Since the end of World War II, the countries of western Europe have relied on the United States for their security. Thus safeguarded, these countries were left free to pursue economic integration while maintaining their democratic systems of government. Responsibility was bifurcated, with Washington handling the continent’s security, and Brussels taking on an ever-greater economic role. This division of responsibility is now uncertain. U.S. President Donald Trump has demanded the purchase of Greenland, attacked European leaders, and interfered in European countries’ domestic politics. More recently, he has warned that, if NATO allies do not assist in the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, “it will be very bad for the future of NATO.” Trump’s antagonism has spurred leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron to call for “strategic autonomy” from Washington. Analysts writing in Foreign Affairs—including Erik Jones and Matthias Matthijs—have suggested that the European Union must take on a greater role in European security. They argue that this should come as part of a wider push to become a “global power” capable of counterbalancing the Trump administration’s policies.
This would be a mistake. The European Union is a vehicle for economic cooperation. It is a peace project, not a war project. It has been remarkably successful in this endeavor, achieving its founding objective of binding France and Germany together economically. But that success has required Washington’s continued commitment to NATO. Changing this arrangement would create strains between member states that would ultimately threaten the existing structures of European cooperation. The European Commission needs to step back and allow coalitions of nation-states from within and outside the bloc to develop new, intergovernmental partnerships. It is only through this process that Washington and Brussels can bolster European security—and ensure the survival of the European project itself.
LAYING THE FOUNDATIONS
In the face of Trump’s threats, European leaders including Macron and President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen have declared that Europe should act as a global power. Although the European Union has shown an increasing enthusiasm for assuming this mantle, it is in no position to do so. Rather, Brussels needs Washington now more than ever before. The reason for this is simple: historically, the force most responsible for European integration has been the United States. Washington’s support for a united Europe dates to the end of World War II and the Truman administration’s belief that integration was the most effective way to rebuild the shattered continent and halt the spread of communism. The U.S. approach was not always welcomed. The British government in particular regarded Washington’s desire for European integration as external interference that threatened Europe’s democratic systems of government.
The original institutions of European economic integration were therefore designed to complement, rather than supplant, national sovereignty. This compromise has proved extraordinarily resilient. European leaders worked to bring down barriers to communication and exchange, beginning with the establishment of the Organization for European Economic Cooperation in 1948, and the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951. Six years later, the ECSC was transformed by the Treaty of Rome into the European Economic Community. As the European project has deepened and expanded, the institutions and agencies of economic integration have taken root.
This process was not accompanied, however, by a similar integration of defense capabilities. After the French National Assembly voted against the idea of a European Defense Community in 1954, no meaningful common defense policy was developed. Instead, NATO provided a framework for mutual defense through intergovernmental cooperation, securing European alignment with the United States against the Soviet Union. In return, Washington accepted that it would have to bear the brunt of funding and deploying the military assets essential to deterring Soviet aggression.
The European Union is a peace project, not a war project.
The end of the Cold War produced a change. In response to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German unification in 1990, Washington worked with Paris and Berlin to push for closer European integration. The 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which established the European Union, committed signatories to an “ever-closer Union” in both economic and political terms, achieved in part through the creation of the euro. To prevent excessive economic discrimination against the United States, the treaty was tied to the creation of the World Trade Organization and a new, legalistic approach to ensuring fair practices in international trade.
Even the limited level of integration proposed by Maastricht ran into difficulties with member states. Danish voters rejected the treaty in a referendum, and Copenhagen was subsequently given a series of opt-outs to secure its consent. In France, voters endorsed the treaty, but by only 51 percent of the vote. Parliamentary ratification fractured the British Conservative Party, fatally weakening Prime Minister John Major’s government. Had the Maastricht Treaty included a genuine commitment to common defense, ratification would have proved impossible.
Still, the old bargain held. U.S. military power ensured that European countries could deepen economic integration and pursue enlargement while overlooking the question of common defense. The value of this division of responsibilities was appreciated in Washington, and expressed most clearly by U.S. Senator Richard Lugar in a speech in 1993. NATO, he argued, was necessary to prevent the “healthy national pride” that was essential to a peaceful, prosperous continent from becoming “destructive xenophobic nationalism.” Were the alliance to fracture, Lugar warned, there was “a danger that Europe could again come apart at the seams.”
THE PLATES SHIFT
Between the 9/11 attacks, in 2001, and the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the threat to the Euro-Atlantic area came principally from global Islamist terrorism. Now that threat comes from much closer to home, a fact confirmed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The end of the Cold War forced the European project to change; this new age, in which Europe’s territorial integrity is again at risk, must prompt similar action.
The need for change has been intensified by the global shift in power towards the Pacific. When the Maastricht Treaty was signed, in 1992, the European Union and United States together represented well over half of the global economy. The U.S. share has remained constant, at 26.3 percent in 2023. The European Union’s share, however, has shrunk substantially, to 14.7 percent. Meanwhile, China has risen to become a peer competitor of the United States. The WTO was conceived as the vehicle that would regulate the U.S.-EU trade relationship as part of a new, globalizing economy, but it has failed to challenge China over its systemic theft of intellectual property and its anticompetitive industrial policies. Beijing has become increasingly internationally assertive, and Washington has therefore felt the need to shift its capabilities away from Europe, to defend Taiwan and meet challenges in Latin America.
