‘There Is No Going Back’: The Inside Story of Europe’s Rupture With America

It was almost midnight in Brussels and the leaders of Europe were locked in their fifth hour of an emergency meeting with a single theme for discussion: how to manage a breakup with America.

The new year was only three weeks old and President Trump, after removing Venezuela’s autocratic strongman, had briefly threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark. Around a circular table in the European Council headquarters known as “The Space Egg,” heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.” There were no cameras or recordings and each of the presidents and prime ministers was told to come alone, no phones allowed, for a moment to speak candidly.

“We are drawing a line here,” began Emmanuel Macron, president of France, according to several leaders present and their most senior aides. For a year, America’s closest allies had tried to placate Trump with a mix of flattery and concessions on mutual-defense and trade issues, hoping to buy time. Now, French soldiers were in Greenland, alongside Danish special forces equipped for a shooting war with America. The French president repeated an argument he’d been pressing for years, with mounting urgency: that Europe’s overreliance on America was a security risk. “There is no going back,” he said.

A clutch of European leaders chimed in to complain that the administration seemed more interested in mining and energy deals than upholding America’s traditional role in the world. Europe risked becoming “a miserable slave” to the U.S., groused the prime minister of Belgium. The conservative prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, dissented, telling the roomful of more-liberal leaders that while they might not like President Trump, he could still be reasoned with, according to people present.

To Meloni’s left sat Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, trying to maintain composure. After a week of brinkmanship with Trump, the Danish prime minister looked so shaken that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took a moment to ask how she was holding up: “You OK?”

Hours passed as people talked over each other in a conversation with such seismic implications it seemed surreal: In its 250th year, had America, protector of Europe, now become a threat?

Several participants mentioned a man who wasn’t in the room. Mark Carney, the new Canadian prime minister, had been regularly messaging Europe’s major leaders using a British phone number from his time in London, trying to persuade them that “the old America isn’t coming back.” Now, on the heels of a blistering speech at the annual Davos gathering, his arguments were gaining ground. “Canada,” said the prime minister of Spain, “is openly saying what we should do.”

In the months to come, the January crisis meeting would be remembered by Europe’s most powerful figures as the moment that countries bound together by blood and a sense of shared destiny since the aftermath of World War II began to explore separate paths.

Nobody has filed divorce papers, and important players on both sides are working hard to keep a loveless marriage going. Untangling the ties between Europe and the U.S. would be a massive undertaking. Canada, which is encouraging Europe to hedge against a more capricious America, is paradoxically much more reliant on the U.S. than almost any country on earth.

Militarily, it is hard to imagine the allies entirely going separate ways. This week’s summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will test the resolve of leaders to preserve an iconic fixture of Western might in the face of growing mutual distrust.

The White House said Trump is looking forward to having “constructive and frank conversations with many world leaders” at the meeting in Turkey. “President Trump has effectively restored America’s standing on the world stage, and he has done more for NATO than anyone else,” said White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly. “He also believes that some NATO members should do much more to fulfill their obligations.”

And yet the unvarnished private talks now taking place at the commanding heights of European democracies, many reported here in detail for the first time, signal the perilous path ahead.

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.

More recent U.S. actions are only stiffening the Europeans’ resolve. By the time European Council leaders met again at the Space Egg in March, Trump’s airstrikes on Iran had spiked fuel prices across the continent and Chancellor Merz was furious. Russia, he said, would be the only winner of the Middle East’s newest war, according to leaders present. Several participants began a wry debate over whether a JD Vance presidency would be preferable. Even Italy’s prime minister conceded she was revising her view of the American president. Trump, Meloni lamented, “is not reasonable.”