What Kristersson’s comments lay bare is the lasting damage done to relations between many European governments and the U.S. after Trump’s demands to take “ownership” of the island away from Sweden’s neighbor Denmark.
“For very obvious reasons, trust took a hit, no doubt,” Kristersson said this week, shortly before traveling to the Munich Security Conference. “I’m not at all saying that it is unreparable, and I don’t think it is either, but of course the tone the Americans used against Europeans, Canadians, Denmark, is not building trust.”
It is clear that the conflict between the U.S. and European countries reached its sharpest point in the early weeks of 2026 over the fate of the frozen territory of 57,000 inhabitants in the high north. But tensions had been building ever since Trump re-entered the White House a year earlier, and the underlying cause runs far deeper than the Arctic ice.
Tariffs and turmoil
Everything about Trump’s political outlook runs counter to the conventional way European centrists have run their countries for decades. His aggressive push to reorder international trade arrangements to America’s advantage, with an accompanying blizzard of tariffs, and his assertive efforts to force Ukraine into a peace deal (while talking up future agreements with Russia) reinforced the view that America’s leadership is no longer a reliable ally for Europe.
Then, in December, came the White House National Security Strategy. This document distilled Washington’s highly critical new approach toward conventional transatlantic relations, in black and white. The paper set out a sweeping plan for the U.S. government to step in and support MAGA-aligned “patriotic” parties to tilt the direction of European politics and save the continent from migration that threatens “civilizational erasure.”
Senior figures in the U.S. administration have also intervened on politics in Germany, France, the U.K. and other countries over the past year.