No one was surprised that, at this year’s Munich Security Conference, US Vice President J.D. Vance repeated Donald Trump’s longstanding demand for Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security. But Vance’s accusation that the biggest threat Europe faces comes “from within,” together with the administration’s abandonment and economic shakedown of Ukraine, makes it clear that the issue is not burden-sharing, but betrayal.
This was obvious to Tobias Bunde, Professor of International Security at the Hertie School in Berlin and Director of Research at the Munich Security Conference. Despite Vance’s insistence that the US and the EU are still “on the same team,” Bunde explains, conference participants were largely convinced that the US is “abandoning transatlanticism and everything it stood for.” If there is any “silver lining” to the US behaving like a “nineteenth-century great power,” he concludes, it is that European leaders have finally been “shaken….out of their complacency.”
It should not have taken this long, says Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister and vice chancellor. While Trump’s revisionism might not “make any sense,” since it has “placed the US on a path to self-weakening or even self-destruction,” it was “foreseeable.” In any case, now that Vance has made it “brutally clear” how alone Europe will be from now on, EU leaders must “spare no cost” developing hard power.
For Philippe Legrain, Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute, the “big question” now is how to finance the necessary military spending, at a time when “Europe’s economies are weak, public finances are stretched, and many voters are loath to accept cuts to other government spending.” While higher taxes or cuts to welfare spending may ultimately prove unavoidable, the “politically obvious” and economically sensible solution, for now, is to borrow – and Europe has at least three ways to do so.
According to Daniela Schwarzer, a former director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Europe should not fear going it alone. On the contrary, Europe has everything it needs to “catapult itself forward in technology, the digital economy, defense, and other critical sectors.” But it will take “collective political will” to tackle the large, long-term project of securing Europe’s sovereignty, including by systematically rethinking its approach to security.
Sławomir Sierakowski, Founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement, agrees that Europeans have “all the resources, talent, and instruments they need to secure their sovereignty and restore peace and stability.” But rather than responding to the challenges ahead “with the usual search for unity,” European leaders should focus on building a “coalition of willing EU member states and other countries that Trump is pointlessly alienating, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Korea.”
At least one European leader understands the stakes, writes Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Whereas some are “still trying to have their cake and eat it” – defending Europe while working with the US – incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has “launched what amounts to a full-frontal attack” on the US. Moreover, as an “über-Atlanticist and fiscal conservative,” he might be the “only German politician who can credibly bury the debt brake” – crucial to enable Europe to rearm and its largest economy to finance investments in infrastructure, renewables, and digitalization – and “pave the way for a truly independent Europe.”
In fact, even before Trump was elected, Merz was sounding the alarm about Europe’s continued dependence on the US. Rather than continuing to seek “comfort in the past and confidence in the solitary US leadership” that defined the post-Cold War era, he argued, Europeans must define a shared “sense of purpose” and “forge their own decisions.”
No one was surprised that, at this year’s Munich Security Conference, US Vice President J.D. Vance repeated Donald Trump’s longstanding demand for Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security. But Vance’s accusation that the biggest threat Europe faces comes “from within,” together with the administration’s abandonment and economic shakedown of Ukraine, makes it clear that the issue is not burden-sharing, but betrayal.
This was obvious to Tobias Bunde, Professor of International Security at the Hertie School in Berlin and Director of Research at the Munich Security Conference. Despite Vance’s insistence that the US and the EU are still “on the same team,” Bunde explains, conference participants were largely convinced that the US is “abandoning transatlanticism and everything it stood for.” If there is any “silver lining” to the US behaving like a “nineteenth-century great power,” he concludes, it is that European leaders have finally been “shaken….out of their complacency.”
It should not have taken this long, says Joschka Fischer, a former German foreign minister and vice chancellor. While Trump’s revisionism might not “make any sense,” since it has “placed the US on a path to self-weakening or even self-destruction,” it was “foreseeable.” In any case, now that Vance has made it “brutally clear” how alone Europe will be from now on, EU leaders must “spare no cost” developing hard power.
For Philippe Legrain, Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute, the “big question” now is how to finance the necessary military spending, at a time when “Europe’s economies are weak, public finances are stretched, and many voters are loath to accept cuts to other government spending.” While higher taxes or cuts to welfare spending may ultimately prove unavoidable, the “politically obvious” and economically sensible solution, for now, is to borrow – and Europe has at least three ways to do so.
According to Daniela Schwarzer, a former director of the German Council on Foreign Relations, Europe should not fear going it alone. On the contrary, Europe has everything it needs to “catapult itself forward in technology, the digital economy, defense, and other critical sectors.” But it will take “collective political will” to tackle the large, long-term project of securing Europe’s sovereignty, including by systematically rethinking its approach to security.
Sławomir Sierakowski, Founder of the Krytyka Polityczna movement, agrees that Europeans have “all the resources, talent, and instruments they need to secure their sovereignty and restore peace and stability.” But rather than responding to the challenges ahead “with the usual search for unity,” European leaders should focus on building a “coalition of willing EU member states and other countries that Trump is pointlessly alienating, such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and South Korea.”
At least one European leader understands the stakes, writes Mark Leonard, Director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Whereas some are “still trying to have their cake and eat it” – defending Europe while working with the US – incoming German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has “launched what amounts to a full-frontal attack” on the US. Moreover, as an “über-Atlanticist and fiscal conservative,” he might be the “only German politician who can credibly bury the debt brake” – crucial to enable Europe to rearm and its largest economy to finance investments in infrastructure, renewables, and digitalization – and “pave the way for a truly independent Europe.”
In fact, even before Trump was elected, Merz was sounding the alarm about Europe’s continued dependence on the US. Rather than continuing to seek “comfort in the past and confidence in the solitary US leadership” that defined the post-Cold War era, he argued, Europeans must define a shared “sense of purpose” and “forge their own decisions.”