Constructing Europe as a rival: US foreign policy discourse in the Trump era

Abstract

This article investigates how the Trump administration discursively reframed the European Union (EU) as a strategic rival in US foreign policy. Drawing on a corpus of 65 primary texts, including presidential speeches, policy documents, press releases, and tweets, the analysis employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) within a constructivist framework to trace how the EU was repositioned in US strategic identity between 2017 and 2020. The article identifies three recurring frames: reciprocity and exploitation, which cast trade relations as systematically unfair; burden-sharing and NATO delinquency, which portrayed European allies as debtors compelled into compliance; and sovereignty versus supranational control, which depicted the EU as the embodiment of illegitimate bureaucratic authority. Together, these frames unsettled the symbolic foundations of transatlantic partnership by normalizing a rival identity for Europe within US presidential discourse. The findings demonstrate how discursive practices can reconfigure allied relations by linking economic, security, and institutional grievances into a coherent narrative of imbalance and illegitimacy. The article contributes to scholarship on transatlantic relations by situating Trump’s discourse within broader debates on the erosion of Atlanticism, the politicization of alliance politics, and the constitutive role of language in shaping strategic identities and rivalries.