NATO doesn't need the US to defend Europe
Strategic autonomy is Europe's only option
Most people assume Europe can't defend itself without the US – even NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte says those who think otherwise should "keep on dreaming." But this mindset, argues political scientist Rajan Menon, is the product of decades of American strategy that has convinced wealthy, capable NATO allies they are powerless without Washington. In fact, Europe possesses the resources and capabilities to defend itself. Menon shows how Europe's chosen dependence could be overcome, and why the Trump era makes it both possible and necessary.
States see their security as tied to the domination of other states—or at least the powerful ones do. But that doesn’t necessarily require occupation and conquest; security through domination can be achieved subtly, and even with the consent of weaker states. NATO’s evolution since its founding in 1949 is an example of what might be called silk-glove hegemony.
The United States turned its European allies into dependencies, who soon could not conceive of security apart from an alliance with Washington. And as long as they believed that Washington’s protection was indispensable, the US acquired leverage that could be used in many ways—not only matters of war and peace. The problem for the dependencies is that when the hegemon radically changes the terms of the bargain, they are caught flat-footed. They have lost the capacity to conceive of security outside the established arrangement and also lack experience in acting in concert to make their way toward a new one. This, as NATO’s history shows, is precisely the predicament that America’s allies now face.
The alliance in a post-Cold War world
During the Cold War, NATO’s purpose was captured by invoking Lord Ismay, the alliance’s first Secretary-General, who quipped that it existed to “keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.” The formulation was memorable because it distilled the alliance’s strategic logic: deter Soviet expansion, anchor American power in Europe, and prevent the reemergence of destabilizing German militarism.
By 1989, however, two pillars of that rationale had eroded. Communist regimes collapsed across East-Central Europe, ending the Warsaw Pact. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself dissolved. What did it mean any longer to say that one of NATO’s purposes was to ward off a Russian threat? Yes, the Russian Federation that emerged was nuclear-armed, but it was economically devastated, its GDP contracting by roughly 40% during the 1990s.
As for Germany, by the late 1980s, Europe’s fear of Berlin’s revanchism had faded. A democratic Germany had integrated into European institutions and bore no resemblance to its past. The argument that NATO was needed to “keep Germany down” was no longer persuasive.
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Rutte’s recent claim that Europe cannot defend itself independently beggars belief, but it reflects a belief widely held by European leaders and defense experts, who seem incapable of imagining a security strategy that does not involve perpetual dependence on the United States.
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Despite all of these changes, NATO did not fade away. A generation of British, European and Canadian leaders internalized a grand strategy centered on American leadership that institutional ties, military cooperation, think tanks, universities, and assorted elite networks reinforced. While their reasons differed, both they and the United States sought to reshape NATO, not defenestrate it.
Both the expansion of the alliance’s membership and the ensuring of Europe’s continuing dependence on Washington aimed to guarantee NATO’s continued relevance amidst dramatically different circumstances. Beginning in the 1990s, NATO admitted, in stages, former Warsaw Pact members and one-time Soviet republics. Russia objected repeatedly, but to no avail. Today, NATO has 32 members, preserving America’s leadership role within Europe.
Washington has access to a constellation of military facilities: 38 bases and 18 other military-related sites in Britain and Europe for projecting power far and wide, beyond Europe.
The importance of this for the United States has been evident during the 1990-1991 Gulf War and the wars in Iraq (2003-2011) and Afghanistan (2001-2021). Europe’s continued dependence on Washington for security also made it easier to enlist some of its countries in these and other campaigns.
NATO’s continuation after the Cold War thus helped sustain what Charles Krauthammer called the “unipolar moment”—unrivaled American global primacy. Today, however, Europe and the United Kingdom face challenges that their reliance on the United States has made them ill-equipped to address.
