Europeans have grown up with the comforting idea of transatlantic friendship. It remains one of the core pillars of modern European identity. Our American partners crossed the ocean to liberate the continent, enacted the historic Luftbrücke to save West Berlin from starvation and shielded Western Europe from the grip of the Soviet Union. Yet for decades Europe has done far too little to emancipate itself from its stronger brother or to stand up for its own strategic interests independently.
This ingrained subservience was laid bare recently in Washington. During a preliminary meeting, a senior adviser to Chancellor Friedrich Merz attempted to build rapport with Jared Kushner by invoking the deep historical bonds and shared democratic values of the transatlantic alliance. The response from the American side was notably blunt. They were told that the administration consists of business people, not sentimental friends, and that future relations would be strictly transactional.
There were many moments for Europe to wake up to this reality. The first Trump presidency served as a loud warning bell. Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and the full-scale war in 2022 should have forced a radical shift. However, European leaders preferred to keep quiet and collect the peace dividend. They built expansive domestic infrastructure projects and expanded welfare states but refused to project power forward. The goal was never to conquer, but Europe failed even to secure its own basic economic interests abroad.
Now the continent finds itself fractured. The only nations with the theoretical capacity to lead a new security architecture are severely weakened. France carries public debt above 113 per cent of GDP and a deficit still running at five per cent, even as it promises a defence budget that analysts have described, politely, as a “say-do gap.” The United Kingdom accelerated its own marginalisation through Brexit and has yet to articulate what role it intends to play on a continent it chose to formally leave. Germany is now deploying a €500 billion infrastructure fund to repair what years of neglect damaged, while its economy stagnates with an output gap approaching two per cent of potential. Each of these nations failed to act when they still had the fiscal space to do so.
Crucially, the political classes in these nations have forgotten a fundamental truth about the European Union. The bloc does not function because of historical friendship or shared traditions. It functions because of deep economic lock-in and market integration, all built on the promise that future generations will be financially better off. As economic stagnation sets in and that promise fades, citizens and member states naturally turn away from Western European hegemony.
International relations theory explains the current predicament perfectly. A bipolar world, such as the one dominated by the United States and the Soviet Union, is inherently stable because the rules of engagement are clear and the cost of miscalculation existential. The historian John Lewis Gaddis called it “the long peace” for good reason. A multipolar world, which we now inhabit, brings profound instability. Partnerships are not lifelong marriages; they are fleeting arrangements formed wherever it is immediately opportune. The evidence is already visible: China has not condemned the closure of the Strait of Hormuz following Operation Epic Fury, it has quietly negotiated safe passage for its own tankers. Iran knows exactly which relationships to honour. This is not cynicism. It is the operating logic of a world where no single power enforces the rules universally.
The consequence for Europe, and specifically the E3 of Germany, France and the UK, is severe. The continent must finally buckle up. It must project power alongside the United States where interests align and be prepared to act independently where American priorities contradict Western European needs. This also requires a much harder stance internally. Nations like Hungary cannot be permitted to turn away from Western democratic norms while continuing to receive massive financial subsidies from the bloc.
This necessary projection of hard power is a role for sovereign nation states. It is emphatically not a job for the European Commission. The Commission is an unelected technocratic body of some 32,800 staff. When figures like Ursula von der Leyen attempt to project geopolitical power on the global stage, it simply erodes public trust in European institutions. The Commission is a hyper-efficient hub for standardising the single market. It must reduce its workforce and stay entirely out of foreign policy.
The overlapping crises of 2026 force a brutal prioritisation. The grinding war in Ukraine sits directly on the European border, demanding constant vigilance to contain Russian aggression. Simultaneously, the escalating war with Iran threatens to choke vital international shipping lanes. Twenty per cent of global seaborne oil and twelve to fourteen per cent of Europe’s liquefied natural gas from Qatar flow through the Strait of Hormuz, and European gas prices have already risen sixty per cent since the first strikes on 28 February. For an export-heavy continent, protecting global trade routes is not an optional extra. It is the only way to secure the future, prevent a cascading economic crisis and fund the domestic military industrial base.
The way forward is clear.
- Form an E3 Security Vanguard:Germany, France and the UK must bypass cumbersome EU vetoes and form a unified, transactional military alliance capable of rapid deployment.
- Defund Internal Dissidents: The EU must immediately suspend all structural funding to member states that actively court hostile foreign powers or undermine collective security.
- Confine the Commission: Strip the European Commission of its foreign policy pretensions, mandate a ten per cent reduction in administrative staff and refocus the institution entirely on single market frictionless trade.
- Prioritise Maritime Trade Security: Deploy combined E3 naval assets to secure critical supply chains impacted by the Iranian conflict, treating economic security as equal to territorial defence.
- Embrace Transactional Diplomacy: Treat Washington as a strategic business partner rather than a nostalgic friend, offering clear military burdensharing in exchange for guaranteed trade access.
The friendship was real enough, in its time. The American soldiers who crossed the Rhine were not acting from pure calculation, and the Europeans who greeted them were not wrong to feel grateful. But gratitude is not a foreign policy. Europe’s reckoning with the comfortable story it told itself is not a loss. Handled with some seriousness, it is an opportunity to become the kind of power that earns partnerships rather than inherits them.
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