An eight-point plan to free Europe from American dominance

A world where Europeans don't have to call Trump "daddy" is possible, but it requires urgent and confident action. Here's how we get there.

It’s only early July, and Europe has already had a busy summer of grovelling. First, in May, we saw the UK sign a surrender deal with Trump in response to his tariff threats. Then last month we saw the humiliating spectacle of European countries cow-toeing to Trump (while calling him “daddy”) in agreeing to his demand of a 5% spending box-ticking exercise and an even greater reliance on US-made weapons. Now, according to reports, the European Commission is preparing to surrender to Trump’s trade war extortion by agreeing to endorse the legality of his 10% tariffs on EU imports in exchange for not receiving even higher tariffs. This is being done because that was the consensus among most EU leaders at last month’s European Council summit, led by clear instructions for surrender coming from Berlin and Rome.

Imagine a world in which the EU didn’t have to grovel. If you just looked at the economic figures, it is incomprehensible why the EU should be trembling with fear in the face of American threats. The EU is a larger market (450 million versus 333 million). The EU has larger trade power. And yet unlike China, India or Brazil, Europe is behaving like a powerless supplicant in the face of Trump’s threats. The reason is that while the Chinese and Americans believe in themselves, Europeans do not. Three generations of Europeans have lived in a world in which they’ve been vassals of either the United States or the Soviet Union. That has taken a severe mental toll, and we can see it in our political leadership on this continent. Europeans have been dependent on the United States - militarily, economically and culturally - for so long that they’ve lost the ability to imagine a world that’s any different. It isn’t just European military bases, financial institutions and TV screens that are occupied by the American empire. It is also European minds.

As long as Europe remains divided into small-and-medium-sized nation-states, it will always be thus. Whether it’s Russia, America or China, Europe will always be someone’s vassal if it is not a federal entity. That is the point of the European Union. It isn’t a peace project, and it isn’t a trade bloc. It is a vehicle for European independence and sovereignty, and there is no other alternative to get there.

If Europeans are tired of having their fate decided by American voters, if they are tired of having to cow-toe to the US president no matter how horrible he may be, if they feel humiliated by the way their leaders grovel to Washington and are unable to develop an independent foreign policy concerning Gaza or anything else, then they must support European federalism. Sticking unyieldingly to the same outdated Atlanticist institutions like NATO is lunacy at this point, but Europeans are trapped in inertia. Our leaders in Europe know the old world order is crumbling but they do not have the vision or ambition to try alternatives.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We need to start spelling out exactly what needs to be done. Here are the eight steps that I believe are crucial for European liberation.

1. Dismantle NATO

June’s NATO summit in The Hague was a moment of continental humiliation, and it really broke through to average citizens. I had so many people who don’t normally follow politics asking me about NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte’s fawning texts to Trump and designation of the US president as “daddy”. I told them that while the former Dutch prime minister (many of them had never heard of Rutte until now) may not be covering himself in glory at the moment, the reality is that anyone in his position would have to do the same. It is only the cringe-inducing language that separates Rutte from his predecessor Jens Stoltenberg, who also grovelled to Trump but in a less obvious way. The reality is that the Secretary General of NATO has only one boss, and that is the US president. This is not an alliance, it’s a protectorate. That is why Rutte was happy to throw the leaders of France and Norway under the bus at his press conference ahead of the summit, insisting they were wrong to say Trump is pulling US troops out of Europe. He doesn’t work for them, he works for Trump. That is why his main job these days seems to be defending his boss.

Rutte isn’t the problem. The problem is NATO. With the way it has been set up over all these years, NATO can never be a real alliance of equals. It is structured as an American military protectorate over Europe where command and control is done from Washington. As the Substack European Tomorrow skilfully explained in February, the way that NATO is structured makes it impossible for it to function without America:

“For the past 80 years, Europe’s freedom has been secured by nothing less than a continental army. That this army was American allowed us to obscure that reality and pretend that all we were relying on was a good old-fashioned alliance of nation-states. But without the American Supreme Allied Commander to call the shots, who will make the key decisions in a European war against Russia, who will coordinate the forces and manage the direction of the conflict? Will a Brit be put in charge, or a Frenchman or a Pole? Will we require a multi-member council as our military executive? Or will this devolve into a collection of mini-militaries as each runs itself according to its national structures, imperfectly cooperating as best as possible?

