Europe needs a Walter Lippmann.
In his 1943 book, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic, the famous American journalist and political thinker persuasively argued that foreign policy ought to be balanced—that is, a state’s foreign commitments must match its power. When a gap arises between commitments and power, the culprit state pursues a foreign policy that invites danger because its aspirations abroad are not backed by its power. For Lippmann, the United States had a tendency throughout its history to conduct such an unbalanced policy. But today, it is Europe’s foreign policy that is, to use Lippmann’s word, “insolvent.”
Europe’s foreign commitments and aspirations are clearly not backed by any real ability to promote them—or, when needed, defend them. They are all based on utopian notions both of international relations, envisioned to be naturally harmonious, and of power, seen as an infinite reservoir of Europe’s own attractiveness rather than the limited and consumable resource that it is. But as Lippman noted, foreign commitments “may in the last analysis have to be met by waging war” and thus, the required power has to be sufficient “to prevent such a war or to win it if it cannot be prevented.” Europe cannot meet its commitments, and thus it has an insolvent foreign policy.
Until some belated and insufficient recent changes, military expenditures in most European Union countries were on a long, steep, downward slope since the late 1980s, averaging a minuscule 1.3 percent of GDP between 2014 and 2018. Decades of underinvestment in defense mean that even a slow increase in spending will not address the enormous military weakness that has been generated.
Europe’s Lippmann gap has two effects on the continent’s geopolitical fortunes. First, it creates deep internal rifts. Lippmann thought that an unbalanced foreign policy creates new domestic divisions and reinforces old ones, resulting in factional support for very different strategic outlooks. Society tends to unify behind a reasonable (that is, balanced) policy. Many of Europe’s current divisions over foreign policy are, at least in part, because its commitments extend beyond its means, and thus discussions on security amplify disagreements on other, less significant issues, including fish.
The second effect of an insolvent foreign policy is that it invites aggression. A foreign commitment without matching power is a bluff waiting to be called by a competitor. An insolvent foreign policy, therefore, weakens the state internally and at the same time invites enemies to probe the state’s perimeter defenses. Wars are often the result.
For the past three decades, Europe’s security appeared to be outwardly unaffected by its vast capabilities gap because of the role played by the United States as the continent’s guarantor and backer, from the wars in then-Yugoslavia in the 1990s to the 2011 war in Libya. The past decade has similarly been relatively blissful for Europe as the United States fought the Islamic State, managed the Syrian civil war, and armed Ukraine in its defensive war against Russia. More recently, Washington has been attempting to reopen the Red Sea shipping route—vital to European commerce—that has been under Houthi threat since 2023. Europe was and is secure only because the United States makes it so. But this is “unearned security,” to use another phrase from Lippmann’s book phrase.
The United States experienced a similar unearned security in the 19th century. Washington made foreign commitments in the Western Hemisphere all the way to the Philippines, but it had little or no national power behind them. For most of the 19th century, there were no major external threats to U.S. security, and thus the world’s balance of power appeared distant and even irrelevant, even though the achievement of U.S. independence was made possible in part by a beneficial European balance of power. Throughout the 19th century, Eurasian potentates, such as the dying Spanish empire, were relatively weak and unable to threaten oceanic sea lanes, which in any case were protected by British sea power ruling the waves. U.S. security was not underwritten by the United States.
The problem with such unearned security is that it ultimately has a pernicious effect on the state that appears to benefit from it. By the time of World War I, Americans had become intellectually lazy, never having to consider the difficult trade-offs that come with strategic thinking. Lippmann considered the first decades of the 20th century to be a story of “national failure” to balance commitments and power, in the end resulting in the unexpected U.S. participation in two world wars. As Lippmann put it, “We came to think that our privileged position was a natural right, and then to believe that our unearned security was the reward of our moral superiority.”
Even more so, Americans came to disdain the very idea of the hard work of security provision. Lippmann noted that they “came to argue, like the idle rich who regard work as something for menials, that a concern with the foundations of national security, with arms, with strategy, and with diplomacy, was beneath our dignity as idealists.” Only the United States’ entry into World War II, the start of the global Cold War, and the specter of nuclear Armageddon finally knocked Americans off their lofty pedestal.
Europeans’ euphoria at the apparent success of their political and economic project of peaceful unification ignored that it was all made possible by U.S. backing. European harmony flourished with U.S. money and arms protecting its frontiers and regions beyond. Many Europeans came to think that their security and well-being was a natural right—a reward for their moral superiority. Enemies, in their view, were not deterred by U.S. military power but rather attracted by Europe’s discovery of a progressive path toward cooperation and peace.
