The United States’ security ties with Europe are fraying. Even before the war in Iran returned the Middle East to the front of policymakers’ minds, the United States was already shifting its focus away from Europe and toward deterring China in the Indo-Pacific. The move is occurring at a perilous moment, with Russia pressuring the continent from its eastern flank as it fights to subjugate Ukraine. As a result, Europeans feel increasingly compelled to take care of their own defense.
Donald Trump’s return to the presidency has accelerated this process. He has criticized European countries for insufficient contributions to collective defense and threatened to reduce the number of U.S. forces available to NATO during crises. But the truth is that the underlying shift in transatlantic relations is structural, not personal. Even if future administrations are less hostile to NATO, the United States is unlikely to reverse its broader shift away from Europe. As a result, discussions over rearmament and defense integration have become a hot topic across the continent’s capitals.
European leaders continue to disagree over how fast they can move and how much they can accomplish. But with sufficient spending, planning, and will, the continent should be able to assemble enough troops and conventional weapons and dramatically reduce (if not totally eliminate) the need for large-scale U.S. ground forces in Europe within a decade. And because both France and the United Kingdom have nuclear arsenals, deepening cooperation with London and Paris could also strengthen Europe’s nuclear deterrence.
But building these military capabilities is one thing; effectively using them is another. And no matter how well Europe rearms, it cannot adequately reproduce the United States’ military enablers—the systems that make up the backbone of modern warfare. Washington possesses unparalleled capacities across a variety of capabilities, including command and control; logistics; training; cyberwarfare and cyberdefense; long-term strategic intelligence; battlefield intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (collectively known as ISR); targeting; and air and missile defense. It has built up these systems over decades, and Europe has long been able to rely on them. Effectively reproducing them would take at least a decade of lead time and a level of funding that is likely beyond the continent’s means.
Europe thus needs a plan to secure reliable access to this suite of military enablers for the foreseeable future. It should propose a new transatlantic bargain that creates durable financial and strategic incentives for the United States to continue providing these critical military capabilities. Doing so would help reduce the risk that an increasingly disengaged Washington abruptly curtails some or all enabling support—and inject a measure of stability into the alliance in this era of strategic upheaval.
NETWORK EFFECTS
Washington has spent generations—and trillions of dollars—accumulating specialized capabilities that allow its military to operate at an enormous scale while minimizing casualties through precision, coordination, and information dominance. It has, for example, developed an unparalleled capacity to instantaneously gather battlefield information via a massive network of satellites and air, ground, and sea sensors, communicate it via complex encrypted networks, and process and act upon it in real time via personnel and institutional structures whose expertise has been honed over decades. These enablers have made the American way of war, and by extension the NATO way of war, possible. They have been indispensable for Washington’s allies and partners.
Consider Ukraine. After Russia’s invasion, the United States provided Kyiv with military targeting information, established a complex logistical weapons supply line, shielded the country from Russian cyberattacks, and, through long-term training efforts, aided the development of Ukraine’s nimble, decentralized force structure. These and other U.S. enablers are not the only reason Kyiv staved off a full-scale conquest, but they were essential.
The success of these enablers isn’t simply a product of their scale. U.S. officials are also uniquely skilled at making these capabilities work seamlessly in combination with one another in real time during combat.
Building military capabilities is one thing; using them is another.
The combination of scale and operational expertise, however, has made U.S. enablers access a point of leverage for the Trump administration as it pressures Europe to contribute more to its own defense.The temporary shutdown of U.S. intelligence sharing with Ukraine in March 2025, for example, suggests the administration is willing to use its enablers as a bargaining chip. The next U.S. president might be willing to, as well. Trump may be unusually hostile toward Europe and NATO. But even if Trump’s successors value the continent more than he does, it is clear that the United States is undergoing a strategic reprioritization. Competition with China has made the Indo-Pacific the new lodestar of U.S. defense policy. Europe, by contrast, is now a secondary theater. And the United States has spent the last two and a half years carrying out repeat military operations in the Middle East, culminating in a full-scale war against Iran.
Washington can provide many of its enablers essentially at will, since it has already paid to develop their capacity to cover multiple theaters. The National Security Agency, for instance, is large and capable enough to collect intelligence all over the world. The U.S. military has more than enough generals, admirals, and other personnel for command and control in Europe and beyond. But other enablers are in much shorter supply.
Speed, a requirement of contemporary warfare, is not a particular European strength.
European leaders are aware of the U.S. shift away from the continent. Many of them, following French President Emmanuel Macron, are now calling for Europe to become as autonomous from the United States as possible, as quickly as possible. But adequately replacing Washington’s enabling capacities will be exceedingly difficult.
Ukraine’s efforts during the war provide some evidence that Europe could create a thinner, less integrated enabling architecture separate from the United States’ systems, making use of innovative and inexpensive new drones, commercial imagery, AI-enabled software, and distributed sensor networks. A Europe that operates with this more limited enabling architecture could likely defend itself against a Russian attack on its frontline countries. But it would need to fight very differently from the way NATO traditionally does. It would have to be willing to accept reduced operational integration, less precision, and, likely, far greater casualties that it ever has under the current transatlantic model. European governments may ultimately decide to accept these tradeoffs. But doing so would require a major strategic, political, and cultural shift.
