Trump’s Return Would Transform Europe

Trump flirted with pulling the United States out of NATO during his first term as president. Some of his former aides believe he might really do it if he gets a second. And it’s not just Trump talking this way: As U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, one of the leading America First acolytes, has argued, “[The] time has come for Europe to stand on its own feet.” Even among those who don’t explicitly subscribe to the America First ethos, the pull of competing priorities—particularly in Asia—is growing stronger. A post-American Europe is becoming ever more thinkable. It’s worth asking what kind of place that might be.

Optimists hope that Europe can keep on thriving—even if it loses the U.S. security umbrella that NATO leaders will celebrate at the alliance’s 75th anniversary summit in Washington in July. The United States might go home, in this view, but a Europe that has grown wealthy, stable, and reliably democratic over the past 80 years is ready to act as a constructive, independent force in a multipolar world.

More likely, however, a post-American Europe would struggle to meet the threats it faces—and might even revert, eventually, to the darker, more anarchic, more illiberal patterns of its past. “Our Europe today is mortal. It can die,” French President Emmanuel Macron warned in late April. In an America First world, it just might.

The fundamental issue was a geography that cramped too many powerful contenders into a single space. The only way to survive in this environment was to expand at the expense of others; this dynamic condemned Europe to cycles of catastrophic conflict. After 1870, the emergence of a unified Germany as the industrial and military juggernaut at the region’s center turned this brew even more toxic. The continent’s politics were as volatile as its geopolitics: From the French Revolution onward, Europe experienced wild swings between liberalism and some of history’s most grotesque forms of tyranny.

There was no reason to think, in the late 1940s, that World War II had broken the cycle. Old rivalries lingered: France was terrified that Germany would rise up and ravage its neighbors again. New radicalisms threatened in the form of the Soviet Union and the European communists it controlled, while right-wing dictatorships remained entrenched in Portugal and Spain. Democracy was in danger in many countries; economic deprivation was accelerating rivalry and fragmentation.

The birth of a new Europe was hardly inevitable: It took a radical, unprecedented intervention by the same country that had long sought to avoid the continent’s quarrels. That intervention was caused by the Cold War, which threatened to make another collapse of the European equilibrium unbearable even for a distant superpower. It came together gradually, in often chaotic circumstances, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And it featured a set of interlocking commitments with revolutionary effects.

Most vital was the U.S. security commitment, via NATO and the troop deployments that substantiated it. U.S. military protection broke the doom loop of violence by safeguarding Western Europe from Moscow—and from its own self-destructive instincts. With the United States protecting the region, old enemies no longer had to fear each other: NATO, one British official said in 1948, would make the “age-long trouble between Germany and France … disappear.” The countries of Western Europe could finally achieve security without denying it to others. That, in turn, short-circuited the political competitions and arms races that had plagued the region, allowing its members to lock arms against a common threat.

U.S. policy thus enabled a second change: unprecedented economic and political cooperation. Through the Marshall Plan, the United States aggressively pushed for intra-European cooperation as a condition for recovery aid, midwifing the transnational structures that later became the European Economic Community and European Union. The U.S. military presence facilitated this collaboration by allowing former enemies to pool their resources without compromising their security. Americans are the “best Europeans,” West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer remarked in 1949. Washington’s presence, in other words, allowed its European allies to bury the rivalries of the past.

The third change was political: If aggression was rooted in autocracy, then transforming Europe’s geopolitics required transforming its politics. That transformation began with the forced democratization of West Germany under the Allied occupation. It involved using Marshall Plan aid to revitalize and stabilize fragile democracies. And this change, too, was made possible by the U.S. military presence—which staved off a Soviet hegemony that would have snuffed out European democracies, while also allowing countries to invest in generous welfare programs that marginalized the radical left and right.

