Europe's strategic nightmare has taken a new shape. The continent's allies no longer simply worry about threats from China and Russia - they now fear that the United States itself could become a third predatory power, leaving them squeezed from every direction with no reliable protector.

That stark assessment comes from Hal Brands, a Johns Hopkins professor and American Enterprise Institute fellow, in a major essay for Foreign Policy's Spring 2026 issue, "Hvylya" reports.

Brands argues that Trump's approach to allies carries a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, his demand for higher defense spending could strengthen the democratic community for a generational contest with autocracies. On the other, his "coercive, asymmetric dealmaking" gives the impression that Washington cares less about strengthening allies than extracting maximum concessions from them. His claims on Greenland and Canada threaten to align the U.S. with land-hungry revisionists - and, in Brands's words, "rip the trans-Atlantic core of the free world apart."

The danger is existential for the Western alliance. If European capitals conclude they face three greedy powers rather than one protective superpower and two hostile ones, the entire logic of the democratic bloc collapses. There would be no new cold war - because there would be no democratic bloc to fight it.

Brands notes that Trump's ethos, in which "big states call the shots and little ones accept their lots," makes him a natural match for Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin rather than for democratic allies accustomed to a rules-based partnership. Yet the essay stops short of writing off the alliance entirely: as autocratic threats intensify, even transactional cooperation among democracies becomes more attractive.

The question, Brands writes, is whether a future U.S. president can tell a story of common purpose rather than simple self-enrichment - and whether that story arrives before the alliance fractures beyond repair.

Previously: Zeihan warned that Europe's defense paralysis could force a radical two-speed split.