The Inside Story of Europe’s Breakup With the U.S.

0:05Today, leaders from all over the world are gathered in Turkey for an annual meeting of NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. It's a major alliance of more than 30 countries that's historically been celebrated by leaders across Europe and North America. But one key person is very unhappy with it. I'll say publicly, we're very disappointed with NATO because NATO has done absolutely nothing. President Donald Trump has a long list of complaints with NATO. He's threatened tariffs. He said he'll take over Canada and Greenland. And he's even talked about pulling the U.S. out of NATO entirely.

0:44I think NATO's making a very foolish mistake. And I've long said that, you know, I wonder whether or not NATO would ever be there for us. Now, it seems like Trump's adversarial stance toward NATO is finally taking its toll. The relationship is breaking down.

1:03Joe Parkinson:Hi, I'm Joe Parkinson. I'm Drew Hinshaw. And we run the Wall Street Journal's World Enterprise team. Our colleagues Joe and Drew have been looking into how this alliance of Western powers is splintering. They've spoken with heads of government and their top ministers and aides. And they've parsed through meeting notes and classified intelligence documents. all to piece together how this partnership that's been in place since the Cold War has started to fracture. Clearly something is happening inside this marriage. No one's filing for divorce, but the two sides are estranged. We wanted to know, in the closed-door rooms where European allies and Canadian allies talk candidly about the U.S., what do they see as the future of this alliance?

1:51Joe Parkinson:What we tried initially to do was to find out what was happening. But then what we discovered was that there were incredibly dramatic conversations happening between the most powerful leaders in Europe. We had seen, of course, since Trump has been sworn in for the second administration, a lot of rhetoric, a lot of crossed words. We wanted to really understand what was happening in the real conversations that are deciding whether the West as an idea can continue.

2:21Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Wednesday, July 8th.

2:35Coming up on the show, how things fell apart between the U.S. and its Western allies.

2:51This episode is presented by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. This episode is brought to you by Optum. Healthcare doesn't always work great. If you ever waited on a refill or couldn't schedule an appointment, you get it.

3:30That's what Optum is changing. They're using data and technology to integrate patient care, pharmacy, and everything else. So healthcare is connected, not complicated. That means cheaper prescriptions that are easier to get and care that looks at the whole person, how you need it. Optum is making healthcare work as one for everyone. Learn more at business.optum.com.

3:57To prepare for a second Trump term, NATO turned to Mark Ruta, who was the longest-running prime minister of the Netherlands. He'd kept a close relationship with Trump for years. After Trump lost the 2020 election, Ruta, who was prime minister at the time, reached out to Trump and they kept in contact throughout Trump's interlude as president. That's our colleague Drew Hinshaw again. And so in October 2024, Trump is leading all the polls. And so they say we need someone who can be a Trump whisperer, so to speak. NATO appointed Ruta to lead the organization. It is a great honor to be here and to take up the position of NATO Secretary General.

4:40And first of all, I want to thank all of your nations for trusting me with the responsibility. Here's our colleague Joe Parkinson.

4:49Joe Parkinson:And he really just has one job. And the one job, from the Europeans' perspective, is to keep the U.S. in NATO. Use that relationship with Trump, use that warmth that they've developed together to try to understand what he needs, what he wants, so that the Europeans can keep America as that hub of the wheel of the military alliance. Ruta believes that the main thing keeping peace in Europe is the United States. When leaders talk about, oh, we need to have a new world order that's less dependent on America, he kind of says, keep on dreaming. Are you going to spend 10 % of your economy on defense?

5:27Are you going to create a nuclear umbrella to protect Europe? Who has a military that can project power globally the way the U.S. can? NATO is built around a single superpower, and that's the U.S. Ruta's approach to Trump was all about trying to appease the American leader, a tactic the European press have called flattery diplomacy. And at first, most European leaders were behind the idea, hoping that it would keep Trump engaged with NATO.

