Europe’s struggle with MAGA is unlikely to end well

In the early 19th century when Britannia — John Bull — ruled the waves and funded all Europe’s struggle against Napoleon, there was a popular English song:

"Who pays the piper?

I, said John Bull.

Whoever plays the Fool,

I pay the piper!"

For the past 80 years, whoever has “played the fool” on the world stage, it has been the United States that has paid the piper.

While MAGA supporters decline to accept that exercising the leadership of democracies has advanced American political and economic interests, most economists believe that dominance of NATO, and of its costs, hasn’t been a downside transactional burden for the US.

Yet even assuming this is true, what is for sure is that this era is ending. Europe is preparing for a new life, almost certainly further distanced from the US than at any time since Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Though it is likely to be many months before we know the detail — just how deep could become the strategic divide between the continents — the big picture is plain. If President-elect Donald Trump makes good on his promise to work with Russia’s Vladimir Putin to foreclose on Ukraine, the future for NATO and collective Western security is bleak.

The days are over when Europeans could look to the US as its shield. Joe Biden is likely to prove to have been the last president to regard the continent’s security as a vital interest — even the predominant foreign interest — of the US. The strategic standoff with China will dominate Washington policymaking in the years ahead.

Some of us believe that Trump, in his incomprehensible enthusiasm for Putin, is making a disastrous mistake. He promises to pull back support for Ukraine and, indeed, for NATO. But the one big global issue on which Trump has made a strong, rational case is that of denouncing the Western Europeans for failing to carry our portion of defense burden-sharing.

It is outrageous that European Union members spend so little on their own security. Spain, for instance, currently allocates just 1.8 per cent of its gross domestic product to its armed forces. Italy does worse — 1.5 per cent. Britain — now outside the EU, but traditionally Europe’s leader on defense — claims to spend 2.3 per cent, but this figure includes stuff such as service pensions, which contribute nothing towards manning, arming and equipping men and women to fight at the sharp end.

Only the Eastern Europeans — above all Poland, which has more than doubled its armed forces budget in a decade — together with the Nordic states are dramatically increasing their defense spending in the face of Russian aggression. In 2017, EU nations committed themselves to a big joint program of weapons and ammunition procurement, but pathetically little of this has been made good.

As for European support for Ukraine, I have written many times that without the US, the cause of President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s nation would be doomed. And so it now appears. Even if military aid to Kyiv isn’t immediately shut down, the Ukrainians’ will to resist the Russians is dwindling, because these hugely impressive, embattled people are watching the West’s will to arm them ebbing away. Trump’s victory almost certainly signals their defeat.

European governments must continue to do everything in their power to sustain a close relationship with the US, and to persuade the new Trump administration that it is strongly in American interests — no good talking about European interests, or about “the cause of freedom” or suchlike mantra — to continue to lead NATO.

Nonetheless, if the European nations are to make policy prudently, they must also increase their own defense spending and their support for Ukraine, in anticipation of American cuts. If we look to the strategic picture for the next 10 or 20 years, as we should, we must expect the threat from the autocracies to persist, and likewise the need for our continent to strengthen its capability to defend itself.

Unfortunately, the leadership of the major European nations isn’t in great shape; indeed, it looks pretty awful. France’s Emmanuel Macron, an erratic policymaker even on a good day, has been a lame duck since he impulsively called a July election. Germany’s Olaf Scholz talked a good game about Ukraine when Russia invaded in February 2022, but has since failed to make good on many of his promises — and that was before the recent collapse of his government. Italy has never contributed much muscle to NATO and is unlikely to do so in the future. Spain is preoccupied with its own troubles and dissentions, worsened by last month’s catastrophic floods in Valencia.

Britain has traditionally led the European continent within NATO, because its armed forces were the most effective. This is no longer true in the post-Brexit world. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an influential London-based think tank, says: “If the UK stays out of the single market, it will be hard for it to play a leading role in a new joint European military-industrial strategy.”

Europe needs some leaders who will cry from the rooftops to their peoples that they can no longer regard security as an optional extra to the core issues voters care about — immigration, welfare and health services, their economies. It is extraordinary, and frighteningly naïve, that Europeans behave as if it is within our powers, our range of choices, unilaterally to renounce war. Such a delusion is madness as long as hostile nations led by China, Russia, Iran and North Korea see extreme violence or the threat of it as the most effective means of fulfilling their policy objectives.

In 2024, EU governments collectively budgeted $326 billion for defense, about one-third of of US spending, which provides two-thirds of NATO’s budget. EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, has emerged as Europe’s most effective leadership personality. It used to be said that, when Washington wanted to talk to Europe, it called Angela Merkel in Berlin. Today, such a call is almost always made to Brussels, and von der Leyen.

She is pushing for stronger and better-funded defense — “a true European Defense Union” and greater integration and rationalization of defense industries. Yet nothing currently proposed is likely to fill the yawning gulf if the US pulls the plug on Ukraine, or turns its back on NATO. Despite a 2017 EU commitment dramatically to increase collaborative defense equipment spending to 35 per cent, today only half this figure has been achieved.

A struggle lies ahead to persuade MAGA Republicans that, while the US remains the mightiest nation on earth it, too, needs allies. We all do, in order to confront the grave strategic challenges that lie ahead. But it would be naïve to pretend that the outlook for the security of the Western democracies is today anything but bleak.