Last week, Die Zeit, the German magazine on whose board of publishers I serve, asked some of the world’s leading thinkers to answer a deceptively simple question: Should Europe break with the United States? Here is my answer.
A few weeks ago, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and a host of other European nations sent troops to Greenland to protect the Danish territory against… the United States. Even a year ago, as Donald Trump took office for the second time, it would have been hard to imagine such a turn of events. But the realization that an old political order is breaking apart, and that we are unlikely to return to the relative calm of the postwar years anytime soon, has slowly been dawning on political leaders desperate to keep living in the past.
That practically forces the question of whether Europe should break up with the United States. But natural though it may be to ask that question at this moment, it betrays naivety about the sorry state of the continent—and risks pushing it in the wrong direction.
It is clear that Germany, in particular, can no longer rely on the United States the way it once did. The extent to which European countries outsourced their military security to America in the postwar era relied on the knowledge that, despite all of their differences, both Democratic and Republican presidents would value NATO and tolerate the EU. Given the hostility that Trump—and, crucially, other parts of the rising right—harbor towards NATO and the EU that reliance has become a liability.
But by the same token it is clear that Europe can’t fully break up with the United States. For all of the understandable rage that Europeans have towards the Trump administration over his flirtations with the Kremlin, for example, it is still American arms and intelligence reports that are making it possible for Ukraine to keep defending itself against the Russian invasion. And which paragons of European values should substitute for the United States if Europe decided to make a clean break with Uncle Sam: Narendra Modi in Delhi? Xi Jinping in Beijing? Vladimir Putin in Russia? MBS in Saudi Arabia? The mullahs in Iran?
The answer to Europe’s weakness is therefore twofold. First, the continent must work with the countries that actually exert power and influence in the world in a less sentimental way. This of course includes being willing to deal with uncomfortable partners even if they don’t fully share Europe’s values. But it also includes trying to sustain the increasingly rocky alliance with the United States, Europe’s most longstanding partner. NATO may well break apart over the next three years; but Europe should do what it can to forestall, not to provoke, that outcome.
Second, Europe must at the same time do everything it can to get back on its own two feet. The last months have made it painfully obvious that a strong yet declining economy combined with an extensive and ever-increasing bureaucracy are not enough to have a real voice in the world. If Europe wants more autonomy, the key is not breaking with Washington; it is being able to provide military security on its own continent, to generate genuine economic growth, and most of all to play a real role in the technologies of the future, from electric cars to artificial intelligence.
The real obstacles to Europe’s ability to shape its own fate have nothing to do with the people in charge in some faraway capital. They are rooted in the lack of ambition and imagination that has slowly come to characterize contemporary Europe. After a disastrous first half of the 20th century, the model onto which the western part of the continent stumbled in the wake of the Second World War has worked incomparably better. This makes it tempting to stick with it even as it has come to be increasingly ill-adapted to the changing times. But if Europe wants to play a leading role in the world—or simply to stand up for its own values on its own continent—it must recognize that this model has now run out of road. For Europe to thrive in a new historical era, the continent must adopt a new vision for its own future.
Promises of breaking with the United States are as tempting as they are easy. But if Europe doesn’t get its act together first, reducing its reliance on the White House only means increasing its reliance on the Kremlin or the CCP. The only way for Europe to take its fate into its own hands is to awaken from its slumbers and resolve that it no longer wants to be a museal continent.