Europe must act urgently and stop outsourcing defense

The 32 nations that were members of both the EU and NATO had a special responsibility to “sync our efforts, together with NATO”

Europe must step up urgently to improve its defense and make NATO “more European to maintain its strength”, because the U.S. has shaken the transatlantic relationship to its foundation, the EU’s foreign policy chief has warned.

The U.S. would continue to be Europe’s partner and ally, Kaja Kallas told a defense conference, but no great power had ever “outsourced its survival and survived”.

Tensions with the U.S. flared when President Donald Trump threatened to take over Greenland, a semi-autonomous Danish territory.

Kallas’s remarks came after NATO leader Mark Rutte prompted a backlash when he said European lawmakers should “keep on dreaming” if they thought Europe could defend itself without the U.S.. Also, she said that under the Trump administration Europe was “no longer Washington’s primary center of gravity”, and the continent needed to change the culture away from thinking as nations, and towards acting jointly as Europeans.

Washington DC’s transition away from Europe “has been ongoing for a while”, the EU foreign policy chief said, adding that it was structural, not temporary.

The 32 nations that were members of both the EU and NATO had a special responsibility to “sync our efforts, together with NATO”.

The recent US-European rift over Greenland has highlighted the “tectonic shift” in the relationship that Kallas referred to in her speech, with Trump threatening to impose tariffs on some of his closest European allies after they opposed his plans to take over the Arctic island.

Rutte was credited last week with calming tensions between Trump and European leaders, when the US president dropped his threat during talks with the NATO chief on the fringes of Davos. Trump said he was exploring a potential deal on Greenland, although no details have yet emerged.

Last year, under pressure from Trump, NATO member states promised to increase their overall spending to 5 percent of GDP by 2035, although part of that could go towards national infrastructure.

NATO leader said that if Europe really wanted to “go it alone” on defense it would have to spend 10 per cent of GDP and create its own nuclear capability.

A move away from the US would, in Rutte’s view, “lose the ultimate guarantor of our freedom, which is the US nuclear umbrella”.

NATO’s primary purpose when it was founded in Washington in 1949 was to ensure the security and freedom of its members in the face of a hostile Soviet Union – a Russia-dominated Communist empire that collapsed in 1991.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has long accused NATO of expanding eastwards, creating a security threat to Moscow, and he framed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a response to that. However, an increasingly belligerent Russian state has prompted two more members of the EU, Sweden and Finland, to join the NATO alliance since the full-scale invasion. The Kremlin has demanded that under a future peace deal Ukraine must be barred from joining NATO.

Although it is part of Ukraine’s constitution to join the European Union and NATO, the chances of Kyiv becoming a NATO member any time soon are considered remote.