From Strategic Autonomy to Defence Alliance: Trump's betrayal pushes Europe towards full collective sovereignty

From strategic autonomy to defence union

‘My absolute priority will be to strengthen Europe as quickly as possible so that, step by step, we can truly achieve independence from the United States,’ said future German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in a recent statement. In a situation where the Trump administration is indifferent to Europe’s fate and builds relations with Russia over its head, Europe must create a defence alliance and Germany should cooperate with Britain and France on nuclear weapons. Merz insists that decisive steps need to be taken in the coming months, and suggests that discussions at the NATO summit in June could take on an entirely new form. Admiral James Stavridis, the former supreme commander of NATO's Combined Forces in Europe, told CNN: ‘We may be witnessing the last days of NATO... as well as the emergence of a European Treaty Organisation’.

Merz's statement is the most decisive response yet by a European politician in response to the Trump administration's radical revision of the fundamental principles of American foreign policy. However, these words are not merely Merz's personal opinion. Since the beginning of last week, European leaders have been engaged in intensive consultations on ways to reduce their dependence on the US as quickly as possible. Ursula von der Leyen's ReArm Europe defence plan, unveiled yesterday, which calls for an $800 billion increase in defence spending by EU countries over the next four years, is also aimed at this.

The paradox is that Germany has traditionally acted as a pro-Atlantic force in continental Europe, restraining the desire for autonomy from the United States, which was primarily driven by France. The topic of Europe's separation from its main Cold War ally has been debated for decades. The concept of ‘strategic autonomy’ appeared in European Council documents back in 2013, predominantly in reference to the development of the European military industry. The first Trump presidency gave the concept new urgency when he labelled Europe a ‘free rider’ for allegedly failing to contribute enough to Euro-Atlantic security. In 2017, as part of the push towards ‘strategic autonomy’, the European Defence Fund (EDF) and the Permanent Structured Cooperation Programme (PESCO) were created to ensure that European countries work together on arms and security.

Since the late 2010s, President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen became key advocates for strategic autonomy. Over time, the concept expanded beyond defence to include the economy, energy, and cyberspace, though this broader scope made it increasingly vague. It reflected Europe’s growing ambitions and its struggle to position itself between the US and China, yet it was never seen as an alternative to the transatlantic alliance – until now.

The United States has been sceptical of European strategic autonomy while simultaneously demanding that NATO’s European allies increase their defence spending. For Washington, pushing Europe to take the lead in countering Russia is a pragmatic strategy, allowing the US to focus on its rivalry with China without increasing its own defence budget. However, the anti-liberal fervour of Trump and his team has transformed this pragmatic strategy into outright hostility towards Europe. On a values level, Trump’s administration appears to sympathise far more with Putin than with its strategic allies. As a result, instead of reconfiguring and strengthening the alliance, Trump is steering it toward collapse, an outcome that was never envisioned by the architects of America’s pivot to the East.

The new reality turns the phrase ‘strategic autonomy’ on its head. It now means that Europe must build its own security system and safeguard its interests independently. If Merz's position is supported by a number of major European powers – as seems likely – Europe will take a step towards a fundamentally new positioning on the world stage as an independent geopolitical force and acquiring a level of collective sovereignty that it has never had before.

Scale of dependence

The reality Europe faces today is that it is currently unable to independently defend Ukraine or provide it with effective military assistance, or even to defend itself without US support. While the combined GDP of ‘greater’ Europe (the EU and the European members of NATO) is almost equal to that of the US, it has no tools to realise its political interests. To be more precise, it has such tools, but only in the realm of ‘soft power’, which, unlike in previous decades, is now insufficient. It is Europe's lack of ‘hard power’ and the resulting dependence on the United States that Putin refers to in his frequent remarks about Europe's lack of autonomy.

