When one looks at Europe’s responses to the threats which have faced it in the past few years – the Trump administration demanding they defend themselves, Russia’s incursion into Ukraine – there is something puzzling about the response from Brussels: there has been a consistent lack of a desire to, not only act, but even recognise the problem in the first place.

Think back to when President Barack Obama was first urging European leaders to respond to Russia’s seizure of Crimea with sanctions. Europe was slow to act and wanted the sanctions to drop relatively quickly. France even sought to sell two warships to Russia. There was a perplexing lack of real action emanating from Brussels and most national capitals not named Warsaw, Tallinn, Latvia, or Vilnius.

A similar confounding lack of activity greeted President Donald Trump’s third campaign for office. Throughout the entirety of 2024 – and indeed, his entire public life – he has advocated for tariffs. He did so in the 1980s through now, even specifically calling for a 25 per cent tariff on China in a speech in 2011, when he was briefly considering a run against Obama. Likewise throughout his recent campaign he made clear that Europe’s time was up: it would have to defend itself, or risk losing American support. He even went as far as saying Russia “could do whatever the hell they want” with countries not spending enough to defend themselves.

And yet, each statement and action from the administration – be it Defence Secretary Hegseth’s declaration that Ukraine would not be joining NATO, or Trump’s tariff imposition, or Trump and Vice President JD Vance’s Oval Office argument with Zelensky – has been met with utter shock from Europe. It is clear that, even with an entire campaign – or really, decades of warning – they had simply no plan for a second Trump administration. There was so little planning that, when it came time to choose a name for defence spending, they could not even agree (the original name, “ReArm Europe 2030” had to be edited down to the milquetoast “Readiness 2030”).