The fragmenting U.S.-led global order may not be replaced by a similarly cohesive and dominant order, and Europe’s strategic culture and means are woefully ill-suited for such a new world.
As American hegemony faces increasing challenges from China as well as smaller but effective spoiler powers, the world is set to enter a period without the baseline agreement on rules that has been taken for granted since World War II. This period will most likely be characterized by a resurgence of military conflicts, expansionist revisionism, zero-sum economies, isolationism, nationalism, and protectionism.
Western Europe is at a particular disadvantage having uniquely benefited, for nearly three generations, from a U.S.-provided peace dividend, which exempted it from engaging in hard-power politics while allowing it to reap the rewards of global economic integration and cooperation.
It wasn’t always like this. Some of the EU’s leading member states dominated the great-power competition of the nineteenth century with effective economic, military, and political power projection.
The EU’s challenge isn’t just having to renegotiate the terms of the transatlantic relationship to empower Europeans while keeping the United States engaged, or to “Trump-proof” the alliance. The union needs to devise a twenty-first century power model for itself—one that allows it to preserve and enhance its collective economic standing while forging a new web of global partnerships and deterring ascendent adversaries. And time is of the essence as the EU’s one remaining power trait—its economic might—is rapidly dwindling.
Sovereignty, territorial integrity, international law, and trade and economic cooperation, which have been the pillars of the post-WWII order, have suffered body blows in the past two decades. Sometimes at the hands of adversarial powers like Russia, Iran, or China, and sometimes by the United States itself.
There are many clear signs that the world order is fraying: from the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Syria’s use of chemical weapons with impunity, Iran’s nuclear proliferation, and Trump’s tariff wars, to China’s undermining of freedom of navigation, Russia’s aggression, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates’ sanctions circumvention, and Israel’s defiance of international law with U.S. cover.
The good news is that European countries and the EU have leverage to tap into to meet the moment. The bloc could use its status as a normative and central trade power to redefine trade terms, boost innovation and its standing in frontier technologies, and lead the world in its green transition through mutually beneficial cooperation. But the EU is at high risk of atrophy without a Copernician Revolution in the way it defines its strategic interests, generates wealth and growth, and wields hard military power, including reacquainting itself with conventional deterrence, asymmetric, and information warfare.
There have been recent attempts to address these shortcomings: Emmanuel Macron’s push for strategic autonomy, Ursula von der Leyen’s “geopolitical commission,” the pursuit of industrial sovereignty after Covid-19 and Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, as well as Mario Draghi’s initiative for an EU “foreign economic policy.”
Yet the EU continues to lack transformational leadership, agreement on a strategic threat assessment, and a way forward to supercharge its military and economic power, create a lead on transformative technologies as well as an urgency that translates into concrete action at pace.
Meanwhile, the United States is increasingly reluctant to underwrite the international order that has given it its dominance and a large part of its wealth. The hard American commitment to winning if a conflict arose, and to spare no effort to preserve global trade and use its diverse toolbox of economic and military deterrence to keep revisionist powers in check, is worn out.
Most European countries are also challenged from within. Europe and its citizens are suffering from a crisis of confidence in their socioeconomic, political and, cultural model. This has made them vulnerable to hybrid and asymmetric warfare attacking the bedrock of their prosperity: the free and open information environment.
These vulnerabilities are not only weaponized by countries like Russia or China, or by Islamist terrorists; they are creating internal political crises that, beyond political preferences, undermine the West’s strategic interests. An increasing sense of cultural insecurity, questions about the effectiveness of the democratic system, and physical insecurity are driving some to vote for more and more extreme parties—on the right or on the left—that are Euroskeptic and have a fascination for autocratic strongmen and a preference for their appeasement.
These electoral pressures not only hamstring governments from executing the kind of grand strategy the global shift requires, and at the only scale—the EU level—that could make a strategic difference; they also prevent them from reinvesting in resilience and readiness at the scale required. That is because the necessary difficult budgetary choices—less welfare, more investment in economic and military offensive tools—are not democratically acceptable.
Nevertheless, more unites the Europeans than divides them. And the EU has been a uniquely transformative project, as evidenced by the journeys of member states that used to be members of the Warsaw Pact.
In combining the economic power of some of its states with the strategic muscle memory of others into a cohesive strategic weapon, the EU could find a way to avoid the Cornelian dilemma laid out by former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi: having to “either compromise [its] welfare, [its] environment or [its] freedom.”
The EU can turn the required green transition into an industrial and economic opportunity for itself and preferred partners as a tool for geopolitical power projection. It can do so while boosting and consolidating its defense industrial base and increasing the integration of its military capabilities, from intelligence sharing to air defenses, to operate at a scale, in line with the epochal challenges. This would also empower the EU and its member states to build a more equitable partnership with the United States—one that would preserve the alliance from American isolationism and European anti-Americanism.
