ANALYSIS: How bad will US-European ties get?

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PARIS - Relations between the United States and Europe have historically had their ups and downs but a storm has now blown up as a result of Washington's recent strategic shift.

Europeans have been caught off guard under a tirade of insults, the threat of steep customs duties and notably disagreements on the war in Ukraine.

But the wind was blowing in that direction even before Donald Trump's return to power.

The world's leading superpower believes it has better things to do than to keep paying for a Europe in economic decline, seeing it as freeloading on defence and not doing much for it commercially in return.

On Ukraine, the European approach is "not necessarily helpful", says Kelly Grieco, a US foreign and defence policy specialist

Since Trump's re-election, the tectonic shift has become an earthquake, particularly over Europe's exclusion from peace talks on Ukraine between Washington and Moscow.

The Republican leader has said the EU was "formed in order to screw the United States" while his Vice President JD Vance has plunged the future US military presence in Europe into doubt.

At the same time, Trump acolyte Elon Musk called German Chancellor Olaf Scholz "an incompetent fool".

"There was already a trajectory of distancing that (Joe) Biden embodied politely and (Kamala) Harris would have embodied politely," said historian Frederic Fogacci, from the Charles de Gaulle Foundation in Paris.

"Trump's approach is more brass, more abrasive," added Kelly Grieco, a US foreign and defence policy specialist at the Stimson Center think-tank in Washington.

Frustration

"There's enormous frustration on this side of the Atlantic about (defence) because there's repeatedly been a warning that Europe needs to step up and prepare for this kind of moment," she said.

"They haven't prepared anything."

Europeans only began the debate about security without US support under pressure, and are still trying to keep Washington on-side.

"It's no wonder that Americans look down on Europeans as dependents," said Stephen Wertheim, from the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

"Europeans present themselves as dependents. If Europe provides for its essential defence needs, that might just breed self-respect and inspire a new respect in Washington and the wider world," he added.

On Ukraine, the European approach is "not necessarily helpful", said Grieco.

"It seems to be still very focused on some kind of US security guarantee for Ukraine and pushing the administration for that," she said.

"The more they're pushing the administration in that direction, the more it is creating more of a widening gap between the two sides."

'Freedom Fries'

Tensions between the two allies are not new. In 2018, during Trump's first term, the New York Times mused: "Is the Trans-Atlantic Relationship Dead?"

"Let's not forget 'freedom fries'," said Grieco, recalling the time in 2003 when the US Congress renamed French fries because of France's refusal to back the war in Iraq.

There was also friction during the Cold War, with the Suez Crisis a symbol of "geopolitical schooling" by Washington, said Fogacci.

The United States and the Soviet Union demanded the withdrawal of French, British and Israeli troops from the Suez Canal, weakening the influence of London and Paris in the Middle East in the process.

"During the Cold War, we operated in exactly this way. Moscow and Washington, in the end, settled the issue between themselves," said geopolitics scholar Frederic Encel.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, "the Americans were wary of a Europe that was integrating too widely towards the east", said Fogacci.

A general view of the emergency summit with European Union leaders to discuss Ukraine and security issues in Brussels, Belgium, on March 6, 2025

"With the war in the former Yugoslavia, they took precedence over Europeans divided by old historical interests and without sufficient military capacity."

Natural allies?

In his book "The Grand Chessboard", published in 1997, former US president Jimmy Carter's national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said: "Europe is America's natural ally.

"It shares the same values; partakes, in the main, of the same religious heritage; practices the same democratic politics."

Nearly 30 years later, the waters are more muddied.

"Across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat," Vance said in February, citing as an example the refusal of Germany's mainstream parties to govern along with the far-right.

Grieco said there was now a clear difference between the two sides on values and the way to express them.

That contrasted the situation in the 1980s, said Fogacci, when "the neoconservatives had an idea of democracy quite compatible with the European one, their equation being that political liberalism leads to economic liberalism and vice versa".

For Trump, "a country has weight through what it knows how to do, what it can offer or its capacity to cause harm," he added.

"It's an 'ahistorical' vision, reducing democracy to decontextualised principles."

Trump, he added, "does not look at states but land and resources".

Convergence is still possible on the question of China, said Grieco.

"In many ways, Europe still remains a natural ally of the United States in the sense that our interests are aligned on many issues. There's a potential alignment on China," she said.