NATO: Europe without America, with Jeremy Shapiro (Rewind Edition)

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For nearly eighty years, Europe's security has rested on a single assumption: that the Americans would be there. In early March, days into the war with Iran, and weeks after Washington threatened to take Greenland from a NATO ally, we sat down with Jeremy Shapiro to ask whether that assumption still holds, and what Europe does if it doesn't.

Since this conversation was recorded, the Pentagon has ordered thousands of American troops out of Germany, canceled an armored brigade deployment to Poland, and told allies that future U.S. force levels will depend on how well they align with Washington's priorities. France has offered its nuclear umbrella to eight European countries. And at last week's NATO summit in Ankara, President Trump suggested the United States could remove its soldiers from Europe entirely.

Shapiro saw much of this coming. He explains why Europeans no longer trust the American security guarantee, why they can't yet walk away from it, and what a European defense built to operate without the United States would look like, if the political will lasts long enough to build it.

Can Europe defend itself before the American umbrella closes? And what happens to the alliance if the answer is no?

Join us for this special recap edition featuring Jeremy Shapiro, Research Director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. 

Music by Alex_Kizenkov from Pixabay.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Swedish diplomat who had been with his prime minister around the time of the Greenland episode, and he said that his prime minister said to him, Something in me broke last week. I'll never look at the United States the same way.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

In May, the Pentagon ordered 5,000 American soldiers out of Germany. Since then, the cuts have kept coming. Fewer fighter jets, fewer warships. And last week, Trump suggested the rest could follow. For nearly 80 years, Europe's defense has rested on one assumption that the Americans would be there.

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Americans had become the outside threat. Imagine being threatened by your own protector.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

In early March, we sat down with Jeremy Shapiro, research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Before any of this began, he told us that Europeans had already made up their minds that after Greenland, after the tariffs, they had stopped believing the Americans would be there. And he told us Europe can defend itself. It has the money, the technology, and for now, the will. The question might no longer be whether Europe will have to stand on its own, but whether it can be ready in time.

SPEAKER_03 1:17

Maybe Trump or someone like Trump will come back in four years, he did last time. But a lot of other Europeans will say, yeah, maybe he will, but I don't want to spend all that money on defense.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

This is Global Insights by Network 2020. Today, a special rewind edition. Europe without America. This conversation from March was moderated by Courtney Doggard, president of Network 2020.

SPEAKER_00 1:52

I basically wanted to start with the current moment, with the recent US and Israeli strikes on Iran. I wanted to start there, Jeremy, and just get a sense of the range of views that European leaders have expressed, which seems to run from primarily condemning Iran's retaliatory strikes and stressing the need for diplomacy with, I think, Spain as the only country that condemned the U.S. attacks. It almost seems like an uncharacteristic alignment and support given where we've been this past year between Washington and the European continent. So what do you make of this latest chapter and what do you think it says about transatlantic relations?

