STIMSON Leaderless Europe European policymakers in the capitals need to do much more today – even in the face of political and economic turmoil – to promote their own defense needs By Emma Ashford Grand Strategy January 14, 2025

 STIMSON

Leaderless Europe

European policymakers in the capitals need to do much more today – even in the face of political and economic turmoil – to promote their own defense needs

By  Emma Ashford

Grand Strategy

January 14, 2025

At the end of 2024, I undertook a research trip to Europe, seeking to understand how European foreign policy elites are thinking about the many crises facing them in the coming year. At a conference in Paris, and various meetings with foreign policy experts in Rome, I wanted to hear about the progress states have made on defense and national security issues, their views on the worsening situation in Ukraine, and the likely shifts in US defense policy as the new administration takes the reins in 2025.

I did not expect the trip to be engulfed in political turmoil. On December 4th, the French government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier collapsed, his minority coalition brought down by a combination of left and right parties over disagreements about the budget. On December 16th, the government of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz similarly collapsed under coalition disagreement about the budget. Germany now awaits new elections and is unlikely to have a fully functioning government with a mandate until at least late spring 2025. Meanwhile, with new elections impossible in France till summer, a makeshift government in the French parliament will simply attempt to avoid the controversies that brought down their predecessors.

Thanks to all this turmoil, many of my conversations in Europe focused once again on the difficulties of coordinating a coherent, centralized European defense, particularly in the absence of political will at the highest levels. Nonetheless, arguments that European states simply cannot provide for their own defense increasingly ring hollow. These states may face political turmoil and gridlock – as many democracies and autocracies, including the United States, have done in recent years – but the security headwinds facing them suggest that political will must be found regardless.

Who Do You Call When There’s No One in Charge?

Europe’s political crises come at a highly inopportune moment. Who is running the show on defense issues? Who will respond to any policy shifts from the Trump administration and who will act as Europe’s primary interlocutors in coming months? The new administration is poised to make key decisions on the war in Ukraine and on burden-sharing – but Europeans are left without a strong voice to respond. Berlin and Paris are both weakened, and the UK’s role has already been reduced due to Brexit. This leaves a mishmash of bureaucrats in Brussels and leaders in Europe’s mid-tier powers (i.e., states such as Italy or Poland) to manage the situation.

Italy’s Giorgia Meloni carries the hopes of many in Europe – and among DC’s foreign policy elites – who believe that she can bolster the transatlantic relationship and steer Donald Trump in a better direction. Indeed, Meloni has already traveled to Mar-a-Lago to confer with the incoming president’s team and has an excellent relationship with Trump. But most of those I spoke with in Rome suspect that she will not act primarily as a representative of Europe, but will rather seek the best for Italy, driven mostly by domestic politics.

A different leadership problem exists at the European Union level. The most obvious interlocutors are EU technocrats such as Ursula von der Leyen or Kaja Kallas, both part of the new Commission after this summer’s European Parliament elections. Both are vocal leaders with a clear vision on foreign policy, one which often conflicts with Trump’s own instincts. At the same time, Kallas and von der Leyen are also limited in significant ways. First, they represent a diverse set of member states that do not necessarily share their views on foreign policy. And second and more importantly, they are also limited in the issue areas over which they have jurisdiction. Particularly in the case of von der Leyen, her tools are restricted more to fiscal and regulatory measures, tools well-suited for trade wars and sanctions but poorly suited for other national security issues.

The leadership shortfall is very apparent in the way European states are hedging against the incoming Trump administration. Strategies for handling the new administration vary widely across European capitals. Some states are looking for ways to preempt Trump’s wrath on trade and defense with gifts or flattery, while others seek to fly under the radar, hoping that increases in military spending will soothe the new president.

The most concerted preparation for a second Trump term is emerging from technocrats in Brussels, where plans have been developed to respond in kind if the United States begins a trade war with Europe. But this preparation is largely contained to the economic space, and many European elites seem curiously willing to assume that the trade question can be kept unlinked from security questions, and that the incoming president will not seek to use trade as leverage on defense or vice versa. That seems like a high stakes bet indeed.

Ukraine vs. Europe

A potentially hostile Trump administration is hardly the only—or even the most important—problem facing European states as we move into 2025. The trade-offs between the war in Ukraine and the security of states in the EU and NATO are becoming more acute, forcing states to think about the political and economic ramifications of questions like EU membership for Ukraine.

The war itself is going poorly. Ukraine continues to lose territory, albeit slowly, and at great cost to Russia. Many of Kyiv’s long-sought changes in Western policy – such as permitting long-range strikes with U.S. weapons or tightening Russian energy sanctions – have in fact happened in the last six months of the Biden administration. They have done little to change the battlefield dynamics. It’s certainly true that the Russian economy is suffering, a bright spot that suggests negotiations to end or halt the war might be successful in 2025. But it remains unclear how European leaders will reconcile their existing maximalist demands regarding Ukraine – a full restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and integration into the EU, and perhaps NATO – with Trump’s planned shift towards lower support levels and negotiations.

