Politics is not about what you want to do, but what you are allowed to do, and there is always a temptation to bridge the gap between the former and the latter with empty statements. Geopolitics is no exception.

Europe has saved more than €1.5 trillion on defense since the end of the Cold War.

Obama has already made ‘détente’ by resetting relations with Russia. After 2012, he admitted that this strategy had failed, called Ukraine a sphere of Russian interests, and left office in 2017, summarizing his security ‘achievements’ in the so-called Obama Foreign Policy Doctrine of 2016. It was then that Obama noted that Ukraine was a sphere of Russian interests, effectively admitting the failure of his policy.

Biden, as vice president in the Obama administration, advised Obama’s successors in 2016 to seek a modus vivendi with Russia, i.e. mutual understanding. In other words, he advised going for a second round of détente. Then, starting in 2022, instead of providing effective support to Ukraine, which was needed in terms of volume of the weapon, he decided to follow the plan of eternal boiling of the frog (Russia) in a vat (Ukraine) on a slow fire of war (the ‘boiling the frog’ strategy), just to avoid provoking Russia to escalate into Europe, which was very comfortable with such tactics: being behind the back of the United States, relying on the American nuclear deterrent against Russia.

What did Europe do at that time? As early as 2014, it was possible to start increasing defense spending and reach at least the meagre NATO requirements of 2% of GDP. Did Europeans increase defense spending? By the beginning of 2022, only one in four European NATO countries had done so. They thought, as before, that the problem would somehow be ‘sat out’. Now, instead of money and immediate assistance, or at least reliable security commitments legally enshrined, we are back to statements of intent that are far from making Europe self-sufficient in security.

According to Kissinger, this is the model of European behaviour that was formed in the 1970s: ‘Like our predecessors, we have tried to solve the problem by encouraging our European allies to increase their defense spending. Mel Laird, the US Secretary of Defense, requested authority to require our allies to increase their contributions to NATO by an average of 4 per cent annually from 1971 to 1975. The Allies, however, agreed to a non-fixed percentage; they were unwilling to go beyond a commitment to a moderate increase. In the absence of a realistic strategy, backed by the ability to implement it, there was no practical solution to the problem. It remains unresolved to this day.’

Only one in four European NATO countries met the 2% defense spending target by 2022.

Let’s analyze the dynamics of defense spending in Europe since 2008, when Russia challenged regional security by aggressing against Georgia. The leader is the United States, which has increased defense spending by about 30% in 16 years. Now it is about USD 1 trillion, which is about 70% of the defense spending of all NATO countries. Germany has also significantly increased its defense spending by half.

But the UK and France are talking about increasing defense spending by a mere few percent! Question: And on what foundation did Starmer and Macron, and their predecessors, seek to build leadership in NATO? Didn’t they and don’t they still seek to do so, and the leader, the battleship of this military Western flotilla, is still the United States? Probably so.

Poland is worthy of respect – it has tripled its defense spending, as has the Netherlands – a small country with a great sense of responsibility – spending has doubled. Estonia has quadrupled its spending!

As Henry Kissinger once said, ‘Foreign policy decisions are rarely the result of abstract analysis. That is, the philosophy of life and endless slogans are not about foreign policy, defense and security. It is about national ratings.

Europe’s tendency to save on defense deserves special attention. Europe has saved more than €1.5 trillion on defense since the end of the Cold War, if we compare the target of 2% of GDP set by NATO and actual spending since 1991. Euro 1.5 trillion is about 5 annual total defense budgets of European NATO countries, if we take into account Europe’s defense spending as of 2021! That is, Europe is very comfortable under the US security umbrella within NATO.

In October 1991, Manfred Werner, the first German Secretary General of NATO, wrote in The New York Times that NATO should be preserved. He noted that ‘yes, the classic threat is gone, but there is a different risk-uncertainty as a result of the processes in the post-Soviet space, as well as the future of the USSR, a country with an army of more than 3 million people and more than 10,000 nuclear warheads. The USSR, and even Russia, has such a huge area that someone needs to contain it, i.e., a counterweight. Europe cannot do this on its own.

So, Europe was not capable of security self-sufficiency at a time when its defense spending reached almost 3% of GDP. Now Europe has just over 2%, and France has half as many nuclear warheads as it did then. So, can there be a NATO without the United States now?

