CIPHER BRIEF REPORTING – As NATO leaders gather in The Hague this week, they face questions that not long ago would have seemed unthinkable: Can Europe defend itself against a growing threat at its doorstep, as its most powerful member wavers in its commitment to the alliance?
That NATO power is the United States, and since President Donald Trump’s second inaugural, the U.S. has made sharp shifts towards Moscow and away from its longtime European allies. President Trump said in March that the U.S. could not guarantee its support for any NATO nations deemed to be spending too little on defense; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the U.S. is no longer the “primary guarantor” of European security; and the Trump administration has shown a warmth towards the Kremlin unseen anywhere in Western Europe.
These developments have led to a sea change in European security and defense policy – what Lt. Gen. Sean Clancy, head of the European Union’s military committee, recently called a “global reset.” NATO members have agreed ahead of this week’s summit to boost defense spending to 5% of GDP, a huge jump from a 2% target that many in the alliance had struggled to meet. That change is an acknowledgement of both the growing Russian menace and Trump’s threat to withhold support from NATO nations who miss the 5 % mark.
Trump has also made clear that the U.S. plans to reduce its financial and troop commitments to NATO, and he has shown disdain for the alliance’s European members. Last week, Trump argued that the 5 % NATO target wouldn't apply to the U.S. – “I don’t think we should,” he said, “but I think they should.” And as Europe worked a diplomatic channel to bring Iran to the negotiating table, Trump said Friday that "Iran doesn't want to speak to Europe. They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help in this one."
“Europe is facing a decision point, a crossroads,” Doug Lute, a former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, told The Cipher Brief. “And the decision is, will Europe stand up as one of the poles in this new multipolar international system?”
Another former U.S. Ambassador to NATO, Kurt Volker, said he believes the U.S. commitment to Europe will remain strong, but only if NATO’s European members make good on their new pledges to boost defense spending.
“What I see is a tremendous U.S. push to strengthen NATO,” Amb. Volker said. “The U.S. has responsibilities globally and especially in Asia and wants to be able to dedicate more resources there. But it can only dedicate more resources and attention if Europe steps up to do more of its own role in securing Europe and in preparing for the defense of Europe, which they are doing.”
The question, then, for Europe, as the NATO leaders meet: When it comes to defense and security, can Europe go it alone? Or, as Amb. Lute put it, “Can [Europe] assemble the hard power it needs in a rapid, emergency basis under the pressure of time? Can it assemble the hard power required to stand by itself?”
What Europe is saying – and doing
Recent European pledges and military budgets would suggest that at a minimum, the European “reset” is underway – and that the continent is taking significant first steps to bolster its own defenses.
To win consensus on the new 5 % spending target, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte split the commitments into 3.5% for core defense and 1.5% for “defense-related” items including infrastructure and cybersecurity.
5 % may seem a small figure, but it represents a quantum leap for the alliance. Today only 23 of the alliance’s 32 members have met the previous 2% target. (NATO estimates that the U.S. spent around 3.4% of its GDP on defense in 2024.) The percentages of defense spending were higher during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union posed a clear and regular threat to Western Europe from its side of the Iron Curtain. The numbers dropped precipitously after the Soviet state met its demise in 1991.
“After the fall of the Soviet Union, everybody cashed in and defense spending in Europe fell,” Amb. Volker said. Today, he added, “everyone recognizes that Europe has taken too much of a peace dividend and they're not prepared. So that's why they're willing to agree to this 5 % target now.”
NATO has also pledged to boost its surface-to-air defense capabilities, an area in which the alliance has depended heavily on the U.S. And in March, the European Union took steps of its own to boost military spending, creating a 150 billion Euro ($170 billion) “combat readiness” fund for weapons procurement.
Meanwhile, that 1.5 % allotment for infrastructure and cybersecurity is an “underappreciated component” of the European commitment, according to Rear Admiral (Ret.) Mark Montgomery, a senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation (CCTI) at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. In a piece for The Cipher Brief titled “Nato’s Critical 1.5 %,” Montgomery said those funds would be “fundamental to NATO’s ability to project power and sustain forces to fight and win wars.”
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“I actually see a lot of very good progress,” former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Philip Breedlove told The Cipher Brief. He said that a recent tour of eight European countries had convinced him of a broad commitment to spending for “long-term readiness” on defense.
“Most capitals have determined [that] Mr. Putin is not a partner, he's an enemy,” Gen. Breedlove said. “He has now three times amassed an army and marched across internationally recognized borders and invaded his neighbors, and we're going to have to deal with him.”
Beyond the alliance-wide hikes in defense spending, several European countries have made dramatic moves to bolster their own militaries. Earlier this month the British Defense Ministry announced an overhaul of its procurement approach, shifting from a focus on heavy armor to smaller, high-tech weaponry. Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz has promised to build “the strongest conventional army in Europe,” and earlier this year Germany made its first permanent foreign deployment since World War II, stationing a 5,000-strong brigade in Lithuania.