As we have previously written, from its inception, the NATO bloc has been and remains an asymmetric alliance in which Europe bears a significantly smaller share of the defence burden at around 30% (→ Re:Russia: Europe's Strategic Autonomy). The flip side of this has not only been that American generals exercise de facto command over NATO forces – leading the Supreme Allied Command in Europe, the Air Command (AIRCOM), the Land Command (LANDCOM), and the Joint Force Command in Naples (JFC Naples) – but also that NATO forces are structurally dependent on the American military machine.

In military terms, as retired US Major General Gordon Davis notes in a commentary for the Centre for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), European armies are heavily reliant on US strategic command-and-control systems, which enable multi-tiered operations using space, cyber, and strategic aviation capabilities. European NATO forces depend on the US for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets, including unmanned systems, as well as for long-range precision strike capabilities. France and the UK have their own SCALP and Storm Shadow cruise missiles, but not enough long-range systems, and, according to Matthew Saville of the Royal United Services Institute for Defence Studies (RUSI) in an interview with The Economist, the UK's Storm Shadow missiles rely on US geodata for guidance.

European allies also lack sufficient tactical forces, including artillery, engineering, intelligence and electronic warfare. One of the most pressing issues for Europe is the lack of integrated air and missile defence systems, as well as the lack of munitions and industrial capacity to produce them. Implementation of the 2022 EU Capability Development Plan, which is designed to address some of these shortcomings, remains in its early stages of implementation.

Furthermore, Europe is currently unable to replace the American nuclear umbrella. The combined British and French arsenal (about 400 warheads) is dwarfed by Russia's more than 1,700 deployed warheads. No European country possesses a nuclear triad, which limits their nuclear deterrence capabilities. If Trump withdraws from UK-US Mutual Defence Agreement, would need to join forces in developing strategic delivery systems and expand their arsenals by at least 100-200 additional warheads to compensate for the loss of B61 tactical nuclear weapons that the US currently has deployed in Europe, writes British security expert James Fennell in a commentary for CEPA.

The price of autonomy

The paradox is that even today, the combined defence spending of European NATO countries and Canada ($485 billion, according to NATO Secretary General Rutte) is the largest in the world, second only to that of the US ($884 billion, according to the approved defence budget for 2024), and one and a half times that of China ($310 billion in 2023, according to an estimate by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, SIPRI). To spend so much and yet not be able to control the military capabilities created while in a state of political disenfranchisement, which Trump and Vance have blatantly thrown in Europeans' faces, is nonsensical.

In order to create sufficient European defence potential, according to Bloomberg Economics experts, it will be necessary to increase annual military expenditures by about $300-350 billion or bring them to the level of 3.5% of GDP. At this level, ‘greater’ Europe's defence expenditures would rival those of the United States, necessitating a fundamental shift in NATO’s asymmetric structure. With Trump revising the alliance’s core principles, such a shift seems almost inevitable. However, even if another president were in the White House, such a dramatic spending increase would not make sense as a mere additional contribution to NATO’s military infrastructure. The era of an asymmetric North Atlantic alliance appears to be over, and NATO’s architecture no longer aligns with Europe’s economic power and political influence.

To build a fully-fledged great power defence capability, Europe would need to invest approximately $3 trillion over the next decade, according to Bloomberg Economics. Some analysts suggest temporarily raising military spending to 4-5% of GDP, as during the Cold War, to match the current critical security situation in which Europe finds itself, writes The Economist in its editorial commentary ‘How Europe must respond as Trump and Putin smash the post-war order’. Echoing this, Sam Green, director of CEPA's Democratic Resilience Programme, writes that such massive spending should not be treated as a mere increase in current spending, but as an investment in Europe's future for decades to come: a strategic investment that will determine the kind of Europe in which the next generations of Europeans will live. This perspective aligns with proposals from several European leaders advocating for large-scale borrowing to finance additional defence spending.

It is also worth noting that the European defence alliance proposed by Friedrich Merz could serve as a crucial tool for addressing several of Europe’s pressing issues. It would provide a second pillar of European unity, alongside the EU, ensuring stability even if political divisions deepen within the bloc, as seen with Hungary and Slovakia. Such an alliance could also offer a platform to limit or reform the EU’s veto rule, which has become a major obstacle to decision-making after the bloc’s expansion. Additionally, it would reunite Europe with Britain, and Ukraine could naturally become an associated member from the outset.

