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.
As an American living in Europe and who has also lived for a long time in China, I wish for Europe to become the new beacon for realizing Enlightenment values.
Europe has so much talent (education), wealth (quality of life/HDI), and cultural and historical resources. The issue is dependence and decadence that has stalled the true strategic and economic unification of this great continent. I hope that Europeans start to understand that they need each other, and that Greeks, Germans, and even Hungarians have a lot more common values than differences. Will they recognize that these values are worth some compromises? I hope Trump and Vance are aggressively forcing all of us with Enlightenment values to awaken to this. May we learn, commune, and create a more reasonable and morally coherent society and culture together.
This article gets it mostly right but is too pessimistic about Europe and too optimistic about the US. Macron announced recently that 2/3 of the intelligence Ukraine relies on is French. The new weapons systems that Ukraine is acquiring are British and German. It’s still insufficient but we are stepping up and getting there. The other point is that US might is not a given, and that it has become malevolent.
US might is not a given: the AI bubble is going to burst eventually and with it the US stock market. Trump has massively raised public expenditure and decreased taxes. Meanwhile everybody is quietly unloading USD and US treasury bills. The independence of the Fed is under threat and the central banks of all the countries Trump has threatened (basically, all those that count) might choose not to help the US out of a recession. All signs point to a US economic meltdown - and Europe has a strategic interest to make it as bad as possible. The domestic unrest in the US is also turning increasingly violent and Trump has started to use the military to control civilians.
The US is malevolent: the idea that US bases protect us against Russia seems more and more doubtful and arguably they are now about as good an idea as Russian bases to protect us against the US. Greenland and the military interventions in Venezuela and elsewhere are a warning. Who is to say that Trump would not try to kidnap a European leader and replace him or her with a local collaborator, as he did in Venezuela?
So in the short term yes, we should not kick out the US as long as the benefits outweigh the risks. In the medium term clearly we need to.