The Trump administration has launched a review and suspension of portions of American foreign aid, marking a significant shift in the modalities of American engagement. This observation opens a strategic debate that Europe can no longer postpone. Ivan Krastev described Trump in 2025 as the engine of a post-liberal revolution and a possible radicalization of European right-wing movements: European concessions could strengthen American pressures. Central and Eastern Europe faces significant strategic uncertainty, but remains covered by collective guarantees and NATO’s reinforced framework.

The essentials

  • Krastev documents that the Trump administration functions as a revolutionary government with a logic of self-radicalization, making a change of trajectory difficult.
  • Central and Eastern Europe faces significant strategic uncertainty, but remains covered by collective guarantees and NATO’s reinforced framework.
  • The threat of fragmentation is real: separate negotiations by each state with Washington, Moscow, or Beijing would weaken Europe’s collective capacity.
  • The period 2030-2035 could see either an acceleration of defensive integration or a reinforcement of national approaches.
  • The window for building autonomous European liberal power is open, but each bilateral agreement concluded outside the community framework can complicate collective construction.

The revolutionary logic that Europe did not see coming

Europe must determine whether it can assume the role of guarantor of the liberal order or whether it will fragment before attempting to build it.

European debate about Trump long focused on the scale of his actions and the date of a return to normalcy. Krastev reverses the problem. In his 2025 analysis published in The Mounk Letter, he observes that the Trump administration functions less as a conservative administration than as a revolutionary government. The Trump administration apparently pursues objectives of structural transformation of the allied system rather than simple renegotiation of terms.

The distinction is decisive. A transactional conservative government becomes appeased by concessions. A revolutionary government tends to interpret concessions as weakness rather than as stabilization. European concessions on tariffs, retreats on support for Ukraine, and accommodations on digital regulation have not eased American pressures. The pattern described by Krastev appears consistent with the sequence of events since January 2025.

This observation requires abandoning the cyclical hypothesis. Europe waiting for a second, more moderate term, or a Democratic successor who would restore pre-2016 alliances, is preparing for the wrong crisis. Krastev identifies the question that European capitals are avoiding: if America has structurally abandoned its role as guarantor of the liberal order, what power takes over.

The geography of European vulnerability

Pressure is not distributed uniformly across the continent. Several Central and Northern European states, including Poland and the Baltic states, perceive the American shift as a significant threat to their security. These countries have built their security on American guarantees since their exit from the Soviet bloc. Questioning this anchor is not for them an abstract question of geopolitics: it is a question of national survival.

Southern Europe experiences a different vulnerability, but equally real. Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Greece depend on a liberal normative and commercial framework whose collapse would destabilize their economies and their consolidating democracies. The migration crisis and pressure on the rule of law in several member states show that the internal cohesion of the bloc is already under tension, before the American void is even fully absorbed.

It is precisely this geography of vulnerability that makes fragmentation so likely. The countries most exposed have the most urgent reasons to act collectively, but also the strongest temptations to find bilateral arrangements with Washington. Poland has increased its national defense spending, outside the European framework. This reflex is understandable in the short term; it poses coordination issues in the medium term if each state does the same.

The competing reading: Europe has never been good at building power capacities

Krastev’s thesis on European urgency is convincing in its diagnosis. It is less so in its practical implication. Nicole Gnesotto, who has analyzed the fractures of the West for years, offers a grimmer assessment of Europe’s real capacity to fill the void. The Union has built still-limited defense instruments that remain largely intergovernmental, without achieving complete military autonomy; it does not have a centralized military budget covering all national forces, though it already finances common defense instruments and projects, and it generally does not have a foreign policy decided by qualified majority, as the rule remains unanimity with limited exceptions, precisely because these instruments rest on voluntary, intergovernmental cooperation designed to preserve the decision-making role of member states.

External pressure can force acceleration, as Europe’s response to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 demonstrated. But Gnesotto notes that institutional advances in European defense have been accompanied by compromises that have affected operational effectiveness. Europe can announce budgets; it struggles to build command structures. It can adopt declarations; it has difficulty projecting force credibly.

Célia Belin notes that American capabilities in intelligence, logistics, and nuclear force remain without European equivalent in the short term. The rupture is real; total void is an exaggeration. The central issue is to strengthen European strategic autonomy in the face of an American guarantee whose reliability has proven variable.

This reading complements Krastev’s. The urgency is perceptible, but European response capacities face significant structural obstacles. The gap between necessity and capacity will define the decade.