SPEAKER_03 2:37

Thanks for having me. So it's interesting that you were going to talk about the national security strategy, but instead Iran, because if you read the national security strategy, you would not think that we would ever be talking about a war with Iran. I think the first thing that the war in Iran tells us is that the national security strategy is a meaningless document. And we paid way too much attention to it. And I think that that gets at something quite essential, which might end up being a bit of a motif for our conversation, is that there is no strategy here. Donald Trump doesn't have strategy, doesn't want strategy, apparently. He is a sort of mixture of it, ego, and domestic politics. Um, and so what he so it's it's sort of foolish, I think, to look for strategy and to read his documents. This is affecting how Europeans have to deal with this administration. They're in a weird place. They they feel probably more than ever that they, by and large, that they need America, principally the threat from Russia, but also other threats that they feel around the world. The United States, for almost every European country, is quite intrinsic to their defense. I think as they're looking at some of the U.S. behavior over the last several years, they're wishing to change that. But generally speaking, they believe that that is at best a slow process. Some of them believe that's an impossible process. They are living where they do, and and that's what that is what shapes their approach to an event like Iran, um, uh the U.S. attack on Iran, I should say. The, you know, it's it's I think it's interesting to note that Spain is the only country that's really come out against it. Spain doesn't really depend very much on the United States for its defense. It is notably, as I was saying to Courtney before the conference, it is notably far from Russia and didn't really participate in either of the world wars and doesn't see this idea of the United States saving Europe all the time as quite as intrinsic to its identity, and also, not coincidentally, has one of the few left-wing leaders left in Europe. All of the other countries, and I think the most notable ones to look at are Britain, France, and Germany, as usual. They uh they really hate the idea. I think it's I feel very safe in saying they really hate the idea of this attack on Iran from the United States. They they don't believe in supporting this Israeli government, they don't believe this war is necessary, they are very nervous about the instability, and they think that Donald Trump is at best reckless, at worst insane. So they're very, very upset about this decision and this situation. But they the nature of the place that they've gotten themselves into over the last 80 years in terms of their relationship to the United States, is they don't have much choice but to support it. This is conditioned by several things. One is that the Iranian regime is quite odious and they would never create any sort of consensus within Europe in supporting the Iranians. Let's not forget that as much as Europeans and others of us might not like the idea of attacking Iran, this is a regime that was killing thousands of its citizens on the streets. The Europeans themselves have a very bad history with the Islamic Republic of Iran. Don't trust them, don't like this regime, and did not like so they're not really interested, either a political or a strategic matter, being seen as siding with Iran. Probably more importantly, they they know that they could never get consensus on doing that within when they divide, they are they never have any influence. So what they're trying to do is is to sort of generate some lukewarm support. I think they range the responses range from lukewarm support to supportively lukewarm. And what they uh what they're doing is is sort of saying, well, we think that the war should go quickly. We're only gonna participate in defensive operations. I have no idea what that means relative to offensive operations, but and they're gonna sort of uh support the United States politically, but not take very much part in the operation. It's uh it's a position of great cowardice, but I think it reflects the the strategic situation that they're in. And I don't think they have that much choice other than to be sort of moderate on this issue.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

So then where I'd like to go now is one of the interesting things about the second Trump administration is that we've sort of had that interim period of four years, and we had the the first Trump administration, then Biden, which everyone was sort of saying, okay, well, now we're back to normal, and now and now it seems like everyone's thrown that out the window and realized that Biden was the aberration. So I'm curious to understand where you see Washington under Trump the first term versus where it is the second term. When it comes to Europe, what are some of the continuities that you're seeing?

SPEAKER_03 7:38

So I I think that the first Trump administration really was manifested Donald Trump's deep disinterest in allies, but expressed it in a sort of typical American terms, which is burden sharing. The United States is doing too much and want to shift some of the burden to Europe. Every American president since Eisenhower has had that policy that the United States is doing too much and Europe should do more to defend itself and to contribute to alliance defense. Trump took it up a couple of notches in his first term, as he usually does. He made a lot of noises about withdrawing from NATO, cutting off NATO allies that didn't contribute sufficiently. And European defense spending went up in his first term. It was already going up because of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014. Second term has continued that, and I should say it continued through the Biden administration, too. It's a historic American policy for 80 years. In his second term, his administration added a couple of very interesting elements, which are very new. The Trump administration was at least tentatively willing to leverage the U.S. advantage in security affairs, the fact that Europe was so dependent on the U.S. for security into the economic and trade areas. And what that means is they were willing to say, give us this trade concession on steel and aluminum, we won't protect you, uh, or we'll withdraw from Europe. That that has picked up a lot in the second term. Really, the U.S. is really taking advantage of its position as a security provider for Europe to get a lot of economic concessions from the Europeans, which is not a traditional uh US policy. This was clearest during last summer's negotiation over Trump's tariff policy, where Europeans basically accepted a 15% tariff without any retaliation because they were so nervous about the idea that Trump would withdraw American protection for Europe if they didn't do that. The other new element, which is really quite striking and quite surprising, actually, is the is the sort of new American imperialism, the the the attack, if you will, on Danish sovereignty, which I have to say I didn't see coming. I suppose I probably should have. The president mentioned it in his first term a couple of times. Um, but it seems so unserious and ridiculous that it was hard to that it was hard to credit. Um, but it's but it clearly in the second term it's become uh uh a big part of how he sees the world, how how he sees his legacy, and I guess his effort to get onto Mount Rushmore. And in order to do that, you have to expand American territory, and I guess uh there's not that many other places to do it besides Greenland, which is you know large and uninhabited mostly. Um the uh uh similar to that is this approach that started um in JD Vance's speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2024, five, excuse me, 2025, in which the the US demonstrated a desire for uh parties, political parties with um a similar ideology to the MAGA movement in terms of their populism, their anti-immigration stance, their sort of white supremacist stance to um take power in Europe. And they and so they came they came full in in with a full-throated criticism of uh of European domestic politics and culture, claiming the European was at threat of civilizational erasure because of their immigration policies, uh, and sending a signal that um that the US was going to put its weight behind populist parties like the AFD, uh the Reform Party in the UK, or the um what used to be the Front National, the Rassemblement National in France, um, in order to bring into power uh anti-liberal parties, which would take a more U.S. stance on immigration. We can talk about why they've done this. This also was a was a surprise to me. Um, and uh Marco Rubio, in his in his Munich Security Conference speech, to reference the question that was asked, continued this policy with a somewhat softer tone, um, but nonetheless indicated that this is a serious uh approach that the United States is gonna is is going to have. And it's a huge threat to most of the existing governments of uh Europe, um, certainly the UK, France, and German governments. So they're taking it very seriously. Um, but again, it's very hard because the these countries are so closely related to the US, so dependent on the US, for them to push back very hard or very publicly on these types of policies.

