Rep. Sean Casten Reflects on SEEC Institute Europe CODEL in The Hill
The costs of unilateralism and the path to restore US-European relations
Rep. Sean Casten
07/14/2026
I recently spent a week in Brussels and Strasbourg, where I met with European government officials and business leaders, and other European Union-adjacent groups to discuss energy and climate policy.
Although the bulk of the trip was positive and constructive, it was painful to see how much U.S. standing has collapsed, how vulnerable we are to those fraying relations, and how long it will take to restore the trust that the Trump administration has despoiled.
To be sure, we still have so much in common. We both benefit from a robust rule of law and from the stability that comes from the post-World War II multilateral institutions. We both face shared challenges: AI-driven labor disruptions, the rise of China, the political destabilizing effect of climate refugees, and the way free-market neo-liberalism inadvertently fueled the rise of reactionary populism. Within that commonality, Americans are still respected.
But the backdrop of every conversation, despite our reassurances that there are those in our country who care about addressing those issues, was the hard truth that — thanks to the Trump administration — Americais increasingly seen as an unreliable partner. It is often said that trust is “gained in drops but lost in buckets.” Our tariff policies, threats over Greenland and foreign misadventures, from Venezuela to Iran, have poured out buckets of that trust that will take decades to restore.
In one of our meetings, it was observed that U.S. actions in Iran have accelerated the deployment of electric vehicles in Europe. In another, NATO officials noted the strategic challenges of maintaining their historic single-fuel policy across NATO nations when energy policies of member nations diverge. It was also noted that U.S. saber-rattling in Greenland that seeks to expressly leverage European dependence on U.S. liquefied natural gas has direct parallels with Russian saber-rattling in Ukraine that seeks to expressly leverage dependence on Russian natural gas.
As allies, we should be uniting against Russia and not wasting time debating the laws of physics. In practice, too many Europeans now see one science-denying bully to their east and another to their west.
In the short term, that is pushing Europe towards China, who, it was said, “is being much nicer to us than you are right now.” That is understandable, but it is hard to see how it is in our interest for American foreign and economic policies to drive up Chinese electric vehicle sales in Europe, even if that is exactly what we are doing.
In the longer term, this could have some positive effects. A stronger Europe is in the U.S. national interest, after all, so long as they remain allied with the United States. A Europe that spends more on NATO, that makes structural reforms in their economy to facilitate growth, and that accelerates their decoupling of economic growth from fossil fuel consumption is probably a net positive.