The penny has finally dropped for Europe. Slow to the take, it is finally dawning on Europe that if the United States can turn against one of its staunchest allies and try to annex its sovereign territory, then it implies the inversion of the very idea of NATO. The principal guarantor of European security is now violating the core tenet of the European project. The lesson for Europe, therefore, as Canada’s Mark Carney said in his widely appreciated speech, “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”
The attempted Greenland grab was one abuse too many even for the collective docility of a self-pitying continent. After five stages of grief over Donald Trump’s thuggish and coercive ways, his strategy of hemispheric supremacy, there’s now a sense of resignation among European leaders that the transatlantic divorce is inevitable and an acceptance that the old world order won’t return.
There’s even a hint of defiance as the old continent grapples with realities new and uncertain. Macron said Europe must reassert itself and reject the “new colonial approach”. For Poland’s Tusk, “appeasement means no results, only humiliation.” Bart De Wever, the Prime Minister of Belgium, said Europe being a happy American vassal is one thing, but “being a miserable slave is another. If you back down now, you are going to lose your dignity and that is probably the most valuable thing you can have in a democracy.”
From George III to Caligula, history has no dearth of mad kings. Emperor Trump is the latest entrant in its annals. His most recent move is the decision to slap 100% tariff on Canada because Carney, in a bid to diversify Canadian economy, made the ‘mistake’ of signing a trade deal with China – a deal that Trump administration itself has been chasing for months.
As Peter Wehner writes in The Atlantic, Trump is “a malignant narcissist, consumed by hate and driven by vengeance. His mind is warped, his sense of morality corrupted. And yet his mind and his morality are the only checks on his power that he recognizes. Trump believes he is free to do whatever he wills. And it’s not at all clear who or what can stop him.”
By adopting a blanket coercive strategy towards its partners and allies such as Canada, its closest neighbour, in no small measure of irony Trump proved the efficacy of Carney’s comments at Davos where the Canadian PM said great powers are “using economic integration as weapons”, “tariffs as leverage”, “financial infrastructure as coercion” and “supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” In such a world, “integration becomes the source of subordination.”
In this paradigm, norms are no longer predictable, signed agreements are subject to the whims and fancies of a rapacious American President and multilateral institutions have fallen prey to either China-centric or Trump-centric international order.
The prescription for Europe, therefore, is simple. It must diversify. The transatlantic project was incumbent on an axiomatic belief that no longer holds true – that integration with America brings prosperity and security. The question, whether Europe was too naïve or opportunistic, is moot. The reality is that Trump has altered America and even the world order in fundamental ways.
For a while, Europe tried the appeasement policy, settling for a lopsided trade deal, calling Trump ‘daddy’, driven by fears of a fundamental American pivot away from collective security commitments. But it quickly became clear that Trump’s assault on alliance credibility extends beyond tariffs into the existential foundations of the post-1945 security and economic order.
Something has flipped in Europe. It is now speaking India’s language, talking of strategic autonomy – the capacity to act independently in defence, economic security and technology domains. As the 27-member bloc undergoes economic repositioning and strategic recalibration, India emerges as a natural partner in this endeavour.
The significance of the EU-India strategic partnership – that may further strengthen collaboration across key policy areas such as trade, security and defence – goes much beyond the elusive free-trade agreement (FTA) that has dominated the headlines.
Beyond tariffs, customs, or an expansive security and defence collaboration that are high on the agenda, it represents a deliberate architectural shift by two of the world’s largest democratic polities to insulate themselves against the twin shocks of Chinese hegemonic ambition and the gunboat diplomacy of an aggressive, cynical and increasingly unhinged America.
Stephen Miller, one of the most influential members of the Trump administration and a key adviser to Trump, laid bare the MAGA worldview in an interview with CNN. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This obsession with power projection might seem that the US is lashing out at the prospect of its inevitable decline. Janan Ganesh writes in FT that it is only to be expected. “The belligerent turn in American behaviour has in fact come during its relative decline… It is easier for a nation to be magnanimous from a great height. Paranoia and aggression set in when that position slips. As such, we should expect a volatile US until it gets used to the role of being a, not the, superpower.”
Be that as it may, the redefinition of the global order in starkly Thucydidean terms, where might is always right, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, presents the backdrop where the relationship between Europe and India is undergoing a tectonic shift.
For the European Union (EU), the Indo-Pacific strategy is existential. The bloc’s economic prosperity is tethered to the stability of Asian markets, yet its security architecture has historically been dependent on the US. The return of unpredictable trade policies in Washington, exemplified by the tariff threats from the Trump administration, its coercive policies and savaging of the transatlantic alliance, has forced the EU to seek alternative economic engines.
India, with its demographic dividend, its status as the world’s fastest growing large economy, a huge and widening consumer market and trajectory to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2030, offers the only scale comparable to China, making it an indispensable partner for European diversification.
For India, the EU serves as a vital partner for high-technology, economic investment, and a partnership that lends stability without requiring a formal military alliance. New Delhi’s strategic calculus involves reducing its legacy of over-dependence on Russian defence hardware and managing the security threat posed by China on its northern borders.
A deepening partnership with the EU provides access to capital, advanced defence manufacturing and a stable partner. The trade agreement, in this context, acts as the economic anchor for this strategic convergence, ensuring that political goodwill is cemented by deep commercial interdependence.
