America’s schism with Europe
LAST WEEK we wrote about Donald Trump junking the transatlantic alliance that has endured since the end of the second world war. This week our cover package in most of the world looks at the emergence of a new struggle for global power that is emerging from the ruins of that alliance. Many readers have been in touch to share their views on last week’s issue. Here are some of the letters we received, which have been edited and condensed.
Amid all the hysteria and panic most commentators are ignoring reasons to hope for a better future in Europe. Ukraine defended itself very successfully against the Russian invasion in 2022, against all expectations and before the heavy Western military supplies arrived. Russia’s failure in Ukraine has confirmed its weakness as a military and economic power.
Ukraine has the largest, most battle-hardened and best-motivated army in free Europe, closely followed by Poland. Both countries are extraordinarily motivated and committed to the existential cause of resisting Vladimir Putin’s aggression, with or without Donald Trump. We in western Europe owe them our full support, both morally and in our own interests. This will require sacrifices to be made. It is time to wake up.
PETER TAYLOR
London
I disagree with your description of the recent differences between America and Europe as “Europe’s worst nightmare” (February 22nd). The combination of J.D. Vance’s direct and hard-hitting speech in Munich and the bizarre accusations of Donald Trump against Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelensky shows that Europe needs to stand on its own two feet.
We should be honest and acknowledge that we have been warned. From American dismay at the Europeans’ mishandling of the Libyan crisis in 2011 to Barack Obama’s strategic pivot to the Pacific in 2014, through the first Trump presidency and the threats not to defend countries that weren’t paying their defence dues, and on to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, America has been abundantly clear that it saw Europe as a rule-taker, not a rule-maker and, an unwelcome freeloader on American defence. That our purblind leaders somehow thought it was business as usual, even after Vladimir Putin’s aggression, beggars belief.
So we are on our own. Good. We now have the necessary imperative to sort out our internal polities and use our economic muscle to rebuild national resilience, including defence. We can then reasonably expect to sit again at the top table. Alternatively, we can continue to fudge issues, to dodge hard choices and descend into further irrelevance and weakness, a truly dispiriting and terrifying prospect.
Simon Diggins
Colonel (retired)
Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire
Most people would agree that an independent European defence capability is a long way off, and that some kind of American backup will be necessary until, if ever, the Europeans can muster the money and the coherence to replace “enablers” such as airlift, intelligence and staff officers, let alone the American nuclear umbrella.
That view originates in the deterrence theories of the 1960s and 1970s and perhaps pays too little attention to real life. The most powerful military in the world has not enabled the Americans to impose their will, or to deter adversaries armed with very unsophisticated weapons. It has led them into humiliating adventures, the memories of which feed Mr Trump’s fantasy of making America great again by abandoning all its previous policies and alliances.
Europe could, in the quite near future, deploy a ramshackle and under-equipped force along its boundary with Russia, which it would cost the Russians too much to overcome. The theory of nuclear deterrence has always seemed more plausible than the view that the Americans would actually use their nuclear forces to defend their allies.
These days it is more helpful to play up Europe’s ability to defend itself, and one can do that without stretching the facts too far.
Rodric Braithwaite
London
I am hopeful that the mid-term elections in 2026 and a new administration in 2028 will bring sanity back to Washington. Mr Trump’s actions can be reversed by either a Democratic or wiser Republican administration. Relationships can be repaired, albeit painfully with determination and resolve. I remain confident that in the long view of history, this aberration will be just that, a temporary departure from normalcy at home and abroad. America will rebound from this retreat from our domestic and global responsibilities once we pass through this soul-trying period. The key words are “lessons learned”.
JOHN TURLEY
Chicago
At a time when western Europe’s leaders are still mostly asleep, your editorial was timely. But it may not be enough. Not only must there be far greater military spending and co-operation, we now need nothing less than a fully integrated European Defence Force. That will require political oversight. A United States of Europe is now essential, open to all those willing to join, pay up and subsume their defence in a single body.
Andrew Dawson
Worcester
If the Trump administration does turn its back on NATO and Europe, it will do so at the geopolitical peril of the United States. At a minimum, America would either have to relinquish, or at least face restricted access to, deep-water ports in the Mediterranean, including the bases in Naples, the headquarters of the US Navy in Europe and Africa, and Crete, which is critical to checking any instability or strategically threatening developments in Syria. Air bases would be off limits in Ramstein, Germany, as well as RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, which provides a platform for supporting Israel, and, no less significant, the Keflavik base in Iceland. On this point, President Trump would do well to remember that Russia’s interests and aspirations in the Arctic Circle supersede those of their relations with America.
China and Russia are already exerting significant influence in Africa, and with the withdrawal of French forces from west and central Africa, America will need a platform from which to project both hard and diplomatic power into this arena when resource scarcity becomes an existential threat to American interests. And that platform will necessarily be in the Mediterranean.
Perhaps Mr Trump should ask not what NATO and Europe can do for America but what America can do for NATO and Europe.
Jordan Scott
Newcastle
I certainly agree that Europe needs to come together at this critical moment in our shared history. To see America siding with autocracies at the UN, against European democracies, is unprecedented and deeply worrying. Your leader calls for a “fiscal revolution” and for Europe to end its obsession with process and groupings and to appoint a single envoy to talk to Ukraine, Russia and America.
My own experience of finding solutions for Europe in crisis is that the decision-making process of the European Union is not where the urgent focus should be right now. The need for unanimity blocks progress. It is not a country. The EU Treaties are not equivalent to a fully sovereign state’s constitution. They grant significant powers to EU institutions but stop short of key attributes of state sovereignty, especially in fiscal, defence and social policy.
The entire EU budget is approximately 1% of the combined GDP of its members. The reality of its cumbersome, and at times fractious, decision-making processes does not lend itself to speed. The EU project should continue, and we should see more integration, not less. But the emergency we face in Europe on our collective defence must be dealt with by the European nation states in a forum, and with decision-making processes, outside the EU legal order.
Money is the key, and the EU was spectacularly successful in raising billions of euros to help member states during the financial crisis through the establishment of the European Stability Mechanism. This was an international organisation set up very quickly, under its own treaty outside that EU legal order.
I would suggest we start there, with a “coalition of the willing” led by the countries with the biggest defence capabilities and including those smaller nations with the most to lose in the near term. Completion of the EU capital markets and banking union can wait.
David Eatough
Former member of the management board of the European Stability Mechanism, 2017- 2024
Luxembourg City