The response from a Chinese entrepreneur I recently met in Shenzhen, China, about the war with Iran was striking. "U.S. President Donald Trump's attack on Iran is less important than his threats against Greenland," he said. "When he took such actions against America's oldest allies, I had a feeling Europe would not follow the U.S. line on China," he added. Within the United States, there is a tendency to dismiss Trump's periodic insults toward Europe as routine irritation. But in Europe, these insults appear to have accumulated and finally reached a tipping point. Daniel DePetris, a researcher at the U.S. foreign policy and security think tank Defense Priorities, recently wrote in the conservative British magazine Spectator that "the war with Iran has forced Europe to find its backbone," adding that "European leaders are no longer interested in kneeling and groveling to curry favor with President Trump."
Europe is now moving beyond words into action. The European Union's "ReArm Europe Plan/Readiness 2030" calls for investing approximately 800 billion euros in defense over the coming years. Under the old model, the United States was responsible for Europe's security while Europe generously spent money on American-made weapons. Now Europeans want to build European firms and supply chains with their own money and ultimately gain strategic autonomy from the United States.
This logic extends beyond defense. The European Payments Initiative (EPI) is building a continent-wide alternative to replace Visa and Mastercard. European institutions are seeking alternatives to SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), PayPal and other U.S.-led financial platforms. France has moved its gold bars from New York to Paris, and politicians in Germany and Italy have been debating whether their countries should take the same step. European governments, worried that U.S. companies may one day be ordered to halt the provision of critical services, are exploring alternatives to American software.
One could dismiss all of this as a kind of posturing, but one must recognize that Europe boasts the world's second-largest economy and holds the world's second most widely used reserve currency. Its moves carry significant weight. Perhaps the most meaningful shift is emerging from the European right. Anti-Americanism was once the domain of Parisian intellectuals, student radicals and anti-war parties. The right was instinctively a supporter of the pro-American, pro-European alliance. Europe's populist right once regarded President Trump as something of their patron saint. But the Greenland affair, the Iran issue and Trump's general contempt for Europe have made the president a figure to be avoided across the European political spectrum. The Washington Post reported that populists such as UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen of France's far-right National Rally (RN), Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and many within Germany's far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) are distancing themselves from the United States. Even in Hungary, there are suggestions that a speech by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance endorsing Prime Minister Viktor Orban may have contributed to Orban's electoral defeat.
In Asia, U.S. allies have been hit hard. More than 80% of the oil and gas passing through the Strait of Hormuz was bound for Asia. Many countries on the Asian continent are now reeling from the worst energy crisis in half a century, perhaps in history. As a result, allies such as South Korea and Japan have had to grovel and negotiate with Russia and Iran to secure sufficient fuel. To make matters worse, they have had to endure Trump's tirades and criticism for not actively joining the war with Iran. Many of these countries are now in dialogue with China over energy security and green technologies.
One question that keeps being raised about Trump's foreign policy is: how permanent will its effects be? Can the United States restore the trust it has lost with its allies? Countries have already begun long-term policy shifts, and these will soon take on a momentum of their own. These nations entrusted their security to the United States, only to realize that Washington used this dependency to pressure them heavily. So they have decided to take out a form of insurance to replace the United States in protecting themselves. Who could blame them?