The FTA’s strategic value extends beyond tariff reduction. For India, it provides diversification from US market dependence at a moment when access to American consumers faces unprecedented political risk. For the EU, the deal offers supply chain resilience and an alternative to Chinese manufacturing in sectors where European dependence has created deep and seemingly irreversible vulnerabilities.
The description of the India-EU FTA as the ‘mother of all deals’ by India’s commerce minister Piyush Goyal or European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, therefore, is not merely rhetorical. It reflects the opportunities and the sheer complexities and magnitude of the economies involved – a combined market of nearly two billion people and a trade relationship that exceeded €180 billion in 2024. As the Global Trade Research Initiative observes in a report, “the agreement would be India’s biggest and most complex trade deal so far.”
The security and defence partnership, to be signed concurrently with trade discussions, represents an equally consequential dimension. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas has said that the pact will deepen cooperation in maritime security, counterterrorism, cyber defence and maritime domain awareness, with particular focus on stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
In a post Sunday after arriving in India,
Von der Leyen wrote, “I’m so glad to be in India today. India and Europe have made a clear choice. The choice of strategic partnership, dialogue and openness. Leveraging our complementary strengths. And building mutual resilience. We are showing a fractured world that another way is possible.
During her address at the World Economic Forum in Davos last Tuesday, the European Commission chief had said, “Right after Davos, I will travel to India. There is still work to do. But we are on the cusp of a historic trade agreement. Some call it the mother of all deals. One that would create a market of 2 billion people, accounting for almost a quarter of global GDP. And, crucially, that would provide a first-mover advantage for Europe with one of the world’s fastest growing and most dynamic continents.”
And yet, amid this euphoria, it is easy to forget that this strategic partnership took an inordinately long time to mature and perhaps would never have had it not been for the rupture in the matrix caused by Trump.
The negotiations for the trade deal, known originally as the Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA), are a study on lost opportunities. Launched in 2007, the deal remained elusive for nearly two decades due to deep-seated structural and regulatory divergences. For 19 years, the talks were characterized by seemingly unbridgeable gaps and ‘clash of sensitivities’ where one side’s trade interest was the other’s nightmare.
And there was another dimension. As Garima Mohan of German Marshall Fund points out in her essay, “India’s role and importance was not always recognized in many European capitals, with few exceptions such as Paris. For most European governments, India came second to China and ranked below other partnerships in the Indo-Pacific, such as that with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.”
She writes that India’s “efforts started being reciprocated only after certain leadership changes in Europe. Germany, following the departure of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, is seen as one prominent example. But a shift in the European Commission is arguably the most important change. As an Indian official noted,
‘India had always reached out to the EU’, but the ground ‘only really shifted under von der Leyen’.”
While Mohan posits that a turning point came in 2019 as Europe’s relations with China took a turn for the worse, contrast the superciliousness of a virtue-signalling Europe and its institutions, replete with long lectures on democracy, civil rights and religious freedom – with the rhetoric now on display.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said at Davos, “In a few days’ time, the President of the European Commission will travel to India to establish the principles of a free trade agreement between the subcontinent and the EU. I was in India a week ago and I have no doubt whatsoever that the era of great powers presents an opportunity for all of us and for all countries that favour regulations above arbitrary rule and see greater benefit in free trade than in protectionism and isolationism.”
While Kallas, the EU’s highest-ranking diplomat, told European parliamentarians in Strasbourg that EU and India must become more ambitious partners. “Two major democracies cannot afford to hesitate.” She referred to
India as “indispensable” to Europe’s economic resilience.
In an interview to Indian Express, Kallas pitched Europe as India’s
“reliable partner” and said, “at a time when free trade is under pressure and supply chains are being weaponised, deepening our economic partnership makes perfect sense. This agreement is a strategic choice.”
For German economy minister Katherina Reiche, “when old partnerships weaken or break down, we need new partnerships around the world, and we should achieve this more quickly than before.” She told reporters in Davos on Wednesday: “I am optimistic that this can be achieved, particularly with regard to India.”
This is a chastened, humbled, and a more pragmatic Europe. The stark change in its attitude is caused by two major churns. One, the emergence of India as a ‘stabilizing pole’ in a volatile global order that has elevated it from a peripheral partner into an ‘indispensable’ strategic ally for Europe. India’s growing economic and military power offers Europe a democratic alternative to China for ‘de-risking’ critical supply chains and achieving diversification from the erratic trade policies of the US.
India’s leadership of the Global South, its role as a premier clean-tech manufacturing hub, and its growing power projection in the Indo-Pacific complement EU’s own economic and security imperatives. These factors have created space for the dynamic to be expanded from just a ‘buyer-seller’ relationship.
The Trumpian discord provided the final push. Europe’s pursuit of strategic autonomy, driven by Trump’s hostility and imperial foreign policy but rooted in longer-term dependencies on US defence and Chinese manufacturing, requires diversification.
India’s multi-alignment doctrine, formulated to navigate great power rivalry while preserving autonomy, needs institutional anchors beyond transactional bilateral ties. The FTA plus security partnership provides exactly such an anchor. While the trade deal provides the economic logic, the strategic partnership provides the geopolitical glue.
Countless hurdles remain to be confronted. India’s red lines on dairy and agricultural sectors, Europe’s uncompromising attitude on non-tariff trade barriers such as Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism will require creative diplomacy. But for their own sakes both parties need to make this work.
(The views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)
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