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

The starting point of the analysis is the sheer unpredictability of the new American posture. Political positions, the paper observes, now change like daily specials on a menu, and a flood of true and false information makes fact-based political discourse increasingly difficult. The United States under Trump 2.0 still wants to be a hegemonic power, but no longer a hegemon in the sense of the liberal, rules-based world order that it largely built itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this explicit in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, describing the post-Cold War belief that all nations would join a democratic, Western-led community as a dangerous delusion rather than a fantasy. For a political community like the EU, which is founded on rules- and values-based reliability, this is more than uncomfortable news; it is the counter-concept to everything the supranational project was designed to represent.

Kotzur grounds the debate in etymology and political philosophy. Autonomy, from the ancient Greek autos and nomos, means the ability to live under one’s own laws, to make informed and uncoerced decisions. Strategy derives from the art of leading an army. Combining the two, the EU implicitly makes a dual claim: the capacity to decide independently, and the capacity to do so in light of its own interests and values. Strategic autonomy therefore fuses factuality and normativity. It demands a pragmatic view of what is realistically possible and a self-confident view of what ought ideally to be done. Crucially, the paper identifies two preconditions that apply across all dimensions of the concept. Autonomy does not mean total self-sufficiency; it means not being overly reliant on any single other actor, and it means possessing genuine influence, understood not as coercion but as the ability to build sustainable partnerships.

French President Emmanuel Macron articulated the vision of strategic autonomy, or even strategic sovereignty, in 2017, partly in response to internal crises and partly to Trump’s first-term attacks on NATO. For too long, the analysis notes, other member states including Germany ignored the ambition. Macron was not proposing a new political theory of integration or a radical rebalancing of powers between Brussels and the capitals. He was calling for a concrete power to act, above all the potential to become a serious but more independent global player in security and defence. The second Trump term, with its more elaborate version of Trumpism, has given that call renewed urgency and taught Europeans, rather the hard way, that their honeymoon with history is over.

That honeymoon had deep roots. From the founding of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the EU saw itself as a pure force for peace, a normative power that could afford to neglect hard military capability because it believed it could rely completely on American protection. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine exposed this self-conception as short-sighted, and Trump’s tariff politics have done the same for the EU’s role as a global economic player. An impactful peacekeeping actor, the paper argues, must be ready to defend itself and capable of military action if it wants to be taken seriously as a global peacemaker. The geopolitical awakening triggered by the war and by shifting American priorities now demands innovative readjustment in all three dimensions of the Union’s claimed abilities to act.

On the geopolitical dimension, the analysis traces the pressure back to the Helsinki Final Act, the mid-1970s foundation of European security that Russia shattered with its invasion of Ukraine and its attempt to unilaterally reshape the continent’s security architecture. This breach creates military as well as political pressure and serves as a litmus test for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and its integral defence component. The Union’s legal competence is comprehensive, extending to all areas of foreign policy and all matters of security, including conflict prevention, conflict management and post-conflict rehabilitation. Trumpism has intensified the strain, through demands for fairer burden-sharing within NATO, nonchalant attacks on the territorial sovereignty of Greenland, and contradictory remarks on alliance obligations, while simultaneously seeking to isolate EU member states from one another. Paradoxically, the paper suggests, Trump acts as a catalyst for EU governance.

Reform options are on the table. One would be to communitise foreign, security and defence policy, replacing intergovernmental unanimity with qualified majority voting and gradually building a Security and Defence Union. Another, less likely scenario would remove these competences from EU structures altogether. Neither appears probable. More plausible, in keeping with the piecemeal engineering that has shaped integration since its beginnings, are incremental steps of the kind outlined in the Strategic Compass of 2022: joint risk analysis and a gradual shift of competences to the EU level. Twenty-five member states have already established Permanent Structured Cooperation under the Lisbon Treaty, a framework that seeks to balance national sovereignty with credible collective defence. Such coordination, the paper stresses, requires a shared strategic culture and, above all, money. Strategic autonomy does not come for free. Early in March 2025, ahead of the EU crisis summit on Ukraine, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented a plan to rearm Europe, including greater flexibility in debt rules, which the Commission says could mobilise almost 800 billion euros. Without Trump’s pressure, the paper notes, it would never have reached the Commission’s agenda. Discussions of a French nuclear umbrella and Franco-British cooperation on a coalition of the willing for Ukraine point in the same direction.

The economic dimension is equally turbulent. At the 2025 Davos World Economic Forum, von der Leyen declared that the cooperative world order imagined twenty-five years ago had not materialised, and that the world had entered an era of fierce geostrategic competition in which sanctions, export controls and tariffs are used routinely. Trumpism has adopted an aggressive tariff policy that disregards international trade norms, yet the Union still seeks to stand for rules-based multilateral trade, the lowering of barriers, a revival of World Trade Organization principles, and goals such as the European Green Deal and carbon neutrality by 2050. At the same time, the paper highlights an uncomfortable concession: the European Commission has admitted that its own trade deal with the United States most likely does not meet WTO standards, and the promise of purchasing American weapon systems after a meeting at Trump’s private golf club can be read as surrendering a degree of autonomy. The author warns of a neo-feudal style of politics in which strategic accommodation replaces strategic autonomy. Even so, he argues, transatlantic cooperation is not over; its parameters have simply changed fundamentally. Europe must now confront the United States as a strong actor with its own agenda, relying on its economic strength, innovation capacity and proven ability to generate new integration dynamics, as shown by recent trade agreements with Indonesia and New Zealand and the opportunities presented by MERCOSUR.

The third dimension is normative. Article 3(5) of the Treaty on European Union commits the Union to upholding and promoting its values, contributing to peace, sustainable development, free and fair trade, the eradication of poverty, human rights and the strict observance of international law. Trumpism stands in stark contrast: drastic cuts to foreign aid, defiance of international norms such as unlawful attacks on smuggling boats in the Caribbean, and broad threats to rules-based multilateralism. Yet the paper recalls that the EU’s self-image as a legal community, a creation of law in the words of the first Commission President Walter Hallstein, has always been more than functional. Law, conceived as an antidote to force and a carrier of a new spirit of cooperation, can become the cement holding divergent forces together. The EU should therefore continue to act as a mediator for democracy, the rule of law and universal human rights, fill the gaps Trumpism has opened in multilateralism, and pursue genuine dialogue on an equal footing, especially with the countries of the Global South.

The deeper lesson, Kotzur concludes, is that the old transatlantic normality was always partly an illusion. Even before Trump, America’s advocacy of law-based multilateralism was driven to some extent by an America First mentality, and scepticism toward multilateral institutions has grown as China, Russia and Global South states assert their own right to shape international norms. After the first Trump presidency, European leaders erred in dismissing him as a temporary phenomenon. The new normality demands pragmatism, conceptual clarity and self-assurance: the capacity to defend itself as a geopolitical actor, new trade partners and free trade agreements as an economic actor, and honest alliances built on mutual understanding as a norm-setter. Values and interests, realism and idealism, should not be played off against each other in dichotomous thinking. Trump 2.0, the analysis suggests, is keeping Europe on its toes, which may not be such a bad thing if old Europe wants to reinvent itself as a better version of what it has been so far.

Subject of Research: European Union strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism and the erosion of multilateralism

Article Title: Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism

Article References: Kotzur, M. (2025). Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 457-466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00133-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00133-9

Keywords: strategic autonomy, European Union, Trumpism, multilateralism, Common Security and Defence Policy, NATO, trade policy, normative power, Global South, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, World Trade Organization