NATO’s crisis
Donald Trump has constructed a powerful “America First” narrative that casts NATO as a drain on American resources to protect a wealthy part of the world that ought to do far more for its own defense. He has repeatedly accused European allies of free-riding by having American taxpayers shoulder disproportionate and inequitable defense burdens. His rhetoric—describing NATO as a “one-way street”—is an oversimplification, but it has resonated with millions of voters.
Burden-sharing debates long predate Trump, but no previous American president publicly questioned the alliance’s value in such blunt, even toxic terms, or suggested that the NATO treaty’s Article IV commitment—which boils down to an American security guarantee—might not be honored. The tone has changed. The US National Security Strategy, released in December, follows Trump’s script and depicts Europe as declining and adrift—and of diminished importance to the United States.
The facts complicate Trump’s narrative. All NATO members now meet or exceed—and some substantially—the 2% of GDP defense-spending benchmark agreed at the 2014 Wales summit. Plus, all NATO allies, bar one, have allocated 20% of individual defense budgets to acquiring critical military equipment, a stipulation also adopted at the Wales meeting. Defense budgets among European allies have grown sharply since 2015. From 2015 through 2025, the average increase in NATO allies’ defense spending has been 6.9% and rose in 2023, 2024, and 2025 to 9.3%, 18.6%, and 15.9% respectively.
Nonetheless, Trump’s argument has proven politically effective. He has persuaded many Americans that NATO drains US resources and that trade with Europe is unfair—as he put it, “a very one-sided transaction, very unfair to the United States.”
Decision time for Europe
Europeans should not assume that this is a passing storm—that all will be well again once Trump departs the scene. The MAGA worldview has deep roots in the Republican Party and other leaders—JD Vance for one—will follow Trump’s script. Europe’s leaders would, therefore, be wise to use this moment to muster the resources they already possess—and the political will they have long lacked—to move toward greater strategic autonomy and reduce, if not eliminate their military dependence on the United States.
NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte’s recent claim that Europe cannot defend itself independently beggars belief, but it reflects a belief widely held by European leaders and defense experts, who seem incapable of imagining a security strategy that does not involve perpetual dependence on the United States.
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The claim that cooperation toward a common defense is impossible amounts to saying that politics never changes, that Europe’s divisions are as unalterable as the law of gravity.
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The corollary of this mindset has been European deference to the United States, which, during Trump’s presidency, has assumed pathetic proportions. Rutte, approving of Trump’s use of profanities while chiding Iran and Israel after they broke a ceasefire, addressed Trump as “Daddy.” In their meetings with Trump in Washington, the deference of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz had the look of courtiers hoping to please their king.
Remarkably, this supineness continues even as the Trump administration displays disdain for Europe. In a December interview, Trump characterized the continent as a place that is adrift, “decaying,” and led by “weak” people. This sentiment is evident in the November National Security Strategy document—as well as in the comments of its senior figures in the administration.
Beyond that, Trump demanded that Denmark turn over Greenland to the United States, stated that Canada should become America’s 51st state, and referred to Carney as “Governor Carney.” Scott Bessent, Trump’s Treasury Secretary, has encouraged Alberta to secede from Canada and join the US. And in the Ukraine war, Trump has ended direct military assistance to Kyiv and made that Europe’s responsibility—while shutting it out of the talks between Russia and Ukraine, which the US presides over.
When the United States and Israel went to war against Iran in February—for the second time in less than a year, and despite not having been attacked or even threatened by Tehran—the NATO alliance, Norway excepted, once again aligned itself reflexively with Washington. Despite stressing the importance of upholding international law and global norms when Russia invaded Ukraine, non-US NATO states—including France, which under President Emmanuel Macron has been the foremost proponent of European strategic autonomy—dutifully backed the United States.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that “this is not the moment to lecture our allies and partners” about international law but to stand with them. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer went further, putting RAF bases at the disposal of American warplanes for “specific and limited defensive purposes,” such as destroying Iranian missile batteries. Like Merz, he implied that the United States was defending itself against an aggressor. For this display of loyalty, Starmer was rebuked by Trump, who said that the prime minister was no Winston Churchill because Britain had not joined the initial US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
Shedding this reflexive support for the United States will not be easy for its NATO partners. Developing a strategic vision suited to autonomy—and building the consensus necessary for reducing their military dependence on Washington—will prove difficult, though scarcely impossible, given Europe’s substantial economic and technological resources.
