This essay argues that Europe has quietly converted external dependency into an internal governing doctrine. It tries to prove that repeated accommodation of Washington, under Trump’s second presidency, has become path dependent: each concession buys short term relief while strengthening the internal vetoes, taboos, and incentives that make future autonomy harder. The core claim is structural, not moral: appeasement is no longer a tactic but a reinforcing loop that hollows sovereignty by making Europe’s legal and economic tools politically unusable.

Europe’s Doctrine of Appeasement

How dependency hardened into strategy, and why it is hollowing the continent from within

When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, Europe confronted a choice it had deferred for more than a decade. Faced with demands for sharply higher defence spending, threats of sweeping new tariffs, and open contempt for liberal democratic constraint, European leaders could either assert agency collectively or manage dependency individually. From Warsaw to Westminster, from Riga to Rome, they chose the latter.

What followed was not a tactical concession but a governing pattern. Accommodation thickened into habit, habit into expectation, and expectation into doctrine.

This article advances a hard proposition and then substantiates it. European appeasement of Trump is not merely non stabilising; it is a degenerative strategy. It converts external dependency into an internal governing doctrine. Through repetition, appeasement becomes path dependent: it rewires institutional incentives, empowers veto holders, and renders sovereignty politically unusable even where it remains formally intact. What is defended as pragmatism is, in reality, managed decline administered through ritualised compliance.

The argument is structural rather than moral. It rests on observable behaviour, institutional incentives, and repeated outcomes across defence, trade, and democratic governance.

From contingency to doctrine

Appeasement often begins as contingency: flatter to buy time, concede to avoid punishment, defer conflict while capacity is rebuilt. The danger lies not in the first concession but in repetition. When the same manoeuvre is deployed across domains and over time, it ceases to be tactical and becomes legible. Once legible, it loses deterrent value. At that point, leverage drains away.

Across defence, trade, and diplomacy, European leaders adopted gestures designed to signal loyalty without altering underlying power relationships. The most conspicuous was the pledge at the June 2025 NATO summit to lift defence spending to five percent of GDP over the next decade. The figure was not derived from a European assessment of force requirements, industrial throughput, or command integration. It was chosen because it satisfied Washington.

Many governments knew they were not fiscally or politically capable of meeting it. They committed anyway. Numbers substituted for strategy.

The accompanying promise to prioritise United States defence procurement reinforced the pattern. Funds that could have been used to deepen European industrial capacity instead entrenched reliance on American logistics, software, intelligence fusion, and sustainment chains. Short term reassurance was purchased at the expense of long term autonomy. Spending without integration became theatre. Theatre placates a patron; it does not generate power.

Sovereignty by procedure, not by action

Defenders of Europe’s posture point to institutions. The continent is dense with rules, legal frameworks, and enforcement mechanisms. But sovereignty is not the existence of tools; it is the political capacity to deploy them under pressure.

Trade policy provides a clean test. In late 2023, the European Union created an Anti Coercion Instrument explicitly designed to counter economic intimidation. It centralised retaliation, expanded coverage beyond goods to services and investment, and promised speed. On paper, it was formidable.

Yet when Washington announced new tariffs in early 2025 and escalated again in the spring, Europe hesitated. Officials debated proportionality, sequencing, legal exposure, and internal consensus while privately searching for off ramps.

The instrument existed. The will to deploy it did not.

This was not merely caution. It was the formation of political taboo. Once a high salience case passed without activation, non use hardened into precedent. Legal opinions multiplied. Risk aversion became codified. What could not be used once became harder to use again. Sovereignty hollowed not through repeal, but through disuse.

The same dynamic appears in regulatory enforcement. Investigations slow when retaliation looms. Deadlines stretch. Sanctions are deferred in favour of engagement. Officials learn that escalation carries career risk while delay carries none. Over time, avoidance becomes standard operating procedure.

Institutions persist. Authority drains away.

Veto holders rewarded, paralysis normalised

A system that normalises appeasement inevitably rewards those who can block collective action. Europe’s unanimity requirements and fragmented political landscape were always vulnerabilities. Appeasement converts them into leverage.

When leaders fear retaliation more than paralysis, internal veto holders gain bargaining power. Threaten to defect and the centre softens. Invoke domestic backlash and enforcement is postponed. The result is a lowest common denominator posture that advertises disunity to external actors.

The trade confrontation of 2025 exposed this vividly. Historically, negotiations were led by the European Commission with member states aligned behind it. This time, key capitals pre emptively warned against retaliation. Caution was framed as realism and recession management. The effect was to undercut collective leverage before talks began.

Disunity ran so deep that major firms concluded bilateral hedging might outperform collective defence. Parallel approaches by carmakers were not merely commercial tactics; they were signals that the principal agent chain linking Brussels to market power had fractured. When private actors calculate that national deals yield better outcomes than European Union negotiation, collective authority is already broken.

By late July, Brussels accepted a tariff structure that left most European Union exports facing a fifteen percent rate, worse than the deal secured by a post Brexit United Kingdom.

Paralysis ceased to be an embarrassment and became a strategy.

Transactional method institutionalised

Appeasement concedes more than outcomes; it entrenches method. Personalised bargaining, loyalty signalling, and bilateral deal making migrate from exception to routine. This is not cultural contagion. It is incentive alignment.

