EUROPE PUT ALL ITS EGGS IN THE AMERICAN BASKET - TODAY, THAT BASKET IS COLLAPSING

Why do Europeans tolerate their politicians repeatedly bowing to Donald Trump when similar deference to a leader of another foreign power would provoke outrage? In his keynote address at Connecting EU 2026, Brussels-based journalist Dave Keating, author of The Owned Continent, traced Europe’s submission to the USA back to decades of American cultural dominance, which have made it psychologically difficult for Europeans to see the USA as anything but a friend. We bring you highlights from his speech in Sofia.

For 80 years, European citizens have been sold an illusion of independence. In exchange for Marshall Plan rebuilding and NATO protection following World War II, Western Europe surrendered a large amount of its sovereignty to the United States. Given the state of destruction that European powers had brought upon themselves in that war, perhaps this Faustian bargain was inevitable. But what is perplexing is why Europe’s leaders, even after rebuilding with the economic miracles of the 1960s, have chosen to maintain that same protectorate structure, which in many ways resembles that of vassal states, still today, 80 years later.

During the Cold War, in places like here in Bulgaria, Russia’s control was brutal and obvious. West of the Iron Curtain, America’s control was more subtle – and it was a free choice. As the academic Glyn Morgan argues in his new book The Rise and Fall of American Europe, which traces how post-war Western Europe was created by and for the United States, he speaks of the Goldilocks treatment: the USA allowed just enough independence to avoid breeding resentment, but not so much that it would threaten American control.

After 1989, Eastern Europe decided to embrace that Western model of American control, for obvious reasons vastly preferring it to the brutality of Soviet control. But this arrangement was always tenuous and risky. Europe put all its eggs in the American basket. And today, that basket is collapsing.

Donald Trump has exposed not only the degree of America’s power over Europe, but also just how easily the USA can extort Europeans by using those dependencies against them. As a journalist based in Brussels, I spent 2025 watching the repeated surrender of Europe’s leaders to Donald Trump in astonishment. Why, I asked, wasn’t the EU willing to use the myriad tools at its disposal to fight back against this extortion? There are a variety of factors, but to me, one is very clear. Decades of American cultural dominance on this continent have made Europeans unable to see Americans as an adversary, a threat or a possible enemy.

How else can you explain why European citizens have accepted their leaders’ repeated surrender to Donald Trump over the past year? The humiliating concessions of President von der Leyen’s Turnberry deal, signed on Donald Trump’s golf course in Scotland. The over-the-top Trump flattery, calling him ‘Daddy’. The unquestioning acceptance of setting an arbitrary 5% target of military spending at NATO – a level even the United States doesn’t reach. We know that such grovelling to a Russian or Chinese leader would never be accepted by citizens. So why does it somehow seem normal in the American context?

From the time they’re born, Europeans are inundated with American culture. Turn on the radio and you’re almost certain to find an American song. Turn on the TV and you’ll find an American programme. It has been like this for decades and there’s no way that hasn’t had a psychological impact on Europeans. I believe that it has made a vast swathe of the European public subconsciously think they are in America, or at least in the outer edges of an American empire. And that has made it psychologically difficult to accept that the USA could now be an adversary or even an enemy that means Europe harm.

What are the essential steps to liberate Europe from American dependence and achieve European sovereignty?

We have to take the problem of American cultural domination seriously… The irony is we now do have a common European culture: American culture. An Italian and a German don’t know anything about each others’ pop stars or TV shows or news, but when they come together they can talk about American culture. They talk about Superman, Beyonce, Stranger Things. 

We must fix this continent’s broken education systems. The reason Europeans don’t know about EU politics is that their education systems never taught them even the basics of EU civics and how the EU actually works.

Europe can only achieve sovereignty through EU federation There is no other path. And for those who recoil at the F word, I would ask them to explain how else Europeans can be sovereign and free from the domination of global superpowers… Yes, there are differences between the different parts of Europe. But zoom out, to a global level, and you’ll see that Europeans have far more in common with one another than they think. There is a European culture; there is a European life. It is different from other parts of the world. And it is different from America… 

The term United States of Europe is probably leading people to the wrong comparison. A better comparison is India, which is a union of different states which historically were all separate. Different languages, different cultures, different races. They were brought together by British imperialism and when they kicked the British out of the subcontinent they could have chosen to go back to being a bunch of European-sized small princely states. Instead, they chose to build an independent sovereign union.

Europe’s economic muscle: Europe has all the tools it would need to be able to say no to Donald Trump’s extortion but it chooses not to use them. Why haven’t governments and banks signed up to the European Payments Initiative, which would prevent Donald Trump from turning off Europeans’ ability to pay each other with Visa Mastercard overnight? Why is Germany blocking the use of the Anti-Coercion Instrument against the USA? Why is France blocking the diversification of the EU’s trade partners? Why is Italy blocking discussions on using the EU’s tariff bazooka against US services imports? Because Europeans haven’t had the courage and confidence to use the strengths that they possess.

EU army: A pooled European military would be as large as America’s and ten times the size of Russia’s. But efforts to create this have been blocked by this continent’s Atlanticist leadership for fear of undermining NATO, which at this point is indeed a paper tiger, as Donald Trump himself has said. He is after all the one who decides whether it is or not. And it is clear there is no longer US Article 5 protection of Europe. 

Finally, Europeans must believe in themselves. We need to foster a European pride, mindful of the horrific mistakes of the past but moving on, learning from that and creating a European civic nationalism. We can’t keep ceding the emotion of pride and patriotism to the far right. We need to offer Europeans a continental patriotism. We need to define what being European is, in contrast to Europe’s enemies. We need to explain why Europe is not America and why that is a good thing that Europeans should be proud of.

You can watch the whole speech here.

Dave Keating is an American-European journalist based in Brussels who has covered EU politics for 20 years. He is the Brussels correspondent for the international cable news station France 24, the author of Gulf Stream Blues on Substack and the author of the book The Owned Continent about Europe’s dependence on the United States. Previously, he was a Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council and editor of EuropeanVoice.com, a side publication of The Economist. In 2023, he was ranked the top EU social media influencer.