Four reasons Europe can’t trust the US to protect it anymore
Source: Euractiv
With US President Donald Trump making noise about pulling back the US security commitment to Europe, many US allies on the continent find themselves unsure whether they can rely on Washington anymore for defence, or if they’re now on their own.
The past couple of weeks in Europe can only be summed up in one word: chaos.
It all started when the Trump administration alarmed Ukraine and its European backers when he dialed up Russian President Vladimir Putin directly to pitch peace negotiations – without including anyone from the continent.
Granted, the Europeans have chronically lagged when it comes to stepping up their defences and largely outsourced their security to the US – which most of them are only waking up to now, despite years of cajoling by successive presidents in Washington. In many ways, the Americans have been right.
But how far will Trump go to force Europeans to grow up? In the meantime, can the Europeans rely on America? Are the Americans Europe’s friend or foe?
Even if the bond between Europe and America has started to fade, it has yet to disappear. For now, what is for sure is that the Americans under Trump have shown that they hold the strongest hand at every step of the way, and get to dictate the rules of the game.
Behind the flurry of proposals from Brussels and various European national capitals in the past couple of weeks, only a few new steps have been announced. But the Trump administration seems intent on giving the Europeans plenty of reasons to get brutally serious about taking responsibility for their own defence.
We’ve laid out four big ones.
1. The Americans don’t plan to keep footing the bill.
The US has long been the decisive power in the Nato military alliance, and for decades has picked up much of the very hefty price tag for securing Europe, from deploying large numbers troops and military hardware on the continent to promising extensive further military support should there be an attack.
But those days appear to be over.
First of all, nothing explicitly requires the US to send in any of their forces if another Nato country invokes the alliance’s mutual defence clause, also known as Article 5.
So the lack of clear commitment to the “ironclad Article 5” and Trump’s warming up to Putin has prompted some grumbling in European countries. Especially those that sent troops to Afghanistan after the US invoked that clause for the first and only time in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The Europeans who may have hoped for a fair return on their own investment and sacrifice, but have been confronted by a different reasoning from Trump’s Washington.
What is more, the Trump administration has demanded that Europeans and Canadians boost their defence spending all the way to 5% of GDP – higher, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth acknowledged, than what the US is currently spending.
When Hegseth said the country “remains committed to the Nato alliance”, one big caveat followed: “The United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship which encourages dependency. Rather, our relationship will prioritise empowering Europe to own responsibility for its own security.”
Europeans are rushing to catch up, but spending cash on random equipment won’t fundamentally make them stronger. Instead, they’d better hurry up to buy smartly and strategically with enormous amounts of money.
European allies will still heavily rely on America. Even with dramatically higher military investment, it will likely still take many years to match or even replace the tens of thousands of US troops in Europe, sophisticated US-made air defence systems, complicated logistics capabilities, the huge US nuclear arsenal and more
2. Trump may bring the boys back home…
Europeans had been hoping for a sign that American troops would stay in Europe instead got a chilling warning from Hegseth: “Now is the time to invest, because you can’t make an assumption that America’s presence will last forever.”
During his inauguration speech, Trump criticised Biden for defending “foreign borders but refuses to defend American borders or, more importantly, its people”.
In the meantime, about 100,000 US troops remain in Europe, including the 20,000 surge that followed Russia’s attack on Ukraine three years ago. The White House has dismissed reports it planned to close a base in Greece and publicly committed to its presence in Poland.
But many now see that Trump’s position could change overnight. Even some of the Old Continent’s most staunchly pro-American countries are changing and retuning their stance.
Germany’s chancellor-to-be, Friedrich Merz, warned on election night about the urgent need to “establish an independent European defence capability”, and argued that the continent needs to “achieve independence from the USA”. That was a stark shift for Merz, a staunch Atlanticist, and would mark a sea-change for Germany, which has long treasured its “special relationship” with the US and relied heavily on US forces for defence.
3. and their heavy weapons too.
If US troops go, so do their weapons, which would force the Europeans to purchase new gear as replacements.
The chaotic 2021 withdrawal from Kabul under Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden, already highlighted how much the Europeans depended on the US for logistics and arms, as they were powerless to change course without Biden’s backing.
But what if the Americans go even further than pulling out of Europe? What if they decide to no longer sell US-made weapons to Europeans? What if they never re-start the deliveries of military aid to Ukraine? And what if they block European countries from using their US-made weapons?
The US president has a number of ways to keep exerting power over how other countries use US-supplied military hardware.
Should the Europeans try to break with the Americans on geopolitical or security interests, the sentence from the White House could be harsh.
If the US president decides that Europeans are no longer in line with his country’s political interests, or wants to ratchet up pressure on Europe, he could stop the Europeans from using US-made fighter jets, air defence systems, and so forth, he can. The same goes for halting exports of any US-made arms.
But that’s not the only way the US have to keep the Europeans in line.
Ukraine might be the first one to suffer from Trump’s decisions, as he’s reportedly ordered a freeze on US military aid for Ukraine and the Europeans will have to seriously speed up production and purchases to fill the gaps.
They will, however, likely not be able to make up for US military aid themselves, as they lack key sophisticated capabilities and the industrial production capacity at the moment.
4. Washington has started to sound like Moscow.
Donald Trump had been clear: “This war is far more important to Europe than it is to us – we have a big, beautiful ocean as separation”. And top Trump advisors have long argued that the shift away from Europe is necessary to focus on a far more important threat to US power, China.
But Trump’s courtship of Putin, and brutal treatment of Zelenskyy, have some wondering whether he’s making a more dramatic pivot and effectively switching sides.
The first alarm bell rang three weeks ago, when Hegseth, the US defence secretary, said it’s unrealistic that Ukraine would regain all of its Russian-occupied territory and denied Ukraine Nato membership.
While this US position on the possibility of Ukraine joining Nato sounded new to some, it actually was no change from the Biden administration’s stance.
Nevertheless, Trump has flipped many other US positions toward Ukraine and regularly echoed Russian propaganda, including by accusing Kyiv of starting the war and calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” – a comment Trump later claimed to have forgotten.
After a tumultuous few days of tensions between Kyiv and Washington, Trump said the US is back in the lead to end the war in Ukraine, with Kyiv’s and Moscow’s buy-in.
But he reiterated his ambitions to take over Greenland and has not backed down on slapping tariffs on major US trade partners.
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The original article: belongs to Euractiv .
