Will American Power in Europe Run Out?
This article was originally published in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on July 6, 2026.
Introduction
American power is entrenched in Europe. Some 70,000 U.S. soldiers are garrisoned at bases across the continent. American firms control 70 percent of Europe’s cloud computing market and supply the chips, artificial intelligence (AI) models, and connectivity services that underpin Europe’s digital future. The European Union (EU) is the United States’ largest trading partner, and transatlantic exchanges employ more than 16 million people—4 percent of the combined U.S.-EU labor force. European investors hold $15 trillion in U.S. financial assets, and the dollar still anchors Europe’s global trade. By every material measure, the United States is woven into Europe’s strategic, economic, and technological fabric.
Yet the depth of this relationship has become a source of unease in Europe. U.S. President Donald Trump’s claims on Greenland, his administration’s support for Europe’s far-right parties, and his willingness to abandon Ukraine and accommodate Russia have badly undermined Europe’s confidence in Washington. Europeans today see their relationship with the United States as weakened, and they suspect that America may have hostile intentions.
To protect themselves in the face of such uncertainty, Europeans are working to reduce their exposure to the vicissitudes of U.S. politics wherever they can—diversifying spending, procurement, and trade; building digital, financial, and defense sovereignty; and courting new partners, including recalibrating relations with China. Senior European officials now openly discuss “insurance options” that would have been unthinkable a few years ago: a European nuclear deterrent as an added layer of reassurance to Washington’s extended deterrence, a payments system that circumvents the dollar, so-called Made in Europe defense procurement that cuts out American defense companies, and escape hatches from the imposing dominance of the U.S. tech stack.
Is American power in Europe about to run out as a result? No, but major changes are underway. The post-1945 transatlantic bargain—in which a benign American hegemon underwrites European order in exchange for political deference—is no longer tenable. Yet in many ways, that bargain was always exceptional. Instead, a more normal relationship could be emerging between asymmetric partners with overlapping interests.
American power in Europe will evolve and decline in some areas, but the United States will retain substantial leverage over European nations, which have few alternatives for the foreseeable future. As artificial intelligence becomes foundational to economic output and military power alike, technological dependence may overtake security as Washington’s greatest leverage, leaving even a more militarily autonomous Europe bound to the United States. A return to the levels of trust that characterized U.S.-European relations in the past may be desirable for the sake of stability and cooperation, but it will not be necessary to sustain American power as its relationship with this crucial region normalizes.
The future of U.S. power in Europe is thus a litmus test for a more coercive, transactional U.S. approach to regional partners: Can this new approach produce the same—or even more—cost-efficient results as the old alliance? Or will U.S. global influence decline as a result?
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Sophia Besch is a senior fellow in the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The views expressed herein are those solely of the author(s). GMF as an institution does not take positions.