Three foreign policy “tribes” compete for President Donald Trump’s ear: restrainers, prioritisers and primacists. Their combined impact for Europe over the last two years has been unhappy: a hybrid agenda in which no tribe has managed to fully implement its foreign policy vision. These range from restrainers’ preferred full retrenchment of the US from its global obligations, to prioritisers’ wish to focus on Asia, to the continuation of America’s global primacy. The overall result has been US foreign policy made through an unusual combination of presidential improvisation and semi-autonomous bureaucratic agendas. Europe has been on the sharp end of each tribe’s ambitions.
On Ukraine and European security, Trump keeps inclining towards restrainers and prioritisers by cutting support for Ukraine and doing business with Russia. Primacists have prevailed on Iran—to Europe’s detriment, with skyrocketing energy prices and heightened insecurity in its southern neighbourhood. And Europeans keep being pulled in different directions on questions around US troop presence in Europe and building up their own defence-industrial base.
The factionalism around Trump will likely intensify during the remainder of Trump’s presidency, as the battle in the Republican Party to succeed him heats up. This friction will likely be most visible in the US defence posture in Europe, where the Trump administration’s “hybrid” agenda seeks to rescind America’s security responsibilities while retaining its privileges as a hegemon. This competition is a process Europeans can, and should, aim to influence. In fact, a number of new opportunities present themselves to do just this and protect Europe’s interests. These opportunities have emerged because the Iran war has sharply increased the vulnerability and cost of US basing in the Gulf, while simultaneously demonstrating the operational utility of European basing arrangements. Depleted US military stocks have highlighted the importance of the European defence-industrial base. Europeans now have more negotiating leverage than they did in January 2025.
Over the next two years, European policymakers need to engage with—and alter the dynamics of—the “prioritiser-primacist” hybrid agenda. They must signal that Washington cannot rescind its core responsibilities if it wishes also to preserve its traditional hegemonic privileges. However, this will require Europeans to act more collectively.
Not gone to plan
The prioritisers’ project for this presidential term ran roughly as follows. America cannot be present everywhere, all the time; China’s rise is the leading military challenge for the US; deterring China in Taiwan requires all the attention and resources America can muster. Therefore, Europeans should be left to defend Europe, allowing the US to shift its capabilities and political attention to the Indo-Pacific. Alongside Vice-president J.D. Vance, key figures in this tribe include Elbridge Colby, under-secretary of defence for policy.
But Colby and the prioritisers have repeatedly lost the president. On China and Taiwan, he has remained much more interested in striking deals with Xi Jinping than in military prioritisation. The result is an uneasy hybrid: the Pentagon wants to prepare for competition with China while Trump searches for accommodation with Beijing.
If you are a prioritiser, the war in Iran has been even worse: yet another massive Middle Eastern commitment that sucks resources away from Asia and has drained American military readiness.
Another tack
So after these failures, where can the prioritisers still make progress? The answer: in Europe.
This summer the Pentagon sent a questionnaire to America’s NATO allies. The stated purpose was to assess European readiness to do more on their conventional defence, backfilling for future American withdrawals and allowing resource to redeploy to other theatres.
But the format of the questionnaire suggested that orderly burden shifting was not the only goal. European governments were asked not only about defence spending and their ability to replace American capabilities, but also: how much they buy from US suppliers; whether they support measures said to inhibit transatlantic defence-industrial cooperation; whether they publicly support US foreign-policy priorities in the Middle East; and whether they restricted American access to bases and airspace during the Iran war.
The burden shifting elements reflected the long-standing prioritiser focus on European conventional responsibilities. Prioritisers have long argued that the depletion of American stocks means Europe needs to develop its own defence-industrial base. They also opposed the Iran war.
The primacists won’t let go
But much of the questionnaire also seems more in tune with the agenda of the primacists, whose number includes figures such as secretary of state Marco Rubio. This tribe has traditionally pushed Europeans to keep buying from American defence firms. The agenda of each tribe combined in difficult ways for Europeans in the questionnaire. For instance, its section on Iran collapsed two very different things into one category: willingness to defend NATO territory and willingness to help the US wage a unilateral war that has only damaged European interests.
The document thus captures how Europeans are being asked to become more capable and less dependent on American forces, while remaining politically obedient to an increasingly hostile Washington and commercially dependent on American suppliers.
Europe’s opportunity lies in unity
What is the likely outcome of this through to 2028 and beyond? If the prioritisers in the Pentagon use the questionnaire (filled out by the Europeans themselves) to argue some allies are not just expensive but also hostile to American defence companies (and unreliable when America goes to war elsewhere), it becomes considerably easier to argue for reduced commitments in Europe. And if Vance or another prioritiser wins the White House, the groundwork in Europe for a larger pivot to Asia will already have been laid.
Yet European NATO allies now hold some cards, in particular regarding the Pentagon’s 2026 US force-posture review. Four main factors explain this shift. First, US operations against Iran have tied up high-end military assets, meaning America has fewer carrots to offer Europe. Second, recent Iranian attacks have pushed up the cost of US basing in the Gulf, raising the likelihood that these bases will be phased out—and thus improving the value of European geography to the US. Third, the Iran campaign has already shown that Washington still deeply relies on European bases, access rights and logistics to project its power globally. And Europeans’ stronger spending on defence creates an opportunity to grow their military industrial capacity as the US focuses on replenishing its own military stockpiles.
Europe obviously remains heavily dependent on the US for intelligence sharing, missile defence, long-range strike, command and control, nuclear deterrence and weapons supply. A large-scale US withdrawal would still be very costly for Europe. But these interests merely strengthen the case for stronger European unity to negotiate with the US over its force posture in Europe.
For this, Europeans need to gather all the unity they can to undermine Washington’s divide-and-conquer strategy. Defence secretary Pete Hegseth had already publicly criticised countries that restricted US base access during the Iran war, warning such moves would carry consequences. This summer’s questionnaire replicated the threat in a more subtle way. Of course, alignment with the administration on Iran is no indicator of European willingness to defend NATO territory, as Pentagon planners like Colby—who are themselves opposed to the war—are well aware. But the questionnaire on basing access suggests that US presence now depends entirely on whether individual allies fall in line.
Europeans already failed to act strategically when they sent 27 different responses to the Pentagon’s questionnaire. If Spain says “no” on basing access for US Iran operations but Romania says “yes”, the White House does not have to negotiate with “Europe” as a single bloc. It can just pack up and move the bases from one country to another. True bargaining power only works when prime geography and irreplaceable bases are backed by absolute European unity. Instead of treating the questionnaire as bilateral pieces of homework, Europeans could have coordinated a response to make a powerful political point.
None of the three tribes’ visions present easy futures for Europe, including the primacists’. But it is the hybrid of these visions that will hurt Europe the most, by keeping it in a perpetual state of dependence on a volatile ally. Through adopting a more consolidated position and defending their own interests more expressly, Europeans might also influence the factional struggle. The next time America comes knocking, they should have a better plan how to answer the door as one.
About the author
Majda Ruge is a senior policy fellow with the United States programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, based in Berlin.