I’ve spent more than two decades doing business in Europe. I lived in Stockholm for 5 years. I still travel to Europe and the Nordics often, and a significant portion of my work continues to be with executives, investors, and operators from those regions. That gives me a different read on the relationship between the U.S. and Europe than what you get from headlines or polling, and the read right now is worth writing about.
Before I go further, a clarification that matters. There is no single European view, and I want to be careful not to write as if there were. Stockholm is not Milan. Warsaw is not London. The history, the politics, the way trust gets built in the room; all of that varies country by country, sometimes city by city. Anyone who has done real work across the continent knows the differences are not surface details. They are the work.
But after you account for all of that, there is still a theme. Something I keep hearing, in different accents and different rooms, from people whose judgment I trust. That’s what I want to write about.
The wariness was always there
There’s a view many Europeans have about Americans. You Americans, you’re talkers.
It isn’t quite a compliment. It isn’t quite an insult. It’s a diagnosis. We talk too fast, too loud, too confidently. We pitch when we should listen. We mistake enthusiasm for substance and volume for credibility. We leave the room thinking we connected. The people across the table leave the room with a different conclusion.
That wariness predates this political moment by a long way. It is not new. What’s new is that the wariness used to coexist with something else, and that something else is what I want to talk about.
The part Europeans rarely said out loud
Underneath the love-hate relationship, for a very long time, there was a quieter conviction that Europeans rarely stated directly because doing so felt like a confession.
They believed in us.
Not in the swagger or the sermons or the slogans. In the underlying thing. The idea that across the Atlantic, there was a country, however flawed and however loud, where a person could remake himself. Where the rules bent toward possibility. Where the kid from nowhere could build something. Most of the European executives I’ve worked with would never have used the phrase “city on the hill,” but the feeling was there, and I have watched it in their eyes for twenty years, even while they were busy criticizing us.
It took some time to develop the meaningful relationships that I have in Europe. I stopped selling and started showing up. In a recent conversation with a Swedish CEO, he said that Europeans sometimes make fun of Americans, but when they dream of success, they dream in an American accent.
I’ve heard versions of that second sentence from executives in other countries, too, phrased differently each time, with different cultural assumptions, but the underlying note recognizable.
That belief is what’s changed.
What Trump did, and didn’t do
To understand the European reaction to this administration, you have to go back to that first line. You Americans, you’re talkers.
Trump is the ultimate talker. He is, in many ways, the European caricature of the American made flesh and elevated to the presidency. The volume. The certainty. The salesmanship is untethered from substance. The pitch that keeps going long after the room has decided. The willingness to say anything, contradict it the next day, and treat the contradiction as further proof of strength. Every quality Europeans have spent decades privately being wary of in Americans, he embodies and amplifies on a stage they cannot look away from.
That is why his presidency lands the way it does in Europe. It isn’t just that he threatens allies, demands tribute, talks about annexing territory, and treats seventy years of accumulated trust as a sunk cost to be liquidated. It’s that he does all of it in the register Europeans always feared was the real America underneath the polished one. He is the version of us they hoped wasn’t the truest version. And now he is the one in the room.
The European reaction is not what most Americans think it is. It is not anger. It is something quieter and harder to read.
It is disappointment, confusion, and an underlying sadness.
Most of the Europeans I know are genuinely surprised that an American president would behave this way, and more surprised, still, that the country elected him to do it. There is a contingent that expected exactly this from Trump and feels vindicated. But that group is smaller than Americans assume. The larger reaction, especially among the executives and investors I work with, is closer to bewilderment. They believed the institutions would hold. They believed the country would course-correct. They are still adjusting to the possibility that neither assumption was right, and that the talker they had always tolerated as a stereotype now sits at the head of the table.
The recent ECFR polling captures the cold version of it. Across 10 EU countries, the average is only 16% who now view the United States as an ally. About half view America as a “necessary partner.”
That phrase is doing a lot of work. A necessary partner is what you call a difficult supplier you cannot yet replace. It is not what you call a friend.
The warmer version of the same conversation, the one you only hear late and off the record, sounds different. It sounds like: we thought you were better than this. We needed you to be better than this. Not for your sake. For ours.
The sadness is real, and it is proportional to the belief. You cannot understand European disappointment in America right now unless you understand European faith in America before now.
What this means in the room
The takeaway is not that Europeans dislike Americans. That would be lazy and wrong. The executives I work with, across countries, industries, and politics, are still engaged. They are still doing business and hiring Americans. The relationships at the working level are intact, and in some cases stronger than they were, because adversity tends to clarify who actually shows up.
But something beneath the surface has shifted, and any American doing business in Europe right now needs to feel it.
The benefit of the doubt is gone. You used to walk in with a credit balance, the residual goodwill of Marshall Plans, shared sacrifice, JFK in Berlin, and Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate. That account isn’t just empty. It’s been closed.
Talk is being priced more harshly than it used to be, in part because the loudest American voice on the world stage right now is the one Europeans always suspected was the real one. The room you’re walking into has less patience for the long pitch and the big American energy than it did even a few years ago. The European across the table assumes you are performing until you prove otherwise, and there is a quiet sadness in him about having to assume that.
The frustrated, still-engaged middle
Most of the Europeans I know are frustrated with America. They are also, in a way they would rarely admit to an American’s face, mourning the version of America they grew up believing in.
They still want the relationship. Many of them still believe that the American people are not the American government, and that the deeper bonds of culture, capital, and history are not so easily severed. They are hedging, building their own defense capacity, AI infrastructure, and payment rails. But they are hedging the way you hedge in a marriage that has gone bad but isn’t quite over. With one eye on the door, one hand still on the table, and a part of the heart that has not yet caught up with what the head already knows.
What they are over is being told how to run their economies by a country running fifteen trillion-dollar deficits. Done with being moralized at by a political class that has surrendered the moral high ground to MAGA. Done, especially with the talker. The talker, as a national stereotype, was always tolerable, even endearing in small doses. The talker-as-commander-in-chief is something else entirely.
If you are doing business in Europe right now, the assignment is straightforward, even if it isn’t easy. Be the American who proves the stereotype wrong in the specific country you are standing in. Listen more than you speak. Commit to less and deliver more. Show up in February, again in June, and again in November, when there is no deal on the table. Learn the country you are in, its history, its rhythms, and the way trust gets built there. The people across the table have almost certainly bothered to learn ours. And understand that when a European executive looks at you with that slightly distant, slightly tired expression, he is not being cold. He is wondering whether the country you came from is still the country he thought it was, or whether the talker on television is.
The honest answer is that we don’t know yet.
What I tell the European clients and friends I work with is that America was never a finished place. It was always an argument, conducted in public, between the country’s better and worse instincts. The light has dimmed before. It has been relit before. Whether it gets relit this time depends, more than anything, on whether enough Americans decide it should.
Corporate Dyak 