The transatlantic alliance has weathered many crises over the past 80 years, some of which seemed existential at the time. But the one now roiling the alliance feels different and much more treacherous. Unlike previous episodes of transatlantic discord, which mostly revolved around how the alliance should respond to an external threat of one kind or another, the challenge today comes from within. European leaders are asking themselves whether the United States—the alliance’s founder and steadfast champion for eight decades—is still committed to the security of Europe and the West more generally. Recent statements by U.S. President Donald Trump and his senior advisers suggest that the answer is no.
Many European leaders now believe they have no choice but to declare strategic independence from the United States and launch a crash program to defend their continent alone. But they should not. Aside from the incredible expense of achieving a credible European defense posture without U.S. military support, even voicing such an intent risks hastening a total divorce that would threaten the security of both Europe and North America. Abandoning the alliance now would amount to “committing suicide out of fear of death,” as the nineteenth-century German statesman Otto von Bismarck described preventive war.
Instead, Europeans must try to save the alliance. They can do more to defend their continent so that the burden does not fall disproportionately on the United States—an obligation that European leaders now widely acknowledge and accept. Actually shouldering their part of the burden will require demonstrating a clear commitment to ensuring Ukraine’s security and independence after a cease-fire. The signs are promising that a broad-based “coalition of the willing” led by Europeans is coalescing to do just that.
Beyond this immediate imperative, however, European countries have less clarity and consensus about how to safeguard the transatlantic alliance. This challenge cannot be approached as it often has been in the past—by setting broad defense-planning goals and defense-spending budgets toward which each alliance member must work independently. Nor can Europe simply try to substitute homegrown capabilities for U.S. ones where there are obvious shortcomings.
In the years ahead, the United States and Europe will face several interconnected military challenges: deterring Russia from attacking NATO members, protecting Europe’s southern flank from the consequences of instability in the Middle East and Africa, defending the alliance’s interests in the Arctic, and addressing the strategic challenge posed by China. The common factor on which success in all these arenas most depends is a strong defense industrial base, and Europe must focus on that first. Ultimately, the alliance—Europe and the United States together—must determine what capabilities it must develop by working backward from a comprehensive assessment of the specific missions it will need to fulfill to guarantee the continent’s long-term security.
SHARED THREATS
At some point, the Kremlin’s politics and military posture may change in ways that make Russia less threatening. But for the foreseeable future, the alliance’s primary mission will be to deter Russian attacks against its members. As long as the United States continues to ensure that NATO’s nuclear deterrent remains credible, European members should accept the burden of defending the alliance’s vulnerable eastern flank by conventional means. The idea that responsibilities should be divided this way has a long history in post–Cold War alliance thinking. In the 1990s, when NATO’s problems seemed much more modest, its European members aspired to create a force of 60,000 deployable troops, though it never quite got there. In more recent years, it has aimed lower, maintaining a ready-response force numbering in the low thousands; since 2017, it has also provided most of the 5,000 troops making up NATO’s Enhanced Foreign Presence in the Baltic states.
Unfortunately, Europe’s preparedness for an attack by Moscow on a member state remains inadequate. War games conducted by the RAND Corporation in 2014 and 2015 suggested that denying Moscow the ability to quickly occupy all three Baltic states would require no less than seven brigades. Right now, NATO can probably swiftly marshal about three brigades. Subsequent calculations by the Brookings Institution suggest that a viable Western defense of the Baltics might require as many as 150,000 deployable forces across ground, air, and maritime domains.
The key word is “deployable.” Collectively, Europe’s militaries currently have almost two million active-duty personnel. But only about 20,000 to 30,000 of them have the requisite logistical support and mobility to operate at a considerable distance from their home bases over sustained periods. Europe is right to increase defense spending, but fixating on defense budgets alone can obscure important decisions about how to best spend the money. To meet the challenge posed by a revanchist Russia, Europe must make smaller forces more deployable.