Africa and competition for the normative order

The American void is not played out only in Europe. It is also playing out in peripheral theaters where liberal norms were carried by American power, and where other powers are now filling the space.

Africa is the most visible example. Africa is experiencing growth in renewables, but IRENA observes insufficient and volatile African investments, with a sharp drop in 2023. Investment flows in African renewable energies are routed through Chinese, Gulf, and European financiers, with very different normative frameworks on governance, transparency, and social standards.

The liberal order in the energy and infrastructure domain rests on a set of rules concerning competitive bidding, corruption, workers’ rights, and debt management. The reduction of American engagement in development institutions affects the maintenance of liberal norms in these frameworks. Europe figures among the actors capable of carrying this framework with institutional credibility and has financial instruments to integrate it into aid and investment conditions.

The African question is not secondary in the European debate about its own power capacity. It is a full-scale test of what concretely means taking over the liberal normative relay: not only defending borders, but maintaining standards in rapidly expanding markets.

Two trajectories for the decade, a single window

Several possible trajectories are emerging for the 2030-2035 period. They diverge on one precise point: Europe will have to overcome its internal divisions before the construction window closes.

The first scenario is an acceleration of European defensive integration. Geopolitical threats could favor faster defense integration, motivated by necessity rather than by federal vision. Central Europe, whose strategic survival depends on a credible guarantee, becomes the political engine of this integration. In this scenario, common defense budgets would increase, an integrated European command would form, and qualified majority would extend to foreign policy questions. This scenario assumes the maintenance of sufficient external pressure to discourage bilateral arrangements.

The second scenario is a reinforcement of national defense approaches. Internal divisions prevail over common pressure. Hungary negotiates with Moscow, Poland strengthens its direct ties with Washington outside the NATO framework, Italy seeks an arrangement with Beijing on infrastructure. Each bilateral agreement reinforces national approaches at the expense of European coordination. Europe would remain a unified market without coordinated strategic capacity.

The signals to monitor are precise. The share of consolidated European GDP devoted to common defense capacities, distinct from national budgets, is the most reliable proxy of real mutualization will. If it increases by 2027, the first scenario gains in probability. If it stagnates while individual national budgets progress, the second is being realized.

The number of member states concluding bilateral defense agreements outside the European framework is the second signal. A rise confirms fragmentation; stabilization or a decline signals that the common framework is holding. These two metrics are observable today, without waiting until 2030.

Avenues for progress exist and have been identified. An integrated European military command with reinforced structural budget would strengthen the independence of the security guarantee from national political cycles. A decision mechanism by reinforced qualified majority on foreign policy and defense questions would reduce the individual veto right that fuels fragmentation. These two reforms have faced the same institutional obstacles for twenty years. What is changing is the cost of inaction: security issues directly affect a significant number of Europeans.

Europe’s margins for action and inevitable constraints

Assuming the role of guarantor of the liberal order does not mean reproducing the American model of hegemony. The Union has limited capacities for external projection, largely dependent on member states, and does not have an autonomous capacity for worldwide projection comparable to major military powers. What Europe can do is narrower and more precise: maintain a credible normative framework on its own territory and in its direct zones of influence, strengthen its own mechanisms, although the security guarantee of the most exposed members still depends heavily on American capabilities within NATO, and weigh in international institutions so that liberal rules—rule of law, competition, transparency, fundamental rights—remain the reference in spaces where they are contested.

This is less than what America was doing at the height of its engagement. This is considerably more than Europe is doing today.

The self-radicalization logic that Krastev describes accelerates the obsolescence of the European status quo. Europe waiting for a change in American policy allows other actors to redefine norms in its direct zones of influence. The window remains open, but is narrowing.

Sources

  1. African Energy Live Data, H1 2026: Grid Solar PV Capacity Additions Surpass All Previous Years (2026)
  2. Ivan Krastev, Ivan Krastev on 2026, The Mounk Letter (2025), analysis of the revolutionary logic of the Trump administration and its implications for European liberal guarantee
  3. IRENA, Renewable Power Generation Costs and Africa installed capacity data (annual publications)
  4. World Bank, Africa’s Pulse and African energy infrastructure financing data
  5. Nicole Gnesotto, fractures of the West (published works, Jacques Delors Institute)
  6. Célia Belin, analyses of the transatlantic relationship (Brookings Institution / Montaigne Institute)