Europe is in its greatest danger since the 1940s. As Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine enters its fourth year, the Trump administration’s policy shifts mean that Europe suddenly faces the prospect of war with Russia without the full support of the United States. Washington is now negotiating a possible peace directly with Moscow and Kiev, without the involvement of other Europeans. It also appears willing to strike a deal largely on Russia’s terms.
Furthermore, the Trump administration is demanding that all security guarantees for Ukraine be provided by European countries without U.S. support, and is signaling uncertainty about its willingness to uphold NATO’s Article 5 commitments to help defend Europe in the event of an attack. It is a state of affairs that Europe’s armed forces are ill-equipped to deal with.
Europeans could, of course, blame this development entirely on Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump – and many do. But ultimately, Europeans must acknowledge that they are now paying the price for their own geopolitical ignorance.
History abounds with examples of leaders who turned a blind eye to geopolitics, and their nations ultimately paid a high price for it. French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte ignored the challenges of geography when he invaded Russia in 1812, and his army’s devastating losses there contributed to his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo three years later. Nazi Germany made a similar mistake, precipitating its own downfall when it invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, exposing itself to a two-pronged war.
On a grand strategic level, China’s Ming Dynasty made one of the most important geopolitical mistakes in history when it abandoned seafaring in the mid-15th century.
In the 14th and early 15th centuries, China put to sea the most powerful and majestic navy the world had ever seen, completely dominating the trade routes in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific. Yet from the 1430s onward, just as European shipbuilding and navigational skills were on the rise, Chinese emperors reduced their support for shipyards and banned most ocean-going trade. As a result, European navies would dominate Asian waters for the next five centuries.
Europe failed to learn from these examples and ignored three distinct geopolitical developments.
First, Europe largely turned a blind eye to the re-emergence of Russia as an imperial power, the most important and far-reaching geopolitical development to directly affect Europe since the end of the Cold War. Like the Ming emperors who abandoned their fleets, Europeans have literally abandoned geopolitics. Over the course of nearly two decades, they have developed a force structure better suited to fighting insurgents in the mountains of Afghanistan and intimidating pirates in the Gulf of Aden than to defending their European homeland. Europe could afford to take a break from geopolitics and ignore Putin’s growing assertiveness for one simple reason: the security guarantee provided by the United States.
Second, Europe failed to recognize the geopolitical logic of China’s rise, which would ultimately force the United States to rebalance its military posture in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2011, when the Obama administration first announced the “US pivot to Asia,” only two European countries were meeting NATO’s pledge to spend at least 2 percent of GDP on defense. A decade later, in 2021, only four additional European NATO members had reached that threshold.
One important reason for this lack of response was the apparent abandonment of the “pivot to Asia” by the United States when it moved troops to Eastern Europe and warships back into the Atlantic in response to Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. At the time, many in the European strategic community seemed to believe that Washington had permanently turned back to Europe. What they overlooked, however, was that the U.S.’s renewed interest in Asia was being driven by the most powerful and irresistible forces in international relations: the balance of power and the fear of hegemonic expansion.
China’s defense spending of $309 billion in 2023 was greater than that of the rest of East Asia plus South Asia combined, meaning that China could easily dominate the region if the United States withdrew its military presence there.
The situation in Europe, however, is very different. The Russian economy is smaller than Italy’s in terms of nominal GDP and lacks key technological and manufacturing capabilities; any European failure to deter and contain Russia is due entirely to the past and present reluctance of European leaders to do so. This difference in the Asian and European balance of power helps explain Washington’s continued flirtation with the Kremlin. A settlement of the Russo-Ukrainian war would allow for a more comprehensive U.S. military “look” toward Asia.
The third geopolitical development that Europe has ignored at its peril is the Sino-Russian partnership, its inherent strategic logic, and the value that both sides attach to it. China’s economic rise has allowed Russia to diversify its trade relations and reduce its dependence on Europe. This is especially important for Russia since 2014, when the West first imposed economic and financial sanctions in response to the annexation of Crimea.
Furthermore, despite being a junior partner, Russia knows that China is preoccupied with its rivalry with the United States in the Pacific, which mitigates Moscow’s sense of threat from Beijing. Indeed, Russia would not launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with a hostile China on its Asian flank. For China, good relations with Russia are driven even more by geopolitics and balance-of-power considerations. Bringing Moscow on its side gives Beijing an advantage in its rivalry with Washington.
