The EU has its Trojan horses and Nato’s cornerstone has crumbled. But European allies, includIng the UK, are bound by an urgent shared purpose
Nathalie Tocci
The EU has its Trojan horses and Nato’s cornerstone has crumbled. But European allies, including the UK, are bound by an urgent shared purpose
Wed 12 Mar 2025 06.00 GMT
Moscow’s immense military mobilisation is clearly not aimed just at Ukraine. Unless Vladimir Putin accepts a ceasefire with meaningful security guarantees there will be no end in sight to the war. If anything, we could see the extension of Russia’s aggression beyond Ukraine. The bleak reality is that Europe still faces an unprecedented threat and notwithstanding signs of progress for Ukraine at talks in Jeddah, we face it alone.
Worse, we now have to confront it with the US working against us. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump appear to share a plan: a Vichy-like regime in Ukraine and a European continent split into spheres of influence, which Russia, the US (and perhaps China) can colonise and prey upon. Most European publics sense this. A critical mass of European leaders gets it too. They are beginning to act.
Their response is forming the basis for a different kind of Europe from the one we have known for decades, the Europe that was built in peacetime. That Europe sealed peace internally (mainly through close-knit economic and monetary interdependency). Externally, its security was largely guaranteed by the US via Nato. Through the defence alliance, European countries acted as loyal transatlantic allies. They allowed Washington to reap significant gains from the treaty, starting with the US defence industry. Europeans also obediently followed Washington in its follies, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to topple Saddam Hussein.
All along, the EU could afford to be slow and cumbersome; there was no rush. It was wiser to painstakingly construct the “common European home”, gradually weaving together joint interests and believing that a common European identity would slowly emerge.
War in Europe however, and the unreliability of the US as an ally means we have to accept that the post-1945 and the post-1989 Europes are gone.
A new Europe is being born however; and it is easier to say what it is not than what it is. It is not the EU, or not the one we have long taken for granted. The 27-country union is simply not equipped to take decisions with the speed and level of ambition necessary to confront the dramatic, life-or-death, fast-changing geopolitical and security moment its citizens face. Moreover, the EU now includes Trojan horses such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and the populist nationalist Robert Fico, prime minister of Slovakia, who are plainly working on behalf of Putin’s Russia and Trump’s US.
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This is why we have seen European leaders including Emmanuel Macron and Keir Starmer becoming the dominant voices, shifting into crisis mode, convening emergency summits in their respective capitals; invitation lists carefully curated. But Eurosceptics, including those in the Trump administration who are hoping this means that a dysfunctional EU has been sidelined and rendered irrelevant, are off the mark.
The Europe that is being born is not entirely separate from the EU either. Brussels institutions, and especially the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body, are deeply involved in the construction of the new Europe. The landmark relaxation of eurozone fiscal rules agreed last week to permit a massive increase in spending to “rearm Europe”, the establishment of new financial instruments to support Europe’s defence, the completion of the EU single market, and the push for a much bigger common EU budget, better tailored to the strategic priorities facing the continent, will all ensure that the Brussels institutions are in the driver’s seat. No wonder that Trump studiously seeks to avoid engaging with Ursula von der Leyen. It’s precisely because the commission still matters.
The new Europe is not Nato either. Not because Europeans have turned their backs on it. But the US has. The US currently has more than 100,000 military personnel deployed in Europe, 10,000 in Poland alone, with 40 military bases across the continent. We are likely to see a partial (or even total) withdrawal of US forces from eastern Europe, and perhaps beyond.
And given that the Atlantic alliance relied on trust and the conviction, among allies and adversaries alike, that article 5 of the Nato treaty (which says that an attack on one is an attack on all) was for real, the question today is whether Nato still exists. Over the last decade at least, there had been some doubt as to whether the US would have actually defended a small European country under attack. But the doubt was sufficient to act as deterrence. Today, is there any doubt at all that if a small (or large) European country were attacked, Trump would not come to the rescue?
But the new Europe being born also can’t be simply characterised as “not Nato”. Nato members outside the EU are playing a key role. The UK, first and foremost, but also Norway, Canada and Turkey, all of which are expected to help provide security guarantees for Ukraine. In different ways and with different political sensitivities and even interests, they all share the sense that a Putin-Trump convergence on Ukraine (and beyond) represents a threat.
So here we have a Europe that is and isn’t the EU; is and isn’t Nato – it is a “coalition of the willing”, united by a shared sense of threat, urgency and purpose but which cannot have a a sole leadership figure.
One country’s leader would never be accepted by others in the coalition, while the figurehead of an institution, be it the EU or Nato, would end up representing some but not all of the countries involved.
This is a new Europe, coordinated by leaders such as Macron, Starmer, the incoming German chancellor Friedrich Merz and Poland’s Donald Tusk. They share threat perceptions and the will to address them. After all, European countries, put together, are among the richest and most powerful in the world. The European Commission, led by von der Leyen, can, will and must play a key supporting role. Saving Ukraine is a necessary condition for securing Europe. Can they succeed? If they can muster a fraction of Winston Churchill’s strategic vision, Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s courage and Barack Obama’s hope, then, yes, they can.