When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it also tried to squeeze Europe by crimping natural gas flows. But increased shipments of liquid natural gas, much of it from the United States, helped ease the pressure.
Now, smoldering tensions between leaders in Washington and Brussels could turn Europe’s reliance on American natural gas into a similar political pressure point, analysts say.
“We’ve replaced one massive dependency with another one,” said Henning Gloystein, a managing director for energy at Eurasia Group, a political risk research firm. “That looked fine three years ago, but now it doesn’t.”
The need to import large amounts of energy is one of Europe’s strategic weaknesses. Natural gas from Russia was a mainstay for the continent before the invasion of Ukraine. In 2019, for instance, Russian gas accounted for more than half of the European Union’s gas imports.
The huge volumes of Russian gas that flowed through pipelines across Ukraine and Poland and under the Baltic Sea plummeted in the wake of the assault. Prices soared, putting pressure on consumers, industries and governments.
The United States came to the rescue. Tankers loaded at U.S. terminals shipped large volumes of liquefied natural gas to European ports in the Netherlands, France and Belgium, among other destinations, helping to replace the Russian fuel and calming markets.
At the time, the United States had been a modest supplier of natural gas to Europe, with about 5 percent of imports in late 2019, but it has since grown, providing more than a quarter of the European Union’s gas imports in 2025.
Not long ago, those gas flows looked heroic. Now, they are raising eyebrows. Since beginning his second term, President Trump has sought to use trade as leverage in disputes with other countries, including his recent push to take over Greenland.
The growing concern in Europe is that Mr. Trump could turn the strong position that the United States has gained in the oil and gas industry into a weapon to try to coerce other countries. “Recently, people have started to realize we are probably a little bit too dependent on U.S. L.N.G.,” said Anne-Sophie Corbeau, a global research scholar in Paris for the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University.
The Trump administration has encouraged this reliance, pushing Europe to increase U.S. imports as part of the trade deal struck with the European Union last year. In 2025, L.N.G. flows from the United States to European Union countries jumped about 60 percent from the previous year, according to Bruegel, a research organization.
Analysts say these volumes are likely to increase. Although Europe invests in renewable energy like wind and solar power, it still requires natural gas for heating homes and manufacturing goods.
Europe is also producing less of its own fuel because its existing oil and gas fields are winding down, and countries like Britain, whose petroleum production has fallen sharply, discourage new drilling.
“Europe is without much alternative,” said Christoph Halser, a senior analyst at Rystad Energy, a consulting firm.
Partly in response to American complaints, Europe is also in the process of phasing out its purchases of Russian gas, which fell to around 12 percent of imports in 2025. Norway, which is not a European Union member, is the bloc’s largest gas supplier, accounting for around 30 percent of imports.
The United States is already the world leader in L.N.G. exports, and developers are spending heavily to build facilities for chilling gas to liquid form and then shipping it.
Europe, which is a relatively short sail from terminals on the Gulf Coast, is a logical destination for these cargoes. China, the world’s largest importer of liquefied natural gas, has largely stopped buying American fuel because of U.S. tariffs.
In fact, a bright spot for Europe may be that a supply boom is expected in the coming years, which could bring down what have been relatively high prices.
Even in the event of increased political tensions with Europe, some analysts are skeptical that the Trump administration would take steps like reducing shipments that would be contrary to the interests of the U.S. oil and gas industry.
That “would be a very negative market signal, and also significantly impair the competitiveness of the industry, which the administration is committed to supporting,” said David L. Goldwyn, a former U.S. energy special envoy and now president of Goldwyn Global Strategies, a consulting firm.
The industry in the United States also differs markedly from Russia’s. There, the Kremlin was able to use Gazprom, the state-controlled gas monopoly, “to weaponize gas flows in 2022,” Jack Reid, a graduate economist at Oxford Economics, wrote in a recent study.
The United States, he added, is more likely to “redirect flows than bring them to a halt.” Other analysts speculate that Washington might take measures like putting an export tax on gas.
At a minimum, though, meddling with gas flows is likely to lead to higher costs and prices, analysts say, which would be bad news for Europe.
“Import concentration” matters, said Ugne Keliauskaite, a research analyst at Bruegel. “Now Europe is more exposed to U.S.-centered disruptions.”
Stanley Reed reports on energy, the environment and the Middle East for The Times from London. He has been a journalist for more than four decades.
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