The Trump Effect: How One Man’s Politics Rewired Europe
‘Europe needs to face the reality of being a resource-poor continent’
Heather Grabbe is a senior fellow at Bruegel, a Brussels-based economic think tank.
When it comes to climate and the environment, Trump has distracted Europe from addressing its long-term resource vulnerabilities by creating panic over defense and trade. By creating crises around U.S. military support against Russian aggression and tariffs that hit the trade-dependent European economy, Trump has Europe’s leaders on the defensive and has forced them to focus on short-term security. Of course, these are important issues, but they divert political attention and public budgets away from measures that would bring longer-term security from climate impacts, volatile commodity markets and fragile supply chains by investing in climate resilience and enhancing resource productivity. Russian President Vladimir Putin may or may not invade Europe, and Trump may or may not help protect us, but climate change and resource insecurity will certainly damage the European economy.
Europe needs to face the reality of being a resource-poor continent, not only in fossil fuels but also in many other raw materials. And while Trump is trying to maintain Europe’s dependence on U.S. LNG as a replacement for Russian gas, that is the most expensive way of fuelling the economy it also slows down our transition to true energy security. Fossil fuel subsidies of more than €100 billion a year keep Europe vulnerable to the U.S. and other exporters, rather than spending taxpayers’ money on electrification, enlarging renewable energy production and building the grids and interconnectors that would bring us independence.
‘The turbulence the U.S. has unleashed globally has forced many Europeans to grow up’
Aliona Hlivco is founder and CEO of St. James’s Foreign Policy Group and a former Ukrainian politician.
The turbulence the U.S. has unleashed globally has forced many Europeans to grow up. They have finally realized they can no longer rest in the comfort of predictable trade deals or rely on the continent’s famously slow but steady regulatory machinery to keep things ticking along. Europe has woken up to the fact that it must shift from the pace and mentality of an aircraft carrier — vast, heavy and resourceful, lumbering toward a destination set out years in advance — to that of a maritime drone: fast, agile, nimble and capable of striking with precision at exactly the right place and time.
This new agility is felt unevenly across the continent but is unmistakably emerging. Germany is finally, and understandably, overcoming its post-World War II paralysis, reclaiming its role as an economic power as well as the “Eastern flank of NATO,” as one Bundeswehr official put it to me earlier this year. France, long a champion of “strategic autonomy,” has at last found the space to act on it. The Northern European nations — Scandinavia and the Baltics — are leading Europe’s defence innovation, rearmament and the next generation of deterrence, including by taking the lead in supporting Ukraine. They also built a sustainable and crucial bridge with the U.K. through the Joint Expeditionary Force — keeping Europe’s only nuclear power other than France closely tied to the continent after Brexit. Military strength may well become the decisive factor determining who leads Europe in the next 50 years, and in that regard, Poland is rapidly emerging as one of the EU’s most powerful members.
