To many, it is all so simple. With Donald Trump back in the White House, Europe must unite and become more independent of the United States. In particular, it must defend itself without depending on American military capabilities. That means massively increasing defence spending to increase conventional military capabilities and even creating a European nuclear deterrent – perhaps by extending the French Force de frappe to the rest of Europe, which the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has said he is willing to discuss.
In reality, there is no actor in international politics called “Europe”. There is the EU, of course, but it no longer includes the UK, which is essential for European security, as its important role in supporting Ukraine has demonstrated. More than that, those who urge Europe to unite in response to Trump seem to ignore recent political developments on the continent. In particular, they seem to imagine there is no far right in Europe apart from in Hungary – or at least they fail to think through the implications of the hard right for European security.
The current debate is a kind of rerun of the one that took place during the first Trump administration, which centred on the idea of “strategic autonomy”, or independence from the US in security terms. In 2017, after the election of Trump created radical uncertainty about the American security guarantee to Europe, the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said that Europeans must “take their destiny into their own hands”, though she did little to make this a reality. Similarly, after the German election in February, the new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, said that Europe must “achieve independence from the United States” – a statement that many analysts saw as unprecedented.
However, several things have changed in Europe since then. The UK is now outside the EU, which makes it much more complicated to deliver “strategic autonomy” through the EU – even if all of its member states were to agree this would be a better approach than trying to develop a “European pillar” within Nato. More importantly, hard-right parties are in power across Europe – in Hungary but also in Italy and the Netherlands, two of the original six members of what became the EU.
It has always been hard to unite Europe, especially against the US. Postwar European history suggests transatlantic rifts are always also intra-European rifts. For example, despite the attempt by France and Germany to unite Europeans in opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, they ended up divided between what the then US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, called “old” and “new” Europe. Now, however, hard-right governments in Europe are more ideologically aligned with the Trump administration than with centrist European governments like Macron’s. This makes it even harder to imagine they could create a counterweight to American power.
The problem is not just that the rise of the far right in Europe makes collective action even more challenging. It also undermines the whole logic of European “strategic autonomy”. The term is deliberately meant to suggest Europeans would go from dependence to independence. Compelling, but what this would really mean for EU member states, including Germany, is exchanging dependence on the United States for dependence on each other – and above all on France, the EU’s only nuclear power.
Yet France might elect a far-right president in 2027. On 31 March, a French court convicted Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National, of embezzlement and banned her from running for political office for five years. This could further embolden her supporters and increase her party’s chances of winning the next election. With this looming, would it really be better for Europeans to depend on France than on the US?
You could make the case that Le Pen or her 29-year-old protégé, Jordan Bardella, would be a more reliable and less unpredictable president than Trump – despite Le Pen’s ties to Vladimir Putin. From a realist perspective, you could also argue that, regardless of the ideological orientation of its government, France’s strategic interests are more aligned with those of other European countries than American interests are – though central and eastern European countries would likely be sceptical about this.
However, almost no one is trying to make this much more difficult case for why “strategic autonomy” still makes sense despite the rise of the far right in Europe. Instead, foreign policy analysts just seem to be ignoring political reality and pretending that Hungary is still a kind of exception in a Europe that has a broadly “liberal orientation”, as Zaki Laïdi, a French professor of international relations who was an adviser to the former EU high representative Josep Borrell, put it in an op-ed recently. It is not enough to exhort an undefined “Europe” to “step up” and “Trump-proof” itself, as if it were just a matter of will. This tendency – what I call European security voluntarism – is illustrative of a wider failure of foreign policy analysts, many of whom seem to have become little more than cheerleaders. Instead of endlessly repeating what they think must happen, those who believe in the idea of European “strategic autonomy” need to think harder about the reasons it has not already materialised, and show how the structural barriers to it can be overcome.
[See more: The West is bored to death]
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This article appears in the 10 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Spring Special 2025