One year of Trump II: Europe’s wake-up call

On 29 January, BIG’s first in-house event of 2026 approached ‘one year of Trump II’ as a stress test of Europe’s strategic maturity. The question was no longer whether Washington is changing, but whether Europe can adapt fast enough – institutionally, financially and politically – to a landscape where power is exercised more openly and security guarantees are more conditional.

To explore what that shift means in practice, BIG brought together Diego Martínez Belío, Spain’s State Secretary for Foreign and Global Affairs; Luuk van Middelaar, Founding Director of the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics; and Dave Keating, France 24’s Brussels correspondent and author of The Owned Continent, for a frank exchange on how Europe’s security, prosperity and diplomatic room for manoeuvre are evolving faced with the challenges posed by Trump’s second term – and what a credible European response would require.

Until recently, Europe engaged with the current US administration as if continuity could still be assumed. Officials convinced themselves that the chaos was familiar, that the first Trump presidency provided a usable playbook, and that the relationship would eventually stabilise. As moderator Dave Keating recalled, many in Brussels repeated a simple reassurance: ‘we managed it before, we’ll manage it again’. The past year proved that assumption wrong.

Europe is living through a historical break, not a bad patch. The destabilising fact is not simply that Washington has become more volatile or more transactional, but that the underlying structure that made European habits workable for decades is starting to dissolve. As Luuk van Middelaar framed it:

‘What we really are going through is the end of an era of the historic epoch of eighty years of transatlantic order after 1945. We know that something is coming to an end, but we do not know yet what’s coming next, where we are going.’

Diego Martínez Belío argued that Europe’s problem is not a lack of instruments, but an unwillingness to use them decisively. ‘We invented the European communities and then the European Union,’ he reminded the audience. ‘This is an incredible and unique tool for power. What we need to do is to empower it – give it the means to act'.

For decades, Europe’s Atlanticists feared one nightmare scenario: that America would leave. Van Middelaar’s argument was that Europe has been preparing for the wrong version of this bad dream – and that this is why so many European reactions over the past year looked simultaneously late and inadequate. The old fear was ‘strategic abandonment’: the US withdrawing into its own hemisphere, leaving Europeans to carry their own security burdens. But the new reality is sharper, and more unsettling: the danger is not only that Washington might stop underwriting Europe, but that it is willing to use its power against Europe – to weaken it, divide it, and reshape its politics from within.

‘Strategic abandonment […] leaves us in Europe exposed. That was the old nightmare of the transatlanticists, that one day the Americans will go home. […] But […] we got the nightmare wrong. There’s something even more worrying, and that is the Americans going after us. And that is ideological […] about basically destroying [the] European Union as such, undermining centrist governments, bringing extreme right parties to power.’

The implication, for Diego Martínez Belío, is that Europe cannot treat this new mix of abandonment and ideological pressure as a communications problem to be managed or a storm to be waited out. It requires a shift in posture. ‘In politics, and of course even more in international politics, standing your ground is the basis for respect,’ he argued. ‘So, if you keep giving ground, giving ground […] the other party may even think that, well, these guys are just handing things over, why wouldn’t I try to grab for more?’. In other words, the danger of Europe’s instinctive accommodation is not only that it fails to deter, but that it teaches its counterpart that pressure works – turning interdependence into a one-way instrument of leverage.

What emerged from the discussion was not a roadmap, but a reckoning. Europe is entering a world where pressure is applied deliberately and guarantees are conditional – and where hesitation carries its own costs. The question now is not whether Europe has leverage, but whether it is willing to organise itself to use it. In a landscape defined less by rules than by resolve, strategic maturity will be measured not by declarations, but by choices.