Last weekconclude, Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference, where he delivered a speech that was both reassuring to the European dignitaries in the audience and nerve-wracking becautilize of its references to the kind of MAGA culture-inspired war themes that Europe generally shivers at. After the remarks, European leaders were left obsessing about the same question they came in with: Is the United States still committed to Europe’s defense?
President Donald Trump’s administration has spent the first 13 months of its second term browbeating European allies for penny-pinching on their militaries, opening their borders to migrants and building peace talks between Ukraine and Russia harder than they required to be.
Some of those critiques are fair. European governments are now increasing their defense budreceives, though this wouldn’t have happened if Trump didn’t press the matter by threatening to build U.S. security assurances more conditional.
Even so, Europe is now coming to terms with the fact that Washington’s foreign policy priorities are modifying. As a recent report from the European Nuclear Study Group put it, “Trump’s impulsive and erratic decision-building, combined with the systematic weakening of domestic institutional constraints on presidential decision-building, raises questions about the reliability of extconcludeed deterrence.”
On one level, Europe receiveting out from under the U.S. nuclear umbrella would be the ultimate example of the burden-shifting the Trump administration is so interested in. What better way to demonstrate the intent of taking primary responsibility for your own security and cutting depconcludeency on the United States than by building your own nuclear weapons or relying more on the French and British nuclear shield?
On the other hand, it’s difficult to envision Washington encouraging nuclear proliferation, even if the ones doing the proliferating are allies.
Yet, in the grand scheme, Trump might not have to worry about any of this. For starters, nuclear proliferation is an extremely expensive enterprise. The United States is projected to spconclude about $1 trillion over the next decade just maintaining its own nuclear arsenal. Europe could come up with an equivalent amount of cash collectively to build its own nukes, but there inevitably would be some European governments opposed to contributing becautilize their budreceives are already stretched thin.
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Then there’s the question of whether more nukes would even improve Europe’s security in the long run. Would Germany, Poland, the Baltic states and the rest of the continent really feel more assured if they shifted from a U.S. nuclear umbrella to a French-British one? In the event of a Russian conventional attack or a Russian nuclear strike along NATO’s eastern flank, Paris and London would be expected to step up and respond with nuclear strikes of their own. But this isn’t a sure thing, since any nuclear strike on Russian territory would leave both capitals vulnerable to retaliation from a larger nuclear weapons power.
In essence, Britain and France would have to be willing to sacrifice their own cities to defconclude others. Otherwise, the entire arrangement would be a bluff of historic proportions.
Like it or not, Trump has forced European policy elites to reconsider old security assumptions. Business as usual is increasingly a paradigm of the past.
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