Foreign Affairs - Trump Has Got Europe All Wrong Why America Needs the European Union - Anthony Luzzatto Gardner - March 30, 2026

 Foreign  Affairs

Trump Has Got Europe All Wrong

Why America Needs the European Union

Anthony Luzzatto Gardner

March 30, 2026

Flags of the United States and the European Union, April 2025

Dado Ruvic / Reuters

ANTHONY LUZZATTO GARDNER served as U.S. Ambassador to the European Union from 2014 to 2017. He is the author of Stars With Stripes: The Essential Partnership Between the United States and the European Union.

President Donald Trump has long disdained the European Union. In his first term, he frequently railed against the bloc, describing it as a “foe” and “worse than China.” In his second term, Trump’s attitude has morphed into outright hatred. His desire, now, is to fracture the EU: a leaked draft of an earlier version of the 2025 National Security Strategy included the objective of “pulling” certain countries “away” from the bloc. That aim is also evident in Washington’s decision to impose high tariffs on the EU’s exports and in the final version of the National Security Strategy, which suggested that the U.S. government would support far-right, anti-EU parties across the continent.

Trump’s objections to the EU are numerous. In February 2025, he told his cabinet that the EU “was formed in order to screw the United States. That’s the purpose of it, and they’ve done a good job of it. But now I’m president.” He has recently attacked its leaders for their unwillingness to support U.S. military actions against Iran. He believes that the continent’s democratic institutions and Judeo-Christian heritage are being destroyed by its supposedly permissive approach to immigration. He views its trade and technology policy as unfair, and, fundamentally, he seems to regard the EU as determined to undermine the United States.

Trump’s charges are a dangerous caricature of the bloc. Eight decades of bipartisan U.S. foreign policy have promoted European integration, and the instances of the EU diverging from the United States have been far outnumbered by the instances of alignment. Washington’s historic support for European integration did not stem from starry-eyed idealism but from the clear-eyed view that a closely knit, prosperous, and stable Europe would be an effective partner in tackling a host of international challenges. That has proved to be the case.

If the administration gets its way, and the EU breaks up, U.S. interests would suffer. A fractured Europe would usher in the return of the instability and volatility that have scarred the continent’s history. The end of the EU would also mean the end of the single market, from which U.S. businesses have benefited spectacularly, and the end of the euro that has reduced cross-border transaction costs. Moreover, Washington would lose a key partner in implementing sanctions, as well as in law enforcement, counterterrorism, and combating climate change. Trump’s antagonism has already caused great damage. The EU is in shell shock from Washington’s unprecedented hostility, especially following the threat of the invasion of Greenland. But the U.S.-EU relationship is too important to be allowed to wither. Too much depends on it. The relationship needs to be maintained, and this can best be done through cooperation on those issues on which Brussels and Washington are still in agreement. Top of that list should be collaborating to confront an increasingly powerful and self-confident China, which wants to shape the world in ways that are inimical to both American and European interests.

THE TROUBLE WITH TRADE

Trump has been vexed by Brussels’s purported nastiness as a trading partner. He dislikes the fact that the EU enhances its 27 member states’ negotiating leverage. The bloc, he has argued, was set up by European states, especially Germany, as a “consortium” to “screw” the United States through unfair trade practices. To support this narrative, the Trump administration points to the transatlantic trade balance. The president has claimed that the United States runs a trade deficit with the EU of more than $300 billion. Although U.S. and EU trade statistics differ, the range of the net overall trade deficit is, in fact, between $60 billion and $150 billion (including services trade, where the United States runs a surplus). The deficit is small compared with the $2 trillion transatlantic trade flows or, indeed, to the $290 billion trade deficit the United States runs with China. In any event, trade deficits are not necessarily proof of cheating. They are, instead, largely a reflection of macroeconomic factors, including the lack of savings and excessive spending in the United States, as well as a lack of investment in Europe.

The president has repeatedly stated that the EU is a closed market, whereas the United States remains an open one. The facts paint a more nuanced picture. Before the U.S.-EU trade agreement of 2025, the tariff average (weighted by the share each product represents of total imports) was 1.5 percent for the United States and 1.3 percent for the EU. It is certainly true that, in some important areas, the EU maintains high tariff and nontariff barriers, especially in agriculture. It is also true that these barriers have the effect of inhibiting trade with U.S. firms. But many agricultural nontariff barriers reflect the fact that European consumers differ from their U.S. counterparts about what they want to eat. Although Brussels does maintain certain restrictions, the United States is itself hardly a model of openness. The U.S. government protects many areas of the economy, including agriculture.

The EU’s regulation of the digital economy and the fines that the EU has imposed on U.S. technology companies have also irked Trump. U.S. firms have attracted these fines and investigations because of their size and predominant role, not because of supposed anti-American bias. According to the president, however, no foreign regulatory authority should dare to investigate, tax, fine, or legislate against U.S. companies. This view is in conflict with the United States’ long history of extraterritorial law enforcement. One of many examples are the penalties of more than $50 billion that Washington imposed from 2014 to 2024 on European banks for infringements such as fraud and the evasion of U.S. sanctions.

