A specter is haunting Europe. Not Vladimir Putin’s Russia, whose imperial ghost has returned in the invasion of Ukraine. Not illegal immigration, which could be called a tide, except it runs in only one direction. Not Islamic extremism, which Europe’s political class still largely insists is a figment of the “far Right” imagination. Not even the Apocalypse of St. Greta of Thunberg, the climate climacteric at the end of the world. The specter haunting the minds of Europe’s leaders does not come from the south or the steppes, as the Umayyad Caliphate and Genghis Khan did. It comes from the west, from Europe’s modern conqueror: the United States of America.
during a parade in Dusseldorf, Germany, Feb. 12, 2024. (Photo by Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Europe’s leaders are panicking at the prospect of a second Donald Trump presidency. As Trump secures the Republican nomination for 2024 and talks with his customary disinhibition about anything he fancies, the Europeans are talking with an unusually high degree of unanimity on the need to “Trump-proof” Europe, should the orange fog blow in from the west once more in January 2025.
In November, Boris Pistorius, Germany’s defense minister, told the Berlin Foreign Policy Forum that a second Trump term would mean “catastrophe” for Europe. Pistorius was worried about whether Trump would withdraw American military protection from Europe or even pull the U.S. out of NATO entirely. That would leave some of the world’s richest societies either to organize their own defense or, with the war in Ukraine still unresolved, crumble before Russian aggression.
“If 2024 brings us ‘America First’ again, it will be more than ever Europe on its own,” the Belgian prime minister, Alexander De Croo, warned the European Parliament a few days later, following Trump’s victory in the Iowa Republican caucuses. “For America and for other allies, the support for Ukraine is a strategic question, it is a geopolitical consideration. For us Europeans, the support to Ukraine is existential. It goes to the heart of our security and our prosperity.”
If Pistorius and De Croo sounded more worried by Trump’s rhetoric than by Putin’s aggression, it’s not just because sneering at Trump is sound domestic politics. For Europe, this is a matter of survival. When European members such as France and Germany gambled on joining the American-led campaign in support of Ukraine, they were confident of American support. What happens if Trump wins in November?
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The Russian invasion of Ukraine proved that Europe’s states are unable to defend themselves individually or collectively without American support. The Biden administration calls this proof that NATO is still needed and still works as originally intended, as a defensive alliance against Russia. The administration has exploited and prolonged the conflict to reduce Russia, expand NATO, and advance the U.S.’s decadelong quest to convince the alliance’s European members to rebuild their military capacity. The Biden administration claims this as a strategic success in what it characterizes as a global struggle between “democracy and autocracy.” Yet this marshaling of forces has no clear exit plan.
President Joe Biden has not repeated his exuberant call for regime change in Russia, issued on a visit to Poland in March 2022. He has also stopped talking about diplomatic “off-ramps” and negotiations. The Council on Foreign Relations reported that as of Feb. 24, the U.S. had spent $74.3 billion on aid to Ukraine, of which $46.3 billion (62%) went on military expenditure. This spending has stopped Russia’s forces from advancing, but it has not pushed Ukraine’s forces forward.
March 9, 2024. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart)
The much-touted Ukrainian summer offensive of 2023 failed to secure a breakthrough. A Republican-controlled House of Representatives is blocking the Biden administration’s request for a final splurge of $60 billion, which the Senate approved in February as part of a $95 billion foreign aid package. “Ukraine is not running out of courage and tenacity — they’re running out of ammunition,” CIA Director William Burns told Congress on March 12. That day, Biden announced an emergency shipment of military aid worth $300 million. Jake Sullivan, his national security adviser, told the press that the munitions were “nowhere near enough to meet Ukraine’s battlefield needs” and “will not prevent Ukraine from running out of ammunition in the weeks to come.”
The administration’s stated goal — pushing Russian forces out of eastern Ukraine, restoring the borders of February 2022 — was always a long shot (“U.S. is overreaching in Ukraine,” Oct. 4, 2022). It is now unattainable. The administration’s wider ambition, breaking Russia’s influence over Europe, was always impossible and possibly a short path to a wider war (“American aid to Ukraine is in a war spiral,” Feb. 7, 2023). The Biden administration chose to prolong the war in Ukraine and pursue its maximalist objectives, against the advice of the late Henry Kissinger, among others. Time is now against the administration and its strategy.
