There is a certain fantasy doing the rounds in Brussels and parts of Europe’s political class: that the continent can finally grow up, shrug off American protection and defend itself as a fully sovereign strategic power.
It is a comforting story, popular in committee rooms and think-tank seminars. But as NATO’s Secretary-General Mark Rutte made clear this week, it is also largely nonsense.
Speaking with unusual bluntness, Rutte dismissed the idea that Europe could secure itself without the United States — and, crucially, without the American nuclear umbrella — as wishful thinking. Those who believe otherwise, he said, should “keep on dreaming”. In the sober world of deterrence, dreams have a habit of turning into catastrophes.
For all the talk of “strategic autonomy”, Europe remains militarily dependent in ways its leaders are reluctant to admit. The United States provides not only the bulk of NATO’s high-end capabilities — intelligence, logistics, missile defence, space assets — but also the ultimate guarantee that deters existential threats: nuclear weapons, and the political will to use them if deterrence fails.
That is not an ideological position. It is a material fact.
The renewed debate has been sharpened by Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his well-worn impatience with European free-riding. His rhetoric — at times erratic, occasionally provocative — has unsettled allies who have grown accustomed to American protection being both automatic and unconditional. Yet beneath the noise lies an uncomfortable truth: Trump is merely saying out loud what successive US administrations have thought quietly for years, Europe simply does not pull its weight.
Even now, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shattered decades of complacency, many NATO members still struggle to meet basic spending targets. Promises to raise defence budgets to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 are ambitious on paper, but politically fragile in practice. When faced with domestic pressures — pensions, healthcare, cost-of-living crises — defence is still too often the first budget to be trimmed.
And even if those spending targets were met, money alone would not buy credibility. Nuclear deterrence is not a line item in a spreadsheet. It requires decades of investment, specialised industrial bases, secure command-and-control systems, and above all a political culture willing to contemplate the unthinkable. Europe does not currently possess that culture.
France, the only EU member with an independent nuclear arsenal, is sometimes floated as the answer. Yet Paris’s force de frappe was never designed to underwrite the security of 27 states. Extending it would raise thorny questions of sovereignty, decision-making and legitimacy — not least who, in extremis, would have the authority to press the button. The idea that such questions could be resolved quickly, or cheaply, is fanciful.
Mark Rutte’s intervention cuts through these illusions. If Europe truly wanted to go it alone, he warned, it would require not 5 per cent of GDP but closer to 10. That figure alone should end the argument. No major European democracy is prepared to make that sacrifice — and electorates know it.
There is also a deeper, ideological confusion at work. Calls for European strategic autonomy are often framed as an act of emancipation from American “unpredictability”. Yet NATO’s strength has never rested on predictability of tone, but on clarity of interest. The United States remains profoundly invested in the security of Europe because instability here still threatens global order — and American interests.
What Europe risks, by indulging in autonomy rhetoric without capability, is not independence but irrelevance. Worse, it risks sending mixed signals to adversaries. Deterrence works only when commitments are credible. If Moscow or Beijing come to believe that Europe is drifting away from American protection without replacing it with something equally formidable, the result will not be a safer continent but a more dangerous one.
This is not an argument against Europe doing more. Quite the opposite. A stronger European pillar within NATO is essential. Investment in conventional forces, air defence, cyber resilience and industrial capacity is long overdue. But all of this must be done in partnership with the United States, not in defiance of it.
The Atlantic alliance was never meant to be symmetrical. It was meant to be effective.
There is also a political realism that Europe would do well to rediscover. The post-Cold War assumption that history had ended, that great-power rivalry was a relic, has been brutally disproved. We are back in a world where power matters, where deterrence matters, and where nuclear weapons still sit at the apex of security calculations. Pretending otherwise is not enlightened — it is negligent.
Trump’s America may be more transactional, less sentimental, and more demanding than its predecessors. But it is still the only actor capable of guaranteeing Europe’s security at the highest level. That reality should prompt not resentment, but responsibility.
Rutte’s message, stripped of diplomatic varnish, is this: Europe must choose between seriousness and self-deception. It can either invest meaningfully within NATO and accept the American nuclear umbrella as the cornerstone of its defence — or embark on a ruinously expensive, politically implausible quest for autonomy that will leave it weaker, not stronger.
For a continent that prides itself on pragmatism, the choice should not be too difficult, one would hope.
Main Image: National Nuclear Security Administration / Nevada Site Office, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=190949
