Europe is rearming. Not by choice, but forced into re-evaluating its security after US President Donald Trump’s administration has appeared to align the US with Russia against Europe, the most obvious manifestation of which is Trump negotiating Ukraine’s future with Russian President Vladimir Putin alone over a telephone call. The shift was heralded when US defence secretary Pete Hegseth told his Nato counterparts at their first meeting that Russia would get to keep the territory it held in Ukraine.
The following day, US Vice President J.D. Vance scolded European leaders at Munich for not listening to populist concerns: the threat to Europe, he declared, was not from Russia or China but ‘from within’, given which ‘there was nothing America can do for you.’ The rift was exposed on the third anniversary of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, when the US voted with Russia and against Europe on this matter at the UN.
As Vance had declared in Munich, “There is a new sheriff in town” and he appears unencumbered by historic loyalties to Nato or other allies. As European leaders unite to assess the implications of losing American support and reconsider defence and nuclear deterrence viz. Russia, Europe’s problems could soon become the world’s problems.
Europe now has to consider the unthinkable. What if the United States walks away from Nato – the organisation it helped found to bring peace and stability to Europe in the wake of the most destructive war in history. Nato, as its first secretary general joked, was created “to keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.”
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The Germans are rearming and America might walk out. Two out of three. However, Nato without the US’ nuclear umbrella and conventional forces will be a shadow of its current power, and European leaders are now apparently planning for an orderly transition over five to ten years, which gives them enough time to rearm.
Europe has come together at a dizzying pace, realigning loyalties and obligations to re-arm as a cohesive unit. As the United States announced that it would meet with Russia to discuss the war in Ukraine in Riyadh (without either Ukraine or any other European powers present), French President Emmanuel Macron convened a summit of European leaders to respond to America’s changing position. It was to be the first of several summits and meetings of defence chiefs in subsequent weeks – Paris was followed by London and Brussels with another one due in Paris at the end of the month.
Until the US voted with Russia against Europe on Ukraine, European support for Ukraine had been a defence of the rules-based order and of Ukraine’s territorial integrity. However, Trump’s unilateral overtures to Russia, his refusal to reiterate full-throated support for Nato, including America’s commitment to Article 5 of the Nato treaty, and his overnight withdrawal of military aid and, for a fortnight, intelligence, to Ukraine has changed calculations as European leaders worry about a resurgent Russia no longer held in check by US security guarantees to the continent. (It may be worth recalling that Article 5 of the Nato Treaty – which treats an attack on one member as an attack on all – has only been invoked once in Nato’s 76 year history: in 2001 by the United States after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.)
Ukraine is now the frontline of Europe; in President Macron’s words, “Russian aggression knows no borders,” while warning that, “the innocence of these 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall is over.”
German chancellor-in-waiting Freidrich Merz observed, “This American government is largely indifferent to the fate of Europe.” Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has been more direct in highlighting the incongruity of ‘500 million Europeans … begging 300 million Americans for protection from 140 million Russians who have been unable to overcome 50 million Ukrainians for three years.”
With Nato’s future now in question the EU, long mocked for being a swamp of bureaucracy and indecision, has taken the lead. Those that are outside the bloc – including Norway and Britain – are now forging closer ties in defence as it moves from being an economic power to a potential military behemoth. It will not be frictionless as Europe has never defended itself as a single entity: different states will need to operate under unified command, with unified rules of engagement. However, ‘the clear and present danger’ that Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has identified is focussing minds.
Re-arming Europe will be costly and take time. Until now, the American nuclear umbrella and American troops in Europe spared Europe’s Nato allies from having to raise large conventional forces. US President Trump’s decision to block American intelligence sharing with Ukraine shook those countries – Germany and Poland in particular – who have bought significant quantities of high-end American kit.
The consequences of American intelligence being blocked were immediate and brutal as Russia stepped up its missile and drone attacks on Ukraine with deadly effect. American intelligence had until then helped Kyiv repel Russian attacks. Even Ukrainian offensive capabilities have been blunted as some of the European-supplied weaponry depends on American intelligence for targeting. The fear that America could block ‘critical enablers’ (such as command and control facilities and intelligence gathering satellites) that allow certain high-end weapons to operate, even if they are owned by Nato allies rather than the US, cannot be dismissed. Europe will now have to rethink its suppliers on everything from bullets to bombers.
