There is an annoying kind of dishonesty that passes, in elitist circles, for diplomacy. For at least three decades, European governments practiced it to perfection. They attended summits, issued public statements, committed themselves to targets they never intended to meet, and relied on the assumption that Washington would cover the gap between their stated goals and their actual decisions.
What ended this status quo was not a policy shift but a linguistic shock. President Donald Trump said, in plain language, what NATO’s reports had been saying in bureaucratic prose for decades: Europe was not paying its way. The substance was not new. The language was: blunt, undiplomatic, occasionally rude, and maddening. But consider what that language actually did: it made the unsayable, sayable.
This is not an endorsement of presidential discourtesy as a governing philosophy. The question is whether the European reckoning of costs and responsibilities of self-defense would have arrived through gentler means. The evidence of the preceding decades suggests not. Despite Americans pressing European allies to contribute more to their own defense, Europe has spent the post-Cold War era producing the same ritual after each crisis: an emergency summit (usually convened days after the crisis had already shifted), a declaration of unity, an action plan, a public statement binding everyone to everything, and then nothing. European governments felt entitled to cut defense budgets, confident that, as predicted by Francis Fukuyama, history had ended. When Robert Gates, in his 2011 speech “Reflections on the status and future of the transatlantic alliance,” warned that NATO may face a “dim, if not a dismal future” if European members continued to free ride on defense budgets, the speech was received politely and ignored almost entirely. Gates was not rude enough. His warning came with too much diplomacy.
In 2006, NATO Defense Ministers agreed that member countries would commit to annual military spending of at least 2% of GDP. However, looking at NATO countries’ defense investments from 2006 onward, it is clear that the fifteen countries that made up the European Union as of 1995 have proven to be an unreliable partner. Europe has been living inside a comfortable lie and free-riding on the American security umbrella, plain and simple. And Washington, out of diplomatic courtesy, let it happen.
This pattern of European strategic passivity has been exhibited also in the recent US peace memorandum with Iran. Brussels and the major European capitals left Washington to navigate the hazardous geopolitical waters alone, only to complain once the dust has settled. Once again, Europe treated foreign policy as an exercise of text-editing rather than of power.
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But look at how Trump’s communication style has broken the status quo. European defense budgets, stagnant for a generation, are now rising across the continent. On March 21, 2025, the German constitutional debt brake, the Schuldenbremse, long treated as a near-sacred fiscal principle, was revised specifically to accommodate defense spending increases. Poland is now among the most militarily strong countries in the alliance, committing a higher share of GDP to defense than any other member. The same applies to the Baltic states. These are not trivial changes.
Trump’s language may have performed a greater service to Western security than decades of polite statements. Having the American security commitment conditional, and not guaranteed anymore, produced in Brussels a real and tangible discomfort. So was its utility. A continent that had confused declaration for action, needed something to break the spell. It got it. The alarm clock was not charming. But Europeans are, at last, awake. And that, whatever one thinks of the style that roused them, is an outcome worth welcoming.
Samuele Murtinu is Full Professor of International Business and Head of the Entrepreneurship Section at Utrecht University School of Economics. He is Research Fellow at IREF (Institute for Research in Economic and Fiscal Issues). He sits in several scientific committees of private associations and foundations. He was independent evaluator for the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, several governmental agencies, universities, private organizations and industry associations.