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 editorial traces an unexpected political trajectory. Unlike right-wing populist politicians in Europe, Trump was not clearly identified by party or political inclination until 2015, the year he announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency. For much of his career he worked as a marketeer, stamping his name on hotels, condominiums, wine, neckties, steaks, and even what the authors describe as a bogus university. The American political establishment did not take him seriously. Yet a significant element within the evolving core of the Republican Party did. Rockman and his colleagues describe how Trump found a way to channel resentment against prevailing elites, and how a central pillar of his pitch was the claim that America was being taken advantage of by its purported allies and by the rest of the world. That framing, the authors note, was not the whole of his appeal, but it was an essential structural component of it.

The intellectual core of the Trump approach to world affairs is captured in the slogan America First, a phrase previously associated with pre-World War II American isolationists. Some observers, the editorial notes, have defined America First as America Alone. In the authors’ analysis the doctrine has two operational components. The first is transactionalism: American international policy should be based on self-interested advantages in international dealings rather than on ideological differences. The second concerns the instruments of statecraft. Soft power, the capacity to attract and persuade through culture, values, and institutional credibility, should be eliminated, while hard power should be enhanced. This inversion matters technically because soft power is a slow-building asset embedded in alliances, treaties, and reputational capital, whereas hard power is deployed directly. A strategy that liquidates the former to expand the latter changes the cost structure of every future negotiation the United States enters.

The first Trump administration provided a proof of concept. The editorial records that many steps were taken to undo prior international commitments, including the Paris accords on global climate change and the six-power agreement with Iran designed to stem the potential development of nuclear weapons. Both withdrawals illustrate the transactional logic in practice. The Paris agreement rested on diffuse, long-horizon collective action, a structure that yields no immediate bilateral leverage and therefore carries little value under a purely transactional calculus. The Iran accord, by contrast, was a negotiated constraint exchange, verifiable in its terms but revocable by any successor government, which made it vulnerable to a doctrine that weighted immediate advantage over institutional continuity. Climate cooperation and nonproliferation are both classic transboundary common goods, and the editorial frames their erosion as precisely the kind of damage that motivates the Special Issue.

Guardrails, however, were present during the first term. The authors attribute this partly to what they describe as the president’s limited attention span, which worked in some measure to soften the actual policy product. This observation has analytical significance for students of governance. Policy outcomes in presidential systems depend not only on the preferences of the chief executive but on the friction of implementation: career civil servants, legal review, allied pushback, and the sheer bandwidth required to convert intentions into regulations and diplomatic actions. In the first administration, that friction absorbed much of the radical energy. Institutions acted as dampers, and the deviations from international norms, though real, were buffered by the residual authority of the foreign policy establishment.

The second presidency removed those dampers. The editorial states that by the time Trump reappeared as president after losing the 2020 election, preparations for an even more radical departure from international norms were in place, no longer to be disturbed by the existing foreign policy establishment. In a striking formulation, the authors invoke reverse biblical parlance to describe the transformation of American foreign policy power as the capacity to turn alms into arms. The image conveys a substitution of coercion for inducement. Where the traditional postwar toolkit relied on aid, membership benefits, and shared institutions to align other states’ incentives, the renovated toolkit substitutes direct pressure. The technical consequence is a shift from repeated-game cooperation, in which states invest in reputation across many interactions, to one-shot bargaining in which every relationship is priced independently.

The contributions gathered in the Special Issue analyze how these radical plans have come to some measure of fruition and what they have done to the global system. According to the editorial, the articles examine effects on regional alliances, on the production of common goods across national borders, and on the dilution, if not full elimination, of soft power resources. The concept of common goods is central to the analysis. Public goods such as climate stability, pandemic preparedness, and open trade routes suffer from underprovision when the largest contributor withdraws, because no single smaller state can substitute for its scale. When the hegemonic guarantor of an order converts its contributions into bilateral transactions, the collective-good equilibrium of the entire system shifts, and regional powers must decide whether to backfill the gap, hedge, or pursue autonomous provision.

The editorial also directs attention to the demand side of the Trump phenomenon, exploring why it has been successful in gaining power in the United States. The authors connect that domestic success to the international consequences: the same anti-elite, anti-establishment resentment that propelled the candidacy supplies the political energy for dismantling the institutional commitments that elites built. This coupling means that the durability of the transactional turn cannot be assessed by studying diplomacy alone. It requires understanding the constituent coalition within the Republican Party that took Trump seriously when the establishment did not, and the conditions under which that coalition continues to reward the abandonment of multilateral commitments. The Special Issue’s contributors treat this domestic-international linkage as a single analytic problem rather than two separate fields.

The final strand of the editorial concerns reconstruction. The authors write that the contributions consider how global policy and institutions must now be conceived and remade in the aftermath of the Trump disruptions. That question has a technical dimension. Institutions designed in the mid-twentieth century assumed a stable American commitment anchored in ideological alignment and reputational investment. If transactionalism persists across administrations, then effective redesign may require mechanisms that do not depend on the goodwill of a single hegemon: distributed financing, automatic compliance incentives, and coalition structures in which middle powers carry larger shares of provision. The editorial, published as an open-access framing piece in Global Public Policy and Governance in December 2025, positions the Special Issue as an early empirical accounting of what breaks when the rules-based order is run on a strictly self-interested ledger, and as a starting point for thinking about which parts of global governance can be rebuilt to withstand it.

Subject of Research: The impact of the America First doctrine and two Trump presidencies on global governance and the international order

Article Title: Trump and globalism

Article References: Rockman, B., Jing, Y., Pegram, T., & Traniello, C. (2025). Trump and globalism. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 303-304. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00139-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00139-3

Keywords: Donald Trump, globalism, global governance, America First, foreign policy, soft power, hard power, international order, transactionalism, Paris accords, Iran nuclear deal, common goods