After just a few months of Trump II, northern Europe is gradually coming to terms with the returning President’s dramatic revision of U.S. foreign policy. Denmark is a partial exception, as a result of the American administration’s astonishingly aggressive approach towards Greenland, which is still part of the Danish realm. Danes are boiling with fury. Britain and Sweden, the countries that I know best, are more typical.
Despite their very different security backgrounds, the two countries have ended up in similar positions: both feel obliged to make the best of an exceedingly bad job. Their governments have adopted accommodating – even obsequious – positions toward an administration that they find deeply unsettling. The reason is simple. In the short to medium term, countries like Britain and Sweden have no other realistic security option.
Under the American umbrella
In 2022, soon after the major Russian attack on Ukraine, Sweden’s then Social Democratic government implemented a huge change in the country’s security strategy. After 200 years of neutrality or nonalignment, Sweden applied to join NATO. This was not an obvious or inevitable step. The outbreak of interstate conflict in its vicinity might conceivably have persuaded a nonaligned country to accentuate its independence from power blocs.
However, Finland’s decision to dash for NATO membership might have left Sweden isolated, had it not chosen to follow suit. In any case, Sweden’s nonalignment had been eroding since the end of the Cold War (and arguably even earlier) as it drew closer to NATO. By 2022, a credible neutrality had probably become irrecoverable.
Finland’s accession to the alliance went quickly and smoothly. For Sweden, Turkish and Hungarian obstruction made the same path much rockier than expected. But it was completed in March 2024, much to the relief of the entire Swedish political class, even including two left-wing parties that remained halfheartedly sceptical of the alliance.
For sure, NATO’s European members had expected relations with the United States to get bumpier once Trump won the 2024 presidential election. No one had missed his campaign pledge to make NATO’s security insurance conditional on its members’ payment of what he considered sufficiently high premiums. But they were unprepared for the triple shock that Trump delivered to Europe in February 2025: his overtures to Russia; his defense secretary’s public disavowal of Ukraine’s path to NATO membership (which the previous administration had said was “irreversible”); and his Vice President’s startling polemic about oppressive European political elites.
Since his return to the presidency, Trump has not publicly suggested that America’s commitment to its NATO obligation is in doubt. Nevertheless, given their experience, some Europeans believe the worst. To them, the triple shock undercut the very basis of European security since the end of the Cold War, perhaps since the end of World War II.
The lenses of history – and geopolitics
This shock was felt more keenly in some European countries than in others, partly due to varying attitudes toward the war in Ukraine. Every European democracy shares the view that Russia is the aggressor and that Ukrainian sovereignty must be preserved. Still, some have advocated these positions with far greater intensity than others.
Britain and Sweden have adopted stridently anti-Russia stances. National elites in the fields of politics and policy, as well as the media, share a near-consensus view: the only important reason for the war is Russian imperialism. In both countries, there has been very little space for any more nuanced view of what lies behind the conflict.
As the economic historian Robert Skidelsky has written, British antipathy to Russia has deep roots, running through the 1853–56 Crimean War, the “Great Game” over Central Asia played during much of the 19th century and, of course, the Cold War. It is only a slight exaggeration to assert that the British elite has interpreted the Ukrainian tragedy as a reenactment of the Second World War. That conflict, as we all know, ended in victory for Britain and its allies against an expansionist continental tyranny – a triumph that did so much to shape the modern British self-image.
The implicit or explicit equation of contemporary Russia with Nazi Germany has, in turn, engendered the assumption, frequently articulated by British ministers and officials and never challenged by media interviewers, that Russia – or rather “Putin,” as the aggressor is often personified – will pursue a broader offensive against the rest of Europe unless it is stopped in Ukraine. This view draws on a supposed lesson from history about the “appeasement” of aggressors. It is almost universally believed in Britain that concessions made to Hitler in Munich in 1938 by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were a disastrous mistake: they induced, rather than prevented, the subsequent war in Europe.
For Sweden, meanwhile, the conflict in Ukraine taps into a deep-seated “rysskräck,” fear of the Russian, which stretches even further back into history. Finland, which had previously been an integral part of the Swedish kingdom, was conquered by Russia in 1809 following fierce battles on what is modern Swedish territory.
This fear is easily discernible in public discussions. Despite a strong norm in Sweden against associating groups of people with generalized character traits, it is common to hear speakers from Swedish research institutes and think tanks refer to what Russians “are really like,” as if their behaviour is somehow congenital. “Putin’s Russia is not a historical anomaly, but rather a continuation of over 500 years of Russian expansionism,” wrote one leading commentator, now a government adviser, in the newspaper Expressen in 2022. Concessions to Russia are pointless, declared an analyst recently in Svenska Dagbladet, because it “will never be satisfied. It only brings forth even more Russian expansionism and imperialism.”
This overwhelmingly anti-Russian attitude has stretched across the political spectrum of both the U.K. and Sweden. The Sweden Democrats, a national-conservative party that props up the current centre-right Swedish government, have expunged the few even vaguely pro-Russian voices that could be heard among their members before 2022. Nigel Farage, the mercurial populist whose latest party vehicle, Reform UK, currently threatens to reshape the British political landscape, did suggest, during the national election campaign in the summer of 2024, that NATO might be partially culpable for the war because of its expansion eastward. He was furiously criticized and has not said anything similar since.
