Following the catastrophic meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, mused on social media that “the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” The tweet attracted criticism, not least because Kallas’ claim to global leadership was not exactly matched by her own track record—earlier that week, she had allowed herself to be humiliated by making the trip to Washington and then being denied a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State.
Especially from an Estonian, it was music to the ears of those who had been arguing for Europe’s strategic autonomy for years. The reality of Trump’s, JD Vance’s, and Elon Musk’s daily antics provides compelling reasons to press ahead with the agenda, even for those who harbor hope that NATO and the transatlantic relationship can eventually be salvaged.
Now, “strategic autonomy” has always been a weasel word. In its more uncontroversial version, the term referred simply to Europe’s need to do more to strengthen its defenses. In the more ambitious, sneakier version it meant doing more independently of the United States and relying on domestic (ideally French) defense industry instead of the U.S. one.
Even the most committed of Atlanticists would be hard-pressed to explain how that distinction matters at a time of a wholesale collapse of confidence in the United States as an ally. If Trump’s America is not going to come and fight for Narva, Estonia—and it would require a real suspension of disbelief to think that it will—what exactly is the point of buying American? With divergent priorities on both sides of the Atlantic, the exact same argument applies to U.S. materiél as to supplies from non-allied nations: namely, in the case of a conflict affecting Europe but not the United States (or vice versa), it is unlikely that U.S. manufacturers would prioritize their European contracts for deliveries, maintenance, or spare parts.
There has been some speculation about a “kill switch” that would allow the United States to disable the functioning of F-35 fighter jets, purchased at great expense by a number of European air forces. Whether an electronic back door is real or just a figment of paranoid European imagination, the U.S. government has ample control over the usefulness of the platform by providing or denying timely maintenance, repairs or ammunition for those planes—a consideration that must be weighing in new ways on the minds of governments who are considering paying top dollar for a state-of-the-art fighter.
Every day, the transatlantic relationship is hitting a new bottom, oftentimes in grotesque ways. Clearly, Ukraine’s success in the war is critical for Europe’s security. Trump, meanwhile, has done essentially everything in his power—short of normalizing the U.S.-Russian relationship or providing assistance to Russia—to set Ukraine up for failure. Ukraine “may not survive anyway,” the president quipped in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. Trump is considering, it has been reported, redeploying the 35,000 troops currently stationed in Germany to Hungary—a nation under the most explicitly pro-Russian and pro-Chinese government in the EU and NATO. One is left to wonder whether the new military bases in the country would be built with loans from the Belt and Road Initiative, of which Hungary is, in Viktor Orbán’s words, a “pillar.”
All sentient Europeans must understand by now that they are dealing with a U.S. administration that is qualitatively different from the first Trump term. There might be a role for flattering the U.S. president, or bribing him—or perhaps for offering one of the daughters of European royalty in marriage to Barron Trump—but none of that is going to change the reality of a fundamental unreliability of an administration that is casually picking fights with the likes of Poland for no reason whatsoever. The most important task ahead for Europeans is to place themselves in a position of strength as they seek to deter Russia and also as they engage with Trump.
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Following the catastrophic meeting between President Donald Trump and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the EU’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, mused on social media that “the free world needs a new leader. It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.” The tweet attracted criticism, not least because Kallas’ claim to global leadership was not exactly matched by her own track record—earlier that week, she had allowed herself to be humiliated by making the trip to Washington and then being denied a meeting with the U.S. Secretary of State.
Especially from an Estonian, it was music to the ears of those who had been arguing for Europe’s strategic autonomy for years. The reality of Trump’s, JD Vance’s, and Elon Musk’s daily antics provides compelling reasons to press ahead with the agenda, even for those who harbor hope that NATO and the transatlantic relationship can eventually be salvaged.
Now, “strategic autonomy” has always been a weasel word. In its more uncontroversial version, the term referred simply to Europe’s need to do more to strengthen its defenses. In the more ambitious, sneakier version it meant doing more independently of the United States and relying on domestic (ideally French) defense industry instead of the U.S. one.
Even the most committed of Atlanticists would be hard-pressed to explain how that distinction matters at a time of a wholesale collapse of confidence in the United States as an ally. If Trump’s America is not going to come and fight for Narva, Estonia—and it would require a real suspension of disbelief to think that it will—what exactly is the point of buying American? With divergent priorities on both sides of the Atlantic, the exact same argument applies to U.S. materiél as to supplies from non-allied nations: namely, in the case of a conflict affecting Europe but not the United States (or vice versa), it is unlikely that U.S. manufacturers would prioritize their European contracts for deliveries, maintenance, or spare parts.
There has been some speculation about a “kill switch” that would allow the United States to disable the functioning of F-35 fighter jets, purchased at great expense by a number of European air forces. Whether an electronic back door is real or just a figment of paranoid European imagination, the U.S. government has ample control over the usefulness of the platform by providing or denying timely maintenance, repairs or ammunition for those planes—a consideration that must be weighing in new ways on the minds of governments who are considering paying top dollar for a state-of-the-art fighter.
Every day, the transatlantic relationship is hitting a new bottom, oftentimes in grotesque ways. Clearly, Ukraine’s success in the war is critical for Europe’s security. Trump, meanwhile, has done essentially everything in his power—short of normalizing the U.S.-Russian relationship or providing assistance to Russia—to set Ukraine up for failure. Ukraine “may not survive anyway,” the president quipped in an interview with Maria Bartiromo. Trump is considering, it has been reported, redeploying the 35,000 troops currently stationed in Germany to Hungary—a nation under the most explicitly pro-Russian and pro-Chinese government in the EU and NATO. One is left to wonder whether the new military bases in the country would be built with loans from the Belt and Road Initiative, of which Hungary is, in Viktor Orbán’s words, a “pillar.”
All sentient Europeans must understand by now that they are dealing with a U.S. administration that is qualitatively different from the first Trump term. There might be a role for flattering the U.S. president, or bribing him—or perhaps for offering one of the daughters of European royalty in marriage to Barron Trump—but none of that is going to change the reality of a fundamental unreliability of an administration that is casually picking fights with the likes of Poland for no reason whatsoever. The most important task ahead for Europeans is to place themselves in a position of strength as they seek to deter Russia and also as they engage with Trump.