The last day of February 2025 will resound in history as America’s entrance onto the world stage as a rogue state. To be sure, the United States has written some inexcusable chapters in its foreign-policy record—Vietnam and Iraq being the most notorious—but never has the country’s government been so brazenly and boastfully on the side of dictatorship, aggression, and general indecency. Never has a gleeful thuggishness been so undisguised.
The treatment of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky at the hands of Donald Trump and his principal henchman, J.D. Vance—as a guest of the White House, mind you—is unprecedented in this republic’s record. The only analog in modern diplomatic history was in 1939, when Czech president Emil Hácha was summoned to Berlin, where Adolf Hitler and his foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, threatened him in tag team fashion: hand over your country to us, or we will bomb it to rubble. The main difference between Trump’s and Vance’s behavior is that they demanded Zelensky deliver Ukraine to a third country, Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
That might appear to be the beginning of the end of Ukraine’s brave resistance against the neo-imperialism of Russia, just as Czechoslovakia, abandoned by Britain and France, disappeared into the darkness. But this is a potential illusion fostered by American parochialism, a self-centered and provincial view of the world that is held, above all, by right-wingers who believe the rest of the world only exists at our sufferance, but to some degree also by many liberals who oppose them. Wasn’t it Madeleine Albright who called the United States “the indispensable nation?” Further, “We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future?”
This unbecoming sense of self-importance has led to many failures. In reality, we didn’t “lose” China in the late 1940s because China was never ours to lose, just as the geopolitical dynamics of Vietnam and Iraq could not be altered by our faulty perception that what was in our alleged interest was in their peoples’ interest. Charles de Gaulle is reputed to have quipped that the graveyards are full of indispensable men; the same might be said of nations. Ukraine has other sources of survival than the United States.
As much as well-informed and thoughtful Americans might believe the preservation of Ukraine’s sovereignty is a national interest—and it is—then it is obvious that Ukraine’s independence is even more vital to the European Union. Preventing a hegemon from dominating Europe is important to the United States, but for Europe, the prospect of a vengeful and triumphant Russia sharing a thousand-mile border is an existential nightmare. Can Europe rise to the occasion?
Napoleon claimed that in war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one. To predict whether the governments of the various European states can summon the sustained will to provide the military and financial resources to help Ukraine successfully resist Russian aggression would be to engage in speculation—we just cannot know. For decades, U.S. presidents far better intentioned than Trump have asked, hectored, and begged the European members of NATO to increase their defense spending, with variable results. But just as the prospect of being hanged concentrates the mind, the expectation of a victorious Putin extorting Europe, with no Uncle Sam as a backstop, may disperse the fog of indecision in Berlin, Paris, and other capitals.
If their will is a question mark, the means to provide for Ukraine’s defense certainly exist. The EU’s nominal gross domestic product is roughly $20 trillion, roughly nine times greater than Russia’s. Its contributions to Ukraine thus far, particularly the economic assistance without which Kyiv could not keep the lights on, have totaled $145 billion, exceeding that of the United States.
Adding the economies of Britain (a significant contributor of military and economic aid to Ukraine) and Canada (the highest contributor of direct financial aid per capita among the G7 nations, which, because of Trump’s punitive tariffs, have no incentive to follow Washington’s irrational dictates) results in contributor states with a combined GDP of $26 trillion—roughly equivalent to that of the United States.
Of more immediate concern than the overall economic output of Europe is manufacturing potential. The EU’s manufacturing output is 15 percent of its economy compared to 11 percent for the United States; it has ample capacity to substitute for American war materiel should it decide to go all-in to supply Ukraine. Europe’s ability to produce defense articles is a more muddled story, but it should be able to defend Ukraine—again, provided the political will.
Some observers doubt this, believing that Europe simply cannot fill the gap left by the U.S. suspension of arms deliveries. They point out that Europe has far fewer high-end defense items like large surveillance aircraft. Its defense industry is less integrated than the United States and may have difficulty quickly gearing up without long-term contracts. This argument, however, mistakes the kind of war that is taking place.
Europeans lack the strategic intelligence assets of America, but that may be less of a handicap than it seems, given the frozen battle fronts and the Russian penchant for predictably using brute force rather than finesse. Intelligence that unmasks the Kremlin’s subtle machinations will have less utility than the sheer firepower of masses of traditional artillery whenever the Russian general staff, true to form, hurls whole battalions of Russian convicts or purchased North Korean cannon fodder at Ukrainian lines.