For NATO’s southern European members, the primary security challenge in recent years has been to restrict the flow of migrants traveling across the Mediterranean or through Turkey. Countries such as Greece, Italy, and Spain have sought to deter and interdict illicit trafficking by building border fences and enhancing their coast guard and other maritime capabilities. But these defenses can easily be overwhelmed whenever a famine or major conflict in the Middle East and Africa prompts massive outflows of people. Given that the combined population of Africa and the Middle East is expected to double by the middle of this century and that climate change’s disruptions are likely to intensify, NATO must plan for potential military interventions that could stem migration by responding to major outbreaks of conflict and humanitarian disasters at their source.
Europe needs to invest the alliance with a renewed sense of purpose.
Currently, Europe’s peacekeeping capabilities are not substantial enough to meet this mission. European nations collectively deploy more than 6,000 troops to various peacekeeping missions (largely in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa), and Britain and France maintain a particularly large presence in their former colonies, the broader Middle East, the Mediterranean Sea, and the Indo-Pacific. But observers’ estimates of how large a force would be needed to, for instance, curb a genocide in even a small African country often surpass 10,000 troops. European nations must develop at least ten more peacekeeping brigades (each with some 3,500 soldiers, plus support staff and equipment)—at an annual cost of perhaps $50 billion—and as many aircraft as currently operate on NATO’s eastern territory (about $30 billion annually). This sounds like a lot of money, but most of the cost could be raised by repurposing existing spending and reconfiguring existing force structures.
European nations must move to secure their interests in the Arctic, too. An adequate European presence requires basing more infrastructure, rapid-reaction capabilities, reliable communications, and most urgently, icebreakers there. The Nordic countries in particular do have considerable icebreaking capability, but it is focused on assisting commercial shipping in the Baltic Sea. Nordic countries must keep the Baltic open in winter, but NATO also needs a stronger military presence in the Arctic to make clear to Moscow that it cannot simply do as it pleases in the region. The United States long neglected the Arctic but now plans to build up to nine icebreakers with polar capability. And European nations—notably Finland, which has considerable shipbuilding capability—are well positioned to build even more.
The U.S. Defense Department considers China’s military development its so-called pacing challenge. In the case of an outright conflict in Asia, European nations are not likely to deploy large-scale forces. But should war break out, the Europeans could still back the United States and its other Asian allies by, for instance, helping the U.S. military block the shipment of Middle Eastern oil to China. European countries already deploy naval assets to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden to counter threats emanating from Yemen; these assets can be used in any U.S.-led confrontation with China. None of these aims can be accomplished without strengthening the alliance’s industrial base. Europe’s strenuous efforts to support Ukraine have revealed serious limitations to the continent’s defense industry: it is too fragmented.
Expanding Europe’s defense industrial capacity will require subsidizing producers, facilitating multiyear procurement contracts, expanding dual-use manufacturing, and purchasing ordnance up front to deepen munitions stocks. These are the same tools that the United States is starting to use to address its own defense industry weaknesses.
COLLECTIVE STRENGTH
The total cost of the initiatives Europe should take to revamp the transatlantic alliance would run upward of $100 billion yearly. This means that on average, European countries’ military budgets might have to reach 2.5 percent of GDP. But it is dangerously reductive to adjudicate defense investments merely by examining the percentage of GDP a country spends on defense. If Europe refined its military priorities and reoriented some of the existing force structure it has anchored to home territories, it might afford all of what we propose at 2.2 percent of GDP. Pressure from the Trump administration has already spurred European allies to inch toward that figure.
Washington, too, must revitalize its commitment to the transatlantic alliance. The United States currently maintains about 100,000 troops in Europe. Their host countries partly offset the cost of supporting these troops, and the United States should maintain them—and be prepared to send reinforcements if necessary. Most of all, Washington must make clear that the U.S. nuclear umbrella—a crucial and time-tested deterrent to Russian aggression—remains in place. The United States cannot be secure if Europe is insecure. But at such an isolationist moment in U.S. politics, Washington may need Europe to show the enduring value of this partnership. Beyond acquiring more material resources, Europe needs to invest the alliance with a renewed sense of purpose, clarity about its core strategic objectives, and a determination to fulfill them. European nations should embrace this challenge not only because they fear abandonment by the United States but also because more collective strength would boost their own leverage on the world stage.
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