The Russian military’s weaknesses have been apparent since the early days of the war in the Ukraine. The staggering losses in troops and equipment, Moscow’s inability to adequately equip or even supply its troops, and the multiple shifts in command—Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov being Russian President Vladimir Putin’s latest choice—have exposed the myth of the Russian army’s supposed invincibility.
The jostling between Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group—a private army active in the key battles of Soledar and Bakhmut—and Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu as well as Russia’s high command attests to deep and persistent friction among the very people Putin counts on to run the war and attain victory.
Still, nearly a year since the invasion began, Russia is still regarded by many as a formidable military power and a dire threat, not only to Ukraine itself but also to Europe as a whole. This continues to be the predominant lesson drawn from the Russian military’s decision to invade what is—the European part of Russia aside—Europe’s largest country in land area and one of its most populous.
Driving this widespread assumption is the misguided notion that Europe is simply incapable of defending itself without the help of the United States and that in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine the U.S. military presence has to be beefed up—which it has. This belief is pervasive in the corridors of power in Washington and Europe and was reiterated most recently by Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin in December.
This assessment—of a Europe rich and technologically advanced but in effect defenseless—was compelling for much of the Cold War. Back then, the Soviet Union had a substantial conventional military advantage over Western Europe. Soviet troops were forward-deployed all across Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe (which formed part of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact), with more than 300,000 Soviet troops stationed in East Germany alone. European economic recovery was also a work in progress.
Today, however, this view is flat-out wrong.
Consider some of the standard metrics used to compare countries’ military potential: GDP, population, defense spending, and level of technological advancement. They all show that Russia is far weaker than the 27-member European Union and that the balance of potential power indisputably favors Europe. At no point since the end of the Cold War has Russia’s economy amounted to more than 15 percent of Europe’s GDP—in 2021, Russia’s $1.8 trillion GDP was a fraction of the European Union’s $17 trillion.
When it comes to technology, Russia ranks 44th on the list of the world’s most technologically advanced countries, and as tech-savvy Russians leave the country to escape the military draft, it wouldn’t be surprising if its ranking has dropped further. Russia has one-third the population of the EU—and within that population, a sizable chunk of the working-age Russian men who haven’t fled are being conscripted and killed at the front. In January, Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated that Russia’s killed or wounded totaled “significantly over 100,000,” while Norway’s chief of defense, Eirik Kristoffersen, estimated that the count had neared 180,000.
To be fair, one can’t fault U.S. officials for worrying about the threat to Europe once Putin’s war began. On paper, the Russian military looked like a large, competent force that could overrun Kyiv in days, and prominent commentators as well as the CIA predicted it would do just that. By some estimates, the Russian military spent at least $150 billion a year between 2014 and 2019 trying to refit, rebuild, and modernize its military and much more if one starts the tabulation from 2008, the year modernization efforts began.
For these reasons, once Russian troops crossed into Ukraine, the Biden administration vowed to defend every inch of NATO territory and deployed an additional 20,000 U.S. troops to Europe, bringing the total to around 100,000. More F-35 fighter jets were stationed in the United Kingdom, air defense systems were sent to Italy, and U.S. bases in Poland became permanent—the first such move on the alliance’s eastern flank.
Yet Russian military power is becoming depleted after nearly a year of fighting a tenacious Ukraine, which has inflicted heavy equipment losses and casualties on Putin’s forces. Helped by more than $27 billion in military assistance from the United States, the largest security contributor to Ukraine by far, as well as billions of dollars more from the U.K. and Europe, Ukraine has inflicted more losses on Russian forces in 11 months than the Soviet Army suffered during its nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan. (Most of this military aid has come from Britain and the United States, though European countries have stepped up their commitments recently.)
Russian equipment losses have been staggering: More than 1,600 tanks, 1,900 infantry fighting vehicles, and 290 armored personnel carriers have been destroyed, damaged, captured, or lost. Those losses will increase substantially now that Germany, after persistent pressure from the United States and several of its European allies, approved the transfer of an initial batch of 14 Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine. Berlin’s decision paves the way for other countries such as Poland, Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, or Spain to send the Ukrainians some of their own Leopards, which are far superior to Russia’s T-90 or T-14 Armata models. (The latter, problem-ridden, has not even been deployed to battlefields in Ukraine.)
