When U.S. President Donald Trump reentered office last year, European leaders felt that familiar sense of dread. And indeed, Trump launched back into his first-term habit of harping on Europe for everything from defense spending to trade imbalances. Vice President J.D. Vance turned the knife even deeper with a speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, blaming Europe for its own demise for things such as government impingement upon free speech and uncontrolled immigration.
European leaders, for their part, initially responded to these provocations with a familiar mix of panic, unease, and warnings that the trans-Atlantic relationship was doomed. But Trump’s latest threats against European countries—in response to their refusal to go all in on Washington’s war with Iran—don’t seem to be eliciting the same response from the continent as before.
When U.S. President Donald Trump reentered office last year, European leaders felt that familiar sense of dread. And indeed, Trump launched back into his first-term habit of harping on Europe for everything from defense spending to trade imbalances. Vice President J.D. Vance turned the knife even deeper with a speech at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, blaming Europe for its own demise for things such as government impingement upon free speech and uncontrolled immigration.
European leaders, for their part, initially responded to these provocations with a familiar mix of panic, unease, and warnings that the trans-Atlantic relationship was doomed. But Trump’s latest threats against European countries—in response to their refusal to go all in on Washington’s war with Iran—don’t seem to be eliciting the same response from the continent as before.
For example, Trump’s recently announced plan to withdraw 5,000 of the roughly 36,000 U.S. troops from Germany was met with a shrug by German leaders. Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, said the decision was “foreseeable.” Compare that to 2020, when the U.S. threat to withdraw 12,000 troops from Germany (admittedly, a higher number), caused a near-meltdown among European policymakers and analysts alike.
Even the threats to remove troops from Spain and Italy haven’t landed with the same oomph. Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said it’s not a decision that she would support but didn’t seem too alarmed about it, likely because she and the U.S. president have had a relatively strong relationship thus far. And Spanish Defense Minister Margarita Robles said in response that the European pillar of NATO must be strengthened and that Spain doesn’t support illegal wars. That hardly sounds like panic.
Why does Europe suddenly seem so chill? Two things seem to be happening simultaneously. First, Trump’s threats have begun to lose their shock value. Second, European leaders have actually started bolstering their own capabilities, meaning that if nothing else, they have a plan if Trump makes good on his threats.
The first term was a real earthquake for the continent. European policymakers had spent decades operating inside the safe assumption that NATO was sacrosanct, that the United States had its own interests in keeping its high troop levels in Europe, and that the institutional foundations built since World War II would hold. During Trump’s first term, Europeans started openly questioning those assumptions, while the second term further confirmed their breakdown.
But after a decade, European leaders are now used to being on the receiving end of the United States’ ire. After all this time, Europeans certainly don’t think Trump’s threats are hollow, but they don’t necessarily expect the worst anymore, either.
On the tariff and trade front, Trump’s threats have certainly come to pass. The sweeping tariffs imposed on European goods in 2025, part of a broader global trade offensive, made clear that the administration was ready to hit Europe where it hurt. But on security and defence, Trump’s threats haven’t yet resulted in any meaningful reduction of the U.S. footprint in Europe, at least not yet. Various institutional mechanisms all work together to slow or stop the most dramatic moves. And today, instead of reacting with panic at every announcement, Europeans are sitting back to see what actually happens.
At the same time, to a degree not fully appreciated in Washington, Europe has actually launched a meaningful response to its ally’s mercurial policy. The continent is now putting its money where its mouth is in the quest for strategic autonomy. This allows it to display a degree of flexibility and sang-froid not possible during Trump’s first term.
Germany has abandoned years of fiscal restraint, suspending its constitutional debt brake to unlock hundreds of billions in defense and infrastructure spending. France and the U.K. have deepened bilateral defense cooperation. The EU launched its Readiness 2030 initiative, which commits 800 billion euros toward defense capacity. Poland is now spending more than 4 percent of its GDP on defense, and the Nordic states—notably Finland and Sweden—have joined NATO creating, with the Baltics, an arc of military coherence across Northern Europe.
None of this means that Europe is ready to go it alone. The continent is still highly dependent on American strategic enablers like intelligence and surveillance, logistics and airlift, and nuclear deterrence, to name a few. The muted responses from European leaders don’t necessarily come from a place of total confidence. Instead, they come from a place of exhaustion, a desire to avoid playing into Trump’s hope of public panic, and a belief that the continent is already taking the key practical steps necessary to respond with clear actions rather than words. As a result, Europe’s new strategy seems to be: acknowledge the threat, disagree with it, point to Europe’s growth in capabilities, then move on.
That said, there are moves that Trump could take that would still upend Europe’s composure. If the United States started reconsidering its nuclear umbrella over Europe or openly stated that it wouldn’t stand by its Article Five commitments, those decisions would send shock waves that the continent couldn’t easily absorb. Similarly, if the United States decided to begin a major troop drawdown in Europe, it would strain Europe’s logistics and command structures to a point that would leave it dangerously exposed.
Here, the 2026 National Defense Authorization Act could provide some comfort. Among other guardrails it puts around U.S. military decisions in Europe, it requires the Defense Department to consult NATO allies and submit a report to Congress before reducing troop levels on the continent below 76,000 for more than 45 days. Of course, this law does not offer an ironclad guarantee against the administration’s reckless impulses, but it could certainly help check them.
Ultimately, whether Europe can sustain its position of relative calm will depend on its ability to convert rhetorical resolve into lasting military power. It’s one thing to shrug off threats to deny Trump the reaction he’s been hoping for. It’s quite another to shrug off threats because panic is no longer necessary and Europe has the military backbone to prove it. Europe is on the right track; it just needs to make sure it keeps going in the right direction. Time will tell how this strategy plays out.
