Why Europe Can't Defend Itself Without Donald Trump

The winter bitterness of Romania’s steppe was not the only chill as NATO soldiers exercised just miles from Ukraine last month.

There were no U.S. forces taking part in NATO’s biggest exercises this year. This may have always been the plan, but European nations going it alone on Ukraine’s doorstep took on a fresh significance as U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration rewrote Washington’s relationship with the continent.

The Steadfast Dart drills at the southeastern training ground of Smârdan throughout February were designed to show how a British-led multinational force could operate in a crisis. Aircraft struck mock enemy targets, tanks blasted live shells, soldiers wiggled their way through a frozen trench network and a bagpiper emerged from a smoke screen to waiting cameras.

But Trump’s pullback has shaken European nations badly and raised questions over how the continent could defend itself in a real crisis without the U.S. backing that has protected much of Europe from the potential Russian threat since the end of World War II.

Decades of sidelining defense spending after the end of the Cold War has allowed European countries to maintain prized social welfare systems, but has also left them with yawning capability gaps on defense and a deep reliance on the U.S. that has become increasingly unpalatable to the White House. There is no shying away from this from European officials, nor a desire to—there is a universal acceptance, privately and publicly, that the continent has been lamentably lax.

Despite alarm bells ringing for years, and even more loudly since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the continent’s leaders have still struggled to summon the political clout to significantly boost military spending. For most Western European members, the threat is geographically too far away—it is hard to make a convincing case to budget more for militaries when that could mean cuts to sectors such as health care, or further tax increases in what are already some of the world’s most heavily taxed countries.

Young people living far from the frontline states of NATO’s eastern flank with Russia show little appetite to serve in the military, let alone fight a war in defense of the continent.

‘Very Vulnerable’

Despite recent talk of a united European Army, even if European states do find the money and personnel, there is a question over how they could work together to coordinate everything from defense procurement to battlefield operations in a way that would allow them to field an effective fighting force.

At the drills, commanders would frequently say the different nations worked together slickly, taking the best parts of each country’s military forces. Lower-ranking soldiers, however, spoke of challenges at basic levels such as language skills.

“Very vulnerable” is how Europe would be without U.S. support, Ed Arnold, a senior research fellow at Britain’s Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) defense think tank, told Newsweek.

The war in Ukraine has been the breaking point for the old relationship between the U.S. and those formerly seen as its greatest allies. Although some officials in Europe have attempted to paper over the cracks widening across the Atlantic, others concede that Europe is in trouble, adrift in this new security reality.

“Decades of the old relationship between Europe and America are ending,” warned Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, himself facing personal insults from Trump and his acolytes as well as possibly the loss of a big chunk of his country in proposed U.S.-Russian peace negotiations to which he has not been invited. Zelensky said: “Europe needs to adjust to that.”

To be clear, the U.S. has not said at this point that it is abandoning Europe, where it still has tens of thousands of active personnel. But as well as Trump’s administration indicating security priorities elsewhere, such as Asia, the president himself has spoken of halving the U.S. defense budget. The U.S. accounts for two-thirds of NATO defense spending.

“We think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger,” Vice President JD Vance told a stunned European audience in Munich last month in an address that more broadly hacked at transatlantic unity.

The U.S. has demanded that each member state dedicates 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) to defense. The current NATO threshold stands at two, and several countries still fall short of this. Germany—Europe’s largest economy—has only just dragged itself over this marker, although the smaller economies of the Baltics and Poland on Russia’s fringes have stormed ahead.

Officials in Europe have avoided committing to 5 percent, although NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said “considerably more than three percent” is the right ballpark.

Europeans need to have a “strong” commitment to NATO’s Article 3, U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said during a visit to Brussels in February. This is the line in the alliance’s founding treaty that lays out that each country must “maintain and develop their individual and collective capacity to resist armed attack.”

The U.S. provides many of the costliest military capabilities for Europe and has long done so. America’s contribution in Europe accounts for much of not just combat equipment, but also enablers, said Arnold. This refers to capabilities like reconnaissance, air-to-air refueling and logistics.

“All of that is really expensive,” he added. Many U.S. assets could now have to head over to the Indo-Pacific to square off against China, meaning Europe will also have to foot the bill for acquiring replacements, Arnold said.

The Steadfast Dart exercises were themselves an example. While the exercises did not involve U.S. forces directly, they were there in behind-the-scenes strategic roles. Whether European countries would even have been able to carry out the exercises without U.S. support is an open question.

Right now in Europe there are gaping holes. The most obvious are in air defense, in producing long-range missiles, tanks and armored vehicles, as well as attracting enough personnel into the armed forces, military experts and officials say.

