The Europeans Don’t Trust Us

A “No Kings” protest in Berlin on March 28, 2026. (Photo by Adam Berry/Getty Images)

FOR MORE THAN EIGHTY YEARS, the Pax Americana has protected the world. Imperfect and incomplete as it was, American reliability was a pillar of Cold War stability. NATO membership and the American nuclear umbrella were, to a large degree, the reason for European safety from Russian threats. American alliances, including mutual defense treaties, plus American pressure also allowed Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines to democratize. Our strategic support (albeit in a more ambiguous way) was also the basis for Taiwanese security.

But the underpinning for all of that was American trustworthiness, the faith and confidence our allies had in America’s promise that we would come to their aid when needed. That faith and confidence is fading.

Some of the indications of that diminishing faith are large and obvious. To cite but one example: Recently, Norway, a NATO founding member, became the ninth European country to sign up for French nuclear protection. Given the Russian threats and the broadly faltering trust in U.S. reliability, France has offered to extend its nuclear umbrella, with its roughly 290 nuclear warheads, to protect all of Europe as a replacement for American promises.

But our allies are not only less willing to rely on and trust America. They are also coming to see America as a threat. Association with America is now a risk that needs to be taken into account and, if possible, reduced.

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Here’s one example: Increasingly European governments are moving away from U.S. tech giants as service providers. Reports are that “French civil servants [are] preparing to abandon Zoom and Teams, Austrian soldiers [are] adopting open-source office software, and German bureaucrats [are] turning to free programs for their administrative tasks.” Part of the reason for the move is a simple desire to reduce dependence and become a “digital sovereign.”

But the more insidious and troubling problem is that the belligerence of the Trump administration towards the continent has generated fears that bellicose language will be translated into hostile action. After Trump’s sanctions against the International Criminal Court cut off six judges from their banks, credit cards, and even email addresses, Europeans have a legitimate fear that that Silicon Valley giants could be compelled to cut off access to critical services for a whole government or even a whole country. It’s no wonder that Europe is, increasingly, seeking to reduce its digital dependence on the United States.

The most recent evidence of European distrust is perhaps a bit obscure, but likely even more systemically significant. Every Western nation, including the United States, has a system for blocking commercial transactions that it thinks might be threats to national security. In America, the Committee on Financial Investments in the United States has blocked sales to foreigners of everything from steel mills to high-tech encryption systems. Typically, the blocked transaction involves companies associated with adversaries, Huawei, in China, for example. Less frequently, if the technology is of great enough importance, we have even blocked corporate sales to Israeli companies, even though they are close allies.

The Dutch operate a similar system. Recently, the government considered the sale of a Dutch cloud service provider responsible for holding data relating to the Dutch national identification system to an American company. For the first time ever, the Dutch said “no” to an American company and blocked the sale on national security/public interest grounds.

And there you have it, the Dutch don’t trust us. They fear us and think that American control of their digital infrastructure is a national security risk to their country. It’s a small thing (the sale itself was only worth $120 million), but it’s a token of a much larger change in European attitudes toward America.

More than 8,000 American war dead from World War II lie in the Netherlands American Cemetery in Holland, a token of the close bond between the two countries. For eighty years, that sacrifice has cemented our friendship in the Netherlands and across Europe. Today, Trump has thrown that trust away, and it may never be recovered.

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