> “the sky is falling” rhetoric

It's hardly rhetoric, from the European perspective. The EU is already embroiled in a proxy war against a major power in Ukraine, and are now faced with the prospect of their strongest erstwhile ally moving to annex EU territory.

Simultaneous war on two fronts, where one opponent is deeply embedded in your supply chains, is an existential threat.

The dependencies were always there. But never before (since the forming of NATO) has the US leadership so clearly and concretely distanced themselves from Europe. Before that there was a strong sense of North America and Europe belonging to the same “liberal” world where many things did be relatively cheaply exchanged.

The dependencies were therefore seen as a non issue for many. Banks have always been skeptics of the cloud because of the ability of the American government to just pull the plug if they want. Before it was a theoretical possibility that still came up in risk analysis. Today it is something that could even concretely happen.

Prosecutors and others have been denied access to their official work email etc because they displeased the president.

Trust has been eroded.

It doesn't have to be the sky is falling, it's reality. In one year Europe went from "can we fight Russia with American help" to "can we fight Russia without American help" to "can we fight America". If Europe doesn't get itself unencumbered with the US they are in a very vulnerable position.

The US is not trustworthy anymore. Your president is switching randomly from on insane idea to something equally insane. Canada doesnt want to the the 51st state. Greenland is part of Denmark, which is in the EU, which has been the biggest ally for the US and now your president was not ruling out using force to take over greenland.

Trump fans are saying "this is how he negotiates, don't mind", etc but anything coming from him os just random bullshit and nothing he says can be believed because the next day he can be 180* on the same topic.

There were no such issues between any of the US allies in the time I can remember.

We thought that whenwe help the US in Afganistan and Iraq then it will be remembered when we need help, but now Trump threw all that goodwill down the toilet when he said that the allies basically didnt do anything.

There were always issues with Nordstream, but the project rapidly imploded only after the war made it all untenable.

Tariffs + coercion via-vis EU tech regulation + Greenland are rapidly making the transatlantic tech status quo untenable.

Sure the issue was always there for you or people like you. But for a majority of the EU population there was no problem until very recently. And now people like you are starting to have more leverage to influence people who can make the right calls.