A prolonged war is a war of attrition, a war of scale in resources, production, and numbers. That arithmetic favors Russia. Russia’s industrial base is on a war footing, with 6% of GDP being spent on military production. The U.S., having shuttered much of its military industrial base, is struggling to produce key munitions, such as 155 mm shells, leaving the Ukrainians to fight on short rations from donor nations. As Ukraine’s human resources run down, the Biden administration is nearing its aim “to bleed Russia to the last Ukrainian.”
While the U.S. is subsidizing a war of containment, Russia seeks victory.
The American alliance’s strategy is reactive. The Russian strategy is dynamic. If the Russians break through the Ukrainian lines this spring or summer, Congress will still be arguing about sending money when Russian tanks are on the road to Kyiv. Even if the Ukrainians hold the line, the war will be on the ballot in November as one of a cascade of this administration’s foreign policy crises, including the retreat from Afghanistan, the botched attempt to buy off a nuclear Iran, and the subsidizing of Iranian proxies that made possible Hamas’s assault on Israel on Oct. 7.
The public retains a shrewd sense of the stakes. In February, the Pew Research Center reported that 74% of Americans see Ukraine as “important to U.S. national interests.” At the same time, public support for funding an open-ended proxy war with Russia, with its attendant economic dislocation and strategic turbulence, has declined since 2022. Another February poll, from the Associated Press and NORC, found that 37% of voters, including 55% of Republicans, said they believe “too much” is being spent on aid to Ukraine.
Trump, who was impeached for making inquiries about the Biden family’s business dealings in Ukraine, declared in March 2023 that he had a plan to end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours.” The details are still not forthcoming, but Trump’s opposition to funding an open-ended proxy war has been consistent. “He will not give a penny into the Ukraine-Russia war,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban told the press after visiting Trump in Florida on March 10. “And therefore the war will end, as it is obvious that Ukraine on its own cannot stand on its feet.”
“President Trump has repeatedly stated that a top priority in his second term will be to quickly negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war,” the Trump campaign’s Steven Cheung added in a statement. “Also, President Trump believes European nations should be paying more of the cost of the conflict, as the U.S. has paid significantly more, which is not fair to our taxpayers.”
Under a second Trump presidency, NATO’s European members will face a Russia that is not just undefeated in Ukraine but possibly also negotiating from a position of strength. They will face it unsure of American support but also under increased American pressure to spend more on defense.
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On Jan. 11, Christine Lagarde, the head of the European Central Bank, called a second Trump term “clearly a threat” to Europe. “Just look at the trade tariffs, just look at the commitment to NATO service, just look at the fight against climate change,” Lagarde said, to the relief of sweaty penguins everywhere.
Calling the American commitment to NATO a “service” tells us everything about how European elites are accustomed to seeing the U.S. NATO is a service provider, the military equivalent of an American-run utility company. The company supplies infinite amounts of top-quality defense for free, even though its European customers are wealthy enough to pay their own way. The company will, if needed, send its employees to die for their customers under the terms of a contract issued by the Truman administration in 1949 to a dozen consumers, and now extended to 32, with three more, Ukraine among them, on the waiting list.
Europe’s nightmare scenario, a cutoff in supply, was raised on Jan. 9 by Thierry Breton, a French member of the European Commission. Breton claimed that at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2020, then-President Trump had told the European Commission’s leader Ursula von der Leyen, “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.”
No one else at the meeting confirmed Breton’s account. Still, outlets all over the world reported it as fact. It sounds like an excerpt from Trump’s first-term friction with Europe’s NATO members, Germany in particular, over their decadeslong policy of failing to meet the terms of their NATO membership by spending the equivalent of 2% of GDP on defense. So does Breton’s claim that Trump added, “By the way, you owe me $400 billion because you didn’t pay, you Germans, what you had to pay for defense,” and said, “NATO is dead.”
A month later, at a rally in Conway, South Carolina, on Feb. 8, Trump corroborated Breton’s claims. In Trump’s recollection, a president of a “big country” in Europe had asked whether, if it failed to pay its way in NATO, the U.S. would still fight to defend it against a Russian invasion. Trump said he replied, “No, I would not protect you.” “In fact,” he claimed to have added, “I would encourage [Russia] to do whatever the hell they want.” This matches his statement at an August town hall when he said he had told “delinquent” NATO members that he would not “protect you from Russia.”
