Why Europe must be stronger

Over the last weeks, the words and actions of the Trump administration have caused the biggest rift between the United States and Europe since the end of the Cold War. Relations between the longstanding partners are more strained now than they were in the run-up to George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq or in the aftermath of Trump’s 2018 joint press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified that Trump pressured the prime minister of Denmark, a longtime ally, to cede parts of its national territory to the United States. They took umbrage at a speech at the Munich Security Conference in which J. D. Vance, Trump’s vice president, seemed to ally himself with the continent’s right-wing populists. Now, they are apoplectic that an American delegation has flown to Saudi Arabia to negotiate about the future of Ukraine with their Russian counterparts, without any European representatives at the table, while their boss back in the White House is tweeting insults about Volodymyr Zelensky.

There are good reasons for Europeans to be deeply concerned about these developments. Since the end of world war two, the United States has been a guarantor of security and stability in western Europe. The Marshall Plan helped to lift the economies of France and Italy, of West Germany and the United Kingdom, out of an initial postwar slump. American soft power helped to boost moderate parties on the western side of the Iron Curtain at a time when the fate of democracy hung in the balance at every election (something that is now all too easily forgotten). The presence of American troops put limits on the territorial ambitions of leaders in the Kremlin, stopping Joseph Stalin from swallowing West Berlin and (much later) Vladimir Putin from invading Estonia. These historical facts shaped the most fundamental assumptions that European foreign policy makers made about the future — and it is now becoming clear that they will have to radically revise their mental model.

But while Europeans have good reason to be saddened, they have no excuse for being shocked. Trump made his feelings about Nato amply evident during his first term in office. He has expressed his sympathy for Vladimir Putin on countless occasions. And he has been deeply hostile to Zelensky — as well as extremely critical of American support for Ukraine — for years. Nothing about any of this should have been surprising.

So why is Europe so unprepared for what is happening? Why was the audience at Munich so unprepared for Vance to tell them things that Trump and his closest allies have been saying for years? Why aren’t European leaders able to give sufficient support to Ukraine to make it impossible for Russia, America or anybody else to make a deal about the country’s future without their participation? Why, in short, are Europeans still so incapable of taking the fate of the continent into their own hands?

In the fall of 2016, I was a junior fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund — a job title that gives you a sense of the general vibe that prevails in the worthy, if rather staid and unimaginative, institutions that make it their business to ensure the smooth functioning of the western alliance. A few weeks before Donald Trump was set to face off against Hillary Clinton, we went on a road trip to meet senior policymakers in Berlin.

At every meeting, our sherpa, Steve Szabo — a man with a midwestern demeanor so placid that it’s easy to miss how incisive his questions tend to be — would gently press our interlocutors on their plans for a potential Trump administration. And at every meeting, the responses of Greens and Christian Democrats, of Liberals and Social Democrats were well-nigh identical: Trump can’t possibly win. But what if he does? American foreign policy surely won’t change all that much. But what if it does? Things will go back to normal after Trump. But what if they don’t?

Silence. A shrug. And then, in few words or many, the implicit refrain: they have to, because anything else would be unthinkable.

This set the tone for what Europe did — or rather, didn’t do — for the next eight years. While the continent’s leaders were deeply discomfited by Trump’s victory, they treated his presidency like a one-off nightmare from which we would all eventually wake up, with the laws of the world around us magically reset to “normal.” They took advice on how to shake Trump’s hand during summits. They tried to placate him with modest increases to their military budgets or lavish shows during state visits. They bided their time and waited for Americans to come to their senses by electing somebody like Joe Biden. And then, of course, that’s exactly what Americans did, seemingly proving that European inaction (in truth born of a total lack of imagination) was a stroke of tactical genius.

The same denial of impending realities has shaped the European response since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. At every security conference, think tankers and military strategists fretted about the extent to which support for Ukraine was becoming a political playball in Washington. “Did you read about the Republican Congressmen who voted against the latest aid package?” one think-tanker would say. “Have you seen the latest Truth Social post about Zelensky that Trump sent from his exile in Mar-A-Lago?” another military strategist would whisper.