If the European defence alliance eventually includes all EU and NATO countries, its total population would reach around 590 million people (including Ukraine and Canada), its GDP would be roughly 12 times larger than Russia’s, and its military budget (at 3.5% of GDP) would be four times greater than Russia’s – even if Putin forces Russians into austerity and continues spending 10% of GDP on defence.

Early last week, European leaders attempted to agree on a general spending plan under President Macron’s leadership (→ Re:Russia: Europe's Black Swan) and later discussed it at an emergency summit in London on Sunday. The ReArm Europe plan, presented by Ursula von der Leyen, aligns with these calculations. It calls for an increase in European defence spending by approximately 1.5% of GDP (partly through higher national budget deficits), adding €650 billion in additional defence expenditures over the coming years, as well as €150 billion in extra market borrowing. In an explanation of the plan, von der Leyen stresses that these funds should enhance ‘pan-European defence capabilities’ such as air and missile defence, artillery systems, missiles and munitions, drones and counter-drone systems, as well as cybersecurity and military mobility capabilities. Notably, these areas align precisely with the critical dependencies of NATO’s European forces on the US, as previously outlined.

The Urgent Eastern Question

The shift toward a new European security architecture does not necessarily mean an immediate departure from NATO. Rather, it could follow a dual-track approach, where combat-ready European armed forces are developed alongside NATO’s traditional European infrastructure and in coordination with it, but on principles of autonomy. Building a full-fledged European military infrastructure will take many years in any case. However, the first stage of this process could be the formation of a ‘coalition of the willing’ to ensure Ukraine’s security after the conflict is resolved – the key topic of the emergency summit in London. This coalition would aim not only to deter potential Russian aggression against Ukraine but also to secure the Baltic region. Its creation is an urgent necessity for Europe.

To prevent a quick Russian breakthrough in the Baltic States, Bruegel experts, in their report ‘Defending Europe without the United States’, estimate that a minimum of 1,400 tanks, 2,000 BMPs and 700 artillery pieces (155 mm howitzers and multiple rocket launchers) would be required. This exceeds the combined land forces of France, Germany, Italy, and the UK. Additionally, to sustain combat operations for at least 90 days, Europe needs a stockpile of at least 1 million 155mm shells. The continent must also expand logistics capabilities and enhance its missile, drone, communications, and intelligence warfare potential, which includes ramping up long-range drone production to around 2,000 units per year.

At the NATO summit in Madrid in 2022, the allies agreed to create a tiered rapid response system, ensuring that 100,000 troops could be deployed within 10 days, 200,000 within 30 days, and 500,000 within 180 days. However, these plans remain unfulfilled. With the threat of US withdrawal from NATO, Europe now faces the urgent need to increase troop numbers by more than 300,000, Bruegel notes. Europe, including the UK, currently has 1.47 million active military personnel, but as Belfer Centre expert Richard Hooker highlights in his report ‘Building a stronger Europe’, many large European armies have only a single brigade in their land forces, and some air force units exist only nominally.

Richard Hooker argues that Europe must restructure NATO’s current ‘America-centric’ command system, which he considers outdated. Currently, responsibility for NATO’s eastern flank lies with Joint Force Command Brunssum (JFCBS) in the Netherlands, led by a German or Italian general. Hooker suggests relocating this command to Poland, where it would be led by a Polish general. Moreover, with Finland and Sweden joining NATO, the northern flank has gained strategic importance, necessitating the creation of a major command structure led by a Swedish general, according to Hooker.

Regardless of the specific approach, establishing a combat-ready and fully operational military force to defend the Baltic region and potentially Ukraine in the near future could become Europe’s first real experience of collective military development without US involvement, while still coordinating with NATO’s European forces.