For the latter half of the 20th century, twice rebuilt from catastrophe, Europe constructed something genuinely unprecedented: a continental order in which war between its members became not merely unlikely but unthinkable.
That order rested on two pillars. One was European integration: the painstaking project of binding economies, laws, and institutions together tightly enough, in the European Union, that conflict became irrational. The other was American power. NATO did not just deter the Soviet Union. It underwrote European security so completely that European states could afford to stop thinking seriously about defense and start thinking about everything else: welfare states, single markets, the endless procedural architecture of integration.
For seven decades, this arrangement held. Today, this is over.
What has replaced it is something categorically different: a transactional relationship in which American security commitments are no longer a standing guarantee but a service conditional on compliance. The United States has become, in effect, a subscription-based security provider. And like any subscription, it can be repriced, suspended, or cancelled if the terms aren’t met.
Some European governments have responded to all of this by reaching for the language of patience, calling it an aberration, a negotiating tactic, a passing storm. That interpretation was always thin. After the Trump administration’s threats to Greenland, after watching Washington openly toy with abandoning Ukraine to a dictated peace that rewards Russian aggression, after repeated blithe hints or outright threats to withdraw from NATO – or most recently even to suspend other members — it is untenable.
An American administration that publicly contemplates absorbing the territory of a NATO ally, and responds to that ally’s objections with contempt rather than reassurance, is not engaged in tactical disruption. It is demonstrating a worldview in which allied sovereignty and security is conditional on American interest. The question is no longer whether the old relationship is recoverable. It is not, as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney expressed in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January. For Europeans, the question is what they build in its place, and how fast.
Europe’s problem is not only external. Its capacity for collective action is hobbled by internal structures that were designed for a different era. The European Union’s requirement for unanimity in foreign and security policy means that a single member state can immobilize the other 26. Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and Robert Fico’s Slovakia have demonstrated this repeatedly. But it would be a mistake to treat this as an issue of those two men. They are symptoms of a structural vulnerability, not its cause. Poland lived under the obstructionists of the right-wing, anti-European Law and Justice (PiS) party for years before it lost power in 2023. Now Orban’s Fidesz party has lost power in Hungary. But tomorrow it could be someone else blocking EU action. The problem is the mechanism that hands any illiberal government a veto over the security of an entire continent.
This is where Europe finds itself: facing a transformed external environment with institutions that were not built for it, dependent on a security guarantor that has repriced its guarantee, and constrained internally by rules that confuse unanimity with legitimacy.
Not Always a ‘Free Rider’
Before examining what has changed, one thing needs to be said plainly, because it is routinely omitted from this conversation: Europe was not always the free rider it is now fashionable to describe. During the Cold War, NATO’s European members — not least Germany — spent between 3 and 5 percent of GDP on defense annually. This represented real political choices, real budgetary trade-offs, real military capacity. The free-rider narrative took hold later, in the post-Cold War years when the Soviet threat had dissolved and the peace dividend seemed permanent. Years of American pressure on Europe to spend more on its own defense seemed to meet deaf ears.
For years, European countries essentially bet their future on the idea that they didn’t need to spend much on defense, trusting that the United States would always be there to foot the bill and handle the heavy lifting if things went wrong. They poured their money into social programs and domestic projects instead, feeling safe under the American umbrella.
That changed in 2022 with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While Moscow’s 2014 sudden capture of Crimea and first invasion of eastern Ukraine were shocking at the time, Europe was easily lulled into thinking that was a one-off and perhaps Russian President Vladmir Putin would be satisfied with just a slice of one neighboring country. But the February 2022 full-scale Russian invasion stunned European governments into taking defense seriously again. Germany announced its “Zeitenwende” restructuring of security policy and committed 100 billion euros to the Bundeswehr. Poland ramped up its defense spending to levels that embarrassed most of its NATO partners because they fell far short. The Baltic states, which had never stopped taking the Russian threat seriously, found their threat assessments suddenly validated. Defense budgets across the continent began moving in the right direction.
But moving in the right direction is not the same as having arrived.
The shift away from unconditional American commitment is not only Donald Trump’s doing, though Trump has made it impossible to ignore. The transformation spans the U.S. political spectrum. It reflects a bipartisan U.S. exhaustion with postwar burden-sharing, with roots that stretch back to the 1990s — to the Newt Gingrich revolution, to the fights over U.N. dues and multilateral commitments, to a slow drift in the United States, away from the internationalist consensus that had defined American foreign policy since 1945. Trump voiced this reorientation without apology and stripped away the careful diplomatic language that had allowed Europeans to keep pretending otherwise.
The Munich Security Conference is one venue where this split became increasingly apparent. The high-level meeting has for decades served as the annual gathering point of the transatlantic community on security issues, the place where American and European officials reaffirmed shared commitments, argued about burden-sharing in the familiar ritualized way, and left having confirmed that the North Atlantic Alliance, whatever its tensions, remains intact.
Munich 2025 was different. U.S. Vice President JD Vance arrived not to reaffirm commitments, but to lecture. His target was not Russia or China but Europe itself, its handling of migration, its relationship to free speech. Many European officials chose to interpret it as provocation rather than doctrine.
