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The European Union has drawn criticism from the administration as an over-regulated bureaucracy

BRUSSELS—President Trump and his team have spent much of the year railing at Europe, complaining about what they see as a cluster of countries too soft on immigration, weak on preserving democratic freedoms and unwilling to pay for the full cost of their defense.

Their biggest target, though, is the European Union. The U.S. helped create the institution from the wreckage of World War II, but Washington now regards it as an over-regulated bureaucracy incapable of responding swiftly to events and fulfilling its role as a U.S. ally

Trump’s antipathy to the bloc represents the most fundamental reassessment of U.S. trans-Atlantic policy since the Cold War and is upending America’s most important alliance. Administration officials say they are trying to strengthen the West and put a wayward Europe back on track.

The position, most recently articulated in Trump’s new national-security strategy, hews to a longstanding MAGA criticism of the bloc as a supranational body squelching national character and initiative. Vice President JD Vance, a vocal proponent of the view, helped launch the administration’s push in February with a speech in Munich, where he referred to EU officials as “commissars,” using a title for Soviet officials.

The administration will “encourage the revitalization of the industrial bases of all our allies and partners to strengthen collective defense,” the new strategy says, and urges Europe “to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, acting on that admonition, earlier in December threatened the EU with tariff hikes or other trade action if it doesn’t stop imposing fines on American tech companies, days after the bloc levied a $140 million penalty on social-media platform X. An EU spokesman said the bloc’s rules apply equally and fairly to all companies that operate in it.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Tuesday the U.S. would bar a former E.U. official from entering the country over his role in creating and enforcing an online-content law that the administration has criticized for allegedly censoring Americans.

By targeting the EU—also a longtime focus of Russian vitriol—Trump is dispensing with decades of U.S. policy and putting the West in uncharted territory.

For European leaders, however, the EU—with some 450 million consumers and a combined economic heft of more than $20 trillion—is key to their nation-states’ ability to defend themselves and exert force on the world stage. They acknowledge the 27-country bloc is unwieldy but see it as a defender of European sovereignty. The EU is also now working to lighten regulatory burdens that European companies say hurt their global competitiveness, although results aren’t yet clear.

“Europe’s independence will depend on its ability to compete in today’s turbulent times,” said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who heads the bloc’s executive arm, in her annual State of the EU speech in September. “But we know the economic and geopolitical headwinds are strong,” she said.

Still, EU officials reject U.S. criticism of European democracy. Many view the attacks as based on American commercial self-interest.

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“There will be no freedom of speech if citizens’ freedom of information is sacrificed to defend the tech oligarchs of the United States,” said European Council President António Costa, who oversees the grouping of EU national leaders, in response to the national-security document.

For many Europeans, including former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi, the EU—far from being a problem—offers the best hope for jump-starting their lagging economy. By deepening economic ties among members, the argument goes, the bloc might finally achieve the efficiencies and scale its vast market has long promised but failed to deliver.

The dispute is crucial to trans-Atlantic ties because Europe’s economic strength underpins its ability to arm itself against intensifying external threats. Most EU countries are also members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and in June they yielded to pressure from Trump and agreed to more than double their military spending. They are also now shouldering most of the cost of supporting Ukraine in its fight against Russia’s invasion.

External threats continue to metastasize, and if Russia were to attack Europe, the continent’s military spending “would grow massively,” NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said recently in Berlin. “There would be emergency budgets, cuts to public spending, economic disruption, and further financial pressure,” he said.

The EU’s importance to NATO isn’t incidental, because the two share common roots. They both emerged after World War II, at a time with parallels to today: Europe’s economy was struggling, external threats were growing and Washington didn’t want to continue policing the continent. Top U.S. officials saw deeper European integration as a path to resilience.

“The U.S. was trying to disengage from Europe at the end of the war,” said Benn Steil, director of international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. The U.S. diplomatic and military establishment faced a challenge, said Steil: “How do we defend our vital economic and security interests in Europe without troops?”

As the State Department analyzed how to jolt Europe’s economy, “they came to the conclusion very quickly that it could only be done by integrating the economies—or reintegrating them” to restore prewar linkages, Steil said.

Unlike today’s comity among most European leaders, wartime distrust lingered and cooperation proved elusive. President Harry S. Truman and his secretary of state, George C. Marshall, told the Europeans that the U.S. would help fund them if they presented a unified reconstruction proposal, not national pleas.

The result was the Marshall Plan. NATO emerged as the security umbrella to safeguard Europe’s recovery just as the Soviet Union swung from wartime ally to Cold War adversary.

“NATO came to be seen as the necessary military escort for Marshall aid. The two went together,” said Steil, who wrote a book on the Marshall Plan. The North Atlantic Treaty was signed a year and day after Truman signed the Economic Cooperation Act, launching the Marshall Plan.

The plan worked better than expected, and what began in 1951 as a six-country European customs union covering coal and steel evolved over decades into the EU. The bloc’s unified market for goods and services became a one-stop shop for companies to ply their offerings under common rules and fairly standardized regulations. U.S. multinationals were—and remain—among its biggest boosters.

Over the past two decades, as Europe’s economy slumped, the EU shifted from focusing primarily on integrating its markets to other objectives, such as working to protect citizens’ online privacy. The bloc responded to emergencies that leaders saw as existential, including the eurozone debt crisis, Brexit and the Covid-19 pandemic.

But military spending lagged behind and national leaders have yet to take emergency measures in response to the threat Rutte spelled out.

“Europe has a pretty good playbook for crises. It doesn’t have a very good playbook for governing in normal times,” said Mujtaba Rahman, managing director for Europe at Eurasia Group, a risk-management consulting firm.

In a flip from the late 1940s, when Europe was able to focus on economic recovery thanks to U.S. help, today Europeans increasingly see the Trump administration as a commercial adversary. Friction with the U.S. is amplifying calls for more EU reforms.

If the U.S. also came to be seen as a security threat, said Rahman, “it would absolutely trigger a revival around this economic conversation in Europe.”