NATO states have “less than” 5 percent of the necessary air defense capabilities to protect central and Eastern Europe from large-scale attack, the Financial Times reported in May last year. European officials have told Newsweek that air defense capacity is currently a fraction of what it should be, and a major worry.

“In the near future, Europe would be unable to defend itself against a Russian attack,” one Czech defense official told Newsweek. If a ceasefire in Ukraine frees up Russian assets, Moscow could “attack the Baltic Allies and Europeans alone would hardly be able to stop it,” the official said.

‘Be Prepared for a Wartime Scenario’

Militaries must, of course, be supplied by industry. Speaking in Munich, former Spanish Foreign Minister Arancha González Laya told Newsweek that the European defense industry could “very clearly” reach the levels needed.

The Czech defense official said that if Europe doubled down on rearmament today, “they could realistically be in a position to repel a full-scale Russian attack in five years from now.”

Admiral Rob Bauer, who stepped down as head of NATO’s military committee at the start of the year, said in November that defense companies in Europe “need to be prepared for a wartime scenario and adjust their production and distribution lines accordingly.”

“While it may be the military who wins battles,” Bauer said, “it’s the economies that win wars.”

On the face of it, that should put Europe in a strong position to counter Russia. European Union economies plus Britain total more than 10 times Russia’s GDP. But also critical is the ability to mobilize the funds and while Russia has a wartime economy under authoritarian President Vladimir Putin, Western European countries are democracies that ultimately require their people to agree on shifting spending.

European states are already some of the highest spending in the world and that gives them little option for extra spending without inflicting severe pain. Britain, while warning of a “generational challenge,” has still only pledged to raise defense spending to 2.5 percent of GDP from 2027.

When World War II broke out, only 20 percent of Britain’s GDP went on government spending so the state could ramp this up to 60 percent to support the war effort. But government spending already accounts for 44 percent of modern Britain’s GDP, giving it less freedom for massive military spending in addition. Government spending in France is now 57 percent of GDP.

In fact, Russia may have more room to increase defense spending than they do. Its government spending is only around 36 percent of GDP and that could come down further if the U.S. relaxes sanctions.

By some measures, Russia is already spending more on defense than Europe. When calculated in terms of purchasing power parity—which takes into account Russia’s much lower costs—Kremlin spending would be the equivalent of $462 billion compared with $457 billion for Europe in 2024, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a U.K.-based think tank.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, has said it plans to propose the removal of annual spending limits for defense costs so that countries could borrow more, but for the most indebted, that could also provoke an adverse reaction from bond markets fearful of unfunded commitments.

For those with intimate knowledge of defense issues, beefing up military capabilities in Britain and continental Europe is a must.

But for the general public, it’s murkier. Research by pollster YouGov in late January showed that 30 percent of people it surveyed in Great Britain said it was key to increase defense spending, even if it meant making cuts in other sectors, like public services. But 35 percent of respondents said they would prioritize keeping up funds for social sectors, even if it meant there were no funds to boost military spending.

More than half of Britons surveyed by YouGov in a separate poll earlier this year said they would oppose increasing taxes to finance defense spending hikes.

One senior British military official and a former U.S. official said while military and defense-focused officials embroiled in security debates feel the urgent need for increasing defense spending, this had not trickled down to the ordinary person in several NATO countries.

A Closer Threat

The nations within touching distance of Russian territory feel differently. Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Poland have very visibly laid down new fortifications to trip up advancing tanks. In mid-November, NATO’s newest member, Sweden, published a brochure it said helped the country’s residents “learn how to prepare for, and act, in case of crisis or war.” Other Nordic countries issued similar guidance, while Poland’s defense minister said in the last few days that civilian airports in the country would be adapted for military use.

Denmark has also significantly upped defense spending to 3 percent and pushed for “massive rearmament.” In 2023 it abolished a public holiday, Great Prayer Day, to boost military spending. The government said the cancellation would provide an extra 3 billion kroner—about $420 million—that would go toward its defense budget.

One element that affects the balance is nuclear forces. Like Russia, both Britain and France have nuclear weapons, though combined they have less than a tenth the number of Russia’s warheads. In a sign of the groundshift in Europe under Trump, the man expected to be Germany’s next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said he would talk to the fellow Europeans about extending their nuclear protection.

The first line of defense is more likely to be people, however, and here again it is far from clear that Europe can rally the capabilities it might need to defend its furthest-flung states against invasion.

The British army may lead the Allied Reaction Force (ARF) that showed off its skills in the face of an imaginary enemy at Smârdan, but British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer described the country’s land forces as “hollowed out” last year.