Trump’s February remarks about NATO were widely condemned as a reckless, pro-Russian assault on the international order. The Biden campaign accused Trump of giving Putin a “green light” to attack NATO members in Poland and the Baltic States. Charles Michel, the president of the European Council, said Trump’s remarks “serve only Putin’s interest.”
Trump’s remarks should not be confused with French President Emmanuel Macron’s statement in a 2019 interview with the Economist: “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO.” At the time, the Russian Foreign Ministry praised Macron’s analysis as “truthful words … an accurate description of NATO’s current state.” Macron recanted after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, though his efforts to implant a French-speaking brain in the nonexistent body of a common European Union army would, in the unlikely event of its success, serve Putin’s interest by rendering NATO superfluous and splitting the U.S. from Europe.
Nor should Trump’s intemperance be confused with Secretary of State Robert Gates’s 2011 measured warning of an impending “blunt reality” that there would be “dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress, and in the American body politic writ large, to expend increasingly precious funds” on defending nations that are “apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense.”
In 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine, only three NATO members met their NATO commitment of spending 2% of GDP on defense. European NATO members collectively spent only 1.47% of their GDP on defense. This year, 18 NATO members will meet the 2% threshold, and the European members will collectively spend 2% of their GDP. That goal was set in 2014, under pressure from then-President Barack Obama, who in 2017 sounded positively Trumpian when he criticized “free riders” that didn’t pay their own way.
Obama is getting what he and Gates asked for, which is what Trump and Biden then demanded: a NATO where the Europeans do more of the lifting. The Europeans have got the message. “There is no reason why we should be so clearly militarily weaker than Russia, and therefore increasing production and intensifying our cooperation are absolutely indisputable priorities,” Poland’s new prime minister, Donald Tusk, said on Feb. 12.
In January, Belgium’s De Croo responded to the prospect of reduced American support by invoking the Sheryl Sandberg school of foreign policy. The Europeans, he said, should lean in, embrace the burn, and bust through the glass ceiling of their dependency. “We should, as Europeans, not fear that prospect. We should embrace it by putting Europe on a more solid footing, stronger, more sovereign, more self-reliant.”
As usual, Trump is less radical than he sounds and incapable of accepting a win. This underlying consistency in American demands and European responses is hidden by the extent of American support for Ukraine, by domestic partisanship, and by the cloud of clickbait that spews from Trump’s mouth like smoke from an active volcano.
First, Europe’s leaders slow-walked bipartisan American demands that they do more to defend themselves. Then, under intense pressure from the Biden administration, they raced down the road to confrontation with Russia in Ukraine. They now fear that they will have to retreat without the umbrella of American support and face Russia alone. In August, John Bolton predicted that a second-term Trump would “almost certainly” withdraw from NATO. But these fears may be partly misplaced.
In February 2023, the British historian Sumantra Maitra published a proposal for a second Trump term’s NATO policy, “Pivoting the U.S. Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO.” Maitra, a conservative realist, believes that the real challenge to American power is not Russia, a “third-tier” power. It comes from $33 trillion in debt, a debilitated military, and a rising China. Yet the U.S. still needs to retain decisive influence over Europe, for without an America-led framework, Europe will fracture politically and even turn against the U.S. There is no chance of a “Euro-Atlantic pivot to Asia with NATO patrolling the Pacific,” so the U.S. should focus on working with Pacific allies to balance the rise of China while “burden-shifting” toward a “relatively self-sufficient Europe.”
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This, Maitra wrote, requires returning NATO to its original purpose, “deterrence and defense.” That means extracting American NATO policy from the NATO bureaucracy, which, he argued, is “self-sustaining and prone to push missions that are beyond NATO’s core role and, at times, opposed to the domestic interests of the United States.” It means pushing the Europeans to spend more and do more in their own defense. It means the U.S. stepping back but also maintaining the last-resort nuclear guarantee and the presence of American air bases and nuclear weapons in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Turkey.
Maitra’s paper, which was closely studied in Trump’s camp, offers one path to make NATO work for the U.S. Russia’s response is only one of the possible obstacles. Building up Europe’s military preparedness will take decades. It will mean diverting budgets from welfare to weapons. It requires the kind of coordination that France and Germany struggle to manage and Britain distrusts. Yet the alternative, Europe’s leaders are beginning to realize, is that there is no alternative.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on Twitter @drdominicgreen.