President Donald Trump holds a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron on February 24, 2025, in the Oval Office of the White House. Europe cannot attain the military and economic strength it needs without the United States. (Shutterstock/Molly Riley/The White House)

Why Europe Doesn’t Need Less America, It Needs More Europe

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A European strategy that hedges with Russia and China or “goes it alone” will ultimately leave the continent weak and isolated.

During this week’s NATO Force Sourcing Conference, military leaders coordinated allied national force contributions into the alliance’s command structure. The United States is reportedly set to detail President Donald Trump’s plans to accelerate the withdrawal of troops from Europe, which will go beyond the 5,000-troop reduction in Germany. 

These events spell a stark reality that the Europeans have long debated in theory: build genuine defense capacity and accept that reliance on America isn’t permanent. Yet from NATO’s front lines—Vilnius, Warsaw, Bucharest—to the powerhouse capitals of London, Paris, and Berlin, a new self-defeating debate emerged: America or Europe? 

The new debate treats America and Europe as if they were competitors rather than pillars of the same alliance. Some Europeans suggest the European Union (EU) should go it alone, seek friends elsewhere, or wait out Trump, hoping for business as usual. But framing transatlantic security as a zero-sum choice between America and Europe misunderstands both the threat and the solution.

The EU’s ambitions for strategic autonomy stretch back decades, from the Maastricht Treaty’s Common Foreign and Security Policy in 1992 to Federica Mogherini’s 2016 Global Strategy. After Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, these discussions expanded to security and defense, with French President Emmanuel Macron’s push for “European sovereignty” and the EU’s 2022 Strategic Compass for Security and Defense. 

But framing these ambitions as a necessary response to Trump’s questioning of American commitments obscures a more uncomfortable truth: more than 35 years after the Cold War, the European Union, with its $20-trillion combined economy, still cannot defend itself against Russia, whose economy is about 10 times smaller. 

As Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said: “The paradox is that 500 million Europeans are asking 300 million Americans to........

© The National Interest