5:54Joe Parkinson:So there was a consensus and a relatively strong consensus that the best way to deal with Trump would be to flatter him and talk about the things that he was doing that they agreed were positive. Following Ruta's lead, European leaders spent much of the last year telling Trump what he wanted to hear and learning to speak the way he does. So that means communicating with him in the way that he likes to communicate. Shorter, pithier messages. It means using all caps for emphasis. They were having coordination calls, speaking together about who should say what, when, how, even down to editing text messages together.

6:36Joe Parkinson:The prime minister of Norway and the president of Finland would sit down with one another, editing the text messages, discussing, workshopping them before firing them off to Trump's personal phone. And for a while, this was actually very effective. I just want to take a moment to say how remarkable it is to picture these European leaders kind of like putting their heads together, looking at text messages, being like, is this the right word? Should I? It's just, yeah, such a... They did a lot of this over the encrypted messaging app Signal. and they would talk to each other like, how are we going to do this?

7:07For example, at one point Trump sort of lectured one of the European Union's top officials, Ursula von der Leyen, because she was advocating for sanctions on Russia. So she starts calling economic pressure tariffs because she thinks that that will go down better.

7:24But Ruta's strategy was about more than just communicating with Trump. It was also about giving Trump policy wins. In particular, the president's demand that European countries spend more on NATO. The organization spends a lot of money on defense for its member countries. It is, after all, mainly a military alliance. And the U.S. is the biggest contributor. Trump has complained about this for years. Here he is back in 2017. This is not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States. and many of these nations owe massive amounts of money from past years and not paying. Trump has demanded over the years that European countries pay more.

8:07And when Trump was reelected, European leaders got together to decide how to address the issue. European leaders met in Brussels in this beautiful palace, this 16th century palace, the Egmont Palace. And they were there to all get on one page about what we're going to do. As they're meeting here in this palace, Ruta, the secretary general, is saying, let's give the president a win. After that meeting in the palace, Ruta kept lobbying throughout 2025. His hope was to get enough NATO countries on board with the increased payments before a June NATO summit in The Hague. So before they even get there, there's this frantic diplomacy by Ruta, and he needs them all to do one thing, which is pledge that at some point they will spend 5 % of their GDP on defense.

8:585%. That's the number Trump wants. And Ruta came up with a creative way to hit that 5 % target. He convinced some of the nations to label other spending as defense. Airport runways, meteorological stations, even like bridges and tunnels that you might technically need to drive down to get to the front lines in a war with Russia We'll call that defense-related spending. Ultimately, Ruta convinced enough countries to pledge that higher amount. And Joe says Trump saw this as a win.

9:31Joe Parkinson:It was something like a victory march. And the way that it was described to us, again, by the leaders who described what happened behind closed doors, was that Trump basically sat there and the leaders took turns to compliment him. So really, it was kind of a love-in. And how did Trump react? He smiled. He was enjoying it. He had some of the most powerful people on Earth lining up to compliment him. After that summit, Trump held a press conference where he said that NATO was no longer a bad deal for American taxpayers. I left here saying that these people really love their countries. It's not a rip-off.

10:09And we're here to help them protect their country. So Trump comes out of this meeting. He's feeling good. He's saying nice things about NATO. I mean, is it fair to say that Ruta's, you know, flattery diplomacy was working? At this point, I would say yes. At this point, I would say yes. But there are warning signs. A few weeks after this European love fest, Trump had another big meeting with an important international leader. This time, he flew out to Alaska to speak with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The president is expected to greet Putin with a real red carpet arrival, and we've actually seen that red carpet.

10:47It has been rolled out already. Today's meeting is a historic one, marking the first time Putin has stepped foot on U.S. soil in about a decade. The two leaders talked about the war in Ukraine. And afterwards, Trump seemed apparently skeptical of Ukraine's chances in the war. At the same time, an intelligence report started circulating among European countries. It said that the U.S. was considering a deal with the Kremlin, one that would include jointly mining the Arctic for rare earth minerals. For Europe, this was an emergency. A few weeks earlier, they'd been offering Trump all these concessions and kind of praising him one leader after the next.