As access to Washington becomes a scarce good, national ministries learn that personalised channels outperform collective process. Commission procedures are bypassed not out of ideology but efficiency. Over time, institutions adapt to irrelevance.

This institutional shift has domestic consequences. When external success is achieved through personal leverage rather than procedural authority, internal challengers draw the lesson quickly. Institutions talk; decisive actors deliver. The grammar of transactional politics is validated not rhetorically, but operationally.

Silence on democratic backsliding abroad follows the same logic. Throughout 2025, the United States administration intervened openly in European politics, endorsing candidates and attacking constitutional safeguards. European leaders largely stayed silent, not from sympathy but calculation. Confrontation risked retaliation elsewhere.

The cost was not moral credibility alone. By treating democratic defence as negotiable, Europe narrowed its institutional capacity to enforce norms consistently. What cannot be defended abroad becomes harder to defend at home.

Stability redefined downward

The most dangerous shift is semantic. Stability once meant securing interests. It now means avoiding punishment.

Under this definition, appeasement works if catastrophe is delayed, even as leverage erodes. Success is measured against the worst alternative rather than the best attainable outcome. Expectations fall. Decline is normalised.

In defence, continued access to United States systems becomes the objective rather than autonomous capability. In energy, emergency diversification hardens into structural dependence. In trade, escalation avoidance substitutes for market defence.

Once stability is defined as non provocation, strategic retreat ceases to register as failure. It becomes common sense.

Ukraine as the revealing case

Nowhere is the doctrine clearer than in Europe’s handling of Ukraine. Rhetorically, the war is existential. Practically, Europe behaves as if Washington remains the sole decisive actor.

European governments announced spending pledges and reassurance deployments while failing to build autonomous production, stockpiles, or command authority at scale. Resources existed. Authority did not. Without authority, resources do not translate into outcomes.

This is not a technical failure. It is an institutional one. Where joint procurement succeeded in limited cases, it did so under external pressure that temporarily overrode vetoes. Once that pressure receded, paralysis returned. The binding constraint was not money or capacity, but political authority to act collectively without permission.

Appeasement bought time and then spent it without restructuring. Time without reform is decay.

Conditioning expectations abroad and at home

Behaviour trains belief. Repeated appeasement conditions Washington to expect compliance and to escalate demands accordingly. It also conditions European electorates to expect capitulation, and insurgents to weaponise humiliation.

This dynamic is reinforced by electoral horizons. Leaders operate on four to five year cycles. The costs of restructuring defence, trade, and energy are front loaded and visible. The benefits are back loaded and uncertain. Appeasement aligns with re election incentives; autonomy does not.

What begins as rational short term optimisation becomes systemic bias. The system selects for concession.

Once expectations are set, reversing them becomes exponentially more costly. Each unchallenged concession raises the price of refusal.

Coalitions, and their limits

Faced with paralysis, some advocate coalitions of the willing, informal groupings to bypass vetoes. These arrangements have delivered tactical gains. They matter.

But coalitions are supplements, not substitutes. They reduce transaction costs for subsets of states but cannot replicate the scale economies, credibility, or deterrence generated by universal commitment. Without reform of unanimity rules, coalitions remain marginal.

The hardest questions, command authority, industrial integration, nuclear deterrence, are merely deferred. Avoiding them does not preserve security. It entrenches dependence.

Trade, energy, and the extension beyond Trump

The logic of appeasement now extends beyond Trump himself. Trade and energy policy reveal how conditioning persists even as contexts shift.

Europe’s market power remains formidable. Yet repeated hesitation signals non use. Once retaliation is seen as politically taboo, deterrence collapses. External actors learn to push harder.

Energy completes the picture. Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe replaced one vulnerability with another, trading dependence on Russian gas for reliance on United States liquefied natural gas. The shift was unavoidable in the short term. Treating it as permanent is strategic error. Diversification is not climate policy alone; it is sovereignty policy.

What began as emergency adjustment risks becoming doctrine.

What the pattern reveals

Across domains, the pattern is consistent.

• Tools exist but are politically self deterred.
• Procedures function while authority drains away.
• Internal veto holders are empowered by fear of escalation.
• Transactional methods displace institutional process.
• Stability is redefined as non provocation.
• Electoral horizons systematise short term rationality into long term degeneracy.

This is not mismanagement. It is adaptation. Institutions reorganise around avoidance. Compliance becomes governance.

Dependence Into Habit

European appeasement of Trump is not diplomacy. It is behavioural conditioning. It converts dependence into habit, fear into policy, and compliance into legitimacy. By substituting ritualised deference for strategic action, Europe has trained Washington to expect submission, empowered internal veto holders, institutionalised self deterrence, and hollowed out the structures designed to act collectively.

This trajectory is not inevitable. Europe still possesses capital, industrial capacity, and legal authority. What it lacks is a mechanism to break the reinforcing loop.

Reversal requires pre commitment: suspending fiscal constraints, shifting from unanimity to qualified majority where possible, and accepting short term political cost to restore long term authority. Autonomy does not require confrontation for its own sake. It requires the capacity to say no, and to absorb the consequences.

Until that capacity is rebuilt, appeasement will continue to masquerade as pragmatism. And managed decline will continue to be administered, quietly, procedurally, and at enormous cost.