Several European nations produce howitzers firing the standard NATO 155 mm. round, a mainstay in the ferocious artillery battles in eastern and southern Ukraine. Their shell production last year was roughly equal to that of the U.S., and Rheinmetall, the continent’s premier shell producer, broke ground in early 2024 on a dedicated 155 mm. howitzer round facility.
America never considered sending F-35 stealth fighters to Kyiv and even took its time before delivering the F-16, a 50-year-old design. The M1 Abrams tank, which the Biden administration implied might be something beyond the capacity of the Ukrainians to employ and temporized too long before delivering, is a design of similar vintage as the F-16.
The French Rafale fighter, the Typhoon, used by five European militaries; as well as the Swedish Gripen, all currently in production, are roughly the F-16’s equal and easily a match for their Russian counterparts. The German Leopard II tank, whose diesel engine gives it greater range than the M1’s turbine and obviates the need to provide separate logistics to supply jet fuel to a ground vehicle, can easily fill in for the absence of American tanks.
What will Ukraine do without U.S.-supplied longer-range missiles such as the ATACMS, weapons ensuring that Russia can’t simply fight for years inside Ukraine without worrying about retaliation against targets inside Russia? The Anglo-French Storm Shadow missile is one system that could fill that role; the British had long been ready to see it used but only received a green light from the Biden administration in November when the writing was already on the wall for a U.S. retrenchment from Ukraine.
America’s logistics capabilities, including long-range airlift, certainly overshadow Europe’s, which is why European armies have always had difficulty in out-of-area operations. But Ukraine is not out-of-area. War materiel, whether U.S. or European, has traveled by truck or train along commercial routes into Ukraine, so in this respect, at least, America’s absence will not be felt.
Quickly ramping up defense production will be a challenge for the EU, just as it has been for the United States, but the plan just announced by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, calls for a huge €800-billion multiyear boost in defense spending. This initiative should enable industry to increase production capacity with far less business risk.
European leaders should clearly understand that rearmament is not only about Ukraine. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the EU has consistently punched below its weight militarily, complacently dependent as it was on the United States. This military weakness also subtly influenced its diplomatic image worldwide; the EU’s voice has been cautious and hesitant more often than forceful.
That will no longer do. Every fair-minded person, both in Europe and America, recognizes there is no longer the slightest doubt that Trump and his accomplices are consciously working on behalf of the Kremlin’s interests in a kind of inverted Realpolitik.
The White House’s tariff policy alone could hardly be better calculated to alienate America’s long-standing friends and allies and sow the seeds of a global economic slowdown that will not only weaken traditionally friendly countries but prepare the way for rule by right-wing extremist parties under Russian influence. How else can we explain the Russians’ belief that relations with Trump will give them an opening to rebuild their spy networks? There will only be worse to come.
Retrospective judgments about the post-World War II era’s fundamental stability and the strength of international norms of conduct have often been exaggerated: the Cold War was no golden era. But there is no question that the world is now entering a period of ruthless jungle politics that bears comparison to the 1930s. It is not enough that the nations of Western Europe can pride themselves on their citizens’ gold-standard level of economic security and a life expectancy exceeding that of the United States. Those conditions came about under extraordinary circumstances that no longer apply. Europe’s achievements must now be physically protected from those who would destroy a free way of life.
In the years after the Maastricht Treaty was signed, a common currency was established, and new member states were brought into the fold; the European idea slowly stagnated. In the absence of a unifying principle, a corrosive disdain for Brussels has developed among gullibly cynical elements of the European population in much the same manner as American malcontents blame Washington for every ill that has befallen them, real or imaginary.
Given the relatively shallow economic rebound since the pandemic in the EU, and especially Germany’s recent manufacturing slowdown, a vigorous rearmament program would not only serve as Keynesian economic pump-priming but provide a project to focus energy and revive belief in Europe as a culture worth defending.
Politically embattled heads of government like Emanuel Macron may also just happen to find that nothing rallies electorates around their leaders like a genuine threat to their safety–if they themselves rise to the challenge. After all, departing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s approval ratings, and that of his party, shot up from abysmal lows the instant he angrily retaliated against Trump’s tariff policy, which has to be seen along with the abandonment of Ukraine as a concerted strategy to benefit Moscow.
A new European spirit of resolve cannot happen too soon. The statesmen of that continent cannot have been so blind as not to realize that one day, the United States would not be there. It already happened once, after World War I. It will be a difficult role to take up, but somebody has to do it until such time as an American voting majority reclaims its sanity and moral judgment. Europe must defend democracy, human rights, and decent conduct in the international arena. In a strange reversal of history, fate has now called upon the Old World to redress the balance of the New.
