On the evening of 16 February, the American ambassador to Belgium summoned Belgian officials to a meeting that, by multiple accounts, rapidly descended into a tirade of insults and threats. The Brussels Times reported that Belgian officials described the encounter as unprecedented in its tone, prompting a formal diplomatic protest. "I will not tolerate his insults," one senior Belgian official said publicly — language that diplomats reserve for interactions that have genuinely exceeded the bounds of accepted conduct.
Taken alone, an ambassador's outburst is an incident. Set beside everything else that has happened in the past month, it is a data point in a structural crisis.
The pattern has become impossible to overlook. At the Munich Security Conference, American officials threatened, in terms that left little ambiguity, to pursue the acquisition of Greenland — the autonomous territory of Denmark, a founding NATO member. Senator Lindsey Graham, dispatched ostensibly to reassure European allies, reportedly deployed profanity in his attempts to manage the fallout, according to reporting from Puck News. The reassurances did not reassure. European officials left Munich describing a level of trauma — a word several used without apparent self-consciousness — that had not been present at previous conferences even during the most contentious periods of alliance history.
Simultaneously, the Geneva peace process has made explicit what has been visible in outline for weeks: that Washington is applying asymmetric pressure on Ukraine — the invaded party — to make territorial concessions, while directing comparatively little public pressure at Russia. As President Zelenskyy stated on Tuesday: "It is not fair that Trump publicly urges Ukraine, and not Russia, to make concessions for peace." That the victim of a war of aggression must publicly rebuke its principal sponsor for even-handedness is itself a measure of how far the transatlantic relationship has deteriorated.
And then there is Secretary of State Rubio's calculated warmth toward Hungary's Viktor Orbán — the one EU leader who has most systematically obstructed European solidarity on Russia. The signal is legible and has been widely read in European capitals: the United States is rewarding those who fragment European consensus, not those who maintain it.
Senior EU officials have begun speaking, with increasing candour, of a deliberate American strategy of European disunity. "We are increasingly concluding it is strategy," one official told The Guardian, adding that the question of whether the pattern reflects chaos or design has effectively been resolved in the minds of Brussels' senior leadership.
None of this happened in a vacuum. The Trump administration entered office with an explicitly transactional worldview and a stated scepticism of multilateral institutions. But there is a difference between a transactional approach to alliances — which allies can adapt to — and one that appears to treat allied solidarity as an obstacle to be fragmented rather than a resource to be husbanded. The former is manageable. The latter represents a fundamental departure from the architecture of postwar Western security that has, whatever its imperfections, underpinned seven decades without a great-power war in Europe.
European governments are now making decisions that reflect a new baseline assumption: that American reliability cannot be taken as a given. France and Germany have accelerated defence spending discussions. Poland, already NATO's biggest per-capita defence spender, is expanding its military further. Denmark, shaken by the Greenland threats, has announced significant increases to its Arctic defence posture. The Nordic and Baltic states have deepened their bilateral security arrangements.
These are adaptations to uncertainty, not to the certainty of American withdrawal. But they mark a threshold: European governments are no longer willing to discount the possibility that the Atlantic alliance, in its current form, may not survive the present American administration intact. For the architects of postwar order, that sentence would have been unthinkable. Today, it is merely realistic.
