National Interest

by Trevor Filseth

    Elbridge Colby contends that Europe will always remain dependent on the United States and should follow America’s directives for its own protection. Europe disagrees.

    For all of the criticism that President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has attracted, even his most stalwart opponents must admit to its one major triumph: after years of effort, he has led America’s allies to invest more in their own defense.

    This is no small accomplishment. From the early 2010s onward, successive US administrations have chafed at European NATO allies’ tendency to free ride on American security guarantees and urged them to ramp up defense spending, with little success. In spite of their best efforts, neither Barack Obama nor Joe Biden could ultimately shake America’s allies from the belief that Washington would always be there in the end to save them. The first Trump administration gave some NATO nations pause, but did not ultimately lead to change; as recently as 2023, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau privately told NATO officials that Canada would “never” spend 2 percent of its GDP on its own defense. What a difference one administration makes!

    Trump could trumpet this as a significant foreign policy accomplishment and indeed he has. Yet a byproduct of Europe’s growing self-reliance on defense has been an increase in its autonomy and a newfound willingness to defy the United States. European intransigence in the face of American requests is not entirely new, of course; the 2003 US invasion of Iraq saw widespread protests and several NATO nations prominently declined to take part. Yet many European nations did eventually, if grudgingly, throw their support behind the mission and commit troops. Two and a half decades later, European NATO members one and all have refused to support Trump’s recent campaign against Iran, provoking his ire. Even the United Kingdom, a stalwart US ally in 2003, initially refused to allow the US Air Force access to British air bases for use against Iran (it later relented). Trump’s fury was predictable, but this series of events was a natural consequence of Europe’s decreasing reliance on America.

The paradox at the heart of Trump’s foreign policy is that the president wants Europe both to be more independent—lessening the need for American assistance in a pinch—but also to remain firmly subordinate to American foreign policy wants. How can one square this circle

• Colby’s Argument: Europe Will Always Depend on America

    Trump strategy czar Elbridge Colby recently made an attempt to do precisely that. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter) on Tuesday, the “Under Secretary of War for Policy” decried the nascent formation of a European-centric “middle powers” strategy, writing that European nations did not have the power to establish an independent defense sector and would remain tied to America’s as a matter of historical inevitability. That being the case, Colby argued, Europe should abandon any plans for strategic independence and resign themselves to American leadership.

    “The simple fact of the matter is that no alternative country or countries can compete with the US defense industrial base, either in quantity or quality,” Colby wrote. “The United States, as the President says, makes the best equipment and we make it at a scale that no plausible competitor can match.”

    The undersecretary went on to stress that “access to the American DIB is a privilege, not a right”—an implicit threat to cut off supplies to disobedient weaker allies who failed to support Trump’s foreign policy initiatives.

    Is Colby correct that a “middle powers” approach is worthless  A few facts clearly point in that direction. Europe’s defense industrial base is a small fraction of the size of America’s. All of the greatest weapons are made in America and in numbers far surpassing Europe’s industrial capacity. This could change, but it is difficult to see how it would in the short run.

Europe’s problem is geographic as well as industrial. A disparate group of roughly equal middle powers spanning the entire world, as envisioned by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney at his groundbreaking speech in Davos in January, is rarely as effective as one central power with smaller subordinates following its lead. The Cold War was fought between the United States and its smaller allies and the Soviet Union and its own. As the Soviet Union’s greatest ally, China, grew in strength, its own tensions mounted with Moscow, culminating in a public split that irreparably shattered the Eastern Bloc. Neutral groupings of weaker states such as the “Non-Aligned Movement” were never a real third force of their own. With this in mind, can the nations of Europe—the UK, France, Germany and Italy, divided as they are by political, linguistic and cultural differences—really operate in concert in a way that matches the strength of the United States

    Europe’s security challenges are far from abstract. In the east, Russia is wounded, but still strong enough to bring destruction westward. In spite of its recent investments, the argument goes, Europe still needs the strength of the US security umbrella to protect against the Kremlin. In a world of realpolitik, Europe must bargain for that umbrella. The price the Trump administration has set is fealty to Washington; and the circle is squared.