As much as European tanks and jets, what we need is a European system of command. It is a debate we have long dismissed as a distraction or unhelpful, largely because it is controversial and has no easy answers. But that unwillingness to look the problem in the eye is why we now risk having no backup defence plan in the event of American withdrawal.”

This does not mean creating the dreaded “EU army” - a boogeyman used by nationalists to scare the public away from European defence. What we’re talking about is a European military alliance that would work in the way that Europeans have fooled themselves for 80 years into thinking NATO works. It would be 28 national militaries working together in a real alliance of equals (it would necessarily have to be larger than the EU because of Brexit). The key is that this EU+UK military alliance cannot involve the United States (or Turkey), it must have its own command and control structure and be completely independent from Washington. That European alliance could then be in a restructured two-pillar NATO that is a real alliance between two equal powers. This isn’t some kind of left-field crazy idea. It was already planned in 1952 when the European Defence Community was proposed. But that sovereign European defence was never created, first because the French parliament vetoed it in 1954 (it was too soon after the war) and then because the Atlanticists argued that creating such a thing would undermine NATO.

This is how we ended up in the disastrously insecure position Europe finds itself in today, having allowed itself to become dependent on an unreliable protector. Putting all of Europe’s eggs in the NATO basket was a grave mistake. Simply spending more on defence, committing to the clearly unrealistic 5% target demanded by Trump, isn’t going to make Europe more militarily sovereign if its done with the same flawed NATO structure we have had. Shovelling more money over to the US military-industrial complex (two-thirds of European military spending goes to America) only entrenches Europe’s dependence. Combined, the militaries of Europe would already rival the United States at their current spending and personnel numbers and would be far larger than Russia’s military. Europe should spend more, but the spending isn’t the problem. The problem is the fragmentation and the reliance on American command and control. The Americans may want Europeans to spend more, but they do not actually want to lose their control over European defence in the process. It is up to the Europeans to defy the Americans and create that independent defence themselves.

2. Pay European, not American

The US doesn’t just militarily dominate Europe, it also economically dominates Europe. One of the most tangible example of that is something we do every day here on this continent: making electronic payments. Europeans may not have given it much thought, but every time they make a payment with a credit or debit card they are dependent on the United States. That’s because the credit card companies are American, and the payment infrastructure that’s being used is American-controlled. It isn’t only Europeans’ military security that Donald Trump can throw into chaos with one swipe of a pen. He could also, conceivably, turn off Europeans’ ability to pay for everyday purchases.

European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde has been warning about this for some time. Right now, the payment solutions we use here in Europe that are not American are national-only and cannot be used outside our own country. For instance, here in Belgium we have Payconiq which allows us to make payments online or in person using a QR code generated by our banking apps. But if you’re buying something online from next door in the Netherlands, you can’t use it. The Netherlands have their own payment system called iDEAL. So when I order something from the Netherlands, I need to use Visa, Mastercard or Paypal. The European Commission has been supporting the European Payments Initiative which is trying to unite these national systems but so far it hasn’t had success. The payments dependency problem has been plagued by the same problem that has dogged efforts to lessen Europe’s military, trade and cultural dependency - Europeans have felt no urgency to do so. Since almost everyone has a Visa, Mastercard or Paypal (all American companies), they can just use those when travelling to another EU member state or buying something from a website somewhere in the EU that’s not their home country. Few have seen any problem with this.

But imagine if all of this were suddenly turned off. What if Donald Trump decided to forbid these American companies from letting Europeans use their services? We would literally not be able to pay each other from one day to the next. This is a massive vulnerability which must be solved urgently. And it is frankly crazy that Europeans have allowed themselves to become completely vulnerable to a simple US executive order that would cause this whole continent’s economy to suddenly grind to a halt.