This was a uniquely U.S. solution to Europe’s problems. Only the United States was powerful enough to protect Europe from its enemies—yet distant enough that it posed no real threat of conquering and permanently subordinating the region. Only the United States had the resources to help rebuild a devastated region and bring it into a thriving free-world economy. Only the United States could smother Europe’s rivalries while protecting, and even strengthening, its democratic liberties. Indeed, the U.S. project in Western Europe proved so mind-blowingly successful that, once the Cold War ended, it was simply extended eastward.

U.S. intervention helped turn a “dark continent,” as historian Mark Mazower called Europe, into a post-historical paradise at the heart of an expanding liberal order. It was a world-changing achievement—which some Americans now seem determined to put at risk.

This shouldn’t be surprising: The U.S. role in Europe brought extraordinary benefits but also imposed extraordinary costs. The United States pledged to defend, even at the risk of nuclear war, countries thousands of miles away. By providing foreign aid and allowing asymmetric access to its vast home market, it rebuilt a continent and helped foreign countries grow faster than the United States itself.

It tolerated allied leaders, such as French President Charles de Gaulle, who sometimes seemed positively indignant at the protection the United States provided. And Washington discarded one of its most venerated diplomatic traditions—a hostility to encumbering alliances—to become custodian of a continent that had long been nothing but trouble.

The resulting ambivalence was kept in check by the exigencies of the Cold War—and because the critics could never offer a workable concept of European security without the United States. But today, as old irritants persist and new challenges pull Washington’s attention in other directions, U.S. skepticism toward Europe is stronger than ever. Its embodiment is Trump.

Trump has long lamented the burdens Washington bears in NATO; he has threatened to let marauding Russians do “whatever the hell they want” to free-riding European allies. He clearly loathes the EU, which he views not as the culmination of continental unity but as a cutthroat economic competitor. As an illiberal populist, he is indifferent—if not outright hostile—to the fortunes of liberal democracy in Europe. Why must Americans take care of Europe, he asks, when there is an “ocean between us”? When Trump touts his America First foreign policy, he means a foreign policy in which the United States finally sheds the unusual obligations it has taken on since World War II.

To be clear, no one knows precisely what Trump might do in office. A full-on withdrawal from NATO, which would enrage the remaining Republican internationalists, might not be worth the political price. But with Trump contending for the presidency and his acolytes gaining strength among Republicans—and the threat that China poses to U.S. interests in Asia growing ever more severe—it is time to take seriously the possibility that the United States might really leave Europe someday and consider what might happen next.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addresses the Council of Europe summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, on May 16, 2023.JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP via Getty Images

Europe certainly has the resources to fend for itself. It isn’t the fragile, immiserated place of the late 1940s but a rich, potentially powerful community where democracy and cooperation have become the norm. The EU’s GDP is about 10 times that of Russia. Since 2022, EU countries have collectively given more military and other aid to Ukraine than the United States, and they are finally reinvesting in defense industries that atrophied after the Cold War. European leaders, moreover, are already preparing for the post-American future, whether by turning their countries into serious military powers, as Poland is doing, or by advocating a renewed push for European strategic autonomy, the perennial priority in Paris. It is past time to build a “more united, more sovereign, more democratic” continent, Macron—the leader who seems most bullish about Europe’s post-American prospects—declared in April.

The problems with the optimistic scenario are easy to spot. When Macron touts European integration as a substitute for U.S. leadership, he seems to forget that Europe has been unified and cohesive precisely because of the climate of reassurance Washington has provided. In previous instances in which the United States stepped back to allow European powers to step forward—at the beginning of the Balkan Wars in the early 1990s, for instance—the result was often chaos rather than strategic cohesion. The EU was deeply split on how to handle Russian aggression right up to February 2022—until Washington took an early lead in supplying Ukraine. The lesson is that it is devilishly hard to coordinate collective action among dozens of countries with distinct interests and strategic cultures, unless someone is gently knocking heads together and providing hegemonic leadership.