SPEAKER_00 12:35

I did want to talk a little bit one very specific case, which would be Ukraine and in particular the peace deal. So I'm just curious to get your sense on how European policymakers are viewing the approach of being asked to share some of the burden of implementation of any potential ceasefire while being excluded from the new from the negotiation process, where you see an acceptable peace framework for European powers, whether or not the EU or Europe in general possesses the political cohesion or fiscal capacity to serve as Ukraine's primary security guarantor without US backing, which it sounds like you're saying they're pretty terrified of losing that.

SPEAKER_03 13:22

Yeah. So the Ukraine issue is from a security standpoint certainly the one that most preoccupies almost all European leaders, uh, perhaps with the exception of Pedro Sanchez, as I mentioned, is very far from Russia. Even ones like Denmark and the United Kingdom, which are not super close, very, very focused on this. The U.S. approach worries them quite a bit. It's not so much that the U.S. is expecting them to pay, or in fact, is already insisting that they pay. I think they've already internalized the fact that they have to pay for arms to Ukraine. Right now, there is this deal going on. The US, both US and Europe were sending both money and weapons to Ukraine. The US has stopped sending money to Ukraine and stopped sending weapons that they've paid for. What they've agreed to do is allow Europeans to buy American weapons and give them to Ukraine. So there's basically no more money flowing toward the Ukraine war from the United States, but there are U.S. weapons flowing, but they are being paid for by Europeans. And Europeans don't love that, of course. They do understand that Russia's a lot closer to them, that they are wealthy enough to deal with it, and that's the a burden that they need to take on. I think the bigger problem for them, as Courtney was implying, is that they don't have any, despite spending all that money, they don't have any control over the process. It is an odd fact that the United States is very far away. The United States is not providing any money or any weapons directly to the Ukrainians. They are providing some intelligence, but Europeans are doing that too. And yet it is the Americans who are negotiating with both the Russians and the Ukrainians over the war. And Europeans are by and large shut out of it. This has got to be immensely frustrating. This is like paying all the rent in the building and not being able to sit on the condo board. Why is it not that difficult to understand? Because I'm using this word Europe, which is a nice shorthand, but there isn't actually any such thing as a political matter. There are 27 countries in the EU, there's 32 in NATO. They they all have they have important variations in their perspectives on this question, and they have a lot of difficulty coordinating and forming a policy, particularly when the United States has one, because what happens is they divide on whether to agree with the United States or not. What they're trying to do is make sure that whatever deal the United States strikes with Russia and Ukraine doesn't cross any of their red lines. That's mostly about making sure that Ukraine has sufficient agency. The settlement doesn't ratify the fact that you can take territory through aggression, and that Ukraine can defend itself, and Europe can defend itself in the future so that it has enough military left to be able to do that. I think that there is a great deal of worry in Europe, and I suppose I share it, that the United States is simply going to sell Ukraine down the river, that what they're really trying to do is get sort of economic deals out of Russia, and then they're going to force Ukraine to accept a very difficult. There's been some indication that that's happening, although I have to say that the Trump administration has been a bit inconsistent on this. They have put some pressure on Russia. I think that the Europeans remain very worried that the Trump administration doesn't really like Ukraine, doesn't really like the Ukrainians, doesn't really like Zelensky, and has a sort of strange admiration for Vladimir Putin and for Russia. And so is looking to use the Ukraine settlement to reset relations with Russia, create a new type of relationship with Russia, which will be very dangerous, not just for Ukraine, but for Europe as a whole.

