As the US increasingly contests multilateral institutions it has set up and maintained with its European partners, EU actors are confronted with a steep trade-off: Should they defend multilateralism, or should they yield to the US? This paper investigates how EU actors navigate this trade-off and argues that European engagement is shaped by transatlantic goal divergence and power asymmetry within the relevant policy domain. I expect that the costs of accommodating the US are larger the stronger the transatlantic preference divergence over the contested institution, and thus the greater US contestation deviates from the EU’s position on the institutional status quo. The costs of US retaliation will be higher the larger the transatlantic power asymmetry in the relevant policy domain, and thus the more dependent EU actors are on the US. The combination of these two variables, and the respective incentives and constraints, will shape Europe’s response to US contestation from submitting to the US over collaborating with the US to shielding from the US to even defending against the US. The paper assesses these expectations by examining EU actors’ responses to the first Trump Administration’s contestation of NATO, IMF, WTO, and the JCPOA. Europe’s varying responses to US contestation have important implications for the future of the rules-based order and the EU’s position within it. 

The paper is part of the Special Issue project "The Deep Structure of Transatlantic Relations," edited by Eugénia da Conceição-Heldt, Andrew Moravcsik, Erik Jones, and Marianne Riddervold.

The paper draws on data from my project "LIDO – Loyalties in a Divided Order: Europe’s Responses to the US Withdrawal from Multilateral Institutions,“ funded by the European University Institute & EUI Max Weber Programme.