The American president triggered a fresh wave of transatlantic confusion this week by first permitting his defence secretary to cancel the routine rotation of an armoured brigade to Poland, then publicly overruling him to announce 5,000 additional soldiers would deploy there after all. Viewed from Washington, the sequence laid bare a decision-making process driven less by strategic review than by personal chemistry with the newly elected Polish president, Karol Nawrocki, whom Donald Trump claimed to have “proudly supported”. Within the Pentagon, the episode left war secretary Pete Hegseth politically wounded: leaked accounts describe an irate telephone call from the White House and the first open calls for his resignation from retired senior officers.

At the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Helsingborg, Sweden, Secretary of State Marco Rubio delivered the sobering corollary. The United States would continue to reduce its military footprint in Europe, he confirmed, because a smaller presence was “ultimately inevitable”. He reiterated the president’s “well-documented” disappointment with allies who failed to back Washington’s operations against Iran, warning that the matter would be settled at leader level during July’s Ankara summit. Secretary-General Mark Rutte, straining to project unity, insisted that America still possessed a “strong will” to remain in the alliance and that any aggressor would meet a “devastating” response under Article 5. Yet the relief expressed by Poland’s foreign minister—“all’s well that ends well”—could not mask the broader unease.

From Berlin, the initial order to withdraw 5,000 troops from German soil was read as an undisguised punishment for Berlin’s reluctance to join the Iran campaign, a reading reinforced by Rubio’s remarks. In Rome and Madrid, officials privately assessed that the long-expected drawdown will soon reach their own bases, a prospect that Italian foreign minister Antonio Tajani effectively conceded by calling on Europe to end its “welfare” dependency on American defence. Analysed from London, Trump’s whiplash corrections have shattered any remaining illusion of American predictability, accelerating European Union debates about a credible autonomous defence pillar. As the Ankara summit approaches, the alliance faces a reckoning: the US security guarantee, for eight decades the bedrock of the continent’s order, is now a transactional asset subject to sudden presidential whim, compelling European capitals to plan for a future in which they must do far more for themselves.