Europe doesn’t need Trump to form a western alliance – and one is already taking shape | Martin Kettle
An Atlantic alliance without the United States? It sounds like a contradiction in terms – Hamlet without the prince. Yet this is the improbable, disjunctive world we now inhabit. It is the one in which our children and grandchildren will live their lives. Like it or not, the systemic shock launched by Donald Trump is our new reality. Absolutely nothing about Trump’s latest phone call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday has changed that.
Europe’s scramble to respond to Trump’s return to power was driven initially by the urgency of maintaining support for Ukraine. Most of the focus was diplomatic: keeping US military aid and intelligence flowing, shoring up damaged channels between Washington and Kyiv, engaging quietly with both Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy to both encourage and deter, while moving very publicly to take up more of the security burden.
Aiding and arming Ukraine remains far and away the first item on Europe’s agenda as well as its most immediate goal. Hugging the US as close as possible continues to be fundamental, whatever Trump’s more cavalier critics may wish. There is no disputing that Trump caught the Europeans within Nato napping in ways that should never have occurred, and which reflect extremely badly on those responsible. For now, American power remains both indispensable and unreliable.
Even so, a more lasting and more Europe-heavy reconfiguration of the western alliance is also beginning to take shape. For now, most of what is being planned is either improvised from existing resources or aspirational. But the outline of a new Atlantic alliance can be discerned amid the diplomatic video conferences and high-minded pledges: a kind of Nato-minus supported by most of Europe, Britain included, potentially plus Canada, and with the role of the US shrouded in uncertainty.
Nato remains the basic framework, even if Trump decides to withdraw. This adaptive effort is being shaped by an improbable trio: a conservative German chancellor who spurns previous orthodoxy; a centrist French president who has just destroyed his own power base; and a UK prime minister equipped with the smallest British army since the Napoleonic wars. But Europe is nevertheless in their hands. They are the team we can put on the pitch.
The inevitability of change has been decisively reinforced by Trump’s 90-minute phone conversation with Putin on Tuesday. Any thought that Trump would somehow persuade Putin to reverse his policy on Ukraine – or even that Trump wanted to – was always a fantasy. Everything Putin has ever said about Ukraine attests that he regards it as Russian land. The conditions he put to Trump amount to a demand to leave Ukraine defenceless against Russian assault and annexation. That assault has continued unabated once again this week.
This puts Trump’s claims as a peacemaker on the spot, but the embarrassment, though useful to those trying to rein him in, is likely to be only temporary. Trump’s strategic wish is to withdraw US military and financial support for Ukraine, preferably amid something he can describe as a peace settlement that only his genius could have engineered. But his longer-term approach to Europe is simply an extension of this impatience towards Ukraine. His aim is to withdraw US support for European defence more generally.
The most significant thing that has happened in Europe this week, therefore, was not the Trump-Putin phone call. It was the vote by the Bundestag to loosen Germany’s constitutionally protected strict financial borrowing rules and, at the same time, to authorise a €500bn fund to boost economic growth, infrastructure projects and military spending. If Europe wants to carry its own defence burden, as it now claims, it has to fire up its own defence industries to scale. More than anything else, that means firing up the German defence industry. This is not an overnight process, but it can now start.
The vote was a triumph for the probable new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, who pushed it through the departing Bundestag on its final day. But it was also a genuine turn in the road for postwar Germany. Burdened by its history, Germany has consistently eschewed both large-scale borrowing and militarisation. Those taboos have now been busted, under the pressure of economic stagnation and the threat from Russia alike.
The internal consequences for 21st-century Germany will be major, assuming that parliament’s upper house endorses the changes this week. It would be mistaken to think the issue is now settled. Both the far right and far left, significantly boosted in the recent German general election, voted against Merz’s plans. Both will continue to see them as betrayals. If inflation rises, Merz’s grip will face fierce challenges.
But the consequences for Europe as a whole are likely to be equally powerful. Since the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, Germany has been the most important western European state where foreign policy looks reflexively towards Russia. Earlier in this century, under Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel, those links were always carefully protected. More recently, Putin has ensured that German policy, first under Olaf Scholz and now under Merz, has become more hostile.
Germany is still the necessary nation for any Europe-wide new political initiative. But now, almost at a stroke, the Bundestag vote has removed the longstanding excuse behind which some European states have been content to hide over the issue of Europe’s manifestly inadequate defence investment. The era of inward-turned European denial about Russia and about defence spending has ended, and the fresh air of truth is breezing through windows that were once firmly sealed.
This is a healthy and overdue moment, not least because the danger is real, but also because it gives this continent a more unifying purpose than it has had since the cold war. But there can be no disputing the risks. European history is full of terrifying examples of international alliances that have not survived contact with a determined enemy. One lesson of the 2020s is that things many people had assumed had been consigned to history – among them epidemics, nationalism, territorial land grabs and charismatic tyrants – have returned in force.
Today, confronted with an aggressive tyranny and faced with an isolationist US, the nation states of Europe, with Canada, are attempting to uphold the moral and political recasting of the world that took place after 1945. There are echoes here of the conflicts that began in 1914, and again in 1939. Then, too, Europe found itself in wars (which included major Canadian involvement) from which an isolationist US stood aside. In both cases, the US proved the essential nation to victory and the postwar order. Today, though, the US marches to an altogether more unreliable drum.
