It's time for Europe to stand up

America is not coming to save you, but you have the power to save yourselves.

America is not coming to save Europe this time.

That is the clear message of two landmark speeches from the past week — one by U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the other by the Vice President JD Vance. Hegseth, speaking at a summit in Brussels on February 12th, declared that Europe is no longer America’s primary security focus:

We're…here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe…The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must – and we are – focusing on security of our own borders…We also face a peer competitor in the Communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity, and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail…Deterrence cannot fail, for all of our sakes…As the United States prioritizes its attention to these threats, European allies must lead from the front…Together, we can establish a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and Pacific respectively. [emphasis mine]

Hegseth also warned that the U.S. will eventually pull its troops out of Europe, and said that Europe must provide the vast majority of support for Ukraine going forward.

Two days later, at the Munich Security Conference, Vance argued that Europe’s biggest threat was not Russia or China, but what he perceives as a slide toward anti-democratic values:

[T]he threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor…[W]hat I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.

As evidence of Europe’s retreat from democracy, he cited Romania’s cancellation of an election result due to supposed election interference, Sweden’s jailing of a rightist activist for burning a Koran, and Britain’s arrest of an anti-abortion activist for silently praying near an abortion clinic. He also urged European governments to spend more on defense, and to listen to their citizens who are upset about recent waves of immigration.

Now, there are two very different ways you can interpret these speeches, but they both lead to the same basic conclusion.

The first interpretation is that Hegseth and Vance are telling Europe hard truths that it needs to hear. After all, even if America wants to be the guarantor of European security as it was in the Cold War and the World Wars, it can’t be — at least, not if it wants to be the guarantor of security in Asia, where its most formidable foe looms. China dramatically overmatches America in terms of manufacturing capability, has four times America’s population, and is a peer in terms of technology. Even with Japan, India, Korea, Australia, and other allies fully on board, America would be desperately hard-pressed to withstand a concerted Chinese attempt to take over Asia.

Stretched by decades of deindustrialization and smothered in layers of lawsuits and regulations, America is not the arsenal of democracy it once was. It has no choice but to prioritize. Asia is more economically important to the U.S., and China is a much bigger long-term threat to the U.S. than Russia is. Thus, it’s simply inevitable that America will have to turn towards Asia and away from Europe and the Middle East.

Meanwhile, Vance has a point about European values. The EU Charter of Fundamental Rights claims to protect freedom of expression, as does the UK’s Human Rights Act of 1998. The laws that criminalize burning the Koran and praying near an abortion clinic definitely seem to go against the principle of free expression. And even though Russia interfered in Romania’s election, annulling an election sets a dangerous precedent, because it’s always pretty easy to claim foreign interference if you’re an unscrupulous autocrat.

So it’s possible that Hegseth and Vance are not only being sincere, but are giving Europe a needed wake-up call.

The second interpretation is that Hegseth and Vance are being disingenuous. According to this narrative, the MAGA movement admires and is closely aligned with Russia. Trump draws a false moral equivalence between Russia and Ukraine, unfairly laying some of the blame on Ukraine for the war. Russia has always favored Trump over his rivals, whether or not their support has been materially important; Trump tends to like people who support him. And many on the American right see Russia (wrongly) as a supporter of traditional Christian and masculine values, unlike the Europeans, who they see as godless deracinated socialists. So perhaps Trump and his people simply want Russia to prevail over Ukraine.

When Hegseth says America needs to divert resources toward securing its own borders, he’s obviously blowing smoke — even quadrupling the amount America spends on border security (just $7.3 billion in 2024 despite years of big increases) would leave it far smaller than Ukraine aid. And it’s a bit rich for JD Vance to criticize Romania for annulling an election, when he supports Trump’s effort to do something extremely similar back in 2020.

In this interpretation, everything Trump’s people are saying is simply an extension of right-wing culture-war politics — their concern for free speech is a fig leaf, they like European far-right parties because they’re anti-immigration, and they want to switch America’s foreign policy back to isolationism and the Western Hemisphere.

I’m a bit agnostic as to which of these interpretations is correct. My instinct is that Hegseth is being sincere, while Vance is probably playing to his domestic political base in the U.S. And I think the Trump administration probably contains a fair number of both right-wing isolationists who want America to withdraw from the world and focus all its energy on internal ideological conflicts, and conservative internationalists who recognize the magnitude of the threat from China.

But more importantly, I think that from Europe’s vantage point, it mostly doesn’t matter which interpretation of America’s recent words and actions is more accurate.

Whether America really wants to focus on deterring China in Asia, or whether it just wants to retreat from the global stage and focus on bullying Canada, Panama, and its own minorities, that doesn’t change the cold hard fact that America is retreating from its role as the guarantor of European security. And whether or not Trump’s people actually think Russia is a threat to Europe, that doesn’t change the fact that Russia is a threat to Europe. And whether Trump’s people truly care about free speech, that doesn’t change the fact that Europe’s people are angry about recent immigration waves, and if that anger isn’t accommodated through the democratic process, Europe’s stability could be in danger.