“Germany's economy has awakened to this new military-industrial demand signal, especially under new Chancellor Merz,” Amb. Lute said. “There are step-by-step indicators that Europe has changed its perception of the threat, the direct threat to Europe, but also this change in the transatlantic relationship.”
For all the pledges, problems abound. Experts warn that a morass of national and continent-wide regulations may thwart or delay efforts to build a potent European defense force. Overall strategy and standards have traditionally been set by NATO commanders, but national military budgets, planning and purchasing are the purview of individual nations. And Amb. Lute warned that European political swings may also hamper efforts to jump-start military production.
“The government [in Germany] can't simply demand that Rheinmetall, for example, begin to produce where it hasn't produced in the last 30 years,” he said. “You actually have to enter into the capital marketplace. And that counts on a significant and reliable year-after-year demand signal, which has not been the case over the last three decades.”
Geography matters
The most concrete signs of a continent on a war footing can be found along the eastern edges of NATO, in places where proximity to Russia has driven defense policy. While Spain, which sits in southwest Europe, far from any Russian border, spent only 1.3 % on defense last year, Poland – which shares a long border with Ukraine as well as a powerful enmity towards Moscow – has nearly reached the 5 % threshold already. Meanwhile, NATO’s two biggest military spenders per capita are the Baltic nations of Estonia and Lithuania; Latvia is close behind.
“The most fundamental observation here is that geography still counts,” Amb. Lute said. “So the closer you are with a land border to Russia and now a newly aggressive, revanchist, neo-imperialist Putin's Russia, the more these hard defensive measures count.”
Such measures reach beyond military spending. This month NATO held its annual Baltops military exercises, with troops from 20 NATO nations including newly-minted alliance members Sweden and Finland. This year’s drills carried two main aims, NATO officials said: to test NATO’s readiness for a Russian attack, and put on a show of force that might deter the Kremlin from future aggression.
Meanwhile, five European nations—Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania—are withdrawing from the international treaty that bans the use or production of anti-personnel landmines, again citing the Russia threat. And Poland has gone so far as to request that NATO nuclear weapons be stationed on its soil.
“Doesn't surprise me at all,” Gen. Breedlove said of the landmine decision and Poland’s remarks about nuclear weapons.
“Remember, these nations now are really trying to decide, is America a reliable ally or not?” he said. “And if they're going to have to go it alone, they're going to have to take some pretty tough measures to make sure that they can hold, should Russia do what they seem to be continuing to do…and they're going to start taking these more drastic measures because you just can't bet your national sovereignty and existence on a hope.”
The missing pieces in a European defense
A recent report from the International Institute for Strategic Studies estimates that it would take Europe 25 years and nearly $1 trillion to replace U.S. military support if Washington withdrew from the continent.
The report found that key gaps for NATO members would involve aircraft, naval forces, and command infrastructure. NATO officials have also warned that current air defenses may be inadequate to protect against the range of threats that have featured prominently in the Ukraine war – high-tech drones, missiles, and fighter aircraft.
The IISS report makes clear – and many experts agree – that for all the commitments to boost European defenses, the continent remains heavily reliant on U.S. capabilities.
“Where America is absolutely the key is all of the enablers, all of the things that make an army potent – long-range precise fires, deep technical intelligence, developing kill chains and target folders in order to strike,” Gen. Breedlove said. He said he sees minimal immediate risk to Europe, given a badly weakened Russian military, but that in the longer term, the Europeans will need to manufacture or obtain a long list of high-end hardware on their own.
“There are a few things that really only America can do,” Gen. Breedlove said, listing rapid aerial transport, high-performing air defenses such as Patriot missile batteries, and sophisticated intelligence systems. “They really don't have the kind of strategic lift that America brings.”
“We're not talking about tank brigades or ships at sea and so forth,” Amb. Lute said. “We're talking about things like a high-end missile and air defense. Think of the Patriot missile system, which really doesn't have a European rival…the intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, and in particular, space-based ISR capabilities. We're talking about air-to-air refueling and that strategic mobility, which is the combination of air-to-air refueling and large-body transport aircraft. So systems like that, for which Europe has relied on the United States, are going to have to become increasingly European owned and operated.”
Lute and others say a fundamental problem for Europe will be that even if the will and funding are there, none of these systems can be produced quickly. It may be that in the short term, while manufacturers in Europe reboot, they will need to spend their money on purchases from American defense firms.
Amb. Volker said he remains optimistic about Europe’s defense future, provided it maintains its current level of resolve.
Filling the gap “is not rocket science, it's easy to do,” he said. “Europe needs to be strategic about this.”
Volker said that while those high-end “enablers” should be a long-term aspiration, Europe’s near-term focus should be on more nuts-and-bolts defense capabilities — troops, armor, artillery, ammunition, aircraft, and so forth.
Ultimately, he said, while some countries will reach the 5 % spending target more quickly than others, the consensus on the gravity of the threat is a good sign.
“The fact that they are agreeing to the target means that there is a recognition that it's needed,” Volker said. “That means there will also be movement toward that target. It will be an iterative process as to how we get there. But no one in Europe is contesting the notion that we need to get there.”
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