At least now and for the next 10 years, no. Starmer and Macron, as well as other European leaders, are well aware of this, and that is why they are trying to maintain relations with the United States at all costs, because Europe’s defense spending has not worked out. Time will tell whether Europe’s leaders will draw conclusions from this situation or remain mentally in 1991.

France has only 64 strategic nuclear warheads—hardly an umbrella for Europe.

‘Europe is always running in circles around the United States”: this is how one can assess its security policy. Macron recently said that France would deploy a nuclear umbrella over Europe instead of the United States. This is deja vu, because in 2018, Macron made a similar statement. And has France’s nuclear umbrella been deployed over Europe since then? What is the problem with deployment?

There are technical issues, there are financial issues, plus 10 billion euros annually for the maintenance of nuclear weapons, there is the issue of the reliability of this umbrella – France has only 290 nuclear warheads, 64 of which are on missiles on only 4 nuclear submarines, the rest are airborne missiles on aircraft with a range of up to 300 km. That is, in fact, we are talking about only 64 missiles on submarines with a range of up to 8,000 km, i.e. strategic nuclear weapons.

The rest are on aircrafts, i.e. tactical nuclear weapons. The United States has 1,550 already loaded strategic nuclear missiles on alert! So how can we compare the first and second umbrellas? Experts say that it will take many more years for France to bring its arsenal of strategic missiles to the appropriate number. This is measured in decades and should have been done since 1991. And what has been done in France? Since then, the number of nuclear warheads has been halved!

So, this is the whole European show around defense capability. When Europe allocates significant, i.e. hundreds of billions of dollars for defense, not just announced, when France starts producing nuclear warheads in the amount of 100 units per year or more, when Europe says that it is already creating its own army and does the most important thing – accepts Ukraine into the EU, demonstrating its geopolitical subjectivity, then we can say that Europe has taken place geopolitically and is ready to leave the military umbrella, and thus the political influence of the United States.

In 1980, the British Foreign Office reported on a French opinion poll on the use of force to deter aggression. Two-thirds of the French believed that ‘if Russia invaded France, the proper response would be negotiations’.

In the end, why be surprised, since nothing much has changed since the Cold War. In 2015, the Pew Research Center (USA) reported that only 38% of Germans would use force to defend a NATO ally, in accordance with Article 5 of the alliance.

In 2023, Michal Onderko, Michal Smetana and Tom W. Etienne studied changes in attitudes towards nuclear weapons in Europe by interviewing the same respondents in Germany and the Netherlands – before the war, in September 2020, and during the war, in June 2022. They compared how public attitudes towards nuclear weapons have changed since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 significantly strengthened attitudes towards nuclear deterrence in Germany and the Netherlands. According to the authors, the number of German respondents who are convinced of the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons has increased by 14 percentage points (from 40% to 54%) for deterrence against non-nuclear attacks, and by an even more significant 23 percentage points (from 36% to 59%) for deterrence against nuclear attacks.

In the Netherlands, the increase is much smaller, but still significant – by eight percentage points for both deterrence against non-nuclear attacks and deterrence against nuclear attacks. Importantly, more than half of respondents in both the Netherlands and Germany believe that the deployment of nuclear weapons on their territory would deter nuclear attacks on other NATO countries.

But that’s not all: in a recent paper, Smetana, Vranka and Rosendorf delve even deeper into the topic of European security and present a new theory of the sources and strength of public attitudes towards nuclear arms control in this new era of global nuclear politics. They conducted two studies: a cross-national survey of public opinion on arms control in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Poland, and an experiment to study the impact of ‘elite cues’ on public opinion in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The US remains the core of NATO’s military backbone and nuclear deterrence architecture.

In all countries, there was a high level of support for negotiating new arms control treaties with Russia and China. The most important reason for arms control negotiations was to reduce the risk of nuclear war, while the most important reason against them was concern about non-compliance with the treaties. It is worth recalling that, first of all, we are talking about the New START treaty between the United States and Russia, which is valid until 4 February 2026.

Thus, Europe is still dependent on the United States for its security, as it was during the Cold War, and current statements by European politicians are far from creating Europe’s defense self-sufficiency, and the solutions are insufficient and far from comprehensive to give impetus to Europe’s defense mobilization. At the same time, the role of the United States in the nuclear deterrence of Russia as a mechanism for ensuring European security is still significant and deserves special attention.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. They do not represent the views, beliefs, or policies of the Stratheia.