Russian forces that are dug into defensive positions in the east and south will soon face Ukrainian forces that have a substantially greater strength in mobile armored warfare, given the Leopard’s capabilities, which include thermal imaging and precision targeting. The Leopard, which comes in different versions and of which there are more than 2,000 in service across Europe, provides just one example of Europe’s advanced defense industry, which could, backed by political will, become much larger.
Given Europe’s massive advantage in resources, there is no reason why it cannot organize an effective defense against Russia. What, then, is stopping Europe from doing so?
Part of the answer has to do with U.S. policy and Washington’s view of its role in the world. Since the end of World War II, U.S. leaders have sought to lead their European allies and, as a corollary, frowned on any steps by Europe toward greater self-sufficiency in defense. U.S. officials opposed efforts, including a 1998 British-French initiative, to increase the EU’s military effectiveness and a bid, two decades later, to promote the joint development of European armaments.
As a recent analysis by the Brookings Institution noted aptly, “Europe has wanted autonomy without providing adequate defense resources, while the United States has wanted greater European defense contributions without diminishing NATO and U.S. political influence.”
The U.S. government isn’t being disingenuous when it says it favors a strong Europe; it just fails to add that it also wants Europeans to remain dependent on U.S. protection and even compliant when it comes to U.S. preferences on matters of security.
The idea of Europe developing a self-sufficient military capability outside U.S.-dominated NATO has long been disliked in Washington. In his last address to NATO defense ministers in December 2000, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen warned that NATO “could become a relic” if the EU built up what he labeled as a competing, redundant defense organization.
Nearly two decades later, after the EU formed a joint fund for collaborative defense projects in 2017, a top U.S. defense official at the time commented that the plans must not distract from NATO’s current activities. “We don’t want to see EU efforts pulling requirements or forces away from NATO and into the EU,” said Katie Wheelbarger, the then-principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs.
European governments don’t automatically follow Washington’s script—though they follow its lead more often than not—but have heeded the warnings, happy to oblige and play the role of dependent. After all, if you can count on a superpower to be your external protector and spend less on defense than you otherwise would, why not take the deal?
This arrangement has deep roots and won’t be easy to change. The U.S. security guarantee to Europe has been in place since NATO was established in 1949. Multiple generations of European leaders have internalized the belief that U.S. leadership is irreplaceable and that their continent cannot survive without it, never mind that Europe has long since become an economic and technological powerhouse itself, one that produces an array of advanced weaponry.
This same orthodoxy—Europe would be imperiled absent U.S. protection—has also long been gospel within the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Moreover, it aligns with the ubiquitous narrative that the world would descend into chaos were there not a constellation of U.S. military bases overseas to maintain order. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s quip in 1998 about the United States being the “indispensable nation” continues to be repeated or paraphrased by foreign-policy luminaries today, and the underlying worldview long preceded her.
In light of all this, no one should be surprised that Putin’s war in Ukraine has reinforced the conventional wisdom: Russia’s imperial ambitions, coupled with Europe’s frailties, necessitate an open-ended, even increased, U.S. commitment to protect the continent.
But the facts suggest precisely the opposite. The U.S.-European security relationship has therefore become progressively divorced from reality. If it is to change, what Europe needs is not more resources but greater political will and self-confidence. Washington, for its part, must jettison the axiom that it has no choice but to serve as Europe’s perpetual protector par excellence.
Such a shift is nowhere on the horizon. It will happen only when foreign-policy experts in the United States and Europe rework their assumptions and have an honest, fact-based strategic discussion about the obsolescence of the current trans-Atlantic security relationship.
The move toward a new arrangement, one appropriate to the times, could include alternating the position of NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe between an American and a European; having Europe assume sole responsibility for deployments on NATO’s eastern flank; sustained increases in European defense spending; and substantially greater pan-European cooperation in armaments production to avoid duplication and leverage comparative advantages.
These changes will take time—but they can begin now.