But mounting concern never translated into real action. While Europe has made a significant contribution to Ukraine’s defense over recent years, the continent’s political leaders never developed a plan for how they could contain Russia if a new administration in Washington really did leave them to their own devices. In fact, some of the same politicians who now appear genuinely shocked by Trump’s betrayal have themselves betrayed Ukraine for political reasons. Facing an uphill struggle for re-election as chancellor of Germany, for example, Olaf Scholz repeatedly touted his reluctance to do more for Ukraine as a mark of his superior judgment, insinuating that the more hawkish position taken by his main rival, Friedrich Merz, would risk inciting world war three.

In retrospect, Trump’s election in 2016, at a time when he did not yet have the political experience or the loyal staff to turn his instincts into reality, was a gift to Europe. It handed the continent’s leaders the better part of a decade to prepare for a world in which they could no longer rely for their security on the United States. But Europe’s leaders squandered that gift. It would be much easier to sympathize with the horror they are now expressing if they hadn’t done everything in their power to avoid preparing for the eminently predictable predicament in which they now find themselves.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a panel at the Harvard European Conference alongside a recent member of the European Commission and a current member of the European Parliament. We were supposed to talk about populism, and we did for a while, but perhaps inevitably the conversation also turned to the continent’s economic and geopolitical prospects. To my astonishment, my interlocutors were very bullish.

One term they were particularly fond of was the “Brussels Effect.” According to this idea, endlessly repeated in speeches and private conversations at the conference, Europe’s true superpower is its ability to lead the world in (no joke) regulation. If the European Union adopts a new set of rules, faraway companies in Asia or North America that want to maintain access to one of the world’s biggest markets will need to abide by the wishes of Brussels bureaucrats. Even when it comes to cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence, the other members of my panel insisted, Europe remains a force with which the world will have to reckon.

One problem with this view is that it demonstrates a shocking poverty of ambition. To think that the rightful role of the continent that invented the printing press and the steam engine, the automobile and the World Wide Web is to become the world’s regulator-in-chief is (as I’ve written before) reminiscent of a child’s dream of growing up to be a hall monitor. The other problem with this view is that it is an exercise in wishful thinking. While this ambition may be dispiritingly modest, the current state of the continent makes it wholly unrealistic.

Take the case of AI. When I asked members of the audience at the conference whether they had ChatGPT installed on their phones, nearly every hand shot up. When I asked who had DeepSeek, about a quarter of the audience raised their hands. When I asked about MistralAI, Europe’s most advanced play in this space, I only spotted one hand. (The former member of the European Commission proudly pointed out to me that I hadn’t noticed a second person who had also raised their hand.)

Now, if none of the world’s cutting-edge AI technology is developed on the continent, Europe might still be able to regulate what kind of content American or Chinese chatbots are able to display within the European Union by threatening to ban them. And if they are willing to place ever more severe restrictions on free speech — a path they have been striding down with uncharacteristic brio over the course of the last years — they might even be able to slow the spread of “harmful” AI-generated content on social networks within the continent.

But this supposed cure would not only be worse than the disease; it would also fail to forestall the real dangers posed by AI. Can Brussels bureaucrats somehow ensure that a lethal bioweapon designed with the help of artificial intelligence stops spreading at the continent’s borders? Will their laws protect Latvia or Finland against a drone army remote-controlled by an advanced AI agent? Will they save humanity against an army of hyper-intelligent robots gone rogue?

Of course not. And the fact that my co-panelists got genuinely mad at me for pointing this out shows just how deeply denial about the true condition of Europe now goes. Call it, if you will, the Brussels Defect.

Europe has forgotten one of the most fundamental lessons of its own past: Either you shape history — or history shapes you. This has seduced European citizens, intellectuals and political leaders into vastly underestimating the price of relative decline.

Over the last few decades, Europeans have — slowly, reluctantly and incompletely — come to recognize that they are playing a smaller and smaller role in world affairs. Technological innovations are happening elsewhere. Economic growth is concentrated in Asia and North America. Even the center of gravity for culture and fashion is steadily shifting away from the continent.