IDENTITY AND FREE SPEECH

Washington’s current objections to Brussels are not solely economic. The Trump administration is also fixated on Europe’s immigration policies. The National Security Strategy warned that Europe is inviting “civilizational erasure” through mass immigration and cratering birth rates. It is strange to accuse Brussels of promoting unrestricted immigration that has undermined the ethnic character of the continent. Immigration is largely a matter for member states to regulate rather than EU institutions. Moreover, several member states have implemented migration repatriation programs. The EU has not opposed these programs. On the contrary, it has signed agreements with several North African and western Balkan countries to prevent migrants from leaving their shores for Europe and to accept migrants who had reached the EU illegally. The National Security Strategy is also wrong to blame the EU for Europe’s cratering birthrates. The phenomenon, more marked in other rich countries including Japan and South Korea, is linked to a host of factors, including women’s decisions to work and marry later and the uneven support of social policies such as childcare and maternal and paternal leave. These are national issues in which Brussels plays almost no role. Although the EU has seen a rapid increase in its foreign-born population in recent years, that proportion is still lower than that of the United States.

The Trump administration has also argued that the EU is guilty of undermining political liberty and sovereignty, censoring free speech and suppressing political opposition. Animated by these views, the United States is now backing extreme right-wing political groups in Europe. After a comprehensive review, Germany’s Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution concluded in 2025 that the Alternative for Germany, the country’s leading far-right party, has ties to the neo-Nazi movement. The party’s members have also been found to have downplayed the Holocaust and advocated race-based views of German identity. Eighty years after the United States liberated Germany from Nazism, Washington is now opposing the right of a democratically elected German government to crack down on neo-Nazis.

Trump has also alleged that the EU is hostile to free speech. At the end of 2025, former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton was banned from entering the United States on the grounds that he was involved in the passage of two EU digital regulations that the administration rejected. Although the regulations were passed as part of an effort to crack down on hate speech and disinformation, the administration claims that their real intent was to “coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints.” The ban was particularly remarkable in that Breton was acting in an official capacity as part of an EU college of commissioners that takes collective decisions. Those regulations were approved by a democratically elected European parliament and national governments. It is hard to conclude that sanctioning an official in this way is compatible with respecting democracy.

To be sure, the EU has many flaws and can be a difficult partner. The Trump administration is correct in its criticism of the EU as fragmented, weak, bureaucratic, and often incapable of taking decisions that keep pace with a rapidly changing world. The president is also right that the EU will struggle to find a role in the might-makes-right world that he has helped foster. But the EU is not the caricature he paints. Stifling EU overregulation has not been the main culprit for the bloc’s economic underperformance, as Washington often alleges. The key failures lie with the member states. Their ineffective application of EU law and unwillingness to truly complete the single market, including by forming a capital markets union and an energy union, have weakened the bloc.

A NARROW PATH

There remains space for mutually beneficial cooperation between Washington and Brussels. But for that to happen, the Trump administration must recognize that the EU can be a key partner in the U.S. campaign to force China to reform its abusive trade practices. This is because Beijing, although it disdains the EU as a global political and security actor, wants continued access to European consumers. After all, Beijing has responded to Trump’s tariffs by redirecting its exports from the United States to Europe. That provides the EU with enormous leverage over China, if it wishes to use it. The time, then, is ripe for the United States and the EU to strong-arm China into reining in its massive overproduction and lowering its subsidies to domestic producers to encourage a fairer trade environment.

As the first step in this process, the United States should work with the EU to revive the World Trade Organization by forcing a fundamental change in its rules. The WTO should adjust the terms of the “most favored nation” principle, which requires any trade concession granted by one country to be extended to all other WTO member countries. The EU’s trade commissioner, Maros Sefcovic, has already suggested that this principle has become a straitjacket, enabling free-riding. Rather than automatically granting unconditional access to lower tariffs, this benefit, he has argued, “must be earned through stronger, credible commitments to the core principles of free and fair trade.” Reforming this rule would incentivize China to end its manipulative trade practices.

The United States and the EU should continue working to decrease their dependencies on China. A priority should be critical minerals, in particular rare earths. The Biden administration established the Minerals Security Partnership, a group that includes the EU, the United States, and 13 other countries, in a bid to reduce reliance on Chinese supply chains. The partnership has been continued by the Trump administration and catalyzes private investment for projects in mining, processing, and recycling across Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The EU and the United States should develop their partnership to increase supply chain resilience in critical minerals by identifying common projects and increasing their companies’ financial and technical backing for them.

This effort must not be limited to critical minerals. Brussels and Washington must also collaborate to reduce European and North American overreliance on Chinese technologies in sensitive areas including renewable energy, telecommunications, and transport infrastructure when practical to do so. Having already coordinated successfully to limit Huawei’s presence in European 5G networks, this model must be expanded to encompass submarine cables, 6G networks, cloud services, and data centers. The EU and the United States should, next, pool their influence in international standard-setting bodies, including the International Telecommunications Union, which influences global Internet and telecommunications infrastructure. Washington and Brussels should strengthen controls on Chinese foreign investments in sensitive areas of the U.S. and European economies. They should collaborate on controlling technology exports to China, including high-end chips and the sophisticated tools to make them, as well as limiting outbound investments into Chinese AI and semiconductor sectors.

Washington supported European integration following the end of World War II because it recognized the benefits that a united continent would bring. The subsequent decades reaffirmed the accuracy of that belief. Brussels and Washington have often collaborated successfully, particularly when imposing sanctions on Iran and Russia. Those days of wide-ranging cooperation might be gone. But some collaboration might still be possible. Before Trump’s second term, Brussels’s views on China were rapidly hardening, and moving into alignment with Washington’s. That alignment could be restored, as both the EU and the United States have an interest in working together to prevent China from setting the terms of global order. And doing so might serve as the starting point for a return to a fuller agenda, as well as giving Washington the opportunity to reconsider its dangerous hostility to such a long-standing ally.

Topics & Regions: United States Europe Diplomacy Geopolitics Economics International Institutions European Union Politics & Society U.S. Foreign Policy