• Colby’s Problem: It’s Not 1991 Anymore

    There are three main problems with Colby’s argument.

    First, changes in the ways wars are fought—particularly in Ukraine—have upended the defense-technology landscape. As Ukraine has struggled to keep up with Russia in artillery exchanges, it has pivoted to the use of cheap drones with an iteration cycle lasting days rather than months, far faster than comparable American innovation. Despite the pre-existing US advantage in defense production, Europe’s economy is no smaller than America’s and in new ways of warfighting such as drone production, European and American companies are competing on more or less level ground. Indeed, Ukraine, once integrated into a European defense architecture, will be a major ace in the hole for the continent’s security. Conversely, the weaknesses of America’s own defense industrial base have been highlighted by the recent Iran conflict, which consumed years of munitions production in days. To address the shortfalls in its military stocks, the United States is increasingly pursuing co-production with foreign partners, both in Europe and Asia—a far more co-dependent arrangement than Colby’s presentation of America making the missiles and Europe buying them. Once the dependency arrow points in both directions, America’s ability to use technology as an adverse-bargaining chip declines dramatically.

    Second, although Europe’s defense capacity is indeed smaller than America’s, it may nevertheless be enough for Europe’s needs. The threat environment the continent faces has quietly receded; its most acute geopolitical threat—Russia—is simply in no position to attack it in the near future. Five years of war have mauled Moscow’s army, with a loss of ground in eastern Ukraine and an 8-1 casualty disadvantage against Kyiv throughout 2026. Crucially, this has taken place without US support, although Washington continues to sell some weapons to Ukraine (with Europe footing the bill). Russia will probably be able to continue the war for some time, but it is extremely unlikely to defeat Ukraine militarily, regardless of the level of US support. And with the looming eastern threat neutered, it is difficult to see why Europe would need vast quantities of American weapons—except to defend against America itself, in which case those weapons would presumably stop flowing in any event.

    Finally, Colby’s thread presupposes that the United States still enjoys its unrivaled position in global affairs, leaving Europe no choice but to fall in line. But the “unipolar moment” after the collapse of the Soviet Union is long over and America is no longer the only game in town. China, identified by the 2026 National Defense Strategy as “the most powerful state relative to [America] since the 19th century,” already has a higher purchasing power GDP than the United States and a rapidly expanding defense industrial base of its own. The United States has so far led Europe in a relatively united front against Chinese economic encroachment, but if it triggers a lasting rift with Brussels, there is no reason to expect that this would continue. By spurning the NATO alliance, the Trump administration is also ironically depriving itself of a potential source of strength in a future showdown in the Indo-Pacific.

• Trans-Atlantic ‘Shared Values’ Aren’t Shared Anymore

    In the 1980s, UCLA management professor William Ouchi famously argued that by far the most effective and least expensive way to maintain alignment in complex teams and organizations was neither through bureaucratic command-and-control, nor through transactions and agreements, but through a common culture of shared values.

    The notion of “shared values”—chiefly a commitment to democracy, the rule of law, human rights and territorial non-aggression—has underpinned the US-Europe relationship for more than 80 years and served as a guidepost for NATO’s actions since 1949. When the United States spearheaded the effort to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein’s invading army in 1990–91, every member of NATO followed. When Islamist terrorists attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, NATO nations flocked to its aid out of a sense of outrage at the attacks and sympathy for America. Two years later, a smaller “coalition of the willing” supported America’s effort, however ill-conceived, to bring democracy to Iraq. And American opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—which, after all, took place halfway around the world and was never likely to threaten the United States—came not merely out of a clinical desire to weaken a potential adversary, but out of a deeply-felt moral belief that the Kremlin’s flagrantly illegal invasion was unjust and Kyiv was worthy of support.

    The conventional narrative goes that Trump has abandoned this way of thinking and views NATO merely as a partnership of convenience against mutual adversaries, in which values are irrelevant. Colby, well-known as a geopolitical realist, makes no appeal to the “liberal international order” in his thread. He presents Europe’s foreign policy as a binary choice: accept American primacy, or abandon it and fall under Russia’s orbit instead.