A reality check
A commonplace contention has it that Europe, a collection of willful sovereign states, cannot muster the unity needed for big moves like defense autonomy. But this belief is belied by the continent’s remarkable progress in economic and political integration, including the creation of a single currency and central bank, the visa-free Schengen zone, and supranational institutions with substantial authority.
The claim that cooperation toward a common defense is impossible amounts to saying that politics never changes, that Europe’s divisions are as unalterable as the law of gravity. In fact, Washington’s opposition to European strategic autonomy, despite its complaints about inequitable burden-sharing, has been one of the impediments to its realization. The United States has fostered, and benefited from, Europeans’ belief that dependence on Washington is the only way to ensure their military security.
But Trump’s dismissive attitude toward America’s NATO allies has prompted them to reconsider a decades-long assumption. The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, argued in her Davos speech that the changes in the American political landscape were not transient and amounted to a warning that Europe could no longer rely on its traditional security strategy, which assumed open-ended American protection. She added that the current moment offered an opportunity “to change permanently” and “build a new independent Europe.”
Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference and a staunch advocate of transatlantic defense cooperation and admirer of the United States, where he served as Germany’s ambassador, worries that the conditions that sustained NATO for decades have disappeared and that the erosion began during the 2003 Iraq war. Friedrich Merz went further: “The decades of Pax Americana,” he said recently, “are over for us in Europe and for us in Germany.”
In his Davos address, Canadian Prime Minister Carney declared that “American hegemony” had once provided stability and “public goods,” but that “this bargain no longer works” in a world in which the great powers are using trade and international institutions as instruments of coercion. The result, he added, was “disruption, not a transition,” and the “middle powers” must respond by diversifying their relationships and cooperating to provide a counterbalance.
When French President Emmanuel Macron remarked in 2019 that “what we are currently experiencing is NATO’s brain death” and that Europe could no longer count on American protection, he was an outlier, just as he was two years earlier when he called on Europe to develop “autonomous operating capabilities.” No longer—and with one big difference: Macron was proposing that Europe seek defense autonomy within NATO. Now, influential Europeans are asking whether NATO itself is in peril.
Strategic autonomy is feasible
Contrary to Mark Rutte’s claim, Europe does not lack the resources needed to achieve this goal. Europe’s inability to articulate a new conception of security—one that does not center on Washington—is psychological, not material.
NATO allies’ combined GDP (measured in purchasing power parity) is $18.4 trillion compared to the United States’ $15.7 trillion, or 17% greater. The GDP of Russia, which Europe considers its main military threat, is less than half that of non-US NATO combined, giving the latter a much deeper well from which to draw for military purposes. NATO (based on 2021 prices and exchange rates) estimates that the US spent $845 billion on defense in 2025 and its allies $559 billion.
Non-US NATO countries would not have to match American military expenditure to acquire the wherewithal for a Europe-centered collective defense against Russia. Plus, their combined military spending last year exceeded Russia’s $145 billion by 26%, and Germany and France together outspent Russia. Money, then, is not among the obstacles to strategic autonomy for Washington’s NATO allies.
Europe and the UK also have impressive capabilities in military research and development and weapons production. They are home to 17 of the world’s largest 60 defense contractors, which have jointly or individually produced world-class military equipment, including fighter jets, tanks, air defense systems, and missiles.