If Europeans conclude that they need more than a limited enabling capacity, they will have to accept that a series of structural constraints hinder Europe’s capacity to adequately replace the full suite of U.S. enablers any time soon. One is simply money. At present, Europe has only a patchwork of enablers that are unevenly distributed across its states. To fill in the many gaps, Europe would need to spend more than its governments can likely raise, especially while they prioritize rebuilding conventional combat power.
Time is another limiting factor. Many enabling capabilities require very long development cycles. A 2020 analysis by the Center for Strategic and International Studies found that the average American military satellite project took nearly nine years to be built and fully deployed. Once developed, these enabling systems require still many more years of integration and training to properly operate, individually and collectively. And speed, a requirement of contemporary warfare, is not a particular European strength.
Even if Europe did somehow quickly assemble a suite of enablers that could effectively replace those of the United States, it would face a formidable political barrier. The continent would need to coordinate on their usage, and this would require a degree of unity in strategic planning that Europe, with its diverse national strategic cultures, industrial interests, and political constraints, currently lacks. Competing state priorities and debates over leadership tend to override collective optimization. Cooperation is possible, but it is slow, uneven, and often contested. This is where the United States plays arguably its most underappreciated role. U.S. military coordination, leadership, and hierarchy hold together NATO’s multinational military infrastructure and make integration possible in the first place.
ALL IN THE DETAILS
If Europe would struggle to defend itself absent U.S. enablers, then the continent’s leaders need a plan to make sure Washington continues to provide them. And the best way to do so would be to create a medium-term, structured arrangement through which European allies pay for the U.S. enabling infrastructure that underpins NATO’s collective defense.
The most important detail of such a new transatlantic bargain would be its financing structure. A phased arrangement in which Europe delivers its payments over time, conditioned on the continued full provision of U.S. enabling capabilities, would literally raise the cost of disengaging for the United States, since an American decision to cut off the continent would lead Europe to cut off a lucrative, long-term funding stream flowing directly into Washington’s coffers. To ensure U.S. compliance, European funds could initially be held in an escrow account.
Such an arrangement would still require a small but critical U.S. military presence in Europe. Certain American military personnel in Europe responsible for managing military enablers would need to stay. And some U.S. bases with combat troops would need to remain operational as training facilities for European militaries.
On its face, a deal that requires Europe to pay for access to U.S. capabilities it can currently rely on free of charge would appear rather one-sided. But preserving this access for the foreseeable future in fact serves the interests of the continent, too—and not just by getting ahead of a potential U.S. pullback. For Europe, a contractual arrangement would not only give the United States a financial incentive to stay invested in the transatlantic defense relationship; it could also help accelerate Europe’s own learning curve when it comes to enablers. Expanded training, operational integration, joint locations, and exposure to advanced U.S. enabling capabilities would give European forces valuable experience in operating and integrating these capabilities themselves.
The most important detail of a new transatlantic bargain would be its financing.
Without a reliable framework for access, by contrast, Europeans would have to undertake the difficult process of rearmament under a cloud of uncertainty, created by the fact that a U.S. president could suddenly decide to withdraw U.S. enablers. The continent would thus be forced to divert resources toward trying to establish enabling capabilities that they cannot easily replicate in the short and medium term and away from the conventional rearmament effort, weakening deterrence in the process.
For Washington, putting Europe in a position to concentrate on its conventional buildup to deter Russia is indisputably in the United States’ interests. A deal that provides an infusion of European funds in exchange for already existing capabilities would be burden sharing in the truest sense. It would also give Washington additional resources to scale up the military enablers needed to support its global posture and more effectively compete with China. And the more that Europeans use these enablers, the more efficient, interoperable, and battle-tested they become.
Critics on both sides of the Atlantic may argue that such a proposal risks cheapening the alliance by reducing it to a transactional partnership devoid of values. But the alliance has always had a significant transactional dimension—large-scale European purchases of U.S. weaponry, for example, have been a quid pro quo for its security provision since NATO’s inception. And although Trump is more nakedly transactional than previous presidents, he is hardly the first to have complained about European “free riding.”
Europe should move to assume primary responsibility for its defense.
European leaders might bristle at the idea of paying for access to capabilities that were once part of the transatlantic bargain, seeing it as a capitulation to U.S. pressure. But such a deal would be best understood as a way to cofinance the strategic backbone of the alliance and as a force multiplier for both the United States and Europe. Framing it this way, rather than as an inducement to get U.S. forces to stay or as a concession to a hostile administration, would get more buy-in from otherwise skeptical European policymakers and publics. After all, both Washington and Europe seek the same end state: a Europe with sufficient troops and conventional capabilities to defend the continent in a conflict against Russia without requiring America to surge major combat forces.
Europe could and should also use such an agreement to get its own concessions. If it is to cut large checks to the U.S. government to secure access to these enablers, it should get some economic relief in return. Rolling back U.S. tariffs on European goods to their pre-2025 level, for example, could help win over European skeptics.
The question is no longer whether Europe should move to assume primary responsibility for its defense. It should. The challenge is how to manage that transition without undermining deterrence and NATO’s effectiveness. Although Europeans can and should strengthen their own enabling capacities over time, there is no way to adequately reproduce what Washington provides any time soon. Right now, Washington fully foots the bill for these enablers. Cofinancing is the best—and most realistic—way to overcome the biggest impediment to Europe’s ultimate goal while preserving the operational coherence of the alliance.
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