    Yet this explanation is incomplete. The core problem at the heart of the US-NATO relationship is not just that Trump does not share the values underpinning NATO, but rather that he is openly hostile to them. A basic tenet of the post-1945 era is the belief that territorial aggression is wrong and cannot be rewarded. The president’s actions suggest that he disagrees; since his return to office, he has threatened to invade Greenland, mulled annexing Canada, threatened the UK with support for Argentina’s claim over the Falkland Islands, seized control of Venezuela’s oil industry and instituted punitive tariffs on a range of nations based purely on combative personal interactions with those nations’ leaders.

    This predatory approach to foreign policy has not only upset America’s European allies, but has also actively made them less likely to cooperate with Washington. One could make an argument justifying US control over Greenland, as long as it could be secured with the consent of all parties. Yet from Denmark’s viewpoint—even setting aside the obvious problem of the wishes of the Greenlanders themselves—would ceding the island to Trump guarantee good trans-Atlantic relations, or would he simply begin to eye Iceland next  As David Blagden at the University of Exeter observed in response to Colby, “Attempting to bandwagon with a ‘greedy’ predator—especially a powerful one—is very dangerous. Since it gets relatively stronger through each concession, it becomes even better placed to devour you next time.”

    While European leaders can press Trump for public commitments to peace and good relations with Europe—such as his disavowal of the use of force in Greenland at the World Economic Forum in January—it is well-known that Trump regularly reneges on prior statements. What matters are his long-term intentions and to Europeans these are clear: he is at heart an expansionist in search of a legacy, seeking to enlarge the United States at the expense of its erstwhile allies. In the presence of such an agenda, shared principles are impossible. Yet without a common set of shared principles, leveraging the coalition becomes strongly dependent on ebbs and flows of power.

    This is the core risk with the Trump administration’s doctrine: it is profoundly destabilizing for America’s allies, all of whom are now in search of other partners—a development that would certainly weaken America. This is the implicit threat that Colby acknowledges and responds to in his thread. Trump’s bet, as Colby articulates, is that the United States still enjoys such an unrivaled position in global affairs that Europe has no choice but to fall in line. If that bet is right, America achieves almost nothing that it did not already have. But if it is wrong, the United States can expect future challenges of the sort it has not faced in decades.

• Colby’s Argument Has an Echo in History

    A curious parallel to this state of affairs exists in ancient Greece. In the 5th century BC, the Greek city-states banded together to repel a series of invasions from the Persian Empire and remain independent. The mechanism for their unity was the “Delian League,” an alliance of seagoing city-states led by Athens, the largest and richest. To fund the common navy, the Delian League established a treasury on the namesake island of Delos.

    This state of affairs persisted until 454 BC, when Athenian leader Pericles seized the Delian treasury and carted it back to Athens. Pericles disregarded the objections of the other members of the League, noting that Athens was strong and they were weak. The seizure of the treasury effectively marked the transformation of the Delian League from a partnership of nominal equals into an Athenian empire, with Athens giving the orders and subordinate city-states following them.

    The empire did not collapse right away; one imagines an ancient Athenian Colby pointing out to its new satraps that they had nowhere else to go. But the other members of the league, feeling slighted by Athens, began to contemplate the possibility of an alternative international order. And the moment Athens stumbled—losing its entire navy in an ill-fated expedition against Sicily—its allies deserted it and aligned with Sparta, not out of a shared affinity for democracy but out of a belief that Sparta would leave the traditional balance of power in place and Athens would upend it. Might a modern state make a similar choice between America and its rivals  For whatever its other faults, China is not threatening to annex Canada.

    Principles—the belief in a common Greek identity, or in a liberal international order—are enduring. The Trump administration has spurned principles for raw power. But power is transitory and any American president should be cautious about invoking it as a cudgel to keep dubiously loyal allies in line—especially as an eastern rival waits in the wings. “Might is right,” Israel Zangwill warned, “until a mightier come.”