Europe Can’t “Trump-Proof” Itself
Europe Can’t “Trump-Proof” Itself
Following the U.S. election, European foreign policy experts are reviving ideas about strategic autonomy from 2016. They fail to understand how much has changed in the last eight years.
During the past year, as the reality gradually dawned on them that Donald Trump might be re-elected as U.S. president, European foreign policy analysts coalesced around the conventional wisdom that Europe must unite and “Trump-proof” itself. This new consensus, which essentially repeats arguments for European “strategic autonomy” that took place after Trump was elected the first time, represents an extraordinary collective failure. Europe’s foreign policy experts have proved unable to think clearly about what has changed in Europe in the last eight years or about the relationship between their own security concerns and those of Ukraine.
The election of Trump in 2016 created radical uncertainty about the U.S. security guarantee to Europe, which went back to the creation of NATO in 1949. While some Atlanticists insisted that NATO countries should hug the United States close—and make concessions like increasing defense spending and buying more American weapons to placate Trump—“post-Atlanticists” urged Europeans to end their dependence on the United States for their own security. If the former tendency was embodied by Poland (where the far-right Law and Justice Party was in power), the latter was embodied by France, and Germany was somewhere in the middle.
Post-Atlanticists have responded to the possibility of a second Trump presidency by simply reiterating the need for strategic autonomy, even if they don’t always use that term. But the experience of the first Trump administration suggests that Europeans are unlikely to unite in response to his re-election. In fact, postwar history as a whole suggests that Transatlantic rifts are always also intra-European rifts. Think, for example, of the period leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, when Europe was divided between what U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called an “old” Europe of France and Germany and a “new” Europe of Central and Eastern European countries.
The situation has also changed since Trump’s first term in ways that make the idea of strategic autonomy even more problematic than it was before. To begin with, the United Kingdom—which, as its leading role in the war in Ukraine has again illustrated, is a key secondary security provider for Europe—is now outside the European Union. (The referendum on membership in the EU took place in the summer of 2016, but it actually left the EU in 2020.) This makes it difficult to see how the EU can replace NATO as the main European security institution, even if Keir Starmer’s Labour government is now attending EU meetings as if the United Kingdom were still a member state.
Perhaps even more important than Brexit, however, is the rise of the far right within the EU itself. When foreign policy analysts speak vaguely of “Europe,” it is never quite clear whether they mean the EU or something bigger that includes the UK—but even if they just mean the EU, it is still far from being the unitary actor that many of them imagine it is, in part because they want it to be one. Worse than this, they tend to ignore political developments in Europe itself. In particular, they seem to talk about the problem of European security as if there weren’t also far-right governments in Europe (with the acknowledged exception of Viktor Orbán’s in Hungary). Today, the right holds power not just in “new” Europe but also in “old” Europe, including Italy and the Netherlands.
The rise of the far right makes it even more unlikely that Europeans will unite against Trump in his second term. It also means that it no longer even makes sense to think in those terms. For most European countries, including Germany, strategic autonomy effectively means exchanging dependence on the United States for dependence on each other—and especially on France. Even without the possibility of a far-right government in France, this was not an especially attractive proposition. But now that there is a good chance that Marine Le Pen could win the presidential election in 2027, it would be extremely short-sighted. As a result, the debate among Europe’s foreign policy experts has become increasingly detached from reality, degenerating into little more than endlessly repeating mantras about how Europe should “speak with one voice.”
The other thing that has changed since Trump’s first term, of course, is the war in Ukraine. But in addition to failing to think through the strategic implications of political developments in Europe, analysts have been unable to differentiate between the security of EU member states and European members of NATO on the one hand and the defense of Ukraine on the other. By simply insisting that the two are inseparable, they have actively prevented a more precise and pragmatic debate about what Europeans could and should do if Trump were to be re-elected.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the conventional wisdom—more assumed than actively demonstrated—has been that if Vladimir Putin were to prevail, he would attack the Baltic states or Poland. In reality, though hawks often claim they know exactly what Putin’s intentions are, the Kremlin is something of a black box. And even if Putin did want to invade a country like Estonia, undeterred by the U.S. security guarantee to NATO countries, the war in Ukraine has demonstrated that his military is in no position to do so.
Meanwhile, if Ukraine was unable to defeat Russia with U.S. support, it certainly will not be able to do so without U.S. support. Given the possibility that Trump was going to be re-elected, the responsible thing for European foreign policy analysts to have done would have been to think about how they could have brought the war in Ukraine to an end under the Biden administration. While the terms may not have been optimal, they would likely be better than the deal with Russia that they themselves said Trump was likely to reach. Instead, insisting that the only way the war could end was with the defeat of Russia, they did all they could to shut down a debate about what a peace deal might look like.
Now that Trump has been re-elected, Europeans find themselves in an impossible position. Having insisted that European security as a whole depends on a Ukrainian victory, they have a choice between continuing to support Ukraine even as the United States threatens to withdraw its support—which would not just be dangerous and futile but also risks angering the Trump administration and in turn endangering the U.S. security guarantee—and abandoning Ukraine to its fate in exactly the way they said they would never do. Either way, the credibility of Europe’s foreign policy experts is shot.
Hans Kundnani is an adjunct professor at New York University. He previously directed the Europe program at the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, better known as Chatham House.