There’s also a sense of unrealism in European debates about Ukraine. Indeed, European policymakers have been far more hawkish and forward leaning on how they might respond if the United States backs away from self-defense than they have been in proposing how they might act if the U.S. were to retrench from Europe more broadly. French president Emmanuel Macron has proposed sending French troops to Ukraine in a “behind the lines” capacity, while other European leaders have suggested they might send troops to enforce any future peace deal. And the Overton Window on options for Ukraine is astoundingly broad: one European think tank recently published a survey of experts asking whether Poland’s new presidency of the European Union could be credible if it were not matched with troop deployments to Ukraine.

There is far less discussion at the highest levels of how these states would respond if the United States were to finally get serious about drawing down its military presence in Europe. It’s almost as if – even after years of threats, publications, plans, and Trump’s statements – leaders in Europe remain unconvinced that there is any prospect of significant U.S. retrenchment from the continent. Or perhaps after two and a half years of repeating the notion that winning the war in Ukraine is essential to European security, they have come to conflate the two. It is clearly untrue, however, that European states would be more willing to fight for Ukraine than for themselves.

This prioritization of Ukraine over homegrown defense capabilities for EU or NATO-member states in Europe is potentially a mistake. Far too little has been done in recent years to bolster these states’ own defense capabilities, including failure to scale up the defense industrial base as promised. Consider the ammunition scheme that promised a million rounds a year for Ukraine by June 2024: the EU declared victory, but several reports suggest that the actual quantity produced was only around half that amount. Some of the ammunition for Ukraine came from purchasing existing stocks from countries like the Czech Republic or South Korea, which are willing to run down their stores.

And though defense spending is rising in many NATO member states, it remains a point of political contention; both the French and German government collapses were at least partly caused by disputes about defense spending. At the European level, significant progress has been made in some areas in recent years: the European Union, for example, has built joint procurement and financing mechanisms that can help small states to avoid duplication and bolster their defense capabilities. Other minilateral arrangements such as Sky Shield offer the prospect for military coordination and integration. But these steps – though dramatic by the standards of European defense – still fall far short of addressing the major question: whether Europe could defend itself independently, and what it would take to get to that point.

The Dispensable Continent

Ten years ago, Europe’s progress on defense would have been groundbreaking. Yet in today’s political and security environment, it’s simply not enough. One notion that came through clearly in my discussions in Europe is that European foreign policy elites have not yet understood that the goalposts in Washington are shifting. During Donald Trump’s first term, he pushed European states to spend NATO’s mandated 2% of GDP on defense; today, he’s pushing for 3-5% of GDP. Voices within the incoming administration – from the Vice President to DOD officials – have called for the United States to focus on Asia and pull back from Europe. Yet preparations in Europe for this have been minimal, amounting almost entirely to leaders sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the best.

A repeated refrain among everyone I spoke to was this: Europeans simply cannot provide for their own defense thanks to institutional, cultural, or budgetary barriers. This is not a new argument. Indeed, it is the argument that European leaders – and their friends in Washington – have been making for decades. It’s not even entirely untrue. There are significant barriers to bringing together a diverse set of European states – each with their own budgetary needs and quirky political systems – into a coherent, common defensive arrangement. Washington’s long-running domination of European defense only makes it harder for states to overcome entrenched ways of doing things.

But I have increasingly come to see the notion that European states cannot defend themselves as a twisted, mirror image of the conventional wisdom in Washington, where the United States is seen as the indispensable nation that must always step up to every global challenge. In both cases, what is missing is imagination from policymakers who argue that because things have always been done this way, they must always be done this way. If America is indispensable, then are European states regarding themselves as dispensable? I doubt that many leaders would say that, but it is nonetheless the logical corollary to the arguments that Europe cannot provide for its own defense.

I am left with the uneasy conclusion that while it is past time for European states to take much more into their own hands regarding defense, this process may end up emphasizing national defense over continental. At the Europe-wide level, progress on defense remains significant but glacial; it takes place on a generational scale and may produce change in 20 years if carefully tended. It is unlikely to do so in the next few years. European policymakers in the capitals need to do much more today – even in the face of political and economic turmoil – to promote their own defense needs.

American policymakers, meanwhile, need to stop accepting the idea that Europeans are somehow uniquely incapable of defending themselves. Political turmoil and gridlock in these states are problematic. But such problems are present across the globe; no one suggests that the United States should draw back from the world simply because Congress is dysfunctional, after all. It is time for European leaders to find the political will to make the necessary changes on defense and security – and time for the Trump administration to push them to do so.