How Trump keeps Europe weak America weaponises energy

“Europe is securing control of our energy supply and strengthening our autonomy.” So declared Roberta Metsola, president of the European Parliament, in a speech this week — explaining that the bloc had just approved a total ban on Russian gas, expected to come into force by the end of the year. Unfortunately, such blithe self-confidence is seriously misplaced, for the EU has just replaced one dependency with another. What the continent once imported via pipeline from Russia, it now largely secures from the United States, which today accounts for roughly 60% of EU liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports.

Nor do things end there. American LNG is not only significantly more expensive than Russian pipeline gas, it is also far more volatile. Pipeline gas was typically delivered under long-term contracts with predictable pricing. LNG, by contrast, is tied to global spot markets, making prices highly sensitive to fluctuations in supply and demand, weather events and geopolitical shocks. Indeed, the timing of Europe’s announcement could not have been more unfortunate: as officials in Brussels congratulated themselves on their newfound “energy autonomy”, US gas prices surged around 70% in a week, reaching their highest level in three years after severe cold weather froze pipelines, disrupted supply, and drove up domestic demand in the US.

Those price spikes will feed directly into higher gas and electricity costs in Europe — during one of the coldest winters in years, and at a time when millions of Europeans are already unable to afford adequate heating. Higher energy prices have already crippled industrial competitiveness and pushed major economies, above all Germany, towards deindustrialisation.

Taken together, the episode encapsulates the self-destructive character of EU energy policy over the past four years. Yet the problem is not merely that cheap and reliable Russian gas has been replaced with costlier and more volatile American LNG. More troubling still is that the United States is far more likely to use its energy exports as an instrument of political pressure than Russia ever was, leaving the EU more dependent on its imperial master than ever.

For all the talk of Russia’s “weaponisation” of gas supplies, history tells a different story. For decades, first the Soviet Union and later Russia continued supplying energy to Germany and the rest of Europe through multiple geopolitical crises, including during the height of the Cold War. More recently, even after the delivery of German weapons to Ukraine, and then the attack on Nord Stream, Moscow repeatedly stated that it was up to Berlin whether to resume gas supplies or not.

The United States, by contrast, has a long and well-documented history of weaponising energy — using it as leverage to extract economic and geopolitical concessions. And under Donald Trump, this has become explicit policy. The US National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, designates “American energy dominance” across oil, gas, coal and nuclear power as a top strategic priority, explicitly framing the expansion of American energy exports as a means to “project power”. This is not mere rhetoric. The Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to intervene aggressively in domestic and global markets, upend established policies and exert pressure not only on adversaries but also on long-standing allies.

By the time Trump returned to office, Europe’s dependence on US energy was already a fait accompli, following the EU’s decision to cut itself off from Russian gas and the sabotage of Nord Stream. Since then, Trump has only actively sought to deepen that dependence. In April 2025, for instance, his administration used the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs to pressure Germany and other EU states to refrain from importing any Russian energy.

A few months later, Trump strong-armed the European Commission into a commitment to buy $750 billion worth of US LNG, oil and nuclear energy products, in exchange for avoiding punitive tariffs. The figure in itself is unrealistic, but that was never the point. As Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright put it, the objective was to signal that Europe’s energy dependence would be “long-term”. The pressure worked. According to Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank, LNG shipments from the United States to the EU rose by around 60% in 2025 compared to the previous year.

At the same time, Washington has increasingly politicised these energy flows, with US officials openly linking continued LNG supplies to regulatory and political concessions. Just months ago, Wright and his Qatari counterpart jointly urged EU leaders to repeal climate and environmental regulations deemed obstacles to fossil fuel imports, explicitly tying these demands to Europe’s reliance on LNG from America and the Gulf.

But it took Trump’s explicit threat to take over Greenland to finally snap Europeans out of their complacency. As The New York Times reported, European leaders and analysts now fear that Trump could weaponise US energy exports to extract concessions not only over Greenland but across a wide range of issues. As Sophie Corbeau of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy put it, “people have started to realise we are probably a little bit too dependent on US LNG.”

That’s a polite way of describing the fact that Europe now finds itself heavily dependent for its gas on a country whose President openly threatens the territorial integrity of a European state. Whatever risks were associated with dependence on Russian gas, they pale in comparison. It is telling that the EU’s energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, is now speaking of the need to diversify away from American LNG.

