The sequel, they say, is always worse than the original. Whether this applies to presidencies as much as Hollywood blockbusters is unclear. Europe, however, cannot afford to wait and see.
The challenges a second Trump administration may pose for Europe are significant, ranging from the expected disruption of trading and security relationships to the multiplication of instability on Europe’s eastern and southern flanks.
Each of these challenges, however, exploits Europe’s own internal divisions. Only by addressing those divisions can Europe bolster its hand not just vis-à-vis Washington but also versus overt threats from Moscow, Beijing, and beyond.
The greatest anxieties associated with the return of Trump to the White House — including the risk of capitulation in Ukraine, the diminution of America’s commitment to NATO, and the putative imposition of tariffs on European exports — are well known.
Others are more subtle but no less destructive, should they come to fruition. Giving Israel an even freer hand in its confrontation with Iran, and potentially escalating direct US involvement in the Middle East, threatens unrest and outflows of refugees from the Levant and North Africa. And Europe’s populists, from the Hungarian and Slovak Prime Ministers Viktor Orbán and Robert Fico, to the potential return of Andrej Babiš as Czech prime minister next year, are eager to work with their new American ally in their tilts against Brussels, Berlin and Paris.
Tactical adjustments — playing to Trump’s ego, nodding in the direction of his own geopolitical priorities, and racing to meet defense spending targets — may help European capitals stave off the worst, but they won’t resolve the strategic challenge. As Poland’s Prime Minister Donald Tusk said in the aftermath of Trump’s victory, Europe needs the capacity to insulate itself from the fluctuations in American politics — a sensibility long held by French President Emmanuel Macron and others. That emerging European consensus in favor of strategic self-sufficiency, if not strategic autonomy, may be the foundation on which Western resilience will need to be reconstructed.
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The fact that Warsaw and Paris are speaking the same language—a language that resonates with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, High Representative Kaja Kallas, and Defense Commissioner Andrius Kubilius — signals a potentially fundamental shift in the power balance both within Europe and between Europe and the US. To become truly meaningful, however, that shift will need rapidly to be transformed into action along three key vectors: ensuring the fiscal room for a European defense surge, consolidating the European fringe, and front-loading long-term strategic deterrence in the east.
On the first, Europe is already committed to a step change in defense-industrial production, but the numbers — a €1.5bn commitment to the European Defence Industry Programme and a series of benchmarks for collaborative intra-European defense procurement over the next decade — are as yet far too small and too vague to be meaningful.
This reticence stems from the limited fiscal room in Brussels itself and in Berlin in particular, a problem the Commission does not have the leverage to solve. The Warsaw-Paris axis needs urgently to bring Berlin on board and to agree a shared set of rapid stretching targets, which they must undertake to support in Brussels by rallying other member states to support the expanded spending targets and relaxed fiscal rules necessitated by the scale of the crisis.
That leads to the second point: To make this ambition effective, a Warsaw-Berlin-Paris axis will need to bring more capitals into the tent, and not just inside the EU. Some of these — such as the UK and Norway — ought to be relatively easy, especially given the new defense agreement between London and Berlin. Rome and Madrid should also be achievable.
And this re-consolidated core of the EU must cease relying on the Commission to enforce good behavior in Budapest and Bratislava, and potentially Prague. EU capitals committed to the continent’s security must impose political consequences on governments that buck European solidarity, going beyond the withdrawal of structural funds undertaken by the Commission. Former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö said as much in his October 31 report on European security.
Finally, facing the impossibility of replacing the totality of US aid to Ukraine — should Trump, in fact, decide to cease military and economic support for Kyiv — Europe will need to prioritize long-term stability as a hedge against short-term instability.
In practice, this means circumventing Washington to develop multilateral or multiple bilateral security arrangements with triggers for military responses to Russian aggression, as well as fast-tracking Ukraine’s EU accession.
This will help ensure that, wherever and whenever the shooting and shelling stop, Kyiv will have a fighting chance of remaining sovereign and secure.
Sam Greene is Director of the Democratic Resilience Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis and Professor of Russian Politics at King’s College London
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
Europe’s Edge
CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America.