When he announced last month that he would be willing to commit British troops to a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, this brought fresh attention to how much impact Europe could make without American forces. Starmer has said a “U.S. security guarantee” would be the “only way to effectively deter Russia” in Ukraine, belying the feeling that Europe alone is not strong enough to enforce a ceasefire.

The British army has now shrunk to its smallest number in hundreds of years, while its former chief, Lord Richard Dannatt, said in mid-February that the army was “so run down” it could not be at the helm of a Ukraine peacekeeping mission.

Struggle To Recruit Troops

It is not only about the budget, it is also about recruitment to the forces and retaining its people. The British army and navy barely met 60 percent of their recruitment targets for the 2023-24 financial year and the nation’s air force did not do much better.

British soldiers in Smârdan believe the looming possibility of deploying to Ukraine could spur on a swell in new recruits signing up. It would likely be sorely needed—any commitment to a peacekeeping force would involve a significant chunk of the country’s active personnel.

There is little sign of enthusiasm to serve among younger generations, however. One recent poll said that nearly two in five Britons under 40 years old would refuse to serve in the military if faced with World War III, with 30 percent saying they would not join up even if their country faced “imminent invasion.”

French soldiers are ending their service an average one year earlier than they used to, Politico reported last year.

Starmer’s proposal to send troops to Ukraine in the event of a peace deal also had the unintended effect of shining a spotlight on the divisions between European leaders and the absence of a coherent leadership strategy.

While European NATO countries like Sweden tentatively said they would consider a similar stance, outgoing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz criticized the idea as “completely premature.”

French President Emmanuel Macron, keen to show Europe was singing from the same hymn sheet, summoned his colleagues to Paris for a rapid response after Munich, but little concrete emerged. On top of this, many European leaders are struggling in their own countries, with Starmer on an approval rating of 27 percent and Macron at just 18 percent.

Although the accuracy of Russian polling may be questionable, the most recent polls there give Putin a figure of 87 percent and close to an all-time high.

Europe is further cleaved by individual judgments on just how much of a threat Russia poses. While the eastern flank is set in its priorities, some leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have been clear: they can live alongside Putin.

Some nations, like Spain, also have other security concerns. Madrid’s eyes are looking south to the Sahel region of Africa, rather than just toward Russia, said Laya, the former Spanish foreign minister.

Without the “glue” of American leadership, Europe runs the risk of fracture, said Arnold, of RUSI. “The U.S. just provides the leadership as well, it provides that clarity.”

The Americans also remain central to NATO’s plans on its eastern flank, ARF’s commander Brigadier Andy Watson said from Smârdan.

NATO’s defenses were long geared toward a Russian enemy and even more so since the invasion of Ukraine. Putin maintained the push into Ukraine was partly in order to stop the advance of NATO into Ukraine, something that the U.S. has now made plain will not be happening.

Putin’s critics always said the invasion was more about naked expansionism, but as Europe discusses how to defend itself it must also consider the question of whether Russia really would take on an existing NATO member.

In Smârdan, they’re taking few chances: the trench networks serving as practice grounds are modeled on those snaking through Ukraine, and drone tactics are directly lifted from Ukrainian operators on the frontlines. Many of the British soldiers taking part in the drills in Romania helped the tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers who have passed through the London-led Operation Interflex.

Latvia’s Constitution Protection Bureau, one of the country’s security bodies, said last month that there was a “rather low” possibility of a direct NATO confrontation with Russia this year, but that if Moscow’s resources were freed up by a ceasefire in Ukraine, the Kremlin “would be able to increase its military presence next to NATO’s northeastern flank, including the Baltics within the next 5 years.”

This would “significantly increase Russia’s military threat to NATO,” the bureau said.

The Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia are particularly vulnerable. Like Ukraine, they all had spells within the Russian Empire as well as being Soviet republics. Their total border with Russia, the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad and Moscow’s ally Belarus is nearly 1,000 miles, and the only route from Europe by land is through the Suwalki corridor—a hard-to-defend 65-mile gap on the border between Lithuania and eastern Poland, which Russia also historically coveted.

If the fighting in Ukraine stops, “hundreds of thousands of troops” will be available for Putin to use elsewhere, Estonia’s Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told Newsweek in November. Tallinn’s foreign intelligence service also recently warned that NATO could “face a Soviet-style mass army in the next decade” if Moscow successfully reforms its military.

The choice facing European countries now is very clear and the European Union and NATO member states should take their future in their own hands, said Laya.

“Or it will most likely be a combination of the U.S., Russia and China writing it for the Europeans,” she warned.