How Europe Can Defend Itself

French President Emmanuel Macron appears to understand the urgency facing Europe’s leaders. Immediately after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s blistering attack on Europe on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, the same venue in which Russian President Vladimir Putin assailed in the Western security order in 2007, Macron convened an emergency summit of key European leaders in Paris with the goal of coordinating Europe’s response.

Macron got it partly right: He understood that this is a moment that requires leaders to make decisions, not build institutions. Though European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President António Costa were there (as well as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte), this was not a European Union institutional meeting which would have been constrained by pro-Kremlin vetoes from Hungary and Slovakia.

French President Emmanuel Macron appears to understand the urgency facing Europe’s leaders. Immediately after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance’s blistering attack on Europe on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, the same venue in which Russian President Vladimir Putin assailed in the Western security order in 2007, Macron convened an emergency summit of key European leaders in Paris with the goal of coordinating Europe’s response.

Macron got it partly right: He understood that this is a moment that requires leaders to make decisions, not build institutions. Though European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Council President António Costa were there (as well as NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte), this was not a European Union institutional meeting which would have been constrained by pro-Kremlin vetoes from Hungary and Slovakia.

The United Kingdom was also present, as were Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands, plus the so-called Nordic-Baltic Eight (NB8: Scandinavia plus Finland and the Baltic states)—states with land and sea borders with Russia that see the Kremlin’s threat clearly.

But the summit itself came out half-baked. Britain suggested supplying peacekeepers to enforce an imaginary deal that the Trump administration and Russia might cook up in Saudi Arabia without European—or even Ukrainian—involvement.

Trump’s venture appears to be an echo of the 1945 Yalta Agreement, through which then-U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed to consign Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni hesitated before turning up: Her own balancing act—being a good European Russia hawk while also remaining on good terms with the White House—is becoming increasingly precarious. Beleaguered German Chancellor Olaf Scholz refused to contemplate either troops in Ukraine or more money. Poland balked at troops, too. (Western Ukraine in particular is historically sensitive for Warsaw; imagine the U.K. sending peacekeeping troops to Ireland.)

Every country had its reasons not to lead alone, so the meeting broke up in collective inaction. A benevolent United States would normally have knocked heads together and forced the Europeans to make progress; now, the Europeans found themselves on their own.

Vance’s speech and Trump’s reckless plan to relinquish U.S. influence in Europe through a Yalta 2.0 in Riyadh were a fundamental attack on European interests and security. Europe, if it musters the will, is more than able to respond. Moreover, it can respond without direct escalation against the United States.

The distinction is important. The Trump regime is not synonymous with the United States. Europe should work with Trump’s opponents and maintain relations with reasonable members of the U.S. Republican party, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and GOP members of Congress, where the party has very slim majorities.

The White House itself, however, has taken a distinctly extortionist turn. The so-called peace negotiations with Russia, which followed a demand from Trump for 50 percent of Ukraine’s mineral wealth, are such an initiative. Ukraine won’t stop fighting, because the alternative is extermination and deportation by Putin’s regime. Worse, if Russia conquers Ukraine, it will extract its resources to rebuild its war machine and conscript its men to be cannon fodder for further expansion, as it did during the Soviet era. Poland and the NB8 have no choice but to stick by Ukraine, even as Russia threatens general European war.

On Tuesday, British Defense Secretary John Healey argued that credible deterrence of Russia requires security guarantees “with a U.S. backstop,” but this U.S. administration is too unreliable to provide one, and European powers therefore need to rely on their own efforts.

Here are 10 steps that European leaders can take immediately.

1. Europe should include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in summits such as the one in Paris: Theater matters in international relations. They should convene another summit on Feb. 24, when they are due to travel to Kyiv for the third anniversary of the war, and show that Zelensky leads one of the major nations of Europe, has a right to be at the top table, and will not be abandoned.
2. European governments should immediately seize the $150 billion in Russian assets frozen in European banks. According to international law, this money belongs to Ukraine, as compensation for war damage Russia has caused and it can put it to good use in Kyiv’s, and Europe’s, defense industries.
3. All major EU countries should immediately increase defense spending to the equivalent of 3 percent of their GDPs if they haven’t already and make plans to raise it to 5 percent within the next three years. To facilitate this, they should establish an intergovernmental rearmament bank—an idea that was recently proposed by British Gen. Nicholas Carter, journalist Ed Lucas, and Guy de Selliers as well as endorsed by Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.
4. European countries should increase their nuclear weapons production. France and Britain have the weapons and technology, but they cannot afford to increase their arsenals on their own, so other large countries should help pay. Some of the effort should be devoted to substrategic weapons, which France possesses in the form of air-launched cruise missiles. Russia might still try to divide Western Europe from Eastern Europe here—just as it tried to divide Europe from the United States during the Cold War—so a way needs to be found for the NB8 and Poland to take part in deterrence.
5. Sweden should send Ukraine all of its approximately 100 Gripen fighter aircraft, whose maintenance requirements are low compared to those of the F-16 and whose ability to fight without air superiority makes them ideal for Ukraine. It should also divert the order Hungary has made for its own Gripen planes to fill the gaps that aiding Ukraine will create in Sweden’s capability until more can be manufactured. Hungarian President Viktor Orban needs to accept that changing sides has consequences. In the meantime, the United Kingdom—possibly with help from France, Spain, and Italy—should fly aircraft to defend Swedish airspace.
6. Norway should use the extra profits that its oil fund has made from higher energy prices caused by the war to fund the war effort. Maximizing Europe’s current level of 155 mm artillery production would be a good use for some of this money. Spare capacity exists at a number of sites in the Nordic countries and Germany, according to sources who wish to remain anonymous.
7. The U.K. should reopen a large-scale artillery shell production plant. Its failure to do so since 2022, when the war began, is sheer carelessness.
8. A coalition of the willing should impose secondary sanctions on businesses that do business with those doing business with Russia. This format allows the U.K. and Japan to be included in enforcement efforts while ignoring Hungary and Slovakia.
9. Europe should expand the Organization for Joint Armament Cooperation (OCCAR), a group in which the U.K. and several EU countries are already members. This would help centralize the procurement of strategic enablers that are too expensive for any one country to buy (such as air defenses, strategic airlift equipment, command and control technology, etc.) but are essential for large-scale modern military operations.
10. And finally, Europe should begin (if it hasn’t already) contingency planning for how European armies would fight Russia without the United States, doing so under the diplomatic excuse of preparing to defend Europe in the event that the United States becomes preoccupied with a conflict in Asia. This has implications for doctrine, the use of air power versus land power, and command and control and logistics, which will need to be worked out.

Speed is of the essence. In particular, there is no time to wait for the new German coalition negotiations, which are due to begin after elections on Feb. 23, to yield a new government, a process that usually takes months. Representatives of the outgoing caretaker administration and the victors of the election should agree to German participation in joint European commitments on an exceptional basis.

The question for Berlin and Paris is whether they will provide concrete financial and military support to their northern and eastern European Union partners. Or will they stand aside and allow Ukraine—which is on the road to joining the bloc—to be destroyed, paving the way for a strengthened Russia to conscript Ukraine’s men and materiel in a war against them?

Flinching now would constitute the failure of Germany’s principal foreign-policy aim since reunification in 1991—to ensure stability on its eastern frontier—and risk another continental European war.