The Trump administration is right that the transatlantic relationship needs to be restructured. As Peter Harrell has argued in Foreign Affairs, the universalist, legalistic approach to international trade pursued in the 1990s is not appropriate in an era of great-power competition. The new trade deals that Washington signed with the European Union and the United Kingdom in 2025, with their focus on economic security and tackling Chinese overcapacity, are a step in the right direction. Yet Washington’s other actions have undermined these achievements. Trump’s repeated willingness to accept Putin’s manipulations at face value has baffled and frustrated Ukraine and its close European partners. The president’s chaotic approach to negotiation has undermined the very trade deals his administration has negotiated. Worst of all, Trump’s push to acquire Greenland has forced NATO partners to question the fundamental assumptions on which the alliance is based.
GOOD INTENTIONS
In this context, calls for the European Union to become a “global power” are understandable. But they risk a catastrophe for both sides of the Atlantic. The European Union does not have an army, and Brussels cannot spend money directly on defense. It can only subsidize its member states through financial grants or, in theory, by issuing common debt. Under the current system, the latter course of action would amount to fiscal transfers from Germany and the Netherlands to France, Greece, Italy, and other high-spending countries. These likely beneficiaries have a wide variety of legitimate security concerns, mostly in the Eastern Mediterranean, Middle East and North Africa, which have little to do with the Russian threat. To ask German and Dutch taxpayers to fund these commitments indefinitely risks a dangerous backlash.
A consolidated European defense sector would require countries to forsake key sources of employment and export revenue in favor of a system with little democratic oversight or coordination. Despite Macron’s rhetoric, France is the country most opposed to the consolidation of the European defense sector. Such a step would force Paris to abandon the principles of national independence that have driven its statecraft since 1958. French unwillingness to surrender control over defense has already wrecked the Franco-German FCAS fighter jet project. It is easy to criticize Paris for this, but many of its concerns are understandable. To create a European defense sector would require a common understanding across all member states of the nature of the threats that Europe faces, how those threats should shape the development of new capabilities, who would control the intellectual property behind those capabilities, and above all, a common approach to arms exports. Brussels does not possess the capacity, expertise, or democratic legitimacy to answer these questions.
A new treaty could solve this problem and establish both a framework and a consensus for greater European integration in defense. But to attempt to negotiate one would upend the politics of the continent. Several member states are either outside NATO and committed to neutrality, or openly sympathetic to Russia. Treaty change for common defense would destroy the delicate framework of cooperation that binds northern and southern Europe together. Northern member states would likely seek cuts to southern welfare programs as part of any new defense spending push, as German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul hinted last month. The popular backlash to such cuts in these countries would be vast.
Above all, any move toward a common defense policy would threaten the German social contract. The combination of widespread employment in manufacturing with membership of the euro has sustained the country for decades. And yet the social contract has already begun to break down. German manufacturing is still struggling to adjust after the loss of access to cheap Russian energy. It is also under enormous and increasing pressure from Chinese competition. In February, Brussels decided to support Ukraine through common debt issuance rather than seized Russian assets, over Berlin’s objections. In this context, advocates of European power are asking German taxpayers to simultaneously increase defense spending, purchase military equipment predominantly manufactured outside Germany, and subsidize the defense spending of other European countries. In isolation, each of these requests would be incendiary, risking increased support for extreme parties of both left and right. Together, they amount to a powder keg ready to blow.
AWAY FROM THE EDGE
To renew the Euro-Atlantic settlement, European Union institutions must step back from defense issues and focus on fostering economic growth through existing competencies. In the short term, there is no alternative to the United States providing the expensive and technologically advanced capabilities needed to deter Russia. In the long term, new spending programs should be developed through intergovernmental agreements, with NATO focusing on maintaining interoperability among its members. Washington should not expect increases in defense expenditure to be equal in percentage terms among EU member states. These commitments should instead vary, depending on fiscal space and voter appetite for increased expenditure. Fortunately, it is the states of northern Europe, and on NATO’s eastern flank, that are most able and willing to increase their defense budgets in response to the Russian threat.
European countries should also look beyond their borders for partners. Projects such as the GCAP fighter development program among Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom only strengthen European security. Similarly, Poland is right to look to South Korea to provide military equipment and gain expertise, since both rely on large conventional land forces. EU member states should commit to giving all U.S. treaty allies partner status in Brussels’s defense financing initiatives. This would encourage beneficial cooperation and limit the European Commission’s willingness to use rearmament as a vehicle for integration.
The United States’ most important partner in this rebalancing remains the United Kingdom. Through defense-industrial and nuclear cooperation, as well as the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, London and Washington maintain an unprecedented and deepening geopolitical friendship. The last Conservative government pioneered “minilateral” defense partnerships through AUKUS and the Joint Expeditionary Force—a vehicle for cooperation among Baltic and North Sea countries to counter Russian actions. That is not to say, however, that London is doing all it should. Despite strong bipartisan support for Ukraine, British defense spending is rising too slowly and is not scheduled to reach 3.5 percent until 2035. Washington should encourage the United Kingdom to spend three percent of GDP before the end of the current Parliament in 2029.
By prioritizing intergovernmental cooperation among like-minded countries, Washington and Brussels can secure peace and prosperity in Europe for another generation. To do so, however, policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic need to see European institutions for what they are, not what they would like them to be. The division of responsibility between economic and military matters has preserved peace across the Euro-Atlantic area for more than 70 years. To cast this arrangement aside is to risk calamity.
Loading…