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Thanks. And so that kind of leads to the question of European security in general. And you mentioned earlier the flare-up over Greenland and what that means for Denmark, a NATO member. What does European security architecture potentially look like going forward? Is NATO a piece of that? How are they weaning themselves off of Washington, so to speak, when it comes to the defense piece?

SPEAKER_03 17:44

Yeah, it's a good question. The disadvantages are much newer. Under previous presidents, the Americans didn't interfere, at least not since like the 50s, in European domestic politics. Americans didn't profit from their control of European security to get economic concessions. To the contrary, they actually gave economic concessions to Europeans. And the Europeans felt that American protection against Russia and other threats was fairly reliable. For a very long time, this was a great deal for Europeans. I think over the last 10, slowly over the last 10 years, but actually fairly quickly in the last one year, Europeans have decided by and large that it is not a good idea anymore. This is a revolution in European thinking to say we don't want, we don't like this American security blanket anymore. It's not worth it. The German chancellor made a speech saying this around the time of the Greenland episode. The Greenland episode, I think, is really the straw that broke the camel's back when the Americans came after European sovereignty itself. So it wasn't just that Americans were failing to protect Europe from outside threats, that Americans had become the outside threat. Imagine being threatened by your own protector. That is something that really can shake your identity. So I feel like this Rubicon has been crossed. They've been moving up to it since the first Trump administration, but but this is a real watershed. I was with a Swedish diplomat who had been with his prime minister around the time of the Greenland episode, and he said that his prime minister said to him, something in me broke last week. I'll never look at the United States the same way. This is a profound statement from a country like Sweden, which has had an amazing productive relationship with the United States for decades. The realization has happened, but getting making that realization into something that they can actually operate on will take much longer. But I think they have already started. You can see it not just in the defense spending, but in the ways that they're talking about spending defense. They are trying to wean themselves slowly but surely off of American weapons. They are starting to build up militaries that can operate without the United States. They are starting to think about how to create the capabilities like intelligence, logistics, precision, and weaponry that only the United States has. And they're starting to think about new institutional forms that can allow them to operate without the United States. I think this is something that they are capable of achieving. It certainly will take somewhere in the neighborhood of five to ten years in the best case, but they have the money for it, they have the technological capacity, and they have, as of now, I think, the political will. There is a significant question as to whether that political will last into the next president. If the next guy shows up, and even if he's Marco Rubio, and he just says, ah, it's not quite as bad as Trump was, I'll still protect you. A lot of people will say, well, maybe Trump will come back, maybe Trump or someone like Trump will come back in four years. He did last time. But a lot of other Europeans will say, Yeah, maybe he will, but I don't want to spend all that money on defense. So let's hope he doesn't. It's not clear that the political will will last, but I think it could. If it does, I think what you'll see is a sort of layered approach from a security architecture standpoint. NATO will remain very useful because NATO is a command structure more than anything else. And you wouldn't really be able to replace that command structure, planning culture, the interoperability standards. But I think that they will seek to build a European pillar inside NATO, more European commands, maybe a European SACER, more European owned plans, readiness, ammunition enablers. The Europeans start to not just pay for things, actually to plan things, to own things, and to take responsibility for things. I think you'll also see, though, because Europe will remain almost no matter what happens, a Collection of countries that don't always increasing resorts to what they're often calling in Europe these days coalitions of the willing, which is like-minded countries on specific issues that can get together at a at a level beneath NATO and the EU. So at numbers below 32 or 27, 8, 10 interested countries on an issue like Ukraine that can really move forward and pool resources in various institutional configurations. And then I think the final thing you'll see in terms of security architecture is a very new nuclear conversation. One of the other ways in which the United States has traditionally provided security to Europe is through its extended nuclear deterrent. If the rest of it isn't working, it's not really credible that the United States nuclear exchange with Russia over Europe. That's not that's not how nuclear deterrence works. So Europeans are going to be looking to create a more independent nuclear deterrent. There's a few different ways they can do that. The French president made a speech about that, in which he said we have nuclear weapons and we can use some of the methods that the United States used to use to extend our nuclear deterrence to other European allies. The British are looking at something similar, although it's a bit more difficult for them. There's some limitations to that because of the size of the French nuclear arsenal and some other difficult technical issues. But again, that's something that the Europeans can do if they have a political will. There's also the possibility of what they're starting to call friendly proliferation, in which countries like Poland and Germany actually get nuclear weapons themselves. But I think they're further away from that. Things would have to get somewhat worse before they went to that. I think what the Europeans are hoping to achieve through all of that is a sort of gradual responsible shift and responsibility. And what they're doing in the meantime is trying to please the United States so it doesn't suddenly withdraw support. And they hope that in five or 10 years they can hit this sweet spot where things are bad enough that their political will for moving forward remains where it is and they continue to take the steps that they've taken in the last year, but not so bad that they feel unprotected and not and not so good that they get rid of this political will and they move back to where they were.