If an independent, geopolitically powerful Europe sounds great, no one can agree who should lead it. France is always quick to volunteer—much to the discomfort of states, particularly in Eastern Europe, that don’t really believe that Paris has the inclination or capabilities to treat their security as its own. Berlin has the economic wherewithal to lead the continent, but its political class has long worried that doing so would simply revive fears of German power. They’re probably right: Germany’s unification after the Cold War was tolerable to its neighbors only because they were assured that Berlin, bear-hugged by the United States and NATO, would not be allowed to pursue European primacy. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Europeans have been willing to tolerate U.S. leadership precisely because the United States is not European—so it can exercise power without renewing the tensions that once ripped the continent apart.

This relates to a final problem. A Europe that can handle its own security affairs would be much more heavily armed than it is today. Defense spending would have to rise two- or threefold in many countries. European states would invest heavily in the world’s deadliest weapons—missiles, attack aircraft, and sophisticated power projection capabilities. With the loss of the U.S. nuclear umbrella, front-line states hoping to deter Russia—above all, Poland—could even seek their own nuclear weapons.

Suppose Europe does arm up in a serious way. Absent the U.S. security blanket, the very act of European countries developing the capabilities they need to confront threats from without could reawaken fears created by military imbalances within. Put differently, in a Europe protected by U.S. power, German tanks are a contribution to the common security. In a post-American Europe, they might look a lot more menacing.

This is the precise scenario that worries Macron and other European leaders. Many European defense initiatives already underway or under consideration are meant to avoid it. In the near term, however, a weak and disunited Europe would be a near certainty.

That’s because a U.S. withdrawal would rip the guts out of NATO. The alliance would lose its strongest, most battle-tested member—the country that possesses the lion’s share of its advanced capabilities and dominates its command and control arrangements. Indeed, the United States is the only country in NATO that has the strategic reach and logistical prowess to intervene decisively on Europe’s eastern front and beyond. What remains of the bloc would be a mishmash of European militaries that have largely been designed to fight in concert with U.S. forces and lack the ability to operate effectively without them. They would be supported by a weak and fragmented defense-industrial base—European NATO members field an overlapping hodgepodge of more than 170 major weapons systems—that is incapable of supporting a rapid, coordinated buildup.

Polish soldiers take part in a multinational training exercise in Nowa Deba, Poland, on May 6, 2023.Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Following a U.S. withdrawal, a militarily debilitated Europe would face a Russia that has reached a higher pitch of mobilization than at any time in decades, with few options for Europe to redress its weakness anytime soon.

Balancing Russia without U.S. power would require enormous, fiscally onerous increases in European military outlays—even more so if Russia succeeds in subjugating Ukraine and integrating its population and economy into the Kremlin’s military machine. Lacking the U.S. government’s “exorbitant privilege” of running massive deficits indefinitely, European countries would have to impose huge, unpopular tax increases or slash social welfare programs. Some countries, like Poland and the Baltic states, might pay that price to preserve their independence. Others might decide that military readiness isn’t worth rupturing the social contract—and that accommodating an aggressive Russia is the wiser course.

Or perhaps European states would just disagree on what threats to counter. Even during the Cold War, the Soviet Union threatened West Germany far more severely than it threatened, say, Portugal. As the EU has grown, this problem of divergent threat perceptions has become even more acute. Countries in the east and north are rightly terrified of Vladimir Putin’s Russia and might well join forces to defend one another. But countries farther west and south might worry more about terrorism, mass migration, and other nontraditional threats. Washington has long played honest broker in such disputes within NATO or simply provided the margin of power that allows a diverse trans-Atlantic community to do multiple things at once. Without that leadership, Europe could fragment and flounder.