In other words, both the challenges that Europe faces, and the fact that the U.S. is not going to help with those challenges, are clear and obvious. Europe must either stand on its own against the threats that face it, or capitulate to those threats.

Fortunately, some of the Europeans may finally be realizing this. Benjamin Tallis has an excellent thread in which he argues that although it’s bad that the U.S. is withdrawing its protection, Hegseth is essentially right that Europe needs to step up and fill the void that the U.S. is leaving. Ukraine’s President Zelensky has been saying similar things. And France’s President Macron has called an emergency EU summit to discuss America’s withdrawal from the region.

And fortunately, Europe has the fundamental strength required to defeat the threats it faces, even without America’s help.

Europe can handle Russia by itself — if it wants to

Just as the U.S. is overmatched by China, Russia is overmatched by Europe. Two years ago, I wrote out the basic case, with some relevant numbers:

Europe has to stand against Russia

Europe has far more people and industry than Russia does. The EU and UK together have half a billion people — more than three times as many as Putin’s empire:

Source: UN

With Turkey in the mix, the ratio is even more lopsided.

As for industrial output, even after Russia’s big wartime mobilization, Europe still makes far more stuff. If Russia is included in Europe, it’s only be the fifth-largest manufacturing economy in the region:

Source: World Bank via Wikipedia

Even the UK manufactures more than Russia!

Now, not all kinds of manufacturing are equally useful for war — Russia tends to make a lot of tanks and artillery shells, while Europe makes a lot of pharmaceuticals and medical devices — so this is just a rough measure. But the comparison is so lopsided that it’s clear that in any protracted conventional conflict, a united, determined Europe would prevail over Russia, even without an iota of American help. And Europe has its own nuclear deterrent as well, mostly in the hands of France and the UK.

Nor is it fanciful to think that Europe might unite to fight Russia. Even if the U.S. formally withdraws from NATO, or simply refuses to come to its allies’ aid, NATO command can serve as a unified military command for any and all European efforts against Russia. Crucially, NATO also includes Turkey and the UK, who aren’t in the EU, but both of which are rivals of Russia. In fact, without a Trump-led U.S. weighing the alliance down, it could be free to become the pan-European military force that the region needs.

Politically, too, Europe is more united than it has been in its entire history — witness how the whole region came together to apply sanctions on Russia in 2022, and how even traditionally neutral countries like Sweden have been joining NATO.

But even with unity, Europe will still need the will to fight. Currently, despite a lot of bold rhetoric from officials in Germany, France, and the UK, none of Europe’s biggest nations are doing anywhere near what it would take to contain Russia without American help.

Usually, this is put in terms of the percentage of GDP that European countries spend on their militaries. And yes, Russia spends far more of its GDP on its military than the major European countries do:

Changes in this number can also give us information about a country’s priorities. The fact that military spending hasn’t climbed much in Germany, France, and the UK shows that they aren’t yet taking the Russian threat as seriously as they should. Poland, in contrast, is clearly taking the threat seriously, which is why Hegseth consistently praises Poland.

Of course, Europe has a much higher GDP than Russia does, so even a smaller percentage of GDP could translate into a larger total amount of military spending. But it’s important to remember that real military purchasing power also depends on prices — if soldiers’ salaries and health care, weapons, vehicles, transportation, etc. are cheaper in Russia than in Europe, that means $1 of Russian defense spending counts for more than $1 of European defense spending.

In fact, Russia gets its military stuff for a lot cheaper. Taking this into account, it probably spends about as much on its military as all of Europe combined:

Russia's military expenditure is rising so fast that it is outperforming all European countries combined despite their effort to boost budgets and rearm, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ latest Military Balance report…The think tank said that Russia’s military expenditure last year was forecast at 13.1 trillion rubles ($145.9 billion)…Meanwhile, Europe’s combined 2024 defense spending was $457 billion…11.7 percent higher in real terms than the previous year…

But if Russia's spending is calculated in purchasing power parity terms — used in countries like Russia where domestic inputs are significantly cheaper than on the world market — the Kremlin's military expenditure would come to $461.6 billion, the IISS said.

In terms of active military personnel, Russia has about 1.1 million, while NATO without the U.S. still has about double that. But it’s not clear how many of those troops NATO could actually bring to bear in a fight.

Germany, France, and the UK need to raise their defense spending — immediately, and by a large amount. Hegseth is right — Poland’s target of 5% of GDP in 2025 is appropriate, and is about the same as the U.S. spent during its peacetime military buildup in the 1980s. Furthermore, European countries need to make sure their troops are well-trained and their militaries are well-integrated. And Europe needs to beef up its nuclear deterrent, to be less reliant on the (now likely nonexistent) U.S. nuclear umbrella — France and the UK need to build more nukes, while Germany and Poland need to get their own.

There are basically two dangers here for Europe: lack of popular will within each country, and lack of coordination between countries.

