The G7 summit opened Monday in Évian-les-Bains against a geopolitical backdrop that few in Brussels or Paris could have scripted even a year ago. The US and Israeli attack on Iran in late February, and Tehran’s subsequent retaliation and closure of the Strait of Hormuz, have unleashed a wave of energy, supply chain, and commodity shocks across the global economy. Macron had spent months crafting a presidency agenda centred on digital governance, global economic imbalances and sustainable development. Events, as is their habit, had other ideas.
Late Sunday night, on the eve of the summit, Trump announced a memorandum of understanding to end the fifteen-week conflict with Iran. Germany, France, the UK and Italy released a joint statement welcoming it as a “diplomatic breakthrough.” The welcome was genuine — but so was the underlying frustration. For European governments, the Hormuz crisis had been a wound inflicted without their consent and managed without their meaningful input. They had spent months calling for ceasefire and negotiation; Washington had spent those same months conducting a war that sent oil prices surging and European households paying the price.
Macron was clear about what Europe now wants from any emerging settlement: support for Lebanon, the lasting reopening of the Strait, a binding accord on Iran’s nuclear and ballistic activities, and — crucially — a diversification of energy routes away from dependence on that single choke point. The last item is telling. After the Hormuz closure exposed how completely European energy security remained subject to decisions made in Washington and Tehran, there is now political appetite, across the continent, to ensure it never happens again.
That appetite is part of a broader reckoning. European leaders are arriving in Évian with a list of complaints: US tariffs on EU products, Trump’s ambiguous stance on NATO, and the economic fallout from the Hormuz closure. The analyst Max Bergmann at CSIS put it plainly: in 2025, Europeans were ready to accept a more submissive posture, but by 2026, that tolerance has worn thin.
What has changed is not just the accumulation of grievances but a shift in how Europeans conceptualise the relationship itself. The Greenland crisis of January 2026 was, for many Europeans, the decisive rupture. The United States had long been seen as the linchpin of NATO’s collective defence; its threats against Greenland’s sovereignty transformed it, in many European eyes, into something closer to a predatory power. At the Munich Security Conference in February, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz warned of a “deep rift” emerging across the Atlantic. By February 2026, roughly one-fifth of respondents in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland had come to regard the United States as a “major threat” to their security.
This is new terrain. European opinion has tolerated American unilateralism through previous cycles. It has weathered tariff disputes, disagreements over Iraq, rows over the Iran nuclear deal. But the combination of territorial threats against a NATO ally, an unsolicited war in the Middle East, and the deliberate weaponisation of trade has produced something qualitatively different: not anger, exactly, but a cold-eyed reassessment of dependency.
The trade agreement heading to a European Parliament vote this week is both a product of that reassessment and a measure of its limits. The Turnberry deal — struck last July between Trump and Von der Leyen — imposes a broad 15% tariff rate on European goods exported to the United States while eliminating EU duties on most US industrial products. MEPs pushed hard for tougher safeguards. The sunset clause, which Parliament initially wanted to expire in March 2028, was pushed to the end of 2029. Lawmakers secured a provision allowing the Commission to suspend the deal if the US fails to reduce steel and aluminium derivative tariffs to below 15% by year’s end.
Several MEPs have been vocal about their discomfort with what they see as a coercive process: Trump’s Greenland ultimatums and repeated tariff threats having shaped the final text as much as any trade negotiation principle. Parliament had previously suspended its own work on the deal after Trump issued his Greenland demands in January, with many lawmakers complaining the agreement was inherently lopsided. Ratification this week, under a July 4 deadline effectively set by Washington, has the character less of a negotiated partnership than a managed capitulation.
Europe can no longer take shared values, shared geostrategic interests, or America’s role as protector for granted. It needs to engage the US — not only under Trumpism — as a strong actor with its own interests, its own agenda and its own strategic capacities. That formulation, from a recent analysis in a European academic journal, describes the intellectual shift underway. The Évian summit and the Parliament vote taking place simultaneously this week are, in their different registers, expressions of exactly that adjustment.
What happens next depends on which direction each of the two transatlantic pressures resolves. On trade, the immediate test arrives December 31: whether Washington will have reduced its steel and aluminium tariffs to below the agreed threshold. If it does not, the Commission holds the formal power to suspend concessions — but exercising that power against an America governed by Trump would carry risks that no European capital will welcome. The sunset clause, expiring at end-2029, provides a structural off-ramp, though it says something about the state of the relationship that its primary function is to ensure Europe is not permanently bound by a deal signed under duress.
On security and the Middle East, the picture is more open. Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer of the German Marshall Fund argues that Europe is in a “transformation limbo” — the United States is rethinking its priorities and its demands on allies, while Europeans are recalibrating in turn. Trump moves faster than Europe’s decision-making structures allow; that mismatch will not resolve itself quickly. But Évian does offer something modest: a room in which Macron can make the case for multilateral engagement on Iran, for continued support for Ukraine, and for treating economic policy as a shared responsibility rather than a zero-sum contest. France has framed the problem of global macroeconomic imbalances as a collective one — China overproduces, the United States over-consumes, Europe underinvests — and has invited Brazil, India, Kenya and South Korea to the table precisely to broaden the conversation beyond a bilateral transatlantic tug-of-war.
Whether that framing lands with an American president who arrived for a bilateral dinner with Macron on his 80th birthday, fresh from a UFC celebration at the White House, is a different question. The European position at Évian is coherent, multilateral and institutionally grounded. It is also, structurally, the position of a bloc that has spent the last year negotiating under threat, ratifying a trade deal it finds imbalanced, and welcoming a ceasefire it had no hand in brokering. Strategic autonomy remains a horizon rather than a reality. The distance between those two things is what this week, in the alpine resort on Lake Geneva, is quietly about.
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