By Owen Sullivan | 22 October 2025
Across Europe, the quiet realignment of power is no longer theoretical. Inside ministries and underground command rooms, intelligence officials are beginning to treat the United States less as a trusted partner and more as a potential liability. The decades-old habit of feeding data into Washington’s vast security network is fading, replaced by a growing consensus that Europe can no longer rely on the stability or discretion of its transatlantic ally.
For years, European intelligence was built around American orbit. The CIA, the NSA, and a range of U.S. defense partnerships acted as both the source and sink of information, a gravitational center that shaped how European services defined their priorities. That structure only worked as long as trust held. But the political chaos of the past decade has given us a USA that European nations can no longer recognise. We now live in a world where the president of the USA has openly spouted his disdain for NATO, has repeatedly taken Russia’s side in debates and has told the world that the partnership the USA used to offer others, now comes with a price tag.
This distrust of the USA has led their European partners to discuss alternatives, and according to reporting from Politico, those alternatives are in-house intelligence infrastructure. An EU version of the CIA may be the next step in the intelligence future for the bloc, but the necessity of that move highlights the absence of the USA in these plans
In recent months, intelligence chiefs Europe have hinted that they are reviewing their intelligence relationships Washington. The Dutch agencies have said so out loud, acknowledging that their cooperation with the U.S. is now conditional.
European governments are quietly building the foundation of what could become a semi-autonomous intelligence network headquartered in Brussels, designed to merge strategic, military, and cyber capabilities under one roof. The project is described by insiders as a “joint command for the invisible war,” a response to Russia’s hybrid tactics but also to Washington’s unpredictable hand. It would mark the first time Europe has attempted to centralize intelligence collection and analysis outside of NATO’s American-led framework, and that shift, even if incomplete, represents a profound psychological break from the postwar order.
Officials close to the process say the change is driven less by ideology than by necessity. The flow of classified material between Europe and the U.S. has become uneven, with American agencies accused of hoarding sensitive data while selectively leaking intelligence to serve political aims. In Brussels and The Hague, that practice is viewed not only as undisciplined but as dangerous, particularly when operations against Russian assets can be compromised by partisan infighting in Washington.
Europe’s security services have no illusions about the difficulty of disentangling themselves. The U.S. remains the dominant power in surveillance technology, satellite coverage, and global signals intelligence. But the direction of travel is unmistakable. What began as frustration with American overreach has evolved into something more strategic — the deliberate construction of an intelligence framework capable of standing on its own if the Atlantic alliance fractures.
It is, in effect, a contingency plan for a world where trust in the United States can no longer be assumed. And in the corridors of Brussels, Paris, and Berlin, that world is no longer hypothetical.