It’s possible that European publics simply don’t worry enough about the Russian threat, or that they’ve become so rich and complacent — or perhaps so infused with leftist ideology — that they hate the very idea of spending money on the military. European elites — especially elites in Germany, France, and the UK — simply need to sell their public on the notion of a strong, integrated defense.

If they can’t do that, the European countries will prove true the common authoritarian accusation that democracies are inherently weak and unable to defend themselves. In the 20th century, democracies passed the toughness test, sacrificing blood and treasure to crush fascism and contain communism. Perhaps America is failing that test in the 21st century. But if so, it becomes all the more important that Europe pass the test.

The other danger is that each European country will look after its own narrow interests, throwing the other countries to the wolves. There’s a tendency of each country to view the nations to the east of it as buffer states — a defense-in-depth to hold off the Russians. This is a dangerous fantasy. The more Russia conquers, the more powerful it growth, since it basically enslaves each conquered group into its army to conquer the next group. When the USSR attacked Poland in 1919, it did so with many Ukrainian troops; when it menaced West Europe during the Cold War, it did so with Polish troops. And so on. Europe has to make a stand and put up a hard wall, instead of letting Russia continue to absorb and enslave its people bit by bit.

If the U.S. abandons Ukraine to Russia entirely, as now looks fairly likely, it might make sense for Europe to actively intervene in the war, helping the Ukrainians stop Russia from grabbing any more territory. Ukraine has grit and inventiveness, but they lack manpower; Europe could send troops to shore up their defenses, and learn how modern warfare works in the process. But even if direct intervention doesn’t happen, Europe will need to fortify its borders in the east against continued Russian encroachment.

In fact, there’s a historical precedent for this. In 1853-56, the UK and France — who at that time were generally rivals — forged an alliance to help shore up the weakening Ottoman Empire against Russian territorial grabs. The result was the Crimean War, in which the alliance of Britain, France, and Turkey — depicted at the top of this post — defeated the Russians and halted their westward expansion. But even if Europe doesn’t actually fight in Ukraine, if it raises defense spending and deploys its militaries to its eastern borders, it can face down the new Russian empire over the next two decades.

Europe needs to fix its economy and immigration

It should also go without saying that Europe needs to fix its economy. The region has stagnated over the past decade and a half. Even measuring at purchasing power parity — which isn’t affected by exchange rate movements — it’s clear that Europe has been falling behind the U.S.:

It’s not just that the U.S. has more immigration, either — Europe’s per capita GDP has lagged as well.

Germany has done especially poorly in recent years. Its industrial production has been falling since long before the Ukraine war started and Russian gas got cut off:

Source: Marginal Revolution

Europeans who are confronted with these facts typically comfort themselves (or attack their American critics) by pointing out Europe’s lower inequality, higher life expectancy, and lower crime. But while those advantages make Europe a nice place to live, they aren’t much use against hundreds of thousands of Russian drones. To build up military-industrial strength, you need higher GDP and you need higher industrial production.

Just how Europe can get those things is a difficult question. There are some obvious policy moves, like eliminating internal trade barriers between European countries, general deregulation, and copying the Danish “flexicurity” system to increase labor mobility. Europe also needs as much cheap energy as it can get, since factories are especially power-hungry. Restarting any and all mothballed nuclear reactors is a must, and a lot more should be built. Europe should also be building as much solar power as possible, especially in Spain where it’s sunny and relatively underpopulated, and then piping that power to the industrial heartland using high-voltage transmission lines.

On top of that, Europe needs to build a better software industry. Software, especially AI, will be increasingly important for manufacturing, and software exports can give the economy a boost as well. Europe is already home to huge amounts of talented coders, especially in East Europe, and it also has tons of capital to invest. But so far the region has really struggled to build a U.S.-style software ecosystem. The first thing to try here is deregulation — reform laws like GDPR until they present essentially no barrier to innovation. After that, tweak financial laws to encourage venture capital, and work to harmonize standards and regulations across EU member states so the market isn’t fragmented.

Europe’s biggest challenge, of course, is aging — something every country in the world is either dealing with or will have to deal with fairly soon. Sadly, effective pro-natalist policies still mostly don’t exist (though France gets modest results with them) Until recently, robust immigration partially plugged Europe’s gap, but there’s clearly a giant backlash against the kinds of immigrants Europe has been taking in en masse for the past decade and a half. Even if you doubt JD Vance’s motives, he’s right that European countries need to accede to the will of their increasingly immigration-skeptical populaces; to do otherwise would risk political instability.

The most obvious move here — in addition to deporting immigrant criminals so that the populace feels more positively about the whole thing — is to simply restrict the set of source countries. Taking fewer refugees from violent war-torn regions, and taking more skilled or semi-skilled immigrants from stable low-crime countries, would probably be a good idea.

Anyway, I have much more to say about the European economy, but for right now, I just want to point out that although Europe desperately needs a stronger military, countries that pump up their militaries without concomitant increases in their economic output typically don’t fare well. The Europeans need to think about economics and military power as one big interrelated effort — a Europe that stands up and fights for itself, instead of waiting for America to swoop in and save the day like it did in the 20th century.

---