11:28And now, just a few weeks later, they are in a situation where he seems to be working out some kind of peace plan and maybe even economic deal with Russia that doesn't really include their input. The European leaders found themselves scrambling. They decided to double down on flattering Trump to try to get him back on their side. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, rallied his fellow heads of state. Macron gets a big encrypted group chat with all of them and says, listen, we all need to go to Washington. All told, six European presidents and prime ministers, plus Ruta, they're all going to go to the White House and try to just get the president back on side a little bit.

12:06And the same cycle takes place. They shower Trump with compliments. They praise him for kicking off peace conversations with Putin. I will be very brief. I really want to thank you, President of the United States, dear Donald, for the fact that you, as I said before, broke the deadline. Something has changed thanks to you. The path is open. You opened it. And the news cameras are there rolling, and the president is visibly pleased. He thanks Mark Rutte. He says, thank you, Mark. You're a great leader. You're doing a fantastic job. Things seem to be going well. The next morning, Trump goes on Fox & Friends and speaks warmly about his relationship with European leaders.

12:44They're very good people. They're very good leaders of their countries. But the reprieve is short-lived. Just a few weeks later, Trump is again talking about a deal with Russia. Within weeks, Trump is once again expressing doubt that Ukraine can win this war, and he is entertaining pursuing a Russian peace plan that touted opportunities for U.S. businesses. And for the European leaders, it's a bit like two steps forward, one step backward. They're pretty close to where they started. Finally, at the beginning of 2026, things hit a breaking point. And it had to do with something Trump had been talking about on and off since his first term, annexing Greenland.

13:26I'm seeking immediate negotiations to once again discuss the acquisition of Greenland by the United States. Just after the new year, Trump was at his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, having dinner with some of his staff and their families. And the wife of Trump's deputy chief of staff looks over at the president. And she sees that he's in an oddly ruminative mood. And he is saying, I wish I had more time. If I had more time, I would do Greenland. And that weekend, she pulls up her phone and thumbs out a provocative single word tweet, soon. And the image is an American flag covering Greenland.

14:10Joe Parkinson:The tweet sort of detonated like a bomb across Europe. It's safe to say it was like a fire alarm going off across the continent in the chanceries and the prime ministries. I think there's a debate that's going on within NATO all throughout Trump's second presidency, which is, is America just losing interest in NATO? Or is America turning into something much scarier, which is a hostile threat, a country that wants to take Greenland from Denmark? And it's the episode in Greenland in January 2026 that tilts the balance and convinces a critical mass of European leaders that America is not just losing interest in NATO, but is actively turning hostile to it on certain places.

14:50Joe Parkinson:After the constant push and pull of the previous few months, the voices within Europe that had always said, we think actually we can't rely on this administration, start to become louder, start to become stronger. One voice actually didn't come from Europe at all, but from an ally even closer to the U.S., Canada. That's after the break.

15:27Join the Wall Street Journal on July 15th to 16th in New York City for WSJ Sports, the next sports economy. This exclusive two-day event brings together the athletes, investors, owners, and executives shaping the future of sports. Through newsroom-led conversations, we'll explore the trends driving investment, innovation, and growth across the industry. Learn more at wsj.com slash wsjsports.

16:02As 2026 kicked off, tensions between Europe and the Trump administration continued to escalate. The feud over Greenland in particular had snowballed into one of the biggest crises among Western nations since the Second World War. For his part, NATO's leader, Mark Ruta, stuck to his strategy of appeasing Trump. Ruta is furiously texting the president personally on his phone. Ruta is lobbying Trump's team. He's trying to figure out, what can I offer Trump that will feel like a concession, that will give him a win politically, but will allow him to walk away without owning Greenland. But even as that was happening, other European leaders started preparing for something that had seemed unthinkable, a possible war with the U.S.

16:50There are Danish troops in Greenland that have brought blood bags in case they're shot by American soldiers. They can do blood transfusions. They've brought explosives to blow up Greenland's own runways so that American planes can't land. France has deployed 15 mountain infantry to Greenland. A bunch of European countries have sent soldiers who are basically a tripwire in case America launches an invasion against its own ally. It was during this historic low in the U.S.-Europe relationship that the World Economic Forum was set to take place in Davos, Switzerland. One of the conference's speakers was the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, and he took the stage with an impassioned speech.

