National Interest

by Emilian Kavalski

    The European experience of dependence on US security guarantees in many ways resembles the familiar decline in quality of digital applications.

    The Munich Security Conference opens amid what the conference organizers themselves have labeled as a crisis of trust in the transatlantic relationship. Europe will likely hear familiar reassurances that America is still committed to the transatlantic alliance, that NATO is indispensable and that burden-sharing must be fair. Whether or not these reassurances are true, the uneasiness and loss of trust among European politicians are signs of a much deeper problem.

    For decades, the transatlantic relationship functioned as the ultimate geopolitical platform. It offered a security operating system developed and maintained by the United States, with Europe as its primary, continuously logged-in user. NATO provided deterrence, stability and a strategic breathing space that enabled European integration. Over time, Europeans not only used this system but also came to believe in it with quasi-religious fervor.

    But geopolitical platforms, like any other platforms, have their lifecycle. The digital activist Cory Doctorow calls the late-stage decay of platforms “enshittification.” This represents a sequence in which a platform is first good to users, then degrades the experience to serve its own interests and finally squeezes everyone until only a residue of the original promise remains. The metaphor may be crude, but the diagnosis fits the current transatlantic dynamics.

    While the United States has not killed NATO, it has begun to enshittify it by turning a shared security guarantee into a system that increasingly behaves like a privately controlled toll bridge—it is indispensable (even if increasingly expensive) and structurally hostile to alternative routes. Washington has already “earned out” its original post-war investment and now extracts recurring value from the European traffic locked-in on the transatlantic bridge.

    The United States has been layering additional costs on its allies (such as the pressure to adopt US tech standards and IP laws, to align with sanctions regimes that often serve US economic interests and to prioritize US defense suppliers), all of which have been framed as the unavoidable cost of continued premium access to American protection. In other words, the transatlantic security guarantee remains, but it has become the foundation for a sprawling, extractive ecosystem that predates the administration of President Donald Trump.

• How Europe Locked into NATO

    Every enshittification story begins with a product that is so good that its users cease imagining life without it. Despite some detractions, for post-World War II Europe, the US security guarantee was the killer app. It offered nuclear deterrence, intelligence, logistics and military heft that allowed a devastated continent to rebuild.

But great platforms do not just help; they lock you in. Once you are embedded in a system with high switching costs, leaving becomes punishing and even if everyone privately agrees that the experience is deteriorating, collective action becomes nearly impossible. NATO did not merely provide security. It framed Europe’s security identity around US capabilities, command structures and industrial ecosystems. In the process, the European strategic autonomy atrophied not through conspiracy but through convenience. Why build expensive satellites, integrated air defense systems, or sovereign command structures when the premium American version was always there, seemingly for free

    The NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte recently reinforced this lock-in by publicly warning that Europe is “incapable of defending itself without America.” He warned that any attempt to build a European pillar is merely “an empty word.” By claiming that going it alone would require a ruinous 10 percent of GDP and “billions and billions of euros” to replace the US nuclear deterrent, the management of the transatlantic platform ensures that switching costs continue to be perceived as terminal. However, this message is not an analysis; it is a vendor’s lock-in disguised as statesmanship.

    In this respect, the lock-in became both structural and cognitive. In fact, most European countries’ entire security identity was woven around US capabilities. The NATO platform was no longer just a defensive tool; it had become a security community ecosystem. And once an ecosystem believes it cannot survive outside its host, the host’s incentives begin to shift.

• NATO Has Become a US Extraction Mechanism

    Once lock-in is achieved, the platform begins to serve the owner’s other priorities, such as political leverage, strategic focus and industrial advantage. For Europe, transatlantic relations during the 21st century have been a masterclass in extraction. The security guarantee remained, but its price evolved into a rolling set of tolls. Politically, alliance solidarity has repeatedly been leveraged to secure European backing for US priorities. At least since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the NATO platform was used for purposes its European users did not always endorse.

    Economically, the drive for “interoperability” and spending targets can function as “junk fees.” They feel like a rip-off because they are framed as unavoidable costs of participation rather than as value-added services. Formally, the 2 percent GDP spending benchmark reaffirmed at the Wales Summit in 2014 is a prime example of such extractivist logic. In a transactional relationship, such financial commitments serve less as a measure of burden sharing and more as a funnel that directs European budgets into US-centric weapons systems, standards and maintenance ecosystems. And when urgency strikes, European governments buy “off the shelf” from American defense giants, deepening long-term dependence.

    The data is stark. As highlighted by a report by the Belgian think tank Bruegel, the US foreign military sales to European allies have skyrocketed from $11 billion during the 2017–2021 period to $68 billion in 2024 alone. Such figures indicate the profound European dependence on high-end US capabilities and the services that sustain them. Because Europe isn’t just buying hardware; it’s renting an ecosystem whose owner controls the licenses, updates and spare parts.

    Europe certainly owns part of this story. Too many capitals treated defense spending as discretionary and relied on the American “premium tier” to fill the gaps. But such tendencies only reaffirm the platform logic of the transatlantic alliance: once a supplier becomes a chokepoint, it can extract value far beyond the service provided. In the process, the supplier also gains an informal veto over alternatives and shapes allied choices in adjacent domains, such as energy, industrial policy and trade. This is a reminder that the platform owner will prioritize domestic constituencies and allies will be asked to adapt.

