials and analysts say. The continent’s leaders have been rattled and galvanized by Trump’s threats to Canada and Denmark, his bid for warmer relations with Russia as he clashed with Ukraine, and his remarks that he won’t protect U.S. allies who don’t spend enough on defense. The moves have left many in Europe facing a reckoning over the region’s decades-long dependence on U.S. military capabilities, intelligence sharing, purchases of U.S. weaponry, and even on the core NATO tenets of mutual defense.
European diplomats privately describe a worst-case scenario in which their strongest ally may one day not just be indifferent, but may actively work against them.
Add to that fresh European fears over the Trump administration’s commitment to democracy and the rule of law, including its intense pressure to thwart Europe’s efforts to contain disinformation – much of it emanating from Russia and seeking to undermine democratic elections or fan anti-migrant and anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment.
“We might have security debates, and we might have trade debates, and we might have debates on policy. But here you have a debate on values, a debate on trade and tariffs, a debate on security,” said Camille Grand, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations and former NATO official. “Definitely, we are in a form of crisis mode.”
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Hendrix reported from London and Francis from Brussels. Kate Brady in Berlin contributed to this report.