3. Defy the American cultural juggernaut

This could perhaps be the hardest step of all for Europeans to take. This continent is dominated by America culturally, and the extent of this domination grows more and more entrenched every day. One of the biggest differences I’ve observed as someone who grew up in the US but moved to Europe at the age of 26 is just how much cultural consumption patterns influence they way people think. When you grow up in the US, you consume almost no cultural output from other countries. Foreign movies are something for elite Americans to view in arthouse cinemas. Music in other languages is only for immigrants. The news is almost entirely domestically focused. The US is culturally self-sustaining, it is a cultural exporter that imports almost nothing for popular consumption. When you’re there, it’s almost as if the rest of the world doesn’t exist. And yet what most Americans don’t realise is that all cultural output produced in America is exported. It’s like a giant fishbowl where the fish don’t realise everything they do is being observed by the rest of the world. Everything goes out, almost nothing comes in.

Contrast that to how Europeans grow up, consuming American culture and hearing about American news as if they were a distant colony in an American empire. When I say the European mind is occupied by America, this is what I mean. Pick up a European newspaper and you will never not find an article about something in the US. In British and Irish newspapers it seems about half of the content is about America, both for politics and for entertainment. And so even as America descends into fascism, Europeans still can’t seem to mentally accept it. Because the America they’re reading about now doesn’t match the America they’re fed by Hollywood. This American ownership of Europeans’ minds is so deep that I honestly can’t imagine what it would take for Europeans to break their fascination with the US. It astounds me that with everything going on in the US, and with Europeans being turned away at the border if agents find criticism of Trump in private messages on their phones, I still have friends excitedly planning their trips to America over the coming months. There’s a total disconnect, as if the US they see on the news has nothing to do with the Hollywood US they’re taking a vacation in. And as for fears of being turned away, I’ve had many Europeans tell me “but I have a right to enter America”. It’s as if, subconsciously, they think they are part of America so could never be turned away.

This phenomenon, where Europeans grow up feeling like they vaguely live in America (or at least in its cultural sphere), has a clear cause. Two-thirds of the film, television and music Europeans consume comes from the United States. The proportion varies from country to country depending on the size and cultural influence of their languages. For instance, the proportion is lower in France and Spain than it is in the Netherlands or Poland. Nevertheless, it is high everywhere - particularly for movies. 70.1% of cinema tickets sold across Europe in 2023 were for US films, according to the European Audiovisual Observatory. According to cinema statistics from the European Commission, that average of 70% is the level for German and Italian cinemas, while in France the proportion is 50% - largely as a result of the Toubon Law setting a quota for French-language content. In the Netherlands, the proportion is 90%.

It isn’t just movies. More than half of the television shown on European screens comes from the US, according to the Observatory, usually American scripted dramas and comedies while the current affairs, game shows and reality TV is domestic. In 2023, 60% of chart music on the radio in Europe was produced in the US. The proportion is highest in countries like the Netherlands, Denmark, Ireland and Czechia while it is the lowest in France, Spain and Italy.

Europe’s common culture is American. With a few notable exceptions like the cultural exchange between Spain and Italy, Germany and Austria or Ireland and Britain, each European country consumes two types of media content: their own and America’s. The culture Europeans share with Europeans from other EU countries is therefor American, and this is largely what has made English the common tongue for communication between them.

Europeans should make a conscious effort to consume more of each others cultural output and less of America’s. That’s not going to be easy. It means less Beyoncé and more Eleni Foureira. It means less Brittany and more Helene Fischer. It means approaching even lighthearted things like pop music with a sense of purpose and intellectual curiosity. It means embracing Eurovision. Europeans should be aware of what their addiction to American culture and news is doing to their brains, and how it is contributing to their collective servitude and vulnerability.

4. Demand digital sovereignty

Like with culture, this is not an easy one. The digital platforms that have become part of our everyday life in Europe are all from America. We use our iPhones to log on to Facebook and Instagram. We receive statements from our political leaders on Elon Musk’s X. We pay with Paypal. We search with Google. We order an Uber to take us home and watch Netflix. That level of dependence gives the American tech giants enormous power over Europe. They collect Europeans’ data, and turn it over to the Trump regime when asked. They control what Europeans see in their social media feeds. And they organise how each of us lives our daily lives.