In short, Russia’s return to imperialism, the US shift to Asia, and the Sino-Russian partnership should have given European leaders good reasons to rethink their continent’s security arrangements, but they have not. We are so used to thinking that Europeans are living on vacation from history that we are less surprised by their ignorance of geopolitics than we should be.
After all, the great European powers were masters of strategy. The realist school of international relations theory, with its strong focus on the balance of power, was largely based on the study of the European great powers. At the height of the British Empire in 1848, the then Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, declared in the House of Commons that "we have no eternal allies and we have no eternal enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and it is our duty to pursue those interests. Palmerston's advice would have served European leaders well in recent decades.
Europe's strategic blindness has various causes, including a leadership class devoid of vision and wisdom. There are two other explanations. One important reason is that European nations have shifted from being strategic masters to being strategic subordinates of the United States. This has probably been the case since the Suez Crisis of 1956, when the United States forced Britain and France to abandon their attempt to invade Egypt and control the Suez Canal.
While European governments have expressed their disagreement with various U.S. policies in the years since, such as the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, they have remained second-tier states in a superpower alliance. As such, they have been more concerned with being good allies and keeping Washington engaged in Europe than with developing their own strategic capabilities.
Another reason for Europe’s strategic ineptitude is the almost exclusive focus on rules and multilateralism in contemporary European thinking. The paradigm shift between rules-based liberalism and balance-of-power realism as the dominant force determining state behavior is a recurring theme in international relations. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Europeans strongly believed that the conditions were finally in place for German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s idea of a perpetual peace based on democracy, free trade, and institutions that would check the politics of power. This post-Cold War optimism was not unique to Europe, but it was more dominant in Europe than anywhere else in the world.
When liberalism became not only the dominant paradigm but also a moral imperative, advocates of geopolitical realism, with their emphasis on balance-of-power realism, were often dismissed as horsemen of the apocalypse. They became the objects of ridicule, as when German officials laughed at Trump warning them in 2018. - as others have warned them before - that energy dependence on Russia is a dangerous strategic mistake.
So where should Europe go from here? To avoid the fate of the Ming dynasty, whose mistakes will haunt China for centuries, Europe urgently needs a grand strategy with a coherent vision for security, democracy, and the economy. Given the continent’s fragmented politics and lack of clear leadership, this is a difficult task.
On the security front, the Ukrainians’ courageous war of resistance has weakened Russia’s military capabilities to such an extent that defense analysts estimate that Europe probably has five to ten years to build up its military capabilities before Russia fully recovers its losses.
While Trump’s policies may have forever changed Europe’s view of the United States, transatlantic ties may not be completely broken. Rather than trying to develop an independent defense concept tied to the European Union, Europe would benefit more from maintaining a relationship with the United States within the framework of NATO. However, Europe should strive for a "inverted NATO", in which Europe, not the United States, is the dominant power in the alliance.
Even as it maintains transatlantic relations, Europe must strengthen its strategic autonomy to the point where it can survive if abandoned by the United States. Europe must also be strong enough to avoid the lure of alliance, in which the United States requires European nations to do its dirty work in missions outside its own interests that run counter to the continent's interests.
The challenges facing Europe go beyond security. Europe's model of democratic governance is now under serious threat - both from within and from Russian and US interference. Finally, as Mario Draghi's recent report on EU competitiveness eloquently pointed out, the European economy is also in chaos. Indeed, a recent report by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization estimates that by 2030, Europe's manufacturing powerhouse, Germany, will account for only 3 percent of global industrial output (down from 8 percent in 2000), while China will control no less than 45 percent (up from 6 percent in 2000).
To maintain the appeal of democracy to citizens and build a solid defense structure capable of deterring Russia, Europe must quickly revive its economy. If the United States is no longer willing to partner with Europe economically, as it is in other areas, then European leaders should seek to bring the United Kingdom back into the EU, develop the continent’s ties with Africa, and reconsider its relationship with China.
Only serious, concrete, and rapid changes in this direction, not more summits and speeches, will show that Europe has awakened from its long geopolitical slumber.