In this Europe, weakness is a temporary condition, and a failure to overcome collective-action problems such as EU security is just the beginning. For as Washington’s stabilizing influence recedes, long-suppressed national antagonisms begin to reemerge—perhaps slowly at first. The European project fractures as fights break out for economic and political leadership on the continent. Revanchist behavior resurges, egged on by domestic populists and foreign interference. The lack of a benign hegemon brings old territorial disputes and geopolitical grudges back to the fore. In a self-help environment, European countries start to arm themselves more heavily; some seek the security only nuclear weapons can provide. Democracy retreats as an illiberal, often xenophobic nationalism runs wild. Over time—it may take years, perhaps decades—a post-American Europe becomes a hothouse of radicalism and rivalry.

This is what some prominent observers expected in the early 1990s. It is the future that ethnic wars in the Balkans, tensions around the reunification of Germany, and a vacuum of instability in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet bloc all seemed to herald. That future was averted, largely because the United States enlarged, rather than contracted, its European influence after the Cold War ended—intervening in Bosnia and Kosovo to snuff out ethnic conflicts while also taking Eastern Europe into the NATO fold as the EU dithered and delayed on eastward expansion. But that doesn’t mean Europe’s demons can never return.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (left) speaks with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Budapest on Nov. 7, 2019.Laszlo Balogh/Getty Images

Today, the flames of violent nationalism still flicker in the Balkans. Revisionist grievances and autocratic instincts animate leaders in Turkey and Hungary. The fallout from the 2009 European debt crisis and the years of hardship and austerity that followed showed that resentment of German influence—in this case, economic influence—is never deeply buried. Even today, as Putin gives European states every reason to work together, tensions between Ukraine and Poland or between France and Germany occasionally flare.

There are worrying political trends, as well. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has spent years deconstructing Hungarian democracy and touting the rise of the “illiberal state.” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is carrying out a similar project in his country. Parties such as the National Rally in France are rising in the polls and trafficking in a hard-edged nationalism that can easily turn into zero-sum geopolitical thinking, with centuries of historical grievances ready to be awakened. The far-right Alternative for Germany remains a political contender even as it becomes more extreme. The triumph of these movements might well be aided by a Russia assiduously waging political warfare, all too eager to set European states against one another.

A fractured Europe gripped by its ancient demons is a nightmare scenario, and nightmares usually don’t come true. But what is crucial to understand is that a post-American Europe would be fundamentally unlike the Europe we have come to know. The geopolitical shock absorbers provided by U.S. power and its umbrella over Europe will be gone. The destabilizing uncertainty over status and security will return. Countries will no longer feel so confident that they can ensure their survival without resorting to the behavior—the military buildups, the intense rivalries—that characterized earlier eras. Today’s Europe is the product of a historically unique, unprecedented configuration of power and influence created by the United States. Can we really be so sure that the bad old ways won’t reassert themselves once the very safeguards that have suppressed them for 75 years are withdrawn?

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that Europe’s transformation into today’s peaceful EU can never be undone. After all, Europe experienced stretches of relative peace before 1945—in the decades after Napoleon’s defeat, for instance—only for that peace to collapse once the balance of power shifted. And don’t think that tragedy can’t befall a continent that seems so enlightened: The history of Europe, prior to U.S. engagement, was the history of the world’s most economically advanced, most thoroughly modern continent repeatedly tearing itself to shreds. Indeed, if there is a lesson from Europe’s past, it is that the descent can come sooner and be steeper than currently seems possible to imagine.

In the 1920s, the forces of liberalism seemed ascendant: British writer James Bryce hailed the “universal acceptance of democracy as the normal and natural form of government.” The newly founded League of Nations was offering novel mechanisms for crisis management. Countries were slashing their militaries and settling outstanding grievances from World War I. Just a decade later, it was the forces of fascism that had the momentum as the continent careened toward another world war. Europe’s own history is testament to how quickly and completely things can all fall apart.

If Europe has benefited from being part of a thriving liberal order in recent decades, that liberal order has benefited from having a peaceful, gradually expanding EU at its core. If Europe turns dark and vicious again, it might once more export its conflicts to the world. On the day that the United States retreats across the Atlantic, it will be placing far more than the future of Europe at risk.