Europeans have been forced to realise that without 'security autonomy', economic and political autonomy are also in jeopardy
To sustain a Western civilisation, Europe must make greater sacrifices both economically and culturally
On July 27, 2025, the US President Donald Trump invited the President of the EU Commission Ursula von der Leyen and other top EU officials to his golf course, Trump-Turnberry on the West Coast of Scotland. Their meeting sealed a trade deal, which von der Leyen described as ‘huge’, but which critics described as a ‘capitulation’.
While the trade deal yielded more favourable terms for the EU than those Trump had announced in April 2025, the deal was still ultimately highly unfavourable. The EU had originally sought a 10% deal; Trump rejected it and threatened 30% before settling on 15%. The deal also included $600 billion in EU investments in the US, and the purchase of $750 billion worth of US energy.
When asked to explain what had happened, why the EU had capitulated to Trump’s demands, the EU Trade Commissioner Maroš Šefčovič told reporters: ‘It’s not only about the trade. It’s about security. It’s about Ukraine. It’s about current geopolitical volatility. I cannot go into all the details.’
Europeans, whether pro-market Atlanticists or EU federalists, will have to come to terms with life within ‘Civilisational America’
Šefčovič’s reticence was unfortunate, because if he had laid bare ‘the details’, Europeans might have discovered that Trump’s willingness to leverage security for trade constitutes a grave threat to the EU, a threat that has no ready response. Since Europe depends on US weapons to protect Ukraine, its capacity for hard bargaining is limited.
We should see the Turnberry capitulation as a historical moment that marks the transition between what I call ‘American Europe’ – a political order that saw the United States underwrite European security, prosperity and autonomy – and ‘Civilisational America’ – a new political order that seeks to exploit American security provision for trade and other political gains. Europeans, whether pro-market Atlanticists or EU federalists, will have to come to terms with life within ‘Civilisational America’.
‘American Europe’, which lasted roughly from 1945-2025, employed different institutions with distinctive functional responsibilities. From a European perspective, international financial regulation was in the hands of the IMF (essentially the US Treasury); security was in the hands of Nato (essentially the US Defence Department); and trade was in the hands of GATT, WTO, and increasingly the EU Trade Commission. Only in the case of trade did Europeans have any significant degree of agency.
Under this American-created international order, post-war Western Europe prospered – both economically and as a global player. For better or worse, the EU became a regulatory superpower. In the early 2000s, the EU Commission was able to tame some of America’s largest corporations. The EU, for example, stopped the proposed merger of Honeywell and General Electric, and forced Microsoft to unbundle its media software and offer consumers a choice of browsers.
Europe’s brief period of success as a regulatory superpower has now led to a reaction. Crudely stated, European regulatory imperialism has helped give birth to American predatory mercantilism. That’s the world we now inhabit. And Europeans, whatever their political identity, are stumped. None has a solution to a United States that threatens to withdraw the US security umbrella to achieve favourable trade deals.
The Turnberry capitulation has forced Europeans to realise that without ‘security autonomy’, economic and political autonomy are also in jeopardy. President Emmanuel Macron had warned of this problem in his Sorbonne speech in 2017. For Macron, Nato is no longer reliable, so Europe needs to develop an effective, independent military. Unfortunately, France – much like the other Western European states – lacks either the fiscal capacity or the collective will to fund this project. Furthermore, ‘security autonomy’ also needs both technological autonomy and energy self-sufficiency. It’s no good matching the US militarily, while relying upon Musk’s satellites and Texan liquefied natural gas.
If EU federalists have no plausible solution to the Turnberry capitulation, what about pro-market Atlanticists? Sadly, they are in a similar pickle. The Atlanticists – especially those in the UK – assumed the US would always underwrite European security and offer reasonable trade deals. They expected post-Brexit UK to bag a huge trade deal with the US. None saw the ‘special relationship’ as a chokehold waiting to happen.
If EU federalists have an unworkable solution to the problem of predatory mercantilism, Atlanticists have no solution at all. They can only hope that Trump is an aberration, and the Atlanticists in Washington will come riding to their rescue. Such hope is misplaced. The conditions that gave rise to and sustained ‘American Europe’ have disappeared.
‘Civilisational America’ is here to stay, because this new political order answers to the Trump administration’s belief that it must extract more rent from its allies, if it is to combat the rise of China as a geopolitical power and economic rival. To sustain a Western civilisation, Europe must make greater sacrifices both economically and culturally. To this end, ‘Civilisational America’ entails a project to call-out the decline in Europe’s civilisational values. Atlanticists and EU federalists alike must decide where they stand with respect to this project.
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