A long front page article from last week.
The Continent’s dependence on America runs deep and belies attempts to replace it with new alliances
The reliance puts Europe at a disadvantage in a world of great power competition and weakens its hand in negotiations with Trump on everything from trade to Greenland and Ukraine.
For decades, Europe has relied on the U.S. for security, Russia for energy and China as a growing export market. Now it depends on the U.S. for all three.
Today, the European Union sends about one-fifth of its exports to America, its biggest international market, and relies on the U.S. for about one-quarter of its natural-gas supplies. The largest U.S. military base in Germany has more soldiers than the biggest German base there.
It isn’t just energy, trade and security. Europe relies on U.S. technology and financial services. Visa and Mastercard control around two-thirds of card spending in Europe. Around 80% of German companies say they rely on U.S. digital technologies and services, according to a recent survey by the Berlin-based digital lobby group Bitkom.
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The EU sent roughly $640 billion worth of goods to the U.S. in 2024, accounting for about 21% of its total goods exports, up from around 18% in 2019, according to EU data. That is almost as much as the combined value of goods the bloc exported to the U.K. and China, its second- and third-biggest export markets. The U.K. is almost as reliant, sending roughly 16% of its goods exports to the U.S.
Europe has become deeply dependent on American tech companies for everything from office-productivity software to data centers. While the Continent boasts a stable of tech startups in countries including the U.K. and France, many of them are in turn often dependent on American tech giants for things like cloud services and artificial-intelligence chips.
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Europe’s consensus-based governance makes it ill suited for the new world of great-power competition, said Moritz Schularick, president of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, a German economic think tank. Europe “is easy to divide and rule,” he said. “It will always be the player in the room that you can read very well.”
Europe’s relationship with the U.S. has been the bedrock of the Continent’s postwar prosperity. Especially in Germany, where the U.S. helped to build institutions and businesses, many politicians and business leaders are reluctant to let go.
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Georg Schild, a history professor at Tübingen University, near Stuttgart, remembers watching annual exercises by the U.S. military every fall when he was growing up in West Germany in the 1960s. Germans of Schild’s generation, he said, felt that they were finally on the right side of history as part of the U.S.-led West. They eagerly adopted U.S. consumer culture.
“We never challenged American supremacy,” Schild said. “We want the Americans to be here, we love them, and they’re turning their backs on us. And that is difficult for us to understand.”
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