However, this is little more than performative indignation. The prevailing European narrative suggests that none of this would have been conceivable before Trump. But this is ludicrous. Trump’s crude tactics pale in comparison to the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the single largest act of industrial sabotage in Europe’s history — an operation that was either directly carried out or politically sanctioned by the Biden administration to forcibly sever Europe from Russian gas and lock in dependence on US LNG. Recall, if nothing else, Washington’s own threats on this very issue. Germany’s — and Europe’s — silence in the aftermath of the attack makes today’s expressions of shock look like mere political theatre.

The truth, then, is that the dangers of replacing Russian gas with American LNG were obvious from the start. The economic and political costs were foreseeable and indeed widely predicted. The only difference between then and now is that Trump has made Europe’s squalid reality impossible to ignore.

It is crucial to understand, however, that Trump’s weaponisation of European energy supplies is about far more than bluster or the ruthless pursuit of short-term gains. As the US National Security Strategy makes clear, these moves are part of a broader, long-term strategy aimed at securing American energy dominance for decades to come. No less important, US bullying should be seen as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the country’s hegemony in a rapidly changing global order.

Control over energy has long been a central pillar of US postwar foreign policy. For much of that time, this effectively meant control over the global oil trade. From the overthrow of Iran’s nationalist government in 1953, to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, virtually every major US intervention in the Middle East followed this logic. This was never solely about securing oil supplies for domestic consumption. More fundamentally, it was about entrenching American global power.

By ensuring that oil was traded in dollars — and that exporting countries recycled those dollars back into the US financial system — Washington was able to elevate the dollar to the status of the world’s reserve currency, granting itself what Giscard d’Estaing called the “exorbitant privilege” of self-financing its imports. At the same time, by controlling the physical and financial choke points of the oil trade, the lifeblood of the global economy, the US acquired a powerful coercive tool: the ability to punish states whose policies ran counter to American interests, either by cutting off their access to energy supplies or by excluding them from the dollar-centric financial system via sanctions.

In recent years, though, the foundations of this system have come under increasing strain. Countries operating outside US control — notably Venezuela, Iran and Russia — have supplied growing volumes of oil to global markets, especially China, helping fuel its rapid rise. In parallel, these and other oil exporting countries, including traditional allies of the US such as Saudi Arabia, have begun pricing oil in non-dollar currencies or openly threatened to do so, challenging the monetary underpinnings of American power.

Until Trump’s recent attack, for instance, Venezuela was supplying around 5% of China’s oil needs. Iran, despite years of sanctions, has maintained remarkably high oil export levels. More than 80% of the Islamic Republic’s crude now goes to China, accounting for 13% to 15% of the PRC’s total crude oil imports. The freedom of countries to export oil and other resources on terms not dictated by the US — and this also applies to Russia’s gas exports to Europe before 2022 — poses a dual threat to its hegemony. It not only undermines dollar dominance, but also weakens Washington’s ability to use energy and sanctions as tools of geopolitical discipline.

Trump has been candid about these stakes. In 2024, he warned that losing the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency would be “like losing a war”. Others have been similarly explicit. Marco Rubio, commenting in 2023 on a trade agreement between Brazil and China, cautioned that such deals were creating a parallel global economy “totally independent from the United States” — one in which Washington would no longer have the ability to enforce economic sanctions. This is why any country pursuing an independent energy policy is automatically framed as a security threat.

Seen in this light, many US actions in recent years — from severing Europe’s access to Russian gas, to the seizure of Venezuelan oil assets, to escalating pressure on Iran — can be understood as elements of a single, coherent strategy: reasserting American physical and financial control over global energy flows, gaining leverage over adversaries and allies alike, and deterring countries from breaking with the unwritten rules of the US order.

Trump summed up this strategy when he said, after the attack on Venezuela, that “China can buy all the oil it wants from us” — but in dollars, and on American terms. It remains to be seen whether this gamble will be successful. But one thing is clear: the greatest threat to peace today doesn’t lie in the emergence of a multipolar world, but in the United States’ determination to prevent it, even at the cost of driving its own allies into the ground.

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