How Transactional Diplomacy Is Rewiring the Transatlantic Bond

A new analysis published in the journal Global Public Policy and Governance argues that the second Trump administration has produced a fundamental, and possibly irreversible, transformation in the relationship between the United States and Europe. Ronald H. Linden of the University of Pittsburgh characterizes this shift as a move toward a distinctly transactional and personalist style of international policy, one in which alliances are treated not as enduring commitments grounded in shared values but as deals to be renegotiated according to immediate American advantage. The study, published on 1 December 2025, traces how this approach has strained institutional ties, reframed economic allies as exploiters of the United States, and eroded the democratic leadership role that Washington has occupied since the end of the Second World War.

The analytical core of the article rests on the concept of transactionalism in international relations. Unlike traditional diplomacy, which embeds bilateral relationships in institutions, treaties, and shared norms, transactional diplomacy evaluates every interaction as a discrete exchange with measurable gains and losses. Linden notes that American presidents have always used elements of transactional foreign policy, but argues that the current approach differs in both degree and kind. Where earlier administrations balanced deal-making with commitment to alliances and democratic norms, the present model elevates the deal above the alliance itself. Personal relationships between leaders substitute for institutional channels, and long-standing partners are recast as competitors who have taken advantage of American generosity.

The economic dimension of this transformation is perhaps the most visible. European allies, historically treated as the cornerstone of American trade and security partnerships, have been threatened with sweeping tariffs and characterized as beneficiaries of an unbalanced relationship. In July 2025, the United States and the European Union reached a trade deal that the White House celebrated as a massive achievement, yet European leaders publicly criticized the agreement as unfair, with some describing its signing as a dark day for the union. The asymmetry between the American framing of the deal and the European reception of it illustrates the broader dynamic: what Washington presents as a win reflects a bargaining posture in which allied prosperity is treated as a cost to the United States rather than a shared foundation of the transatlantic economy, which by most measures remains the largest bilateral economic relationship in the world.

Territorial rhetoric has pushed this transactional logic into territory that analysts once considered unthinkable. The administration repeatedly floated the acquisition of Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, prompting a January 2025 opinion poll showing that 85 percent of Greenlanders did not want to join the United States. Similar suggestions about making Canada the fifty-first American state circulated in late 2024. Linden argues that such statements are not merely rhetorical flourishes but expressions of a worldview in which the sovereignty of even the closest allies is negotiable. The suggestion that the United States might take over Gaza, described in early 2025 as transforming the territory into a Riviera of the Middle East, extended the same logic to the Middle East and alarmed European governments already struggling to coordinate a common position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Policy toward the war in Ukraine reveals how transactionalism has sacrificed traditional unity. Rather than sustaining the coalition-based support model of previous years, the administration reframed assistance as a commercial proposition. In May 2025, Trump approved the first shipment of arms to Ukraine, but as sales rather than aid, a shift documented by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker recorded that Europe had become the leading spender on weapons production for Ukraine, a milestone that underscores both European resolve and the widening gap in burden-sharing narratives. At the same time, the president publicly blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war following a massive Russian attack, and a summit with Vladimir Putin in August 2025 concluded without agreement but with considerable ceremony. The mixed signals extended to sanctions: while Washington imposed measures on top Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil in October 2025, it earlier disbanded a task force targeting Russian oligarchs and granted Hungary a one-year exemption from penalties related to Russian oil purchases.

European far-right parties that had celebrated Trump’s return found themselves in an uncomfortable position when his Ukraine stance diverged from their own. Several of his key European allies publicly faulted his approach to the conflict, a rare instance of criticism from within his ideological camp. Meanwhile, the administration’s engagement with European politics took a more direct form. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Vice President J. D. Vance delivered a message that shocked European audiences, promoting positions he had long advanced domestically and signaling sympathy for movements outside the political mainstream. Linden treats this intervention as evidence that personalist diplomacy does not stop at the border of allied domestic politics but actively reshapes them.

The security consequences for Europe have been immediate and measurable. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, allies agreed to boost defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product, a target the White House credited to presidential leadership but which European capitals largely interpreted as a response to doubts about American reliability. Germany announced plans to double its defense spending within five years, and the European Commission’s ReArm Europe plan, presented under the Readiness 2030 banner, is designed to boost defense funding across member states. The United Kingdom and the European Union signed a dedicated Security and Defence Partnership in May 2025, institutionalizing defense cooperation between the two blocs independent of NATO structures. Twenty-six countries committed in September 2025 to deploying troops to Ukraine in a postwar framework, a coalition of the willing assembled precisely because guarantees from Washington could no longer be assumed.

Trade diversification follows the same logic of hedging. European leaders held a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in July 2025, with Brussels calling for real solutions even as trust remained thin, and the expanding BRICS group offers an alternative pole for economic alignment. Linden’s forthcoming work on EU-China relations suggests that Europe’s search for partners is driven less by enthusiasm for Beijing than by the arithmetic of reducing dependence on an unpredictable ally. The erosion of American democratic leadership compounds the problem. Carnegie Endowment analysts have documented American democratic backsliding in comparative perspective, and Freedom House’s 2025 report on freedom in the world describes an uphill battle to safeguard rights globally. When the country that long anchored the democratic world exhibits its own institutional strain, the normative foundation of the transatlantic relationship weakens alongside its material one.

The study also documents the costs to institutional transparency and democratic norms within the alliance itself. The disclosure that senior American officials, including Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, shared attack plans for a March strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen through an unsecured messaging channel raised questions about operational discipline at the highest levels. The administration declined to participate in a United Nations conference on a two-state solution, and a June 2025 report by the Office of the Special EU Representative for Human Rights suggested that Israel’s actions might violate the longstanding EU-Israel association agreement, exposing further divergence between European legal-normative frameworks and American diplomatic practice. European favorability toward the United States fell sharply following Trump’s return, according to YouGov polling, reflecting a public-level cooling that mirrors the elite-level estrangement.

Linden’s conclusion is that the transformation is structural rather than episodic. The push for Europe to reduce defense dependence on the United States, the drive to find other trade partners, and the erosion of American democratic leadership together point toward a Europe that may be post-American in orientation even if it remains Western in identity. Analysts such as Mario Draghi have urged Europe to turn skepticism into action, arguing that the continent possesses the scale to act autonomously if it chooses to aggregate its economic and technological capacity. Whether the transactional turn proves to be a lasting rupture or a catalyst that finally forces European strategic consolidation is the central question the article leaves open. What is clear, on the evidence assembled, is that the assumptions underpinning eight decades of transatlantic order, that allies share interests, that institutions outlast administrations, and that democracy anchors the alliance, can no longer be taken as given.

Subject of Research: The impact of transactional US foreign policy on transatlantic relations and European strategic autonomy

Article Title: Trump and Europe: a transactional transformation

Article References: Linden, R. H. (2025). Trump and Europe: a transactional transformation. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 444-456. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00129-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00129-5

Keywords: transactionalism, US-European relations, NATO, tariffs, Ukraine, Russia, European Union, democracy, defense spending, trade policy, Greenland, strategic autonomy