The snow fell heavily over Brussels this week, as officials from embassies and European institutions returned from their holiday slumbers to a shocking new world.

Like an icy slap of Arctic air, Donald Trump’s operation to remove Nicolás Maduro from the Venezuelan presidency stunned the EU’s top officials — and froze them into silence. Then he questioned NATO, threatened Cuba and Iran, and declared he needed to own Greenland for the purposes of national security, whether or not the U.S. allies who currently control it agree.

“I don’t need international law,” Trump declared in an interview with the New York Times.  

But international law needs Trump. His approach poses an existential threat not just to global agreements such as the Paris climate accord but to the European Union, the world’s biggest factory for international legislation. Every year the EU produces more than 2,000 directives, acts, regulations and other legal documents guiding the economic and societal lives of its 27 member countries. 

In an American-dominated world where the rule of law doesn’t matter, the EU’s legislative machine could quickly become a quaint anachronism. The first week of 2026 has once again exposed the paralysis and powerlessness of Europe’s leadership to respond to an American president who proudly boasts the only thing that can stop him is his own sense of “morality.” 

“It’s a very important moment,” said one diplomat from a European country, granted anonymity, like others, to speak freely. “There had been a tendency in European media to make fun of Trump and his people and present them as stupid and sometimes even as madmen. I think that’s wrong. They’re highly capable.”

But their mission, this diplomat said, is clear: to do whatever is necessary to advance the interests of the U.S. and the Trump administration. The White House doesn’t care about being a good ally to Europe, and is more than prepared to criticize, threaten, bully and perhaps attack the old continent. “This cannot be a surprise,” the diplomat said.

The Ukraine of it all 

But nearly a year into Trump’s second term, European leaders and officials have never formally debated America’s new distance from its previously close allies at a strategic level. “That has to be discussed,” the same diplomat said. “The reason why we have not had a full-blown discussion on it is because of Ukraine.”

And here is the core of the tension paralyzing Europe’s response. Just as Europe still depends on NATO for its security, despite pledging repeatedly to stand on its own feet, it desperately needs American support to deliver an acceptable truce in Ukraine. 

A meeting of Ukraine’s allies in the so-called coalition of the willing this week inched closer to a plan in which the United States would provide a military backstop to guarantee any peace deal. But the joint statement from more than 30 governments that emerged from the meeting lacked specifics about the American role and was not signed by Trump’s representatives. 

But it is still a perilously delicate moment for Ukraine and Russia is not yet even on board. Alienating Trump at this point would be risky for Ukraine’s allies in the EU and beyond.

The problem is that unless there is an open discussion about the new state of the West, leaders are likely to struggle to generate the political support they need for the scale of the required foreign policy shift away from the U.S. and perhaps NATO.

France’s President Emmanuel Macron has been among the most open about the challenge, warning in a speech this week that the U.S. is intent on carving up the world into spheres of influence. 

“The United States is an established power that is gradually turning away from some of its allies and breaking free from the international rules that it used to promote,” Macron said during his annual foreign policy address.

Macron said Europe must not accept what he called “new colonialism” and should further invest in the continent’s “strategic autonomy.”

Yet the French president himself is now weaker and more unpopular than he has ever been, with a deadlocked parliament in Paris unable to make progress on key measures and an emboldened far right soaring ahead in the polls. While many diplomats and officials share Macron’s assessment, they know his voice does not carry the weight in Brussels policymaking that it once did. 

In his foreign policy speech this week, Macron did not mention America’s actions in Venezuela, or Trump himself, by name.

Even if Trump can be persuaded to stand by Europe, back off on Greenland, and commit American troops to monitor the peace in Ukraine, will it last?

Diplomats still doubt how much any American signature on a peace treaty underwriting Ukraine’s security would be worth, when Trump is willing to do whatever he pleases. “At the end of the day,” another European diplomat said, “you have no guarantees that things will work out.”

Not just a bubble problem

The irrelevance of the EU to Trump’s new world order is evident everywhere, according to the bloc’s critics. In Gaza, the EU has no prospective role on any new peace board that could run the strip under Trump’s ceasefire plan, despite being the biggest aid donor. As Iranian protesters seek to topple the Tehran regime, EU leaders offer little beyond warm words — if they speak about it at all — from 3,000 miles away. 

“Europe has lost its way and I’m not sure it has a role to play anywhere in the world, other than in Ukraine,” said one senior diplomat from outside the EU.

The diplomat pointed to “divisions” at the top as a particular weakness. For example, no single individual speaks for Europe on foreign policy, and separate statements were issued by EU leaders in response to the U.S. operation to remove Maduro. One came from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, another from António Costa, the president of the European Council, and a third from Kaja Kallas, who has the official role of “high representative” and is the EU’s top diplomat. 

But Kallas’ statement calling for “calm and restraint” and respect for “the principles” of international law was in the end signed by only 26 EU member states, with one — Hungary — declining to join in. 

America’s blunt challenge to the world order is a nightmare that reaches beyond Brussels. 

Take Britain’s prime minister, Keir Starmer, himself a career lawyer. Before he came to power, Starmer harangued the Conservative government in London for failing to call out Trump’s disinterest in international law. Now he’s in office, he can offer only the weakest of public commentaries, refusing to give a view on the legality or otherwise of Trump’s regime change operation in Venezuela. 

“What kind of leverage can we have over Russia when we do not object when the U.S. does this in Venezuela?” another European diplomat asked. 

Even when it comes to Trump’s ambitions to take “ownership” of Greenland — part of the territory of fellow NATO member Denmark — Europeans who sought to support the Danish position framed their responses in the mildest terms, carefully avoiding anything that might look like a direct criticism of the U.S. “Law is stronger than force,” was the best von der Leyen could manage. It’s not clear that she’s right.

“The world is not based any more on European values,” the senior diplomat said. “The world is operating totally differently. Europe needs to find its way.”