There has been a big push to establish European digital sovereignty, led among others by French President Emmanuel Macron. Many have scoffed at these efforts, saying that Europe simply doesn’t have the creativity or drive to create the kind of American innovative platforms that Europeans have become addicted to. But nevertheless, the efforts persist. The European Parliament is currently drafting a report on digital sovereignty where they are asking the Commission to specifically map out Europe’s tech dependence on the United States.

The idea is that the EU should have autonomy over its digital sphere: data, technology and infrastructure. A whole bunch of legislation was passed in the previous term to this effect. This includes the General Data Protection Act, which forces US tech giants to give Europeans more control over their personal information; the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which aim to create a safer digital space for users and ensure fair competition among digital platforms; the European Cloud Initiative, which is investing in alternatives to American providers; and the AI Act, which sets rules for safe and responsible use of artificial intelligence.

But the US tech giants have been lobbying hard against this EU legislation and they gave big money to Trump to have him use the full might of the US government to pressure the EU to weaken what it passed. These efforts have already been successful, with a private dressing down of President von der Leyen by US Vice President JD Vance on the sidelines of an AI summit in Paris earlier this year reportedly resulting in the Commission dropping proposals on AI liability and messaging app privacy. This month, it appears that pressure from US Big Tech and the Trump regime has been successful in getting the Commission to delay the union’s new AI rules and water them down. There has been talk of the EU scrapping its new digital rules in exchange for Trump dropping his tariff threats.

Citizens should demand that President von der Leyen not allow herself to be intimidated and that she stick by the laws passed - because these laws are designed to protect them from a predatory America.

5. End Anglosphere news dominance

This is the subject that prompted my first Substack post two years ago. The global news agenda, including news about the European Union, is still dictated by media based in London and the US. In Brussels, the only serious corporate investment in EU journalism came from an American publication (Politico). The go-to media outlet for the Commission to leak information to is the British newspaper Financial Times. Despite the US and UK TV networks not having any correspondent in Brussels (something also true for the BBC now that they’ve eliminated their Brussels correspondent position), the world is still getting its news about the EU from America and Britain. Even worse - the anglophone media is still setting the agenda for national media throughout the EU because English is the common language European journalists have between them.

The powerful media consumed across borders and setting the narrative, particularly here in Europe, are all based in the US and UK. These media present themselves as neutral observers on world affairs - the ‘default’ point of view. Media from other countries are considered to be representing the “French view”, the “German view” or the “Indian view”. But there is a raft of media such as The Economist, the Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the BBC that cannot conceive of themselves as British or American outlets, and rather insist that they are “international” with a neutral point of view. And for years, many here in continental Europe have internalised that narrative. These Anglosphere publications set narratives that are then swallowed and repeated by national media in other languages. Average citizens in continental Europe may not be consuming English-language media, but their politicians and journalists are. They internalise this ‘neutral’ ‘international’ narrative, and they pass that on to their readers and viewers in their respective languages without even realising what they’re doing.

Considering what’s been happening in the UK and US since 2016, how can these two countries’ media have any authority to set the news agenda for journalists across the world? Whether they like it or not, these publications are from where they’re from. It shapes their thinking. Even if the reporters writing stores are not themselves American, it is the New-York-and-London-based editors that choose the topics and steer the agenda. There is no such thing as neutral journalism. All reporting is a product of the time and place it is produced.

The problem, of course, is that EU national media will never have the global reach of the anglosphere media as long as they are not reporting in the globe’s common language. That is a reality continental Europeans need to accept. Wolfgang Blau has written about how the EU still leaves it to UK and US media to tell its story globally, which has become particularly awkward now that none of those media are based in the EU. In fact, both of these countries frequently find themselves at odds with the European Union these days. They are competitors, and sometimes even adversaries. And yet the media telling the story of those conflicts to the world are not based in the EU, but based in the country having a conflict with the EU.