Europe has not wasted time. Germany’s Merz has won a vote in the outgoing Bundestag that removes constitutional limits on borrowing for defence spending and established a €500 billion special purpose vehicle for infrastructure development. It is a sign of the times that Europe breathed a sigh of relief when Germany proposed this massive rearmament.
The EU will make available €150 billion in loans for developing air defence, missiles, drones, etc (critical capabilities normally sourced from the US), and has lifted restrictions on debt rules for spending on defence, thereby potentially freeing up €800 billion to strengthen military capability. Poland will more than double its military from 200 million to 500 million, with Prime Minister Tusk suggesting that every male will have some military training (though conscription will not return). He also announced Poland’s intention to withdraw from the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Treaty and the convention banning cluster munitions.
Frictions, of course, remain. Within a fortnight of announcing the European defence fund as a response to this current emergency, the EU has made it clear that the UK, USA and Turkey (as Nato members) would not be allowed to participate in the funding initiative without a separate defence and security pact with Brussels. The idea of keeping out American components (that would in turn require American authorisation to use) from the defence pool might have been expected in this plan for self-sufficiency, but the exclusion has come as a blow to the UK, especially as it is seen as a victory for French demands to ‘Buy European.’ Some continental rivalries would appear to have a long half-life.
Europe also cannot re-arm overnight, and its present vulnerability as it seeks to build its own security infrastructure against a backdrop of Trump’s erratic support for Nato is painfully clear. Thirty-five years after the Cold War ended, nuclear deterrence is back on the table for discussion. Germany has already suggested some form of nuclear protection from Britain and France. President Macron has offered to extend France’s nuclear umbrella to all of Europe, though nuclear use would remain a sovereign French decision. This has been followed by an announcement to modernise a fourth nuclear airbase, located 200 km from its border with Germany. Tusk has voiced the hitherto unthinkable from an NPT signatory – openly discussing the need to acquire ‘the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.’
The deterrence discussion will not be easy. France may have extended its nuclear protection, but the arrangement will lack a mechanism for invoking a nuclear strike on behalf of another state – apart from the President of France’s calculation that France’s vital interests are threatened. Britain’s nuclear weapons are delivered by Trident missiles supplied and maintained by America. Suddenly, the British independent nuclear deterrent is beginning to look a little less independent as policy makers nervously contemplate the possibility that America may have retained a ‘kill-switch’ on its missiles.
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And overhanging all of this is the question of numbers. Britain and France together have about 550 nuclear warheads, with which to protect Europe from Russia, with its 1,500 deployed nuclear warheads. The last several decades of deterrence theory will need to be rethought from the certainty of an overwhelming response to any nuclear adventurism to the uncertainty that the response will not be nuclear and aimed at causing some degree of unacceptable damage.
There is also recent history. Putin issued veiled nuclear threats at the start of his invasion and again in the autumn of the first year of the war, when Russian forces were bogged down in Ukraine. These threats were firmly countered by America – but not with nuclear threats, but by promising overwhelming retaliation that did not necessarily have to be nuclear. Europe simply does not have the capability at present to respond to any nuclear threats in a similar manner.
Europe’s insecurities will quickly be felt beyond its shores. The nuclear question is only the beginning. From smaller European states feeling the need for some sort of nuclear capability, to the example of Ukraine having given up its nuclear weapons for what ultimately were empty assurances in 1994, nuclear proliferation might be back on the table. The consequences of conventional re-arming will also ripple out. At the very least, global arms flows will be affected as European defence firms prioritise their home markets over overseas buyers. High-end American kit, such as F35s, will start looking like a risky proposition if the ability to use the planes depends on staying in America’s good graces.
Re-arming Europe will have other consequences. Just when aid was needed more than ever after Donald Trump, following some MAGA logic, disbanded USAID overnight leaving some of the world’s most vulnerable in limbo, Britain cut its aid budget to boost defence spending. The EU has to find money for defence against a backdrop of sluggish growth, high energy dependency and extensive welfare commitments. Internally, the welfare commitments and energy subsidies may slide. Externally, the EU’s ability to stay the course on its green energy programmes and its climate mitigation ambitions look uncertain, and the consequences will be borne by some of the world’s most climate vulnerable states. If China or another rising power moves into the gap, the tectonic power plates will slide again.
We are at an inflection point. Three and a half decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Russia is once again a threat to Europe’s security and prosperity. Unfortunately, in an interconnected world, Europe’s problems won’t remain confined to its shores for very long. We are heading to a more uncertain future.
Priyanjali Malik is an independent researcher.
