Europe needs action — and fewer high-stakes summits with Donald Trump

Dalibor Rohac is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.

As the transatlantic alliance braces for this week’s NATO summit in the Hague, its defenders are caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, anyone can see that relations with Washington are as bad as ever — from U.S. President Donald Trump’s musings about Russia at the hastily shortened G7 summit in Alberta to the vacuous so-called trade deal with the U.K. that still hits the country with 10 percent tariffs.

It is increasingly hard for Europeans to find common ground with the Trump administration. But saying it out loud carries the risk of worsening relations and turning it into a self-fulfilling prophecy, much like when France’s President Emmanuel Macron called NATO “braindead” back in 2019. However, to feed false hopes and unrealistic expectations of constructive engagement with the second Trump administration is both dishonest and irresponsible.

What the British and the Europeans need is less talk and more action: on defense, on Ukraine, on trade, and other priorities, without either waiting for strategic direction from Washington or agonizing about Trump’s possible reactions.

Clarity about facts is a necessary first step. With shrewd diplomacy, the upcoming NATO summit may avoid being a complete embarrassment. But that will not change the fact that as community that shares a common strategic perspective, the alliance may not be braindead yet — but it is certainly on life support.

To be fair, due to recent — and ongoing — increases in defense spending by allies, NATO’s joint capabilities are becoming impressive. But what matters for the alliance is the collective willingness to use them. There, U.S. leadership is acutely failing. The planned withdrawals of U.S. troops from Europe will inevitably cast a long shadow on the summit’s proceedings.

Worse yet, at a recent congressional hearing, U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth struggled to answer a simple question about the U.S. commitment to NATO’s Article 5. Likewise, he failed to rule out planning for a U.S. invasion of Greenland. Even the debate about increasing defense spending to 3.5 or 5 percent has to be read against the background that the United States is unwilling to increase its own defense budget to such levels — quite the contrary.

Then, there’s Ukraine. We are past the two-week deadline set by President Trump to assess Russia’s willingness to engage constructively in peace negotiations, to which the Kremlin responded by pounding Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure with massive drone and ballistic missile attacks. The “coalition of the willing” appears to be sitting in the sidelines, waiting for Washington to make a move. That’s a mistake.

No disinterested observer, after all, can avoid the impression that the administration’s preferred policy is — well — to do nothing. “I’m very disappointed in Russia,” Trump said at a press conference earlier this month, before adding that he was also “disappointed in Ukraine” and appearing to give credit to Vladimir Putin for Russia’s sacrifices in World War II. The same day, June 12, Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Russia on its National Day — a step not taken by a U.S. administration since 2022. Meanwhile, Hegseth assiduously dodged answering the question of whether Russia is the aggressor in the war.

The Russian rhetoric indicates the direction of travel is toward normalizing the U.S.-Russian relationship. | Maxim Shipenkov/EFE via EPA

The Trump administration might be constrained by the fact that many of the sanctions against Russia are mandated by Congress and thus hard to reverse. The Russian rhetoric indicates the direction of travel is toward normalizing the U.S.-Russian relationship, not toward Senator Lindsey Graham’s punitive bill penalizing countries buying Russian oil with a de-facto trade embargo.

All of these facts are unpleasant — but they are part of the reality that the U.K. and Europeans have to deal with. The best way to do so is with stoicism and determination — and with a European version of Teddy Roosevelt’s dictum about being quiet and carrying a big stick.

The EU is a $20-trillion economy. The U.K. adds another $4 billion, give or take. With a leadership that understands what is at stake — and it appears that Macron, Germany’s Friedrich Merz, Poland’s Donald Tusk, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, and Commission President Ursula von der Leyen do, among others, do — it can re-arm itself and bankroll Ukraine to eventual membership in the European bloc.

Both the U.K. and the EU should be also pursuing, jointly, an ambitious agenda of trade liberalization, working around America’s arbitrary protectionism rather than trying to accommodate Trump’s every whim. Talk of “special relationship” notwithstanding, Trump’s commitment to protectionism should provide a straightforward impetus for likeminded and geographically close economies to huddle.

On all of those fronts, the British and the Europeans need action – and definitely fewer high-stake summits at which Trump tries to épater les bourgeois. The current moment in transatlantic relations shall pass and we will see a day when the United States will be ready to be a constructive partner again, one hopes. Until then, however, both the U.K. and the EU are committing an act of self-harm by letting the parameters of the American political debate frame the conversations on security, Ukraine, and trade that the old continent needs to have.