Europe Basically Can’t Defend Itself if the U.S. Pulls Out of NATO

Fearing that Donald Trump will pull out of NATO if he’s reelected president, and alarmed that the U.S. Congress is close to cutting off military aid to Ukraine, many Europeans are discussing the possibility of building their own independent defense force to deter and, if necessary, stave off an expansionary Russia. NATO’s 30 European members have been spending more money on defense since 2014, when Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea, and even more since 2022, when he invaded all of Ukraine. According to NATO’s website, “SACEUR is responsible for the overall command of NATO military operations.” This includes planning those operations, analyzing their requirements, identifying what forces are needed to fill those requirements, requesting those forces from NATO nations’ political and military authorities, managing all the resulting resources, running the training facilities, having regular access to all military chiefs, serving as NATO’s senior public spokesman—and, in the event of war, commanding the entire war effort in a campaign to “preserve or restore the security of Alliance territory.” For better or worse, not many European generals have the experience or know-how to perform all of these tasks. When President Trump made noises about the wisdom of alliances in general and quitting NATO in particular, French President Emmanuel Macron declared a goal of “strategic autonomy” for European defense. Timothy Garton Ash, the journalist-historian who has chronicled the reemergence of European democracy as the Soviet empire was collapsing and in the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, recently wrote in the Guardian, “As Putin and Trump threaten from east and west, Europe must stand up for itself.” At the end of his splendid and stirring 2023 book Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Garton Ash looked forward to the day when a revivified Europe could provide for its own defense, leaving the United States to pursue its interests in and contain its threats to Asia Pacific.