This was lazy thinking. But there was little price to pay, because until around 2008, Russia was focused on its own internal problems, not its imperial aspirations. The southern arc from the Maghreb to the Levant was relatively stable, keeping the Mediterranean secure. China was still recovering from Maoist autarky and backwardness, and the United States had no competitors. But this geopolitical condition is no longer in place.
Moreover, Europe—thinking that security was free—aspired for more and extended commitments that it could not back. The tragic case of Ukraine is the latest and most telling example of this Lippmann gap at work. Kyiv asked to join the EU four days after the start of the full-scale Russian attack in February 2022, a completely understandable move on Ukraine’s part. The EU accepted the request and granted the status of candidate country to both Ukraine and Moldova a few months later. In June 2024, the EU agreed to begin negotiations on Ukraine’s membership.
These are grand commitments, reflecting idealistic aspirations that are undoubtedly shared by many Ukrainians and Europeans alike. But it is questionable whether the claims and lofty pronouncements are backed by actual material power—in particular, military capabilities and the will to use them. Europe conducts a highly insolvent foreign policy. The Lippmann gap is glaring, and Russia has been taking advantage of it since it first invaded Ukraine’s Crimea Peninsula in 2014. It is likely to continue to do so.
Europe’s insolvency is equally visible in the wider Mediterranean region, where it cannot stop the ongoing migration crisis despite its deleterious effects on domestic politics. In the Red Sea, the European response to the attacks by the Iran-backed Houthis has been negligible, even though around 40 percent of Asia-Europe trade, including critical energy imports, normally uses that route. Yet Europe is effectively avoiding any serious effort to restore security in this strategic maritime passage.
The commander of the EU Naval Force—composed of three ships and theoretically in charge of keeping the sea lane secure—has demonstrated Europe’s utopian views toward hard-power realities. “We are protecting global common goods like the freedom of navigation,” he stated in early April. Yet he also insisted that “we are not fighting the Houthis. … We have never injured any Houthis during all these actions that we have taken in that area.” This is the perfect encapsulation of the Lippmann gap: big claims, no effective power.
The solution to foreign-policy insolvency is to claim less and/or do more. But some of Europe’s foreign commitments are difficult to renounce at this point. In Ukraine’s case, for instance, Russia’s offensive makes a retreat of the European foreign-policy commitment highly dangerous. To reject such commitment would gift Russia the greatest strategic victory since its 1945 march on Berlin. Similarly, the importance of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean sea-lanes cannot be simply wished away; European economies depend on the safe passage of ships through those waters. And to ignore North Africa and the Levant will only result in greater uncontrolled migration into Europe.
The only path for Europe, therefore, is to do more—that is, to rapidly grow the power of its militaries to cover its foreign-policy commitments. To reach an arbitrary spending number, such as 3 percent or even 5 percent of GDP to defense expenditures, can no longer be claimed as a success. Those were numbers befitting an age of unearned security—when the highest aspiration was a political compromise within the NATO alliance that was acceptable to a European political class unwilling to make the case for defense to its own electorates. That age is gone.
To cover the gap, Europe—like the United States over the past few decades—will have to accept higher debt. Historically, as researchers who conducted a recent study by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy observed, military spending has rarely been financed by reductions in social expenditures. Rather, the most common path to rearming has been a combination of higher debt and higher taxes. A fiscally conservative preoccupation with a balanced budget is admirable—but in some historical moments, it becomes suicidal, as British disarmament in the 1930s demonstrated. Europe, and Germany in particular, would do well to lift its stringent fiscal rules. The danger, as Lippmann wrote in 1943, is that “spendthrift habits” lead to “the bankruptcy of a total war.”
Some of Europe’s complacency and idealism may be subsiding, and recent discussions in Berlin and Brussels to create new financing mechanisms for defense spending are encouraging. But the squabbling over the amount and specifics of such financing, including whether to issue common debt, is worrisome, because it ignores the urgency of rearming. Europe’s insolvency is not a future, far-off reality. There is already a large-scale war on Europe’s eastern frontier and festering instability on its southern one.
Finally, Europe’s security insolvency is not just Europe’s problem. It confronts the United States with an enormously difficult decision. Washington can be drawn into the problems created by Europe’s choices but in the process deepen its own Lippmann gap of global commitments and limited power. Or it can maintain U.S. solvency by lowering its commitments to solve Europe’s problems. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s grumbling in the now-famous Signal group chat that the United States was “bailing Europe out again” by attacking the Houthis matches percolating U.S. disappointment in Europe’s inability to address its own immediate problems.
The faster that Europeans rearm, a contemporary Lippmann would tell them, the better it will be not just for Europe, but also for the trans-Atlantic alliance.
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