Can Trump’s America Drive Europe and the Gulf Together?

As American power becomes more erratic and extortionate, Europe and the Gulf could help each other building strategic autonomy

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When empires decline, they rarely do so gracefully. They become fiercer. They try, with increasing desperation, to defend their pole position through ever riskier military adventures and ever harsher forms of economic coercion. Their rulers appear more erratic. They overestimate their own judgement, their country’s strength and the resilience of the imperial order itself. It is in moments like these that the Thucydidean danger becomes acute: the established power, fearing displacement, lashes out not from confidence but anxiety.

Donald Trump increasingly resembles the emperor trying to save a sinking ship. He has tried to extort America’s closest allies in Europe through aggressive trade policy, threatened to seize Greenland, and drawn the United States into a war with Iran on terms as impulsive as they are strategically opaque.

In the eyes of its closest partners America has become a liability. Europe and the Gulf are confronting the same belated realisation. Their strategic autonomy and, in many cases, elements of their sovereignty have been built around deep American entanglement. For decades, that entanglement was described as interdependence. In truth, that language often glossed over the vulnerabilities embedded in the system. What looked like mutual reliance now appears, in important respects, as dependence on a power that has become less predictable, less disciplined and less trustworthy.

Empire in Decline

The largest military-industrial complex in human history has become detached from a sober strategic decision-making apparatus. At the top sits a political system convulsed by polarisation, distorted by permanent campaigning and made more brittle by outside information warfare and internal lobbying pressures. The result is a pattern of wild oscillation. Periods of hyperactivity – Iraq in 2003, Iran in 2026 – are followed by retrenchment, paralysis and fatigue. American power remains formidable but its use has become increasingly disconnected from a coherent theory of political outcomes.

What makes this moment so consequential is the fact the United States was the principal underwriter of the postwar order. American liberalism was assumed, however imperfectly, to extend beyond its borders: to international relations conducted within the constraints of international law, to an economic order shaped by free trade, and to a political vocabulary at least nominally supportive of individual liberty. Even if that image was never fully true, it was true enough to anchor alliances, reassure markets and legitimise American leadership.

“Make America Great Again” has become the battle cry against historical reality. It is a demand that a unipolar, US-centric world return, even though that world no longer exists and will not come back. The hyperconnected world of flows - of capital, goods, people, energy, and data - does not really recognise superpowers in the old sense. It recognises hubs. The United States remains one of the most important of them. But hub status in an interdependent system is not sustained indefinitely through coercion and compulsion. It is sustained through trust, predictability and the capacity to generate consent. Obsessed with retaining its centrality, Trump’s America is instead exploiting its hub status in defence, capital markets and trade to extract concessions from friends, partners and adversaries alike.

The Case for Strategic Disentanglement

The depth of this co-dependence is difficult to overstate. In defence, Europe and the Gulf have for too long relied on the United States as the ultimate layer of security. Their militaries have been built around a culture of burden-sharing in which American capacity would compensate for insufficient domestic bandwidth. In finance, the dollar remains the dominant clearing currency. Gulf currencies are pegged to it. Energy transfers that keep rentier systems afloat are overwhelmingly dollar-denominated. Now, with the rise of artificial intelligence, another layer of entanglement is being added. Both Europe and the Gulf are subscribing as vassals to America’s AI ecosystem.

Trump’s narcissistic overestimation of his own abilities as a dealmaker has been exposed nowhere more clearly than in the Gulf. The energy-rich monarchies invested strategically in the United States. They became force multipliers for American power projection, not least as states like Qatar have been helping extract Washington from diplomatic and strategic dead ends in Afghanistan, Gaza and now Iran. The calculation was simple. If this president understood everything as a transaction, then the Gulf states would make themselves indispensable to the transaction.

But Trump has not held up his side of the bargain. Despite trillions in Gulf investment pledges, he ignored Gulf advice on how best to contain the Iranian threat. Instead, he fell back into the same neoconservative trap laid by Israel that consumed several of his predecessors. The Gulf states became collateral damage in a war they did not want and whose escalation they had specifically sought to avoid. At the same time, Trump is now trying to strongarm the very European allies he has mocked, tariffed and humiliated into helping the United States reopen the Strait of Hormuz. After all, it is European markets that may bear much of the economic pain from disrupted energy flows and a supply-chain shock of historic magnitude.

Strategic Re-Entanglement in a Relationship on par

Yet there is a silver lining in this for both Europe and the Gulf. Their shared exposure could help sharpen strategic clarity. As both sides reassess the vulnerabilities created by overdependence on the United States, the answer may lie in a closer mutual rapprochement – politically, technologically, militarily and financially. Many in Europe are beginning to recognise that key Gulf states are not simply clients or energy suppliers. They are middle powers in their own right, with capital, diplomatic reach and strategic agency. That opens the possibility of a more balanced interdependence, one in which neither side can easily extort or coerce the other into decisions against its interests.

Europe is capital-hungry and struggling to weather industrial decline. It needs investment, secure supply chains and reliable access to energy. The Gulf states, meanwhile, possess vast sovereign reserves that will have to be deployed with far greater strategic discipline in the years ahead. Rather than making dead investments in an America governed by impulsive, unreliable and constantly rotating leadership, Gulf capitals could direct more sovereign equity into European infrastructure, industry, defence and technology. Yet, this would not be to curry strategic favours, but build military, technological and political sovereignty at both ends of the relationship. The Gulf states must not be treated as mere ATMs but as partners with equal equity and stake in the development of technology, military capability, financial products and energy solutions.

Europe still possesses considerable collective and national convening power. It retains, despite all the obvious hypocrisies, a deeper institutional commitment to a rules-based order than Washington currently does. Even some European governments that gave Israel a blank cheque over Gaza are now discovering the value of rules that prohibit wars of aggression, protect freedom of navigation and constrain extortionate trade practices. In that respect, the Gulf’s strategic preference for accommodation, mediation and dialogue over coercion and maximal force may now be more aligned with parts of Europe than either side is with Trump’s America.

This does not require abandoning the United States. That would be neither feasible nor wise. But it does require a more sober appraisal of where entanglement with America strengthens sovereignty and where it erodes it. A gradual disentanglement by Europe and the Gulf would free up the bandwidth for a more reciprocal relationship between them, one based on mutual resilience rather than asymmetric dependence. That, in the end, may be the deepest unintended consequence of Trump’s presidency. In trying to restore American primacy through coercion, he may instead persuade allies and partners to build a world in which they need America rather less.