17:32I'm going to start in French and then I'll switch back to English. Thank you very much. Merci, Larry. Carney didn't mention the U.S. by name, but it was clear that he was talking about the relationship between America and its Western allies. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture,

17:56Joe Parkinson:we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. The speech actually ended up being exactly what Carney and his closest advisors had wanted, which was to throw a bucket of ice water all over the West and say, look, we've been telling you, this is the time for you to listen, that the world has changed. The old America has not come back. We can't pretend that things haven't changed. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Carney's speech echoed something he'd been saying since before he took office in 2025, that Western powers needed to stand up to the U.S.

18:34In fact, he'd been elected in part because he spoke up against Trump's calls to make Canada the 51st state. President Trump is trying to break us so that America can own us. That will never, that will never, ever happen. His party had been suffering a 20-point poll deficit, but Trump makes this threat to turn Canada into the 51st state, And almost overnight, Carney surges in the polls, wins, becomes unbelievably this prime minister who has somehow jumped out of the political grave. Usually, the first tour abroad for a new Canadian prime minister is a visit to Washington to meet with Canada's strongest ally.

19:19Instead, just two days after taking office, Carney went to Paris. And he met with France's president, Emmanuel Macron, to get in his ear about an unprecedented idea. That Europe should start decoupling from the United States on everything from critical minerals to AI. What Carney is talking about is creating a dense web of connections that doesn't necessarily rely on America. So countries like France, Canada, the UK, Germany, they can turn to each other for all these critical things that we just use America for. If you tap your phone to pay for something in Europe, it's probably bouncing off an American satellite and being processed by an American company.

19:58And we don't even think about this. It's the hidden plumbing of the world. And Carney's saying we need backup pipes, basically. We need backup plumbing because we can't only count on America. And how does Trump take this speech? Trump watches this speech from Air Force One, and he tells his aides Carney's ungrateful. I watched your prime minister yesterday. He wasn't so grateful. They should be grateful to us. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements? What about other European leaders? What do they make of this moment of Carney's, his speech at Davos?

20:40Joe Parkinson:What we discovered was that almost in real time as Carney was speaking, leaders were messaging each other saying that this is the message that we need to get behind. A day later, European leaders held an emergency meeting that lasted five hours. The leaders are told again to come into this room with no phone, no aids, no chance of making a record because they all need to speak candidly about what they've just seen and what's unfolded. And it was described to us afterwards as like a therapy session because people were venting so much. Francis Macron said Europe's over-reliance on America was a security risk.

21:22The prime minister of Belgium said that Europe risked becoming, quote, a miserable slave to the U.S. And Spain's prime minister said, quote, Canada is openly saying what we should do.

21:33Joe Parkinson:Although Carney wasn't there, his name was mentioned by a number of leaders who said, you know, we're looking for a way forward. We're looking for a new strategy. We have to recognize the world as it is, and Canada is showing us one way forward. It's this incredible moment, and the more we reported, you know, we spoke with heads of government, their top aides, their ministers, and the more people we spoke to, the more it just seems like that night, something really deep in the Western alliance broke. One official close to that meeting said this was a before and after moment, a moment where the debate shifted From whether to move away from the U.S.

22:11to how fast. This is an unprecedented new phase for Europe and Canada. NATO countries have never attempted to decouple from the U.S. in this way. It'll also be a massive undertaking. NATO countries, their economies, their militaries, their technology, are incredibly intertwined with the U.S. as the center of gravity. Visa and MasterCard process virtually every payment that happens in Europe, at least on a consumer level. If you beep your phone to pay for something in Europe, there's a good chance that that payment is going through a satellite that's owned by an American company. A tremendous amount of Europe's data is stored in the U.S.

22:51or by U.S. companies. And this is before you get to the really cutting-edge stuff where we're talking about new AI models. But now, with the U.S. looking like a less reliable ally, Europe is trying to break away. Europe is spending hundreds of billions of dollars replicating systems that America traditionally supplies. The EU is speeding up its schedule to launch several hundred European satellites that will let their governments communicate securely over non-American networks. France ordered 2.5 million civil servants to replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with their own domestically built videoconference platform Visio.