To be sure, there are obstacles to defense autonomy, and achieving it won’t be easy or quick. European defense production is fragmented and often duplicative. National industries compete rather than coordinate. Achieving strategic autonomy will require rationalizing procurement, integrating research and development, and overcoming political resistance from domestic firms. And as Germany ramps up its defense spending, it should engage in collaborative research and development and production. By striking out on its own, Germany, given its history, will stoke anxiety in Europe when what’s needed more than ever since 1949 is mutual trust and cooperation to move toward defense autonomy.
In addition, eastern members—particularly Poland and the Baltic states—will have to be persuaded that autonomy in defense will ensure their security. The accession of Finland and Sweden has already strengthened NATO’s eastern and northern flanks. Deploying additional armored and mechanized brigades and integrated air defenses, and improving rapid-reinforcement capabilities, would bolster them further.
Ukraine, Europe’s largest country in area, has now demonstrated its effectiveness in fighting Russia. And its defense industries, whose output has surged from $1 billion to $35 billion since 2022, now produce advanced weaponry, especially missiles and drones. Kyiv already formed partnerships with European companies for local production. An agreement with Ukraine that provides for arms sales, investments in its defense industries, training for its soldiers, and joint exercises would further increase the security of an autonomous non-US NATO’s eastern flank.
Nuclear deterrence
If US extended deterrence became unreliable, Europe would face difficult choices. Deterring a nuclear attack on one or more members of a community of non-US NATO countries will prove more complicated. France possesses an independent nuclear arsenal; Britain maintains one as well. Together, they have some 600 nuclear warheads, far fewer than Russia has. What matters, however, is not the number of warheads they have—Russia will always have many more—but whether those warheads, or at least a substantial portion of them, can survive a first strike, aided by their dispersal on aircraft, land-based missiles, and submarines. Nuclear deterrence does not require parity in numbers with a putative adversary’s warheads; what’s critical is an assured “second-strike capability.” Increasing the number and survivability of a Franco-British arsenal that provides extended deterrence to the rest of non-US NATO should be shared.
Moreover, states with nuclear weapons are most likely to use them in response to a nuclear attack or when they face catastrophic defeat in a non-nuclear war. Britain and France would have no reason to initiate a nuclear strike on Russia. And a strategically autonomous non-US NATO would fight a conventional war against Russia to defend itself, not to seize Russian land, let alone defeat Russia.
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Would Britain risk London and France imperil Paris to serve as nuclear guarantor for the rest of non-US NATO? By the very nature of things, this question admits of no definitive answer. Still, it’s not obvious that the credibility of their extended deterrence would necessarily be weaker than Washington’s, especially now that Trump has downgraded the importance of Europe for the United States.
That has given Britain and France a greater stake in the continent’s security and could make their nuclear guarantee credible. But to provide credible extended deterrence, London and Paris will have to devote more resources to increasing the number and survivability of their nuclear warheads—and their European partners in an autonomous defense arrangement should rightly defray some of the costs. The positive news is that France and Germany, with support from other NATO countries, have begun discussing a European nuclear deterrence—one that reorients France’s nuclear doctrine to provide extended deterrence for Europe without setting off a scramble by other states to build their own nuclear arsenals.
Gains from strategic autonomy
By moving toward strategic autonomy, Europe (along with Canada) can acquire the greater capacity for self-defense it should have even if the Trump phenomenon proves to be temporary and NATO survives. By decreasing Europe’s dependence on the US, defense autonomy will enable Washington’s allies to deal with it on an array of issues with greater strength and self-confidence rather than as dependencies and subordinates.
And should NATO unravel, Europe will not have to scramble for a shared defense strategy or become divided as countries hasten to find individual solutions to their predicament. Defense autonomy does not require, and should not beget, animosity toward the United States. Economic relations—trade and investment—can continue, though with American allies having greater bargaining power, and cooperation can be arranged in areas of common interest, such as protecting vital sea lanes. For America’s NATO allies, strategic autonomy provides a path to cooperation with Washington from a position of reduced dependence and greater equality.