For nearly three years after the invasion of 2022, this maximalist anti-Russian stance felt costless for British, Swedish and many other European politicians. They never thought that Europe would have to take serious responsibility for the war, either through winning it or through agreeing to some compromise with Russia. No serious sacrifice, beyond weapons shipments to Ukraine, would be required of them. Their armed forces would not have to actually fight the Russians. That could be left to the Ukrainians – and in time, maybe the Americans too.
Indeed, the unspoken assumption in much of Europe was that the United States would, in the end, ride to Ukraine’s rescue. Deep down, Europeans felt sure that, to use Churchill’s famous but probably apocryphal aphorism, the Americans would eventually do the right thing once they had exhausted all alternatives. For elites in hardline countries like Britain and Sweden, then, the moral high ground seemed a secure place on which to build permanent rhetorical encampments.
Yet both governments set a trap for themselves. More clear-sighted politicians would have understood that, sooner or later, America was likely to seek a deal with Russia. Even before Russia’s abortive attempt to conquer Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration made it abundantly clear that – given the possibility of nuclear escalation – it did not see American national interests as sufficiently threatened by the impending invasion that the United States was prepared to risk direct conflict with Russia.
That Trump II has retained and clarified this American position, albeit rather brutally, should not have surprised Britain, Sweden and other European countries. Yet it did surprise them. European elites were abruptly faced with the difficult task of having to roll back their previous uncompromising rhetoric about the war. In a sense, Trump pulled the rug out from under them. Britain, in particular, was left trying to save face by orchestrating some European peacekeeping force, a “coalition of the willing,” in Ukraine. The British duly edged away from that idea as its implausibility became apparent. Britain and others now echo America’s calls for ceasefires rather than a full Ukrainian victory, which itself represents a major shift.
Navigating the blame game
For European countries like Britain and Sweden, this U-turn has been painful and embarrassing. Both have been sidelined as the United States has talked directly to Russia. Trump has shone a merciless spotlight on the profound imbalance in the transatlantic relationship (which may well have been the calculated intention behind the triple shock of February 2025). It has thoroughly exposed Europe’s security dependency on the United States. Researchers at one think tank, the European Council on Foreign Relations, refer to Europe’s “vassalisation.”
So far, however, the domestic political costs of these setbacks for European governments have not been great. While their electorates are in a furiously anti-elitist mood, most voters, particularly in northern Europe, remain hostile to Trump for his tariff obsession. His break with decades of free trade in Europe threatens to wreak considerable damage on European economies.
Swedish elite opinion is vehemently anti-Trump. Right- and left-leaning newspapers alike decry his administration’s every move. One columnist in the centre-right Svenska Dagbladet has argued that an authoritarian regime has been installed in Washington.
Elites in Britain are similarly hostile to Trump. The Liberal Democrats, a centre-left opposition party, are seeking to mine a variant of Trump aversion among middle-class voters. When the Labour Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, brandished a handwritten invitation to the President from King Charles in front of the media in the Oval Office in late February, it was regarded by some left-leaning commentators as a mild form of national humiliation. The leaders of both right-wing opposition parties, the Conservatives and Reform UK, were critical of the trade deal that Starmer’s government reached with the United States in early May, when Starmer heaped yet more cloying praise on the President. Farage has stopped talking about his friendship with Trump.
British and Swedish governments, however, have been far more circumspect. Swedish Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard and Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson both hail from the Moderate Party, which dominates the centre-right coalition. This party has strongly favoured Swedish NATO membership for many years. It would be very hard for it to change tack now, only a year after it finally attained that goal. Malmer Stenergard was critical of the United States when Trump first initiated negotiations with Russia, but she and Kristersson have otherwise been very restrained in their comments. The same applies to the opposition Social Democrats, who seek to avoid burning bridges when they may be only 15 months or so from a return to office.
The British government, meanwhile, has sounded even more desperate to avoid friction with the U.S. administration. David Lammy, who became foreign secretary in 2024, referred to Trump as recently as 2019 as a “neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath” – only one among many spectacularly critical remarks. These are now completely forgotten. Lammy is today supposedly great mates, to use the British idiom, with Vice President Vance. When Trump’s allied oligarch Elon Musk publicly accused British ministers of covering up dreadful crimes, he provoked little more than stoic silence in response.
What else can these governments do? For now, not much.
Both Britain and Sweden are rapidly increasing their spending on defence. If maintained over a decade, this would presumably reduce their dependence on America. In the short term, the aim is to signal a break with Europeans’ supposed free-riding and thus persuade Trump to keep America engaged in Europe. Other longer-term security options are being publicly discussed in Sweden. A Nordic nuclear deterrent has even been mooted, although that remains extremely far-fetched. It seems quite likely that Swedish elites will agree to offset the prospect of American disengagement by more fully committing to the European Union’s core, although that option enjoys only lukewarm public support.
A full turn to Europe is not an option for Britain. Over many decades, the British elite convinced itself that the country’s influence in the world should be pursued and cemented mainly through its famous “special relationship” with the United States. That was no less true when Britain was a member of the EU, from 1973 to 2020, as it has been since Brexit. Even Britain’s own nuclear deterrent, its eye-wateringly expensive, submarine-based Trident system, is reliant on American supplies and maintenance. British elites can hardly bear to think about the end of the special relationship because Britain, in their eyes, would be suddenly, sorely diminished. If this is the path down which Britain is now travelling, that new reality would take years for the country to process.