We need to build a real European media ecosystem, and it needs to be in the EU’s common language: English. That will require public funding, both from the EU and national level. But it will also require continental Europe’s large media conglomerates to be bold for once and take a risk on establishing their own English-language pan-European outlets. Leaving the American media and their admirers in Britain to be the only ones telling Europe’s story, even as the US becomes an adversary to Europe or even an enemy in a war, is lunacy.

6. Enable a real EU foreign policy

Imagine a situation in which, in order for the US government to take any foreign policy position, it would need to get the unanimous consent of all 50 state governors. That is the situation in the EU, where foreign policy positions must have the backing of all 27 national leaders in the Council. That gives Viktor Orban, or anyone else, the power to veto EU foreign policy actions - which he often does. The EU is then usually left just to parrot American foreign policy - the Israel-Gaza conflict being a very pertinent example of that at the moment.

Anyone objectively looking at the situation would conclude that this damages the EU’s strength and credibility in the world. The current inability for Europe to make itself even remotely relevant in the Israel-Gaza situation is a case in point. Citizens consulted in the Conference on the Future of Europe a few years ago recommended that unanimity be ended and that foreign policy positions be adopted by majority vote. Some national leaders, such as Emmanuel Macron have been receptive to this idea. But other countries, including Poland and Sweden, have fervently opposed it.

The problem isn’t just that the veto ability prevents the EU from taking foreign policy positions and making itself relevant on the world’s diplomatic stage. It’s also, as I’ve written before, that it allows foreign powers to easily hamstring the EU by using friendly prime ministers within it to get their desired outcome (or non-outcome). The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth learned the hard way how easily Russia can manipulate such systems.

The chief argument used by those who oppose ending the veto is that the EU is not a country but rather a bloc of sovereign countries and therefor no country should be made to take a foreign policy stance that they disagree with. But what this argument ignores is that EU countries are not completely sovereign. They have traded sovereignty at a national level for greater strength and greater sovereignty at European level. Just as these countries are weaker economically outside the union, so too are they weaker militarily and diplomatically outside the union.

Size matters, and that’s a trade-off US states learned to make long ago. When the United States was established it was first made into a confederation, something very similar to what the EU is today. But this was eventually rejected in favour of full federation because the states realised they were more powerful together than separate. US states still control much of their own policy (much more than most Europeans realise). They set their own taxes and decide their own laws. But just as in the EU, on certain areas they cede decision-making to the federal government. Foreign policy is one of those areas. When Trump is making his foreign policy decisions at the moment, the State of New York has to accept them - because the power to make such decisions is in Washington and not Albany. That is a trade-off US states chose to make long ago so that the US as a whole could be strong on the world stage. They did so because they know that New York on its own wouldn’t have anywhere near the same diplomatic heft. If Sweden isn’t willing to make that trade-off by losing the veto power, then they accept that they will never be serious players on the world stage. Because they can only be serious by being part of a larger union.

The time has come for some tough decisions and long-term thinking. National leaders may still have knee-jerk reactions against ceding power to EU federal level, but what is the alternative? Looking at the challenges Europe faces, it is clear that the only way to get rid of American diktats on this continent is to replace the American domination with collective European decision-making. That is going to require some sacrifices of national sovereignty. But a continent that is dominated by the United States is not sovereign, individually or collectively, no matter how much autonomy individual EU member states are able to preserve. It is a false autonomy as long as the lack of European unity allows for American domination.

7. Dislodge the dollar

At June’s European Council summit, leaders had a very preliminary discussion about how to respond to the collapsing value of the US dollar (a result of Trump’s unpredictable and self-harming economic policies). It is a laudable goal and it is good that EU leaders are finally putting it on the table and daring to discuss it out loud. But it is not being pursued with the urgency that it should.

