The starting point of the analysis is the scale of the external shock. The United States, historically Europe’s closest ally, is now using its enormous market power as a geoeconomic weapon, imposing tariffs and regulatory pressure on partners and adversaries alike. According to the paper, the Trump administration’s approach is not an aberration but the product of a coherent ideological project, documented in initiatives such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to reshape American governance and its relationship with the world. For the EU, this means confronting a dual challenge: an economic assault on its export-driven model and a political assault on the liberal-democratic norms on which the Union itself is founded.

Technically, the EU’s response rests on an expanding arsenal of geoeconomic instruments. The paper highlights the Anti-Coercion Instrument, adopted in December 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2023/2675, which allows the Union to retaliate against third countries that apply economic pressure on member states. Alongside it stand the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which regulate the power of large technology platforms, and the International Procurement Instrument, which opens third-country public procurement markets reciprocally. The European Economic Security Strategy of 2023 adds a further layer, focusing on the resilience of supply chains, the prevention of technology leakage, and the integration of economic security monitoring into the European External Action Service. Together, these instruments mark what the author describes as a geo-economization of EU policy: the deliberate fusion of economic regulation with strategic objectives.

Yet the empirical record shows how difficult de-risking remains in practice. Despite the EU’s defensive measures, its strategic dependency on China has actually increased, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, according to research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics cited in the study. The EU’s own China Strategy of 2019 famously described China as a partner, a competitor and a systemic rival simultaneously, a formulation that captures the Union’s ambivalence. While Washington and Beijing decouple, Brussels and Beijing have deepened trade ties, leaving the EU exposed precisely at the moment it seeks strategic autonomy. This tension between declared policy and measurable dependency is one of the central weaknesses the analysis identifies in the Union’s current approach.

To diversify away from this exposure, the EU has accelerated an ambitious trade agenda. Negotiations on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Indonesia were finalised on 23 September 2025, with entry into force expected by 1 January 2027. The Commission has also proposed the adoption of the long-stalled Mercosur and Mexico agreements, and is developing new instruments such as clean trade and investment partnerships and raw-materials partnerships designed to secure critical inputs for the green and digital transitions. The Global Gateway initiative, the EU’s answer to China’s Belt and Road, channels infrastructure investment into partner countries as a tool of geopolitical influence. The paper treats these moves as evidence that Brussels is rediscovering itself as a geopolitical union, at least in the economic domain.

Security policy shows a similar pattern of pragmatic acceleration. The European Defence Fund, a component of the Common Security and Defence Policy with a budget of nearly 7.3 billion euros for 2021 to 2027, coordinates national investment in defence research and improves interoperability between national armed forces. The European Peace Facility has mobilised 6.1 billion euros to reimburse countries exporting defence equipment to Ukraine, and the EU and its member states had collectively committed 63.2 billion euros in military support for Ukraine as of September 2025. Under the ReArm Europe plan and the NATO summit declaration of The Hague in June 2025, allies committed to reaching defence spending of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, of which 3.5 percent counts as core defence expenditure and 1.5 percent covers defence-related items such as infrastructure. The proposed 2028 to 2034 EU budget further embeds defence as a Union-level funding priority.

What the Union conspicuously has not done, according to the study, is reform its own governance. Treaty change, qualified majority voting in foreign and security policy, and deeper fiscal integration all remain blocked by the lack of political will and consensus among member states. Governments in Hungary and Slovakia, along with much of Europe’s right-wing populist landscape, favour a different course altogether, arguing that Europe should seek a balance with Russia through trade and concessions even as Russia rebuilds an empire on the continent’s eastern frontier. The paper contrasts this position with the view, articulated in Foreign Affairs, that a settlement of the Ukraine war favouring Russia would pose an existential threat to Europe. This fundamental disagreement over strategy is precisely what makes governance reform impossible and policy reform the only feasible path.

The author characterises the focus on policy reform as a pragmatic approach with genuine merits. It allows the Union to act quickly with the instruments it already possesses, avoiding the years of intergovernmental negotiation that treaty change would require. It also preserves the institutional status quo at a moment when the legitimacy of the entire European project is under ideological attack, including from within the United States, as illustrated by Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, which criticised European democratic norms. In this reading, the EU’s regulatory state, its single market and its trade competence are its strongest cards, and playing them aggressively is a rational adaptation to a hostile environment.

But the strategy carries a structural vulnerability that the paper places at the centre of its conclusion. Policy reform depends on supportive governments in the member states, and those governments are precisely what Trumpism seeks to change. Right-wing populist parties across Europe, emboldened and networked by their American counterparts, could win power in large EU countries and reverse the geoeconomic turn from within, blocking sanctions, diluting the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and steering the Union toward accommodation with Moscow. The analysis, drawing on recent scholarship on the alliance of the new right, warns that the entire edifice of pragmatic reform rests on a political foundation that could erode at the ballot box. Policy instruments, however sophisticated, cannot protect an institution whose member states no longer share its strategic premises.

The study thus answers its own title question with a qualified negative. Policy reform short of governance reform may suffice to manage the economic shock of Trumpism in the short term, and the evidence of the past two years, from defence spending commitments to new trade agreements, shows a Union capable of remarkable tactical adaptation. Yet without eventual governance reform, the EU lacks the resilience to withstand a political shock, namely the capture of major member-state governments by forces hostile to the integration project itself. The paper frames the present moment as a window of opportunity in which the Union can use the external threat as a catalyst for internal renewal, while acknowledging that whether that window remains open is a question that European voters, not Brussels technocrats, will ultimately decide.

Subject of Research: EU policy and governance reform in response to Trumpism and geoeconomic pressure from the United States

Article Title: Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?

Article References: Regenbrecht, J. (2025). Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 422-432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Keywords: European Union, Trumpism, geoeconomics, governance reform, EU trade policy, economic security, defence policy, right-wing populism, strategic autonomy, Ukraine, China, NATO