But even as its declining importance is starting to dawn on the continent, the assumption that this decline can be managed gracefully stubbornly persists. Perhaps the voice of the president of France or the chancellor of Germany will count for less and less at the United Nations or the G20. Perhaps European companies will be restricted to doing business in legacy industries. Perhaps European universities will no longer be world-class. But life in Europe will continue to be pleasant. Europeans will continue to make good salaries, to enjoy a robust welfare state, to take long holidays, to live in beautiful cities, and of course to enjoy democratic institutions.

Sadly, I am increasingly doubtful that the changing international landscape will allow Europe to decline so gracefully. When the basic economic model of a country like Germany goes kaput, the country’s affluence need not stagnate; it can just as easily nosedive. When countries decline both economically and demographically, their welfare states don’t necessarily become a little less generous; they can just as easily cease to be sustainable altogether. And when countries become increasingly dependent on strongmen and dictators in faraway places, this doesn’t just constrain their foreign policy choices; it may also transform their values and institutions.

During the Cold War, European countries that were subjected to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence ended up as communist dictatorships, one and all. European countries that were part of America’s sphere of influence eventually became democracies, one and (virtually) all.

Sooner or later, client states usually come to resemble their sponsors. Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s first postwar chancellor, faced a consequential choice: he could anchor the newly founded Federal Republic firmly within the western alliance or he could try to turn Germany into a neutral country unaligned with either the United States or the Soviet Union. His decision to reject neutrality despite the (highly uncertain) prospect of reunification was as much about culture as about power politics: it was a testament to his vision for the values that henceforth should — and, for the most part, eventually did — shape the country.

European policy-makers now face a choice that is similarly consequential. Their first option is to hedge. Over the next few years, the temptation will grow for Europe to decide that the way to deal with an increasingly unreliable American ally is to make nice with Russia and China. Indeed, that position is already popular among rulers in Prague and Budapest, and many voters in Paris and Berlin. But that would effectively turn European nations into vassals of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping — and risk making Europe’s domestic politics increasingly vulnerable to the whims of authoritarians around the globe.

The second option is to carry on as before. In this scenario, Europeans would continue with a set of policies that were fundamentally premised on the idea that they can outsource their security needs to the United States. After a round of pledges to increase spending on the military and engage in closer cooperation between their armed forces, they would — as in 2022 — quietly return to business-as-usual. This scenario, it seems to me, is far more likely than the outraged rhetoric of the past days might suggest, in part because it would flow most naturally from the general inclination of European policy-makers: not to make any big changes unless they can’t possibly avoid them. But, like the first option, such a refusal to reckon with new realities would seal the continent’s fate as a plaything of the world’s great powers, including future administrations in Washington.

The final option is for Europe to do what it takes to get back to being a historical actor in its own right. But this would take much more imagination and much greater effort than just about anybody in Europe now seems inclined to recognize. Europeans would need to invest much more money into beefing up their military forces so they can credibly provide security to their own continent, of course. But they would also need to recognize that their ability to stand on their own feet is wholly incompatible with their implicit resignation to being the continent of museums, monuments and mediocrity.

Leaders like Emmanuel Macron have, in the last years, occasionally invoked the need for Europe to achieve “strategic autonomy.” But coming from a French president, it was easy to dismiss such aspirations as a nostalgic attachment to Charles De Gaulle’s unrealized aspirations for la grande nation; it will take much more concerted action in the capitals of a much larger number of European nations to turn such aspirational slogans into anything resembling reality.

The most pressing need for Europe now is to invest in its own defense. In the wake of two horrifying world wars, countries from Italy to Sweden understandably preferred to spend money on schools and pension schemes than on soldiers and fighting jets. And since America emerged from the first half of the 20th century with vast resources and an abiding commitment to the western alliance, they could outsource much of their security to Uncle Sam.

The era in which Europeans could reliably outsource their security to the United States is now over. It will not come back — not even if Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or the ghost of John McCain were to be elected president of the United States in 2028. Unless Europeans take their fate into their own hands, they tacitly agree to put themselves at the mercy of the great military powers on other continents: a communist government hungry for international influence in Beijing; a neocolonial dictator hungry for revenge in Moscow; an increasingly unpredictable wrecking ball with a penchant for chaos in Washington, D.C. Europeans must be able to defend their own continent with their own forces.

This article first appeared on Yascha Mounk’s Substack.