Whether you’re a die-hard supporter of President-elect Donald Trump or a vehement opponent of him, Trump’s landslide election victory is positive in at least one sense. It means that Europe will finally need to take seriously the notion that Americans are fed up with subsidizing the defense of an otherwise wealthy political bloc.
This matters because NATO matters and our European allies matter. For one thing, exports to the European Union earned the United States $369 billion in 2023. Exports to the United Kingdom add another $74 billion to that figure. This is high-value trade in products and services. It does not undercut American jobs — it boosts them. And it reinforces the benefits of peace that have underpinned European security and NATO stability since 1945. Trump is wrong to pretend that NATO simply takes from Americans. On the contrary, this most successful alliance delivers manifest benefits to Americans.
Yet some big things are rotten in the state of U.S.-European relations.
Consider Europe’s arrogant disdain toward Trump, offered openly to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance in Munich earlier this year. Take Europe’s penchant for continued defense freeloading. Take the governments of France, Spain, and Belgium. Supervising the respective second, fourth, and seventh largest economies in Europe, France, Spain, and Belgium have spent the past four years quite openly attacking Trump in private diplomatic forums and in public. French President Emmanuel Macron has been most prominent here. This will not engender the notoriously thin-skinned president-elect’s affection.
To be fair to Macron, he has increased support for Ukraine this year. Macron has also boosted France’s defense posture and defense spending, though only to just barely above NATO’s 2%-of-GDP defense spending target. He wants to show Trump he will take a greater lead for European security even as he continues dealing closely with China. If he continues with these actions, U.S. relations with its oldest ally may remain stable. But whether Macron continues in kind is an open question. U.S., British, and Eastern European officials always caution that, much like Trump, Macron loves the limelight far more than he does durable policy. The problem for Europe is that many European Union countries aren’t matching Macron’s tentatively improved example.
Contrary to the media rhetoric, too many European states continue to miss NATO’s 2%-of-GDP defense spending target or just barely exceed it. Spain will spend just 1.28% of GDP on defense in 2024, Belgium will spend 1.30%, and Italy will spend 1.49% of GDP. These expenditures are incompatible with the absolute U.S. need to divert more air and naval forces to the Pacific in the face of China’s rapacious growth of its naval, air, and missile forces and its undeniably escalating aggression toward Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan.
The exigent question thus follows: Now that Trump is returning, will the Europeans actually realize this concern and get real about doing more in their own defense?
The Eastern Europeans and the United Kingdom suggest the answer is yes, and France suggests it’s a maybe. But Germany suggests that the answer is no.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 2 1/2 years ago, Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged a “Zeitenwende” revolution to increase defense spending dramatically. The implication was that Germany was finally viewing its responsibility to European and NATO security as extending beyond Angela Merkel’s lecturing of America and appeasement of Russia. Today, however, Zeitenwende is on life support. German Defense Minister Oscar Pistorius wanted an 11% defense spending increase for 2025. He got 2.3%. And Germany is cutting military aid to Ukraine in half next year. How these policy choices are designed to encourage a skeptical Trump that the EU is serious about doing more in its own backyard is unclear. Warning Scholz to this effect, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has been ignored.
The problem extends further.
Its claims via the Kiel Institute judged carefully, the EU’s actual record in supporting Ukraine is far from adequate. Four EU nations border Ukraine, and Russia poses a plainly more significant physical threat to the EU than it does to the U.S. Again, the U.S. should confront this Russian threat for reasons of mutual EU-U.S. prosperity, the interest in preserving long-standing alliances, and because the Baltic states and Poland constitute some of America’s closest and most reliable friends — friends who actually put their NATO money where their NATO mouth is. Indeed, Poland will spend nearly 5%-of-GDP on defense in 2025!
The U.S. was right to oppose Soviet imperialism during the Cold War, and it is right to oppose Russian President Vladimir Putin’s imperialism today. Trump’s delusions to the contrary, Russia does not seek or act in pursuit of a detente with America. It acts to hemorrhage American alliances, threaten American interests, and harm American lives. Put simply, Trump would be a fool to abandon NATO and historic alliances. He should keep the U.S. nuclear umbrella at Putin’s throat and retain U.S. Army formations in Europe. But it is not inconceivable nor unjust that Trump will push for a NATO stipulation that members meet at least the 2%-of-GDP target to retain America’s defensive commitment. And if Europe won’t do significantly more for Ukraine than the U.S. does, it is inconceivable to think that Trump will do so.
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More optimistically, if Europe does wake up, and when Trump starts receiving his intelligence briefings on Russia and learns what Moscow is actually doing and saying about him, it is feasible to think we may see a stronger NATO (one that involves more than one French aircraft in simulated full-scale war exercises), a more unified trans-Atlantic partnership on China (rather than one that sees leader Xi Jinping buy off Germany, Hungary, and Spain to the detriment of everyone else), and a Ukraine-Russia peace accord with Ukrainian teeth (rather than the open gateway to Russian invasion that Merkel foisted on Kyiv).
Still, if this great alliance is to sustain and prosper, bold action must be the order of the day.