America’s new National Security Strategy has shaken Europe’s leaders awake to the end of the transatlantic alliance as they know it. But Europeans have the means to stand up for themselves—if they choose to seize them.
On December 4th, the Trump administration published its new National Security Strategy (NSS). It amounted to an announcement of the death of the West—of the geopolitical framework that has ensured European security and prosperity since the second world war. And Europe’s reaction? Several days of near total silence.
Of course, with President Donald Trump’s latest push for “peace” in Ukraine at a critical stage, European governments could tell themselves that they must bite their tongues while trying to walk Trump back, yet again, from a quick sell-out of the country. Yet that very peace process has demonstrated all too clearly just how the NSS will work in practice. No one can now doubt that Trump’s interest in the conflict is confined to emerging with a Nobel peace prize and lucrative business deals with the Putin regime. Anything else is just an irritating impediment. Similarly, no one reading the NSS can doubt Trump’s visceral disdain for Europe—Europe, that is, as exemplified by the liberal, democratic values set out in the EU’s foundational treaties—and his determination to force political change on the continent. (Lest anyone miss the point, Trump reversed back over his supposed allies in an December 8th interview.)
That silence was the silence of shock as Europeans tried to absorb the enormity of the moment. If they want to sustain Ukraine, they will have to rely on their own efforts and face up to the sacrifices that will entail. So too if they want to defend their own sovereignty and independence.
These two challenges are of course tightly linked. Ukraine’s readiness to sustain its resistance in the face of appalling costs and huge American pressure will significantly depend on Europe’s determination to provide the necessary support: most immediately, very large sums of money.
But the linkage works the other way too—if Europeans cannot muster the unity and resolve to pay the price of standing by Ukraine, why should anyone in Moscow, or Washington, or indeed across Europe itself, credit their avowed determination to stand together in defence of their own collective interests?
But, European leaders might argue, what better evidence than their (almost) unanimous pledges of huge increases in defence spending, and their embrace of the €150bn of rearmament loans available under the SAFE programme? And more attention should be paid to how much of Russia’s navy is now at the bottom of the Black Sea, while its vaunted air force has been reduced to skulking in Russian air space. Sadly, these factors have evidently not yet impinged on their populations—a majority of whom, though still anti-Russia and pro-Ukraine, tell pollsters they do not believe their country is in a position to take on Russia militarily.
This is unsurprising, given their leaders’ decades-long complicity in the self-serving myth that without America, all is lost. Some may even be sceptical about whether the defence bonanza will be spent any more effectively than national defence budgets have been in the past—or materialise at all. Russian hybrid attacks are inducing a sense of vulnerability. And the cracks in the facade of European unity are becoming harder to ignore. The political tide is now running strongly across Europe towards national populism, fostered by Russian propaganda and subversion—even before Trump’s America joins in. At government level, the frustrated majority seem incapable of dealing with the Russian Trojan horses in Budapest and Bratislava, while the divisions between the resolute states and the laggards are ever more obvious.
All this opens the dismal risk that, if Ukraine falls, Russia and its US ally may be able to obtain sway over Europe without a shot fired, progressively dividing and picking off more states, and reducing the EU to paralysis and irrelevance.
In matters of war, as Napoleon said, the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1. Ultimately, Europe’s future now turns on its confidence and its determination, from chancelleries to the street. Europe has the means to stand up for itself: what its leaders must now do is demonstrate to themselves that they can still take decisive collective action—and to transmit that confidence to their populations, along with a sharper understanding of the stakes involved and how wider society should complement the role of armed forces.
So, the now-overdue use of frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine is not only vital in itself, but also for its hugely symbolic importance. And, reflecting on 2025, European leaders should ask themselves whether the Trumpian diagnosis of terminal weakness is really surprising—and whether they want that as history’s obituary when the pressure ratchets up next year.
About the author:
Nick Witney is a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.