SPEAKER_00 24:20

I'm curious to get your take on how Washington's needs vis-a-vis China align with European needs and in particular their economic relationship with China. And so where do you see alignment and what the US might be wanting to achieve vis-a-vis China? And where do you see divergence and what are the implications for Washington?

SPEAKER_03 24:46

It's a difficult question because unlike a lot of issues, there's a fair amount of consensus in the United States on China policy. There is a view across, at least in Washington, across the Democratic and Republican establishments, that China is the principal threat of the future, the only pure competitor of the United States, that it is both an economic and a military threat, and that a certain amount of technological containment and rebalancing of trade to get rid of supply chain dependencies and to maintain the U.S. lead and various technologies, in particular artificial intelligence, is critical. And so the administration put into place a lot of export controls to limit technological diffusion to China and started building up. And the Pacific Obama administration started doing that. And the Biden administration really broadened that and introduced a sort of industrial policy element in terms of making sure that the U.S. captured key industries, particularly advanced chips. And the Republicans really seemed quite on board with that. But in Donald Trump's second term, a very strange thing has happened, which is that Trump himself doesn't really seem very interested in the competition with China. He's interested in the trade balance with China, but that's not a strategic issue. And from Trump's perspective, he just wants to make sure that buy more stuff from us than we buy from them. He doesn't really seem to care whether they're buying chips or soybeans from us. Let's say, as we used to put it, microchips or potato chips. It's all the same. And he seems incredibly uninterested in the strategic competition. He doesn't seem that interested in whether China owns Taiwan or what it does to Japan. And this puts him at odds, not just with the Democrats, puts him at odds with his own administration, puts him at odds with the Republicans. But he does seem to be a lot more in control of this administration than the last one. The European perspective on they were worried that the United States would force them to make a choice. They knew if they were forced to make a choice, they would choose the United States. But they didn't want to make a choice. They still have a very important economic relationship with China. And they've been getting a lot of pressure from the Biden administrations to reduce that, to do things like get Huawei out of their telecommunications infrastructure on security grounds to decouple, or as it later became called, de-risk their relationship with China so that China would not have control of their supply chains. And they were doing some of that because they thought they should, but I think others because the United States was forcing them to. That pressure has eased somewhat strangely. They were expecting that pressure to increase in the second Trump administration. I was too. But this Trump administration has been not very interested in China beyond the trade deficit, has not been pushing the export controls, has been willing to sell advanced chips to China more than the Biden administration was, and has been putting a little bit less pressure on Europe than the Biden administration did. And less pressure, by the way, than the first Trump administration did. This is very curious. It really only seems to come from the president. I think Europeans don't know what to make of it. I would say that a lot of them would disagree with me that it's even happening. But, and I'm sure there is some, but I don't think they perhaps notice that it's not really coming from the president, and therefore it doesn't have the real backing. And if they just didn't do it, no one would notice. So some other Europeans have noticed this. There's a divide, to be fair, there's a divide within Europe on China too. So some people in Europe are unhappy about this, and because they were really counting on US pressure to help them create Europe's own pushback against China. My own view is that Europe needs its own China policy. It shouldn't take America's, uh, and it shouldn't have a policy which is just, you know, whatever the Chinese want. Um uh and it it does seem sort of incapable sometimes of having a tough policy without the U.S. pushing it to do it. So China will be uh a test of that, whether it can, whether it can, in the absence of U.S. pressure, formulate its own uh China policy. And I'm the indications are not that great. As the U.S. pressure has diminished, I think you see a lot of European countries going their own ways, even though many of them are wary of China.

SPEAKER_01 29:33

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Global Insights. You can subscribe to Global Insights on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your audio. For more analysis, events, and ways to connect with our community, click on the link in the description. See you next time.