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.
Here’s the problem: The task is impossible. At least for the next several years, Europe requires the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—an alliance that must be led by the United States—for its protection.
NATO’s 30 European members (in addition to their trans-Atlantic partners, the U.S. and Canada) 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. Although just three of the countries were fulfilling their pledge to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, 18 are on track to hit or surpass the mark this year.
But measured in dollars or euros, that isn’t nearly enough without America’s contribution. Of the $1.3 trillion that the 32 NATO nations combined spend on defense, more than half—$860 billion—is spent by the United States. True, the U.S. military has global missions, so much of that money is earmarked for defenses in Asia, the Middle East, South America, and so forth. But our global military is also a network; ships, planes, troops, and so forth, which might normally be deployed in one region, can be re-deployed to a different region. The entire budget could theoretically benefit Europe. But let’s say just half of the budget is devoted primarily to Europe (and that would include the extensive, very expensive military bases throughout Europe). That sum, $430 billion, is more than NATO’s next-dozen-biggest spenders combined.
Jana Puglierin, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me in a recent email, “To build an independent European defense force would take 10–15 years (if we would start now and go all in) and would cost a hell of a lot of money (more than the famous 2%).”
She added, “I struggle to understand how [this independent defense force] could be organized.”
This issue of organization—the O in NATO—is at least as crucial and complicated as money. NATO would be a loose assembly of nations, and not a unified alliance, were it not formally and explicitly led by the United States. NATO’s military leader, known as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, is, by charter (and to no member’s objection), a United States general officer.
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. Or, if there were plenty of such officers, who would decide which of them—which member nation of this independent European defense force—would rise to the top of the hierarchy? Would Germany submit to a French general? Would Poland answer a German’s orders? Would the position or top commander rotate from one country to another? If so, how would continuity be preserved?
These are not trivial questions. They go to the heart of the problem of creating and maintaining a military alliance. In NATO’s case, the position of SACEUR grew out of the Allied structure during World War II, an arrangement that seemed sensible to preserve in the war’s aftermath, as the Cold War got underway—and has seemed sensible ever since.
At certain times, this trans-Atlantic relationship has been strained, by events and by the domestic politics of certain member states. In the early 1960s, French President Charles de Gaulle pulled out of NATO’s military apparatus and even ordered the development of an independent French nuclear deterrent—not trusting an American president to “risk New York for Paris,” as he put it. 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.
It is a lofty goal. 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 (a time he hoped would be soon) 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.
I look forward to that day as well. Yet, as Garton Ash (a strong advocate of NATO) has acknowledged elsewhere, that day is not coming soon—and may even be more distant than he’d hoped in his book. As much as the European nations have come to the aid of Ukraine, their efforts would have failed without American weapons, training, logistics, and intelligence support. The same would be true in the event of aggression against the nations of Europe. It is good that the Europeans are more focused than they have been in a long time. But for better or worse, they will survive an existential threat only if NATO thrives.