Discussing Europe’s military dependence on America has become all the rage these days. But as European Tomorrow put it: “just as we should be able to manage our own military, so we should be able to manage our own money, to emerge out from the under the shadow of the dollar.” While it is American military strength and European military weakness that is prompting the military dependence conversation, when it comes to monetary policy it is precisely the opposite. “The Trump administration is drastically accelerating the decline of the US as the centre of global finance,” notes European Tomorrow. “In taking a sledgehammer to the rule of law, attacking the courts and leaning on an increasingly politicised and tamed judiciary, Trump is undermining investor confidence, already damaged by the erratic nature of his policies. Meanwhile, the latest US budget looks like it will only double down on America’s spiralling debt, pushing further at the bounds of sustainability. From this chaos, Europe can reassert itself and build a financial system where the euro, even if it cannot replace the dollar, can play a foundational role.”

A ‘global euro’ that establishes itself as an international reserve currency would bolster the EU’s strategic autonomy and, as the think tank Centre for European Policy Reform has pointed out, make it more resilient in an increasingly weaponised international economic landscape. “Yet this requires more than just political rhetoric,” notes CEPS. “It demands long overdue and politically sensitive steps towards deeper economic and financial integration, on which progress has stalled for years.”

This isn’t just about the dollar, it’s about the entire America-dominated Bretton Woods system that has governed economic and monetary affairs in the West for 80 years. The 1944 Breton Woods Agreement created a system of monetary management for North America, Europe, Japan and Australia that we still use today. It established the US dollar dominance. It established the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, both based in Washington. It was a bold and visionary response to the devastation caused by World War II, the creation of a new world order. In many ways, it was a success. But it’s clear that this system has now outlived its usefulness for anyone other than the United States, and today it only serves to lock other countries into American dependence.

Europe, though economically powerful, remains entangled in this American-centred system. While the European Central Bank governs the eurozone’s monetary policy, the continent remains vulnerable to shifts in US interest rates, inflation expectations, and financial market cycles. European banks and companies rely on dollar-based financing and clearing systems. When the US imposes sanctions—such as those on Iran or Russia—European firms frequently comply, not because of EU law, but out of fear of losing access to US markets and financial infrastructure. Europe may have legal autonomy, but it lacks economic independence.

Proponents of a new order envision a more multipolar economic system, with regional financial blocs and reserve currencies, and stronger European institutions capable of shielding the continent from American economic coercion. In addition to strengthening the euro as a global reserve currency, there have also been calls to restructure the IMF and World Bank so they are no longer so heavily influenced by Washington (starting with moving them out of the city).

8. Create a new trade architecture

Also at last month’s European Council summit, President von der Leyen said she wants to start a discussion about replacing the defunct World Trade Organization with something else. It elicited gasps (and even seemed to catch Council chair Antonio Costa standing next to her by surprise), but it is a logical thing to do considering that the current WTO is defunct largely because it is both US-defied and US-controlled. But perhaps there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. As Canadian professor Kristen Hopewell wrote in Politico yesterday, why not kick the US out of the WTO?

“Since his reelection, Trump has essentially launched a full-scale assault on the global trading system, terrorising countries around the world with a seemingly endless barrage of tariffs and threats. The US leader isn’t even pretending to abide by WTO rules anymore. Moreover, his tariffs threaten to send the world back to the 1930s, when the spread of trade protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbor policies — spurred by America’s Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act — exacerbated the Great Depression. Under these circumstances, allowing the US to remain a member makes a mockery of the institution and its principles. And countries committed to preserving a rules-based trading order need to fight back and defend the system, punishing his blatant violation of WTO rules.

Former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt called the idea “a radical proposal for a radical situation.” Many leading economists have said it may be the only solution. But the big question is whether European leaders have the nerve to defy the United States to do so.

I know that these eight actions are not easy. Some are easier than others. Reading the mood in Europe right now, I do not think that citizens or leaders have woken up to the danger they are in. They therefor have not recognised the need to take urgent action to avoid that danger. Nevertheless, those of us who care about the future of this continent and its safety, in a world where the United States descends into chaos or becomes a threat, should continue urging action. Right now it may feel like it’s falling on deaf ears. But in the future, when someone asks us what we did as the world crept toward disaster, let’s be able to say we tried to do something.