European elites – brought up to believe the transatlantic relationship was all that mattered – are completely unprepared for American aggression towards Europe.
Ben Wray is a freelance journalist and researcher based in the Basque Country, Spain. He is co-author of ‘Scotland after Britain: The two souls of independence’ (Verso, 2022).
In 2025, American imperialism is perhaps the most visceral it has ever been.
For much of America’s history, the US shied away from a role as a global power despite its economic importance, preferring to quietly build-up control in its ‘backyard’ while remaining in the shadow of the European empires.
It wasn’t until the post-World War II era that the US took on the mantle of global hegemon and was pivotal to establishing international institutions like the United Nations and GATT (the forerunner to the WTO). The US never played by the rules it established for the world, but it at least paid lip service to the ideas of international law and human rights.
Under George W. Bush, the neo-conservative project of ‘full spectrum dominance’ was embraced, but it never dispensed with the notion of a universal set of rules to govern global affairs. Nor did it see any need to savage its allies, instead seeking to build broad coalitions of ‘liberal-democracies’ against a select group of ideological enemies (‘the axis of evil’).
Today, American power has dispensed with all hypocrisies: it openly rules by bullying, bilateral deal-making and – if necessary – brute force. It is actively seeking to destroy the international institutions it once established: the UN and the WTO. And it has no over-arching agenda to impose ‘freedom and democracy’ on the world as the neo-conservatives wished, instead dealing with all countries in a transactional fashion.
Joe Biden made a major contribution to this shameless new era of American imperialism with his dedicated support for the Gaza genocide. But Trump appears to be hell bent on taking great power politics to its logical conclusion. The US President stated clearly in his inauguration speech that America was from now on “a growing nation” which will “expand our territory”.
Some responded to Trump’s expansionist statements about Greenland and the Panama Canal as if they were, at best, bluster, or at worst, a bargaining chip. It is starting to become clear that he was in fact deadly serious.
The FT reports that Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen had a conversation with Trump about Greenland last week in which she offered the US “more co-operation on military bases and mineral exploitation”. Danish deference did not stop the conversation going badly.
“The intent was very clear,” one person on the Danish side briefed on the call said. “They want it.”
Trump imagines himself as a modern-day Roman emperor, seeking to cement his political legacy through territorial conquest. He sees European dependency on the United States as a weakness to be exploited. The European response to this has, unsurprisingly, been like a rabbit in the headlights.
The fact that Denmark is in NATO is neither here nor there for Trump. For the US, NATO is the extension of American military power into Europe. In this transactional era of American hegemony, if a NATO member is getting in the way of American objectives, membership rules can easily be shunted aside.
Trump’s expansionism clearly takes inspiration from Israel, which has in the last year expanded its frontiers deeper into Lebanon and Syria, as well as intensifying its settler-colonial rule over Palestine. Naive European governments which have gone along with Israeli expansionism presumed that Netanyahu breaching the most basic principles of international law would have no significant consequences beyond the Middle East. They may turn out to be more wrong than any of us ever imagined.
If Israel can expand deeper into Syria, why can’t the United States take Greenland? When there’s no rules anymore, when the Westphalian system of state sovereignty is run roughshod over, then – as Thucydides said more than 2500 years ago – “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. Europe may find American power more uncomfortable if they are on ‘the weak’ side of that equation.
Part of the reason that Europe is so ill-prepared for American aggression is because European elites wrongly assumed that Ukraine was as important to the US as it was to them. They thought that they had joined a grand, civilisational alliance to beat back the Russian hordes in the name of democracy and freedom, drawing on nonsense analogies to compare Putin to Hitler, arguing (without evidence) that Russia could go on to invade other European countries if they defeat Ukraine.
In fact, for the US – which is more than 9,000 kilometres away from Ukraine – Russia’s invasion was not an existential threat in the slightest. Indeed, it was an opportunity, not just to weaken Putin and pressure China, but to increase European military and energy dependence on the United States.
That is exactly what has happened. The FT reports that after Russian gas supplies through Ukraine were ended at the start of January, a bunch of American Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) tankers set for Asia abruptly changed course, and headed for Europe.
“Sending US LNG cargoes to Europe in January, rather than Asia, would lead to as much as $5.3mn in higher profits per cargo,” the FT piece states.
It’s not just because of LNG exports that America – the largest oil & gas producer in the world – has Europe exactly where it wants it. Europe is completely technologically dependent on the US: the digital infrastructure of the continent would collapse overnight if American companies pulled out. It also relies on American financial infrastructure for global trade and needs the Federal Reserve to provide dollar liquidity if ever there is a financial crisis. Europe is neither economically, technologically or militarily prepared for American aggression.
It’s exactly because of this dependence on the US that we are not seeing European elites repeat the same hysteria about Trump as they did with Putin, despite the fact that – in many ways – Trump and his MAGA movement are much more deserving of a panicky response. Trump, after all, is threatening to take the territory of a NATO and EU member, by force if necessary. His chief ally, Elon Musk, is organising social media campaigns to depose governments in the UK and Germany and replace them with far-right parties (remember the frenzy about Russian disinformation campaigns?). Most of all, unlike Russia, the United States actually is the most powerful country in the world which spends as much on its military as the next nine largest military spenders combined, meaning it is capable of backing-up rhetoric with action.
But European governments cannot face up to the reality of all of this, because to do so would be to accept that Europe is now in a position of vulnerability in respect to the world’s great powers. By putting the transatlantic relationship above all else, Europe is in no position to confront the US, and neither does it have any other countries to turn too. Europe should have responded to the rise of China by trying to act as a balance between American and Chinese power, independent of both. Instead, it decided to actively participate in America’s drive to curtail China, even when it came at the expense of Europe’s economy. Now we can see the evidence of what servility to America achieves.
For those of us who have been critics of American imperialism for a long time, its current visceral form is an opportunity. Millions of people across Europe who previously bought in to the idea of ‘the rules-based order’ with the US as its ultimate protectorate have had a rude awakening. The argument that we should build international alliances to counter American imperialism and work to reduce European dependence on American power will now be obvious to many.
The alternative is the feeble defeatism we are currently seeing from the EU and almost all European governments towards Trump, a level of obsequiousness that is as unsurprising as it is shameful. There’s little doubt that much of Europe’s politicians would reluctantly put up with a US takeover of Greenland if it came to that. Any European left worthy of the name now needs to make breaking with the American empire a core part of its political programme.