• The US Has Made NATO Conditional

    Stage three is where enshittification hits the fan. The platform degrades the core experience for all parties while aggressively suppressing alternatives, betting that everyone has nowhere else to go. In transatlantic terms, the most corrosive sign is the recurring suggestion that the US security guarantee is conditional. Recent reports that President Donald Trump would “encourage” Russia to attack “delinquent” allies who do not “pay their bills” are merely the most shocking expressions of a paywall mentality that has been installed in the transatlantic app for years.

    Such threats not only erode goodwill, but they also widen the “assurance gap” captured by the so-called “Healey theorem,” named after Dennis Healey, who used to be Britain’s defense secretary in the 1960s. He observed that credibility in the alliance is asymmetrical with his insistence that “it takes only 5 percent credibility of American retaliation to deter the Russians, but 95 percent to reassure the Europeans.” In other words, deterrence may function at the margins, but reassurance demands certainty. A security guarantee that seems negotiable in peacetime invites catastrophic miscalculation in a crisis.

    This volatility in the transatlantic platform is not new. Trust has been eroding for some time due to the fundamental divergence between US and European interests and by repeated reminders (from surveillance scandals a decade ago to the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal) that Washington views allied confidence as a variable, not a constant. Furthermore, Washington’s strategic “feed” appears to be algorithmically pivoting towards the Western Hemisphere. For Europe, facing a brutal war on its borders and persistent hybrid threats, this feels like being stuck in a social media feed, where what you need most is not what the platform chooses to prioritize. The experience is opaque, alienating and manipulative.

    Finally, as in tech, the transatlantic platform defends its monopoly by restricting interoperability. Whether through proprietary standards, export controls (such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, administered by the US State Department), or political skepticism toward ambitious EU defense initiatives, the United States has historically acted to ensure that European alternatives do not flourish. This is the geopolitical equivalent of making “reverse engineering” illegal. The result is a brittle alliance that appears formidable on paper but is so eroded by lack of trust that, as the recent tensions over Greenland demonstrate, it seems only one major shock away from a panicked and uncoordinated breakdown.

• How to Rebuild European Sovereignty

    The old script of the Munich Security Conference, in which Europe promises to “do more” within the US-designed system, is obsolete. It is like begging a social media company for a kinder algorithm. The problem is not the workload; it’s the extractive and degraded logic of the platform itself. Breaking this cycle demands rejecting the TINA (“There Is No Alternative”) reflex that treats dependence as destiny.

    NATO’s strategic mantra of learned helplessness insists that current arrangements are not a policy choice but a law of nature. Rutte’s disparaging claim that “if anyone thinks Europe as a whole can defend itself without the United States, keep on dreaming. You can’t” is not sober realism, but the ultimate expression of TINA designed to extinguish the European strategic imagination. It is the platform owner’s final warning to users who might consider logging off.

    Yet, Europe can choose otherwise. The path forward is “technological self-determination”: building independent European defense and tech systems that can plug into NATO protocols without first seeking US permission. This requires repealing the anti-circumvention mindsets that treat strategic independence as a geopolitical felony. Thus, by reclaiming its right to innovate, Europe can construct an enshittification-resistant future.

    The solution does not have to be a dramatic divorce. NATO remains an essential firewall for Europe. However, the task is to change the source code of the transatlantic operating system so that Europe evolves from a locked-in user to a co-owner of the platform. Strengthening the European pillar of NATO means fostering Europe’s version of “adversarial interoperability”: the ability to build alternatives even when the platform owner resists, because a credible exit threat disciplines the platform and can reverse enshittification. In practice, this ensures a European exit ramp that can be used without leaving the transatlantic highway by developing the capacity to plug into US power when necessary and to operate autonomously when Washington is distracted, divided, or transactional.

    This switch requires turning political ambition into structural reality by:

    1. Building European capacity, not just inventories: Europe has to move beyond symbolic projects. This requires pooling demand, standardizing requirements and scaling production to reduce dependence on a single vendor.

    2. Investing in sovereign “enablers”: Europe must see, decide and act without awaiting a US green light. This means shared intelligence surveillance, secure communications and the unglamorous backbone of logistics, maintenance and integrated defense infrastructures.

    3. Creating a genuine European operational command: A standing EU headquarters with actual authority would turn coordination from a perpetual collective-action problem into a genuine capability.

    This is not an anti-American agenda. It is the only pro-alliance agenda left for the continent. A Europe that can stand alone makes the alliance resilient to US domestic volatility and removes the temptation for extraction. At the same time, it offers Washington what it should truly want: a capable partner, not a managed vassal.

    Platforms fail when users mistake familiarity for stability and dependency for loyalty. For far too long, Europe enjoyed the comfort of being a member of NATO and let its own capabilities atrophy because the American service felt permanent. It never was. The Munich Security Conference must be the moment when Europe stops passively scrolling through a deteriorating feed of reassurance and volatility.

    Instead, Europe must build a sovereign upgrade not to break NATO, but to break free from its enshittified version: a platform that extracts more than it provides, harbors an inbuilt disdain for European concerns and flashes periodic reminders that security is a paywalled service. The choice is not between American leadership and chaos. It is between continued degrading enshittification and the hard, necessary work of strategic renewal.