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United States
June 24, 2025 / July/August 2025 Beware the Europe you wish for - The downsides and dangers of independence of United States’ allies in Europe. II. The EU is adopting new rules to standardize planning and purchasing. A 2023 provision incentivizes and facilitates joint defense procurement and production. Right now, Europe is plagued by redundancy and poor interoperability, largely because each state is responsible for its own procurement. The changes resulted in the signing last year of a $5.6 billion contract by Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Sweden to procure Patriot missiles. European states are also stepping up in terms of leadership. Since 2017, NATO has established nine battle groups, one for each of its nine ’frontline countries’. The alliance has adopted a distributed leadership approach for these groups; only in Poland does the United States lead. In Finland, Sweden is the leader. In Estonia, it is the United Kingdom. Canada is leading in Latvia. Germany leads in Lithuania, Spain in Slovakia, France in Romania, and Italy in Bulgaria. Hungary has taken leadership of its own battle group. European forces within the NATO alliance, with Finland and Sweden as NATO members, has forces that can better manage challenges from China and Russia in the Arctic. To counter Russia’s use of the Black Sea as a platform for striking Ukraine, NATO’s European members are developing new coastal defense forces and autonomous vehicles that can enhance ’U.S. operations’ in the Mediterranean’. The United States will need its European friends, with their newfound strength, ’to help it handle aggressors in multiple regions’.’ across the globe’. Americans overcorrected in their quest to get Europe to do more. Europe has seemingly decided to buy fewer goods from American defense manufacturers. Countries drawing from the EU’s new $163.5 billion defense procurement loan pool must spend the funds only for purchases from European defense companies. Purchases from U.S. defense companies might qualify if their products are manufactured in Europe. The contracts will require employing European workers and paying European taxes. Europe’s newfound autonomy is also causing strategic difficulties. For instance, the United States wants to put a quick stop to the war in Ukraine, and it has therefore argued for lifting sanctions on Russia in step-by-step peace negotiations. The continent has declared that it will not lift sanctions until Ukraine is ready to settle. Europe holds two-thirds of the $330 billion of the Russian assets that U.S. allies agreed to freeze in 2022 to deny Moscow access to financing for its war in Ukraine. The White House cannot dangle this carrot before Putin without European permission. Europe is also home to SWIFT, the payments mechanism that is keeping Russian banks from gaining access to the global financial system. Unlike the United States, the vast majority of European countries will not concede that Russia should be able to dictate whether Ukraine can be a member of NATO - not least because Putin has stated that a peace settlement with Kyiv should also revisit previous rounds of NATO’s enlargement. If a sense of a common transatlantic purpose continues to fray, Europe might wind up undermining Washington’s objectives elsewhere in the world. Should the United States decide to conduct a major military campaign against Iran’s nuclear facilities, for example, it will want to use its military bases in Europe. This would require seeking permission from European countries. Many European countries might refuse. Washington would then either have to start its offensive from far-off bases in the United States - or from partner bases in the Middle East, which are easier for Iran to hit than bases in Europe. European countries may no longer trust that Washington will defend them should the need arise. European leaders are seriously discussing whether the continent should acquire its own credible nuclear deterrent. France and the United Kingdom both have nuclear weapons, but neither currently has the number of warheads and the variety in delivery vehicles that the U.S. arsenal does, or the strategic depth. There is, of course, another force splitting Washington and Europe: Trump. In a poll of 18,000 Europeans conducted by the European Council on Foreign Relations just after Trump’s victory in November, more than half of respondents considered the United States merely a ’necessary partner” rather than an “ally,” a term that just 22 percent were willing to apply. Relations have deteriorated. Washington’s NATO policy seems to change every day. During his first term, Trump had advisers and cabinet members who supported the transatlantic relationship and restrained some of his worst impulses. European officials, for their part, now speak of relations with the United States using a term that they once reserved for China: “de-risking.” This time around, those in his administration are far more in sync with Trump’s deep-seated antagonism toward Europe. Now, European countries are considering enhanced trade with China to mitigate their vulnerability to the United States after Trump slapped sudden, massive tariffs on almost all the continent’s exports. Even if Trump is followed by a string of committed transatlanticist presidents, U.S.-European relations will probably never return to what they were. But the two sides need each other to cope with a challenging Beijing, a destructive Moscow, a dangerous Tehran, and a wildcard Pyongyang. To repair relations, Washington will have to recalibrate its approach to Europe, accepting, that the world now has multiple poles and that the continent is one of them. Generations of American officials have gotten used to European concessions to U.S. priorities. Now, they will have to get better at dealmaking and compromise. The key will be returning to the fundamentals of defense diplomacy. As Washington considers reducing its military posture in Europe, it will need to spend more to compete for the continent’s defense contracts. The United States will likely have to listen to European arguments about balancing the continent’s wariness of Chinese influence with the need for Chinese trade, investment, and technology - just as the United States heeds the needs of its partners in the Middle East, who are developing strong ties with China out of economic necessity. The United States will also have to accept that NATO allies hosting U.S. military bases might have strong views on how Washington can prevent Iranian nuclear proliferation. It certainly will have to acknowledge that the European Union is a powerful economic force essential to NATO’s success. A new transatlantic relationship „respects Europe’s interests”, or it can lose the world order to ’a triumvirate of autocracies: Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran’. Beijing is the primary challenge to American security, so U.S. officials want to prioritize it over Moscow. Now, they can. If the United States can maintain its partnership with Europe, it will have an advantage not available to China or Russia in a multipolar world. U.S. officials now have to make a choice. They can spurn Europe and face a more dangerous world alone and depleted. Or they can forge a new, more accommodating transatlantic relationship. The two parties have nearly a century of shared experience. Their friendship can prevail. (Source: Foreign Affairs)
by Wallander, Executive Director of Penn Washington and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for a New American Security. She was Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs and oversaw U.S. military assistance to Ukraine during the Biden administration.
(Foreign Affairs)
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