To understand this historic shift, The Wall Street Journal spoke to heads of government, their ministers and top aides to reconstruct the closed-door meetings where the alliance began to splinter. The Journal was able to review detailed notes taken by some participants as well as classified assessments that European intelligence agencies gave leaders struggling to navigate the new Washington.

One assessment, from Southern Europe, reads: “You are not dealing with an administration that has processes, you are dealing with a single volatile individual.” Britain’s MI6, struck by the climate of fear in Washington, offered Prime Minister Keir Starmer a more allegorical warning: Trump’s second White House, it said, “is ‘The Crucible’ meets ‘Wolf Hall,’” referencing two fictional works about the Salem Witch Trials and the court of England’s ill-tempered Henry VIII. The British spy agency instructed its staff not to broach the subject of the president with their CIA counterparts.

The reporting reveals the important role of Canada in molding the allied consensus on how to deal with the new Washington. Trump’s threats to make his northern neighbor America’s 51st state lighted a fuse of unintended consequences that continues to burn. It brought to power Carney, a former central banker who had spent the years after the 2008-09 financial crisis formulating a thesis that the West was overreliant on a single, increasingly unpredictable country. As prime minister, he was able to start acting on his theory.

With only a few allies at first—particularly France—Carney worked to persuade his fellow leaders that they faced a structural dependency that couldn’t be solved by appeasing Trump. His approach contrasted with that of another powerful figure, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, a veteran leader who has tried to salvage the American-led alliance in part by praising the leader at its center, a tactic the European press dubbed “flattery diplomacy.”

The stakes couldn’t be higher for the dozens of allies in-between, forced to ask themselves enormous questions that remain unresolved: Will Trump’s antipathy toward Europe prove particular to him—or become America’s new normal? Should they buy more American tech and weaponry to convince Washington their alliance remains a boon for the U.S. economy—or build up their own, and brace for a day the community known as the West unravels?

The Trump Whisperer

It was a year earlier, in February 2025, and Rutte was gesturing animatedly to rattled European leaders around a long chandelier-lit banquet table at Brussels’ 16th-century Egmont Palace, telling them how to tackle the riddle of the newly reinaugurated Donald Trump.

Just days into his second term the U.S. president was threatening tariffs on Europe, and his son Donald Trump Jr. had popped up in Greenland to pose with locals given MAGA hats. Danish Prime Minister Fredriksen and Britain’s Starmer were both in Brussels so the leaders of the EU, U.K., Denmark and NATO could all agree on a common strategy. The conversation was private and strictly off-the-record: The venue had been changed at the last minute to avoid spying.

Tall and telegenic, Rutte was chosen to head NATO partly because of his reputation as a “Trump whisperer” who kept in friendly contact with the president after his 2020 defeat. Over lunch, Rutte offered a pithy proposal that would become his go-to strategy: Give Trump a win.

“We need to spend 3.5% on defense,” he said, according to several leaders present, roughly what the U.S. shells out and far above NATO’s recently achieved target of 2% of gross domestic product. Trump for weeks had insisted the figure should jump to 5%—a number European officials dismissed as Trump bluster—while Rutte’s middle-ground figure came from NATO military planners who studied how a war with Russia might unfold.

In the language of European diplomacy, leaders took turns to both affirm and avoid the commitment. Germany said it understood the goal, yet wondered if it would make more sense to talk about what they should buy, not how much they should spend. Italy’s Meloni said she would like to spend more, although public opinion was very resistant, and besides, EU budget rules wouldn’t allow it. Romania’s president said he also supported the sentiment, but asked, wouldn’t this spark an arms race on the continent? We have no choice, Rutte countered. The allies would have to try.

In his late 50s, Rutte was a lifelong student of the indispensability of American power. His father, a prisoner of war in the Dutch East Indies, would have likely died in Japanese custody had American forces not swept through the Pacific. The longest-serving prime minister in Dutch history, Rutte came of age as an admirer of Ronald Reagan and believed that America’s military and its nuclear umbrella would remain the ultimate guarantee of peace on the fractious continent. He virtually never took a vacation, riding his bike home late from work to practice piano.

Without Washington, he argued, Europe’s kaleidoscope of coalition governments in dozens of nations, many of them deeply indebted, would have to spend more than 10% of their gross domestic product just on defense, especially now that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had brought war to their doorsteps. Not to mention the daunting politics of building a nuclear arsenal that could replace America’s. Unanimously selected to run NATO by its member states, he said he saw no other option than to keep America as the hub around which the West was built. To leaders who flirted with the idea of a new West, without America as its linchpin, he had a response: “Keep on dreaming.”

“People with visions,” he liked to joke, “should see a doctor.”