Clear Signals, Even If Couched Diplomatically
Munich 2026 eventually removed that comfortable notion. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s tone was measured, his language careful, even friendly. But the vision he laid out was not the familiar American commitment to a community of democracies bound by shared values. Instead, he outlined an Atlantic relationship grounded in civilizational affinity, cultural continuity, shared heritage. The message was plain: cooperation is available, but its terms have changed. Energy purchases, industrial policy, migration management, domestic political orientation — all this now factors into the American calculus. The informal firewall between security and everything else was, in effect, declared gone.
When security is framed in terms of civilizational belonging and shared heritage, it stops being a commitment among allies who share values and becomes a selective and exclusive arrangement available to those who qualify culturally and can afford it financially. This is a fundamental departure from what the alliance was built to be. NATO was founded not as a civilizational club based on shared ancestry, but rather on the principle that shared democratic values were the basis for collective defense. That principle is now in question.
While the United States is unlikely to formally withdraw from NATO, the ambiguity of the American commitment may accumulate to the point that the guarantee of mutual support implicit in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty loses its deterrent weight before anyone has formally changed anything. Deterrence depends on clarity. An adversary that believes Article 5 is conditional, negotiable, or subject to the political mood in Washington is an adversary that may begin to test the true resilience of the alliance and whether collective assurances are indeed holding up.
Europe’s external problem would be difficult enough on its own. What makes it acute is that it is accompanied by an internal problem that Europeans have spent years not solving: in the EU’s foreign and security policy, unlike domains such as the single market or its legal order, the unanimity requirement means all 27 member states must agree, or nothing moves. In other areas, a measure passes if it secures the support of at least 15 member states representing at least 65 percent of the EU’s population. But foreign policy, defense, and taxation largely sit outside this framework. There, unanimity applies.
Under Orbán, Hungary blocked EU support packages for Ukraine, vetoed the extension of sanctions against Russia, and used veto threats as a bargaining chip to extract concessions on unrelated matters. The cost to European coherence has been real. But Orbán is just an illustration of the problem. Poland under PiS ran the same playbook. Orbán has been voted out of office; but the vulnerability remains — any government in any member state that chooses to weaponize the unanimity requirement can do so.
This conundrum requires structural change, and changing EU treaty architecture is itself subject to unanimity, creating a Catch-22.
There are partial workarounds. Enhanced cooperation provisions allow subsets of member states to move forward on specific issues without waiting for everyone. The perhaps euphemistically named “European Peace Facility,” a mechanism for off-budget military spending, has been used to fund arms deliveries to Ukraine in ways that would have been impossible through normal EU channels. (The name is essentially a clever political work-around. By calling it a “Peace Facility,” the EU can frame this military spending as an act of peacemaking, which conveniently bypasses the strict rules that normally prevent the EU budget from paying for weapons. The fund is strictly for military hardware and training; all the actual diplomatic and civilian work is still handled entirely separately through the EU’s normal budget channels.) In some instances, coalitions of willing states have coordinated outside EU structures entirely. These mechanisms are all valuable, but they are improvised and lack the institutional weight and financial firepower of formal EU structures.
For Now – and the Longer Term
What can be done? Europe is not ready to provide for its own security without the United States. European capability gaps include strategic airlift, satellite intelligence, long-range precision strike, and the logistics infrastructure required to move and sustain large forces across the continent. These gaps cannot be closed in two years or five. Some will take a decade.
This means Europe needs the United States for now, even a transactional United States, even one that has changed the terms. Managing that dependency intelligently is not appeasement, it is realism. It means paying the subscription fee while simultaneously working to renegotiate it from a position of growing strength. That means defense spending must rise, not as a concession to American pressure but as a strategic necessity that happens to satisfy American demands. Energy sources must be diversified moving forward — again, not because Washington insists but because dependence on Russian supply was always a vulnerability. Diplomatic fights with Washington will need to be picked carefully, reserved for matters of core strategic interest.
On defense, the starting point is industrial consolidation. European defense procurement remains deeply inefficient, characterized by fragmentation and duplication across national systems. EU member states operate a far greater variety of weapons platforms than the United States, which benefits from much higher levels of standardization. Europe fields roughly a dozen to nearly 20 types of main battle tanks and maintains multiple parallel fighter-aircraft platforms rather than a unified fleet. Consolidation, however, is a generational project, shaped as much by politics and industrial policy as by strategy. It nonetheless needs to begin in earnest.
Then there is the question that has been deferred longest and can no longer be avoided: nuclear deterrence. France possesses an independent nuclear capability. For decades, French governments have been cautious about extending that deterrent to European partners, for reasons of doctrine, sovereignty, and complex domestic politics. Those reasons still exist, but the question of whether French nuclear deterrence can play a broader European role must be seriously considered, and Germany has opened this conversation. A continent that is serious about strategic autonomy cannot indefinitely outsource its ultimate security guarantee to a subscription-based provider.
Through decades of painstaking construction, compromise, and the hard-learned lesson that the alternative was catastrophe, Europe pulled together in the past. Now, with the external guarantee that allowed Europe to build inward rather than arm outward gone, the United States has presented Europe with a bill for service and made clear that it expects to be paid.
Europe will need to pay that bill for now, while reforming internally and building the capacity to eventually negotiate better terms. A better alternative is not in sight.
