IN THIS ISSUE

§01 · In focus — Deep dive into fractured US-EU alliance: Is it time for Europe to relly on itself?
§02 · The local view — Berlin, Riga, Warsaw, Vienna and Zagreb
§03 · The podcast — Listen to the latest episode and join the conversation
§04 · From the newsrooms — Recent reporting from the lensEU network

§01 · IN FOCUS

The Lost Transatlantic Trust: What Should Europe Do Next?

For eighty years, Europe organized its security, its economy, and even its politics around a single assumption: that the United States would show up. Pax Americana was never a natural law of history — it was a choice, made deliberately after 1945 for reasons that were partly generous and partly self-interested. Washington needed markets for the half of global industrial output it controlled, and it needed to prevent a third European war from ever again dragging American soldiers across the Atlantic. Bretton Woods, the Marshall Plan, NATO, and quiet American backing for European integration itself were not acts of charity; they were investments in a system that served American interests while lifting Europe out of the ruins of 1945. That system worked. It worked so well that Europeans stopped thinking of it as a choice at all, and began treating American protection as a fact of nature, something to be assumed rather than maintained.

That assumption is no longer safe to make, and the events of the past two years have made the reasons impossible to ignore. Donald Trump's second term has not damaged the transatlantic relationship through a single dramatic rupture. It has done so through an accumulation of blows, each one unremarkable on its own but devastating in sequence: JD Vance's Munich speech in February 2025, in which the sitting Vice President lectured European democracies on free speech while courting their far-right opposition parties; Pete Hegseth's declaration that the United States is no longer the primary guarantor of European security; the withdrawal of American troops from Germany; open threats, voiced at a NATO summit in Ankara, of a full American pullback from the continent over a manufactured dispute about Greenland; and a tariff regime imposed on the EU as though it were a rival rather than an ally. None of this is an accident of a chaotic presidency. It is the visible expression of a worldview that treats alliances the way its architect treats trade deals: as zero-sum contests in which someone must lose for someone else to win. A president who cannot grasp why free trade benefits both parties is equally unable to grasp why a defensive alliance benefits both parties — and so he concludes that allies who have relied on American protection for decades were never partners at all, only freeloaders who got the better of a deal.

This would be troubling enough as a matter of style. But there is now documentary evidence that it is a matter of strategy. A more extensive version of the 2025 US National Security Strategy circulated among journalists before its official publication in December 2025, and it reportedly describes an American interest in weakening the European Union — potentially to the point of breaking it apart — by backing national-conservative and far-right parties across the continent. This is no longer a debate about burden-sharing or defense-spending targets. An ally that works, even quietly, to fracture the political union of its partners has stopped behaving like an ally. It is difficult to distinguish, in its practical effects, from a rival power's strategy of divide and weaken. Whatever the intent behind it, the effect is the same one Russia has pursued for years: an EU too internally divided to act as a coherent power.

The most damaging consequence of all this is not any single tariff or troop withdrawal. It is the collapse of reliability itself, and reliability was always the actual product America was selling. A country does not buy fighter jets, structure its energy contracts, or calibrate its diplomacy around a partner it cannot predict. When European governments look at American weapons systems today, they increasingly see the same problem Canada now sees: a supplier that might turn against you tomorrow for reasons that have nothing to do with the underlying relationship. A Swedish fighter jet carries no such risk, because nobody doubts that Sweden will still be Sweden next year. This is precisely why European states are beginning to prefer Swedish, French, or German equipment to American equivalents, even where the American option is technically superior. Trust, once it is priced into a hardware purchase, cannot easily be priced back out. And the irony compounds itself: the more Washington leverages its dominance as a weapon, the faster it loses the dominance that made the leverage possible. When the United States needed Ukraine to stop striking Russian refineries because of domestic gasoline prices, it no longer had the standing simply to demand it — it had to negotiate, cajole, and hope. Two years earlier, a text message would have sufficed. Coercive power that is used carelessly depletes itself.

None of this means Europe currently possesses everything it needs to stand alone, and honesty about the gap matters more than bravado about closing it. European militaries still lack certain capabilities the United States spent eighty years building and Europe never had to: strategic airlift, in-flight refueling at scale, and the kind of integrated military intelligence infrastructure that cannot be assembled overnight. These are not going to appear in a single budget cycle. But they are being built now, for the first time with real political urgency behind them, because the alternative — permanent dependence on a patron who has shown he will use that dependence as leverage — has become obviously worse than the cost of building them. Germany's declared ambition to field the largest conventional military in Europe by 2035, Poland and Romania's determination to harden NATO's eastern flank, the existing French and British nuclear deterrents, and the growing European defense-industrial base together represent a continent that, as one analysis put it, now has the money, the know-how, and — thanks paradoxically to Trump himself — the political will it lacked for decades of peace dividend. What it does not yet have is full unity of purpose, and that gap is real.

The unity problem is not a footnote to the decoupling argument; it is the argument's hardest test. France, under Emmanuel Macron, has pushed hardest for "strategic autonomy" and has used the Coalition of the Willing to position itself as leader of European defense — a move viewed with some suspicion by countries that do not want Paris setting the continent's foreign policy by default. Germany's industrial and demographic weight makes it the likeliest eventual military heavyweight, but its political culture is not built for the role. And Poland, arguably the country with the most at stake on NATO's eastern flank, remains the most reluctant to frame any of this as decoupling at all: Warsaw still places enormous defense orders with American industry, still lobbies for permanent US bases, and its governing coalition insists at every turn that strengthening European defense is meant to keep the Americans in, not replace them. Polish public opinion captures the contradiction perfectly — a large majority wants permanent American bases on Polish soil, while a comparably large majority now says Trump's presidency has not been good for Poland. Poland wants the American security guarantee and no longer quite trusts the guarantor. That is not a contradiction unique to Poland; it is the condition of the entire alliance.

None of this argues for severing every tie to Washington, and no serious European strategist is proposing that. NATO's institutional architecture, intelligence-sharing arrangements, and decades of interoperability retain real value, and a wholesale rupture would hand Russia exactly the divided, weakened Europe that appears to be, on the evidence of the leaked strategy document, an actual American policy objective. The case for decoupling is narrower and more urgent than that: Europe cannot continue to make its core security and economic decisions on the assumption that Washington will behave as it has for eighty years, because it has stopped doing so, and there is no credible mechanism — not even a change of administration — that restores the old certainty once a great power has shown twice, a decade apart, that its commitments are conditional on the mood of a few thousand voters in Pennsylvania. Reliability, once broken this visibly, is not simply repaired by better manners in the next presidency. It has to be replaced with capability that does not depend on anyone else's goodwill. Building that capability, deliberately and this time as Europe's own choice rather than as a system inherited from a benevolent hegemon, is no longer a preference. It is the only option left on the table.

— Đivo Đurović, journalist, Telegram.hr 

§02 · THE LOCAL VIEW

§03 · THE PODCAST

Security in the post-American Europe

In this episode of the EU Lens podcast, Filip Raunić and Đivo Đurović, journalists at the Croatian news portal Telegram, discuss the unraveling of the liberal international order that has shaped the world for the past 80 years. They break down what Pax Americana actually was and how much of it was a deliberate American strategy versus a natural outcome of postwar power, then turn to how Donald Trump's second term has systematically dismantled US-Europe relations — from threats against Greenland and tariffs on the EU, to troop withdrawals from Germany and an open threat of full American withdrawal from the continent.

§04 · FROM THE NEWSROOMS