The eighth meeting of the European Political Community convened in Yerevan on May 4. Forty-eight heads of state and government attended. The Armenian capital, sitting on the Russian-Iranian-Turkish-Azerbaijani frontier, hosted the largest international political gathering in its independent history. Mark Carney of Canada attended as the first non-European participant, a deliberate signal that the EPC, founded in 2022 as a vehicle for European strategic autonomy from Moscow, has now expanded its remit to autonomy from Washington as well. Donald Trump was not invited. No senior American official was present. The forum addressed Ukraine, the US-Israeli war on Iran and the future of European security in his absence. This is the new normal.

Carney, in remarks at the World Economic Forum in January that have since become the leitmotif of European diplomacy, identified what he called a "rupture in the US-led system of global governance." Antonio Costa, the European Council president, framed the Yerevan gathering in deliberately Carney-ish terms: "Europe and Canada are more than just like-minded partners. Together we are building a global alliance to defend peace, shared prosperity and multilateralism." That is to say, an alliance built around a country that is not the United States, hosted by a country that is not in the European Union, and attended by an EU that has stopped pretending that the transatlantic relationship is unbroken. The optics are the policy.

The chronology of how Europe arrived in Yerevan is worth setting out, because it is rare for an alliance of eighty years' standing to come apart this fast.

The Greenland crisis of January was the first inflexion point. Trump, citing Arctic security, announced on January 17 that he would impose an additional 10% tariff on Denmark, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Finland, rising to 25% on June 1, "until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland." The eight targets were all NATO members.

Trump publicly refused to rule out the use of military force to annex Danish sovereign territory. Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, declared that the United States had "the right to take Greenland." His wife, Katie Miller, posted a map of the island superimposed with the US flag and the word "SOON."

For five days the EU operated on the assumption that an American president was prepared to seize NATO territory. Macron, on X on January 17, replied: "No intimidation nor threat will influence us, neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland." The leaders of five larger EU states issued a joint statement on January 6 stressing "sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders," and the European Council convened an extraordinary informal meeting on January 22 to discuss "recent developments in transatlantic relations." Trump retreated at Davos on January 21, settling for a face-saving "framework deal" brokered by NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte. But the damage was done. As Ursula von der Leyen put it at Davos: Trump was no longer using tariffs to rebalance trade. He was using them to seize territory from an ally.

The US-Israeli war on Iran from February 28 onwards was the second inflection point, and the more consequential. Trump's request that European NATO allies join offensive operations from their territory and through the Strait of Hormuz was met, the Center for American Progress documented in a March brief, with a "fragmented response driven less by alignment with the White House than by fear of retaliation." Spain refused outright to allow US forces to launch strikes from bases on Spanish soil. Trump, in response, threatened a full trade embargo against Madrid. Britain, on early reporting cited by CNN on April 1, initially withheld permission for the US to use British air bases for offensive missions, prompting Trump to lambast the "special relationship" and float, in The Telegraph, an American withdrawal from NATO. He called the alliance a "paper tiger" and noted that Vladimir Putin shared the assessment.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz, sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office on March 3, declined to defend Madrid even when a German journalist raised the issue directly. He later told a German audience that the United States had been "humiliated" by Iran. Trump's response came on May 1-2, days before the Yerevan summit. The Pentagon announced the withdrawal of approximately 5,000 US troops from Germany, a 14% reduction at NATO's most strategically important continental base. Simultaneously, the administration announced an increase in tariffs on EU passenger cars and trucks to 25%. Yonhap News and NBC News both reported that the moves were explicit retaliation for European non-compliance with Iran war requests. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk, on X, called the result "the ongoing disintegration of our alliance." Tusk's Poland sits on NATO's eastern flank and is the European state with the strongest historical incentive to maintain the American security guarantee. That a Polish prime minister now writes those words is the measure of how far the rupture has progressed.

What is striking about the European response across all of this is the absence of pleading. Nathalie Tocci, director of the Italian Institute of International Affairs and a Madrid-based Europe columnist for The Guardian, observed in an interview with Democracy Now on April 10: "Trust in the relationship seems to be broken. And of course, once trust is broken, it's extremely difficult to put the genie back in the bottle." Tocci's argument, echoed by Stephen Flanagan of the Middle East Institute and a former senior NSC defence official, is that European governments are no longer trying to prevent the rupture from happening. They are managing it, as one would manage a bereavement.

The structural drivers reinforce the immediate ones. Steven Hill, in a Washington Monthly essay on April 17 titled "The U.S.-Europe Rift: How Trump's Iran War is Making it Worse," catalogued the cumulative shocks: punitive tariffs, NATO ultimatums, the Greenland threat, abandonment of Ukraine, the Iran war demands, and the recurring presidential insults. Each, on its own, would have been recoverable. The compounding effect has not been. The Washington Times editorial board, hardly a hostile witness, conceded on May 4 that Trump's National Security Strategy of late 2025 "essentially constituted an attack on Europe."

And so, in Yerevan, Europe gathered without America. The agenda was telling. The Ukrainian multilateral meeting was co-chaired by the United Kingdom and France, with Volodymyr Zelenskyy seated opposite Keir Starmer and Macron. Pedro Sánchez of Spain shook hands with Nikol Pashinyan, the Armenian prime minister whose country is now formally on the EU accession track. Carney's presence as the first non-European leader at the EPC was, as Costa pointed out, "politically very significant. It is a reflection of the strong and growing alignment between Europe and Canada." That alignment, every European in the room understood, exists precisely because the alignment with Washington no longer does.

The instruments of the new arrangement are being assembled in real time. The Global Gateway investment programme, the EU's $300bn alternative to Belt and Road, is now being deployed across Latin America, the South Caucasus, North Africa and South-East Asia in ways that explicitly do not require American coordination. The European Peace Facility's bilateral assistance to Armenia, adopted by the Council on January 29, signals that the EU is now equipping a state on the Iranian and Russian borders without American consultation. Costa's "360-degree vision for European security," articulated in his Yerevan press statement, is a polite phrase for a Europe that no longer assumes the American security umbrella holds.

None of this means Europe has left the American orbit. It cannot. The United States is still its largest export market and its principal supplier of financial capital. NATO's nuclear umbrella, intelligence networks, air defence systems and long-range missile capabilities remain American. Europe is, on Hill's accounting, dependent on US tech giants for cloud computing, payment systems and most critical software. The break is asymmetric, but the direction is clear: away from Washington's grasp. 

The lesson of Yerevan is that the rupture is no longer something Europeans are trying to prevent. It is something they are trying to survive. The Carney doctrine of "middle powers rallying together to defend key international values" is now the organising principle. The American security guarantee, on which the post-1945 European order rested, has been replaced by a polite assumption that the United States is not coming to the rescue. The Yerevan EPC, on the literal periphery of the European geographical idea, was the moment that assumption became official.

It is hard to think of a precedent like this in the past 70 years. Empires usually lose their alliances slowly, and at the end with a quiet sputter. America has lost Europe in fifteen months, in an aggressive posture and not at the end of anything obvious. The next chapters will be written not in Washington but in Brussels, Berlin, Madrid and Paris. Trump may yet come to the table. He will find Europe has built a different one with its back to him.