UNITED STATES – EUROPE

Intro: Once you are reliant on foreign forces for safety you must abide by their decisions, like it or not. What is so difficult to understand about that?

IT WAS some two decades ago when Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote: “The rest of the world… reacts to America, fears America, lives under American protection, envies, resents, plots against, depends on America. Every other country defines its strategy in relation to the United States”. And, in turn, the United States defines its foreign policy aims as effective “invulnerability”.

Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump is ruthlessly pursuing this same policy. Bombing Iran, deposing Nicolas Maduro, threatening war with Colombia, and now musing on the annexation of Greenland. “We need it for defence”.

Presidents change and domestic policy changes with the incumbent; as with the British Empire before it, however, the interests of the American state are eternal and perpetual. It is the duty of the White House to follow them, and the role of others to respond with envy constrained by their dependence or fear. In this case, the reaction in Europe to an explicit proposal for the annexation of European territory has been muted by both.

Denmark has complained that Trump has failed to show sufficient “respect for international law”, and Keir Starmer has politely asked Trump to stop musing on the prospects of conquering part of an allied nation. Beyond this squawking, however, there has been no response because Europe has no response to offer beyond hoping that Trump forgets about this issue and moves on. We are not going to see US forces conducting midnight raids to capture Danish politicians, or shots fired in anger over the fate of Greenland. Europe is not going to fight America because it can’t, and America is not going to fight Europe because it has no need to: if Trump really wants the territory and isn’t just enjoying the sight of European politicians scrambling to cover their shame, then he could apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way.

Despite all the rhetoric about the US military and how it intends to be used in the future, the continent’s security is still guaranteed by American boots on European ground, and the outcome of the conflict on its eastern flank by the flow of American weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

If push comes to shove, no one should be betting against Trump using this leverage to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation: declaring that in the absence of new US installations and treaties that deployments to Europe will need to wind down to preserve forces for the protection of the US homeland.

The diplomatic side will be smoothed over, but the faultlines will still exist. Read the responses from European leaders, and there will always be a hint of rulers who have relied on outsiders to maintain their forces, and have belatedly understood that the interests of those outsiders do not always align with their own. In this, at least, they are in company: the last Western Roman emperor was deposed by foreign allies garrisoned within his territory when their demands for land were denied. The Normans entered southern Italy as mercenaries and ended up ruling over swathes of territory. The Mamluks began as foreign slave-soldiers, and became sultans. The European nations of the present day have spent decades freeloading on US defence spending, paying lip service to the American political obsessions of the day on diversity, migration, democracy, and other cultural issues in exchange for this defence. Geir Lundestad coined the term “empire by invitation” to describe this process: embracing dependence and ever greater American intervention in the life of the Continent.

When American and European interests were aligned, this dependence and intervention was tolerable. The constraints rarely chafed. As American relative power has waned, though, the tasks necessary to secure the homeland and to secure Europe have begun to diverge. As one expert previously said some three years ago, the United States did not “have the military capacity to remain so heavily engaged in Europe while ensuring effective defence in Asia”.

Today, that military expert is at the heart of the administration’s defence policy and is putting this policy into action. Subsequently, Europe is now finding that by having a dependence on a nation with interests different to your own is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in. It is also a deeply difficult one to get out of. For all Europe’s talk of strategic autonomy, at every turn it has baulked at paying the costs that this would entail. It left security to the Americans, comforting itself that they would always be there to pick up the bill.

This dependence reaches beyond the military sphere. America and the EU might enjoy the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, but it is not an even one. The economic might Brussels hoped to rely on is a partial illusion: US companies provide the payments systems that many European nations rely on, the cloud storage their citizens store their secrets in, the search engines, AI models, and social media platforms which determine the information landscape for the electorate. If a dispute really escalated, the kill switch is in Washington. The EU scramble for alternatives is a result of this realisation.

Yet, the mistake politicians made was a simple one. Ariel Rubinstein’s book Economic Fables makes the point that there is more than one set of rules that the world can operate on. What we think of as immutable features of society are nothing of the sort. Rubenstein was elaborating in the context of how we teach economics to students, but there is no doubt this point can usefully be taken much further.

Underneath the logic of economics and international law the base level of reality still exists. The law of the jungle does not operate in gold and contracts, and it is not tamed by them. It only sleeps, and the market is only in charge until it wakes. Wealth is only power until the men with guns decide that it should be redistributed in their favour, and their agreement to forego this only holds if you can create more wealth than they could otherwise take. Europe’s leaders are now relearning at their cost these lessons their predecessors could have taught them for free. Once you are reliant on a foreign force for safety and a foreign power for prosperity, you are no longer completely sovereign. All the cultural soft power and economic heft in the world won’t do you any good if your outsourced military decides it can insist on more favourable terms than you are willing to provide.