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‘Happy vassal’ or ‘strategic hedging’? Europe’s hard choices as NATO crumbles

‘Happy vassal’ or ‘strategic hedging’? Europe’s hard choices as NATO crumbles The World Today iallan.drupal 8 June 2026 Europe has four long-term paths to security autonomy from America – which it takes will depend on electorates’ appetites for far greater political integration and financial sacrifice, says Glyn Morgan. The NATO summit in The Hague last year passed more smoothly than many had feared. Credit was due partly to Secretary General Mark Rutte’s now-notorious flattery of President Donald Trump, whom he referred to as ‘Daddy’, and partly to the allies bowing to US demands to spend more money on defence. Those fearing a repeat of the contentious Brussels summit of 2018 – where Trump reportedly threatened to pull the United States out of NATO – were pleasantly surprised. Unfortunately, the Ankara summit in July threatens a return to the fractious atmosphere of 2018. Trump’s most recent diplomatic manoeuvres certainly provide his NATO allies with cause for concern. Not only did he promise to march 5,000 or so troops out of Germany, but barely a few weeks later he promised to march 5,000 back into Poland. There was no obvious strategic reason behind this Grand Old Duke of York act other than the president’s negative feelings towards German chancellor Friedrich Merz, who had just criticized Trump’s Iran policy, and positive feelings towards the Polish president Karol Nawrocki. An asymmetrical military alliance like NATO exposes the weaker party to twin dangers: abandonment or entanglement. NATO as an institution will doubtless survive recent difficulties with the US. The organization has been around for nearly 80 years; it can call on the support of powerful vested interests; and perhaps most importantly, no one has come up with a viable alternative. The survival of NATO as a reliable security alliance is another matter. Disagreements over the Iran and Ukraine wars lay bare structural problems that even Rutte’s emollient rhetoric can’t conjure away. Sceptics might object that NATO has never been wholly reliable. It has always required a suspension of disbelief concerning American assurances, especially in the case of security threats that impose asymmetrical costs across the Atlantic. International relations scholars have long recognized that an asymmetrical military alliance such as NATO exposes the weaker party to twin dangers: abandonment or entanglement. Under the second Trump administration, these dangers are more than mere theoretical possibilities. Abandonment fears Abandonment is the Ukraine story. However erratically expressed on Truth Social, the US administration’s declaratory policy signals a willingness to trade Ukrainian territory – with troubling implications for the Baltics, where a revanchist Russia, having digested part of Ukraine, may feel emboldened to turn next. Entanglement is the Iran story. Having made initial noises about regime change, the Trump administration found that its European allies were reluctant to lend support to the US–Israel military campaign. The fear that a failed state in Iran would flood Europe with refugees was just one reason. While abandonment and entanglement are familiar fears in NATO’s history, Europe must now come to terms with two altogether more alarming prospects: appropriation – the US seeking to absorb Greenland, the territory of a NATO member state; and extortion – the US seeking to leverage its security guarantee for trade gains. The American Europe built between 1945 and 2025 is coming to an end. Europeans and Canadians are discovering that membership of NATO hardly matters to a US president who views the world in purely transactional terms. Even some traditional Atlanticists such as Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk now question whether it makes sense for Europe to rely so heavily on the US for its security. Optimists still like to think that a return of the Democrats to power in 2029 would resolve all problems. Trump is an aberration; the allies retain shared strategic interests grounded on common western values; and now there’s an agreement to increase expenditure. There are, however, four problems with this optimistic response. First, it makes European security vulnerable to the whim of the American voter – a strategy of hope that President Emmanuel Macron of France has repeatedly warned against. Second, the US and Europe are far less congruent in their values than they once were – a point US Vice President JD Vance noted in his infamous Munich speech in 2025. Third, throwing more European money at the problem will hardly suffice, especially now that the current US administration has reminded European political leaders of their vulnerability to abandonment, entanglement, appropriation and extortion. And fourth, since ‘the pivot to Asia’ of the Obama presidency, Democratic and Republican leaders alike have recognized that China is the highest strategic and economic priority. Furthermore, an increase of defence spending within the current NATO framework merely reinforces dependency on a US-controlled command structure. This simply buys more vulnerability, more reliance on what the American political scientist Stephen Walt describes as a ‘predatory hegemon’ – one that prefers threats and humiliating insults to the traditional tools of diplomacy. Rather than a temporary aberration, the current NATO crisis is best understood not as an anomaly to be managed, but as a symptom of a deeper transformation. The American Europe built between 1945 and 2025 – an asymmetric order in which the US provided security, set the terms of trade, anchored the dollar system and shaped Europe’s political horizons – is coming to an end. NATO’s troubles are not the cause of this rupture but its most visible expression. After Greenland, European leaders must worry about a command structure where the Supreme Allied Commander is always an American. The task confronting European leaders is not to bow to American demands for more money but to consider European security in a world where the old transatlantic order is disintegrating. Here it is of critical importance to recognize that the concept of security has at least three different dimensions, each of which requires its own response. Security as territorial integrity involves the ability to resist armed attack on one’s territory and prevent a Ukraine-style loss of one’s border regions. Until recently, it would have been ludicrous to suggest that threats to Europe’s territorial integrity might come not merely from Russia but also from the United States. Following the US threat to appropriate Greenland, European political leaders must worry about a NATO command structure where the Supreme Allied Commander is always an American. Learning to say ‘No’ If a US president is going to treat European borders as negotiable, then the European allies – perhaps in conjunction with Canada – need to organize military forces capable of acting not merely independently of the US, but in extremis capable of adopting a defensive posture against US forces. Needless to say, the defensive forces available to Europe and Canada are likely to be no match for the United States. But it is still important to signal a willingness to resist. Independently deployable defensive forces are a necessary component of that signal. Security as autonomy requires the capability to say ‘No’ to entanglements like the Iran bombing campaign without having to fear the withdrawal of US military security support or extortion in the form of ruinous trade deals. While Europe remains so dependent on the US military, whether in the form of the nuclear shield or the sword of US conventional forces, it will always remain vulnerable to this form of coercion. Related work NATO chief Mark Rutte warns Russia could use military force against alliance in five years European officials faced precisely this dilemma when seeking to negotiate a trade deal with Washington in July 2025. Unfortunately for Europe, they remain dependent not only on the US military but also on US technology (including satellites) and – following the Ukraine and Iran wars – increasingly on US liquefied natural gas (LNG). European efforts to achieve security autonomy are, in short, insufficient without also achieving a measure of technological autonomy and energy self-sufficiency. Security as world-making involves the capacity to shape the rules of the international political and economic system. European leaders have long recognized the importance of a rules-based international system. And they have long hoped that the US was equally committed to this endeavour. The Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has gone further than most leaders in registering the threat the Trump administration poses to the rules-based order. Since his January 2026 speech at Davos, Carney’s fears about the fate of the rules-based order have only been confirmed by US actions in Venezuela, Iran and the Persian Gulf. In May 2026, Trump proudly announced that the US Navy was acting like ‘pirates’ in the way they were seizing foreign ships. If security requires the capacity to shape the rules of the international system, then Europe is less secure than at any time in the post-war era. Four paths to security The realization that the transatlantic order is disintegrating leaves European leaders with four primary strategic paths. None is entirely satisfactory and each involves a disconcerting sacrifice of either prosperity, security or identity. The first option is to embrace the status of America’s ‘happy vassals’. The hope of those who recommend that survival depends on submission is that by spending a little more on defence, the US will continue to provide its security umbrella, while leaving Europeans free to enjoy their longer vacations, more robust safety nets and comparatively idyllic lifestyles. If the Americans will only allow this option at the cost of greater technological and energy dependence, so be it. And should they insist that Greenland is theirs, then Europeans will still always have Paris. Military autonomy is a hollow shell without technological and energy autonomy. The second option is for each European state to pursue a modified Gaullist strategy and follow its own national interest. This will probably mean that Europe gives up the postwar effort to become a unified political and economic territory. Different European states will strike different security and trade deals with the global powers, whether the US, Russia or China. In some respects, this was the path that Viktor Orbán, the former Hungarian prime minister, was pursuing. If Orbán-like populists were to come to power in other European states, we might expect them too to pursue similar strategies. Not surprisingly, some evidence suggests that all three global powers would welcome this development. The US, China and Russia would rather deal with each European state on a transactional basis than with a unified Europe. The danger of a Gaullist strategy is it would allow the great powers to pursue a divide et impera strategy, which, as Machiavelli understood, is the natural strategy of the strong faced with many weaker powers. A possible ‘Euto’? The most ambitious response is the creation of a European-centred defensive alliance – a ‘Euto’ – that formalizes a European command structure independent of NATO. Such a structure would replace the American Supreme Allied Commander with a European general staff, integrate national forces under continental rather than Atlantic command, and develop doctrinal and logistical capabilities for autonomous action. However, military autonomy is a hollow shell without technological and energy autonomy. A European command structure that depends on US satellites for targeting, US semiconductors for its weapons systems and US LNG to keep its industries running would offer only the appearance of independence. This path therefore requires a wartime-scale investment in three interconnected pillars. The first is London, Paris, Berlin and Warsaw leading an ‘E3+Poland’ industrial base capable of producing at scale the munitions, drones, air defence systems and armoured vehicles that Europe currently sources from American suppliers. Security autonomy necessitates something approaching a European Hamiltonian moment. The second is a sovereign satellite constellation for communications, navigation and intelligence – removing the dependence on American GPS, Starlink and reconnaissance assets that the Ukraine war has so vividly exposed. The third is a final decoupling from American energy markets, including the diversification of LNG suppliers, the acceleration of European nuclear capacity and serious investment in renewable infrastructure that does not run through Washington’s regulatory permission. Some commentators have suggested that Trump’s excesses are beginning to shake Europe from its strategic torpor. They point to the new €150 billion defence financing programme as a sign that Europe is now serious about attaining strategic autonomy. They also emphasize the joint military plans put in place to thwart US attempts to grab Greenland. But to interpret these still rather modest steps as a sign that Europe is freeing itself from US dependency is far-fetched. Any genuine commitment to security autonomy requires a level of political integration, fiscal commitment and societal sacrifice that current European electorates have yet to understand, much less authorize. Security autonomy necessitates something approaching a European Hamiltonian moment – shared debt, shared command, shared strategic culture – at precisely the moment when nationalist forces across the continent are pushing in the opposite direction. Yet political integration – the prerequisite for full-spectrum European security – has no champion on the European horizon capable of driving it through. The end of American Europe Finally, Europe could adopt a posture of ‘strategic hedging’. In the current context, this strategy would require considerable guile, for it would require European leaders to sustain NATO as an organization while concurrently building independent military strength and diplomatic ties. By refusing to fully align with Washington’s ‘pirate’ tactics, Europe could – perhaps alongside Canada – attempt to act as a ‘third pole’. NATO may endure as a bureaucratic ghost, but as a reliable security alliance, it is beyond repair. This strategy foregoes any immediate efforts to achieve strategic autonomy – that’s a longer-term project – and aims only for ‘security as world-maker’ by preserving the rules-based order through a coalition of middle powers. Ultimately, the policy of strategic hedging constitutes not much more than a holding strategy, an effort to bide time while Europe develops the political unity to tackle its security, technological and energy dependencies.