Europe is confused, and understandably so. Since returning to office, U.S. President Donald Trump’s treatment of Washington’s oldest allies has been incoherent and disjointed.
He wants Europeans to spend more on defense, yet he is hammering their economies with tariffs. He wants to withdraw U.S. assets from Europe, yet he wants to take over Greenland. He wants Europeans to buy American weapons, yet he threatens to pull vital technical and logistical support to use those weapons.
Europe is confused, and understandably so. Since returning to office, U.S. President Donald Trump’s treatment of Washington’s oldest allies has been incoherent and disjointed.
He wants Europeans to spend more on defense, yet he is hammering their economies with tariffs. He wants to withdraw U.S. assets from Europe, yet he wants to take over Greenland. He wants Europeans to buy American weapons, yet he threatens to pull vital technical and logistical support to use those weapons.
“The Trump administration’s approach to Europe has a coherency problem,” said John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine under President George W. Bush. “You cannot muse publicly that you may not sell advanced fighter jets to Europe because they might become enemies then express unhappiness when they suggest they might not buy arms from you.”
Europe is getting ready to break its long-term dependency on U.S. defense planning. The European Commission has earmarked 800 billion euros ($883.8 billion) on national and pan-European defense projects over the next five years as part of its “Readiness 2030” plan.
The most contentious part of the proposal is a package of 150 billion euros ($165.7 billion) that will be raised on capital markets by the commission and handed out as loans to member states. These funds, as things stand, will be limited to spending within EU countries or countries approved by the EU, as part of a drive to bolster the European defense industry.
While there are loopholes that would allow U.S. firms to sell into this scheme as part of the global supply chain, the overall goal is clearly to direct cash into regional industry, allowing it to grow and possibly rival that of the United States at some point in the future.
Naturally, this is bad news for U.S. arms companies.
“Of course we want those sales. We are currently the world’s top arms exporter and have no interest in losing that market dominance,” said a U.S. defense industry insider, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Our manufacturers are very aware that if the Europeans are serious, they could lose out—and are not happy about it.”
The EU’s Readiness 2030 plan is much more thorough and extensive than previous efforts to recalibrate security planning.
“The Europeans were fundamentally unserious in how they went about defense planning, procurement, manufacturing, and weapons and stockpiling until recently,” says William Alberque, a former director of NATO’s Arms Control, Disarmament, and WMD Nonproliferation Centre.
“Their defense industry, in a nutshell, relied on duplicative product lines with overcomplicated requirements processes run through the EU, in competition with the U.S. and NATO,” he added. “Incredibly, in Germany, their procurement process was built with a dual-stamp procedure run through the Foreign Ministry, focusing on political imperatives rather than fulfilling real requirements.”
The EU political system meant that 27 (previously 28, before the United Kingdom left) countries were competing with each other’s national interests, meaning that decision-making was slow, ineffective, and often protectionist.
“Now, however, the Europeans are coordinating plans with NATO to provide real military capabilities that can fight beside U.S. forces,” Alberque added. “New investment schemes and banks focused on defense are popping up, allowing a longer-term set of investments that is restructured around what they need—fielding credible, autonomous military capabilities—rather than what is politically useful.”
The long-term risk for U.S. firms is that Europe’s internal politics turn on MAGA, and EU nations use political mechanisms to lock U.S. companies out of its procurement plans. If, for example, European countries circle the wagons on regulation standards designed to make importing American weapons more difficult, that could make life incredibly complicated for U.S. firms attempting to serve multiple markets.
Why might they do this?
“The U.S. has burned through so much goodwill at this point that the balance is now strongly tilting toward the traditional French model of buying as much kit domestically as possible,” said Anand Sundar, an advisor at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Across Europe, countries have suddenly become hyperaware of what their reliance on the U.S. for key military systems means in practice,” Sundar added.
The reduction in goodwill that Sundar talks about isn’t purely a result of Trump’s policy, but rather what the Europeans see as a long-term anti-Europeanism that has crept into U.S. politics.
The George W. Bush administration wasn’t exactly rammed full of Europhiles. Famously, even in the aftermath of 9/11, the United States was hesitant to involve NATO allies in Afghanistan for fear that it would overcomplicate the campaign. It is a common misconception that the Americans invoked Article 5 following the 9/11 attacks, a decision that was actually made by then-NATO Secretary-General George Robertson.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s disinterest in Europe has been well documented, as his administration paid greater attention to Asia and the Middle East. At this time, this seemed to be a sensible pivot, as Washington’s greatest threats were widely thought to be the rise of China, North Korea, Iran, and fundamentalist Islamic terror.
Ukraine pulled Washington’s attention back, but the return of Trump has destroyed that. Multiple European officials were dismayed, if not shocked, at comments made by Trump administration defense officials that were published in the Atlantic last month.
“You look at those comments, and they came from younger guys,” said one European security source, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “This type of thinking could last another 25 years, so we need to act accordingly.”
Europe pulling together and bolstering its own security is exactly what Trump wanted. Bluntly, it is what Europe has needed to do for decades.
Done correctly, it could even be a good thing for the United States. If Europeans can look after themselves, it makes it easier for Washington to redeploy troops and resources in Asia or the Middle East, should the need arise. The cumulative effect of a greater emphasis on security should also mean that Europe has more intelligence and combat power to share with the United States.
But if you offer someone both the carrot and the stick, as Trump has done, they may end up taking neither. As Herbst put it: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. No other country has allies as wealthy or strong as the U.S. has in NATO and Europe. Ending that could prove more costly than the MAGA movement comprehends.”
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