European defense reorganizing

Timothy Snyder is a great historian and an excellent analyst of the process by which democracies can become authoritarian systems. But his zeal for supporting Ukraine in its war with Russia carries him away on occasion.

In a recent Substack column, he begins with a plausible observation about our current President:

All his adult life, Trump has been ripping people off. That is his modus operandi. Rather than a conscience, he has the habit of displacement. It is not that he is ripping people off. Everyone else is ripping him off.

As he has aged this has grown into an vulnerability. He actually seems to believe that everyone is ripping him off. He makes no distinction between himself and the government. And he has no grasp of how any significant policy actually works.¹

And he describes how this failing seems to have affected Trump’s attitude toward Ukraine:

Somewhere Trump got the idea that Ukraine was ripping off the United States. And once the idea was in his head, he was its slave. He kept repeating that the Ukraine owed the United States $350 billion.

This made no sense. The assistance in question was aid, not a loan. The value of the aid was about a third of what Trump claimed. Most of the military aid came in the form of spending inside the United States.

But then he veers off track a bit:

And of course the Ukrainians have paid. They have fulfilled the entire NATO mission by themselves in holding off a Russian attack. They have suffered enormous losses of all kinds. And they have shared intelligence and innovations with the United States. But none of that matters to Trump. Once he is told that he is being ripped off, he is helpless, and others must suffer. [my emphasis]

With the NATO alliance as it currently exist now on life support with Trump having convinced all the other NATO countries that the US is currently genuinely unreliable as an ally and even downright hostile to many of its actual NATO allies – notably the two he is threatening with war, Canada and Denmark – clear thinking about how such alliances work is particularly important as European nations make major plans to extract themselves from their current level of dependence on the US.

So it’s important to realize that while Snyder’s comment makes sense as a metaphor, in reality Ukraine is not fulfilling the NATO mission. Ukraine is not a NATO member and therefore has no NATO mission. Yes, it is acting as a de facto NATO ally. But the US and other NATO members have no mutual-defense treaty with Ukraine.

Whether it’s in NATO’s or the European members’ interest to support Ukraine in the war is another question. Despite Trump’s erratic position on the war (like on everything else), the NATO countries including the US are supporting Ukraine in its defensive war against what actually was illegal Russian military aggression.

But NATO members do have a mutual-defense military alliance. One which was always primarily directed toward defense against potential aggression by first the Soviet Union and then Russia – and unofficially to give NATO an implicit threat of aggressive action. Although the only formal invocation of NATO’s self-defense obligation Article 5 came after 9/11 and involved invading Afghanistan. And eventually losing it after 20 years of war.

And while “credibility” may be the most over-used word in the foreign policy vocabulary, when countries make a military alliance like NATO and one of its members is illegally attack by an outside power, any deterrent effect of the alliance does depend on making a credible response to military aggression, i.e., militarily defending the attacked ally. And that was a big problem in the post-USSR-era expansion of NATO, eventually including the former Soviet republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Finland became and member in 2023 and Sweden in 2024.

Most of that expansion of NATO was treated by the US and other member states as “freebies” in the sense that no actual Russia aggression was expected in any immediately foreseeable future. The brief conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008 and Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 made that risk seem more of risk. And the 2022 Russian invasion even more dramatically so, which is why previously neutral Finland and Sweden joined after that.

If Russia attacked Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, the famous “credibility” of the NATO alliance would depend on NATO prioritizing military defense of the attacked member directly against Russian forces above support of non-NATO member Ukraine. That’s part of the high-stakes nature of the arrangement. So loose talk about Ukraine as though it was an ally on the same level as other NATO countries can be misleading.

In practice, there has been no signs or threats that Russia is intending to commit actual military aggression against any of the three Baltic states. Although there is always some kind of covert operations going on, and not just by Russia and not just in the Baltics. A policy brief last month by the conservative-leaning Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS):

Russia is engaged in an aggressive campaign of subversion and sabotage against European and U.S. targets, which complement Russia’s brutal conventional war in Ukraine. The number of Russian attacks in Europe nearly tripled between 2023 and 2024, after quadrupling between 2022 and 2023. Russia’s military intelligence service, the Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (or GRU), was likely responsible for many of these attacks, either directly by their own officers or indirectly through recruited agents. The GRU and other Russian intelligence agencies frequently recruited local assets to plan and execute sabotage and subversion missions. Other operations relied on Russia’s “shadow fleet,” commercial ships used to circumvent Western sanctions, for undersea attacks.²

So, Russia is at least reminding NATO that there are actual threats to NATO member countries which they have to take into account. It’s not pretty. But it’s also what the US and other NATO members signed up for when they expanded the alliance to its current size.

The cold-blooded calculation that no one officially likes to talk about publicly

Part of Ukraine’s dilemma is that Western strategists also are very aware of what I think of as the Afghanistan Analogy, based on the idea beloved by neoconservatives in particular that supplying Islamic jihadist fighters in their war against Soviet occupation from 1979 on critically undermined the Soviet Union and was a critical factor in its disintegration. However exaggerated or fanciful that conclusion may be, we still see it pop up occasionally in discussions of the Russia-Ukraine War. And the advantage of doing massive damage to the current Russian military is certainly explicitly discussed in the current situation by strategist and pundits. That calculation certainly seems to have been very much part of the Biden Administration’s approach to the new invasion by Russia in 2022.

Whatever form the new European arrangements are to Trump’s radical undermining of NATO may take, that practical consideration will also be in the background. It was laughably absurd in the 1960s for Vietnam War supporters to say, “If we don’t stop Them in Vietnam, we’ll have to fight them on the West Coast.” A calculation by European allies that the longer the Russians are kept fighting in Ukraine, the less likely they will be to attack Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland is a more obviously practical assumption. Coldblooded, too, but an obvious consideration.

I would prefer to see some kind of stable and practical peace agreement that squares the circle with Russian and Ukraine so that the war could stop and the extensive postwar reconstruction of Ukraine could begin, without formally ceding illegal Russian claims to Ukrainian territory. The first months of the Trump 2.0 Administration, though, don’t make such a difficult arrangement look any more likely.

But this is also why it’s important to distinguish between the nature of the Western commitment to Ukraine and the nature of the commitment of European nations to NATO.

And there is a real chance in the foreseeable future that Europe will have to either leave NATO outright or sideline it in practice for a more reliable defense posture not dependent on the United States:

Britain's defence industry is urging the EU and UK to strike a security pact as early as next month and not to make it conditional on a wider reset, so it can access a new €150 billion European instrument to ramp up defence spending.

In a letter addressed to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and European Council chief Antonio Costa, the heads of the UK's main aerospace, industry and tech associations say a security pact "must be a central deliverable of the upcoming UK-EU summit" to be held in London on 19 May.³

There are likely to be a lot of cold-blooded calculations and decisions made on that front this year. The process will not be entirely pretty. But in the spirit of hope-springs-eternal, we can hope that the outcome will be more good than bad for the world.

The Bruegel think tank and Kiel Institute for the World Economy recently described the challenge:

Europe needs to be able to defend itself against Russia, with or without the United States. …

For the Russian military, the war in Ukraine has been costly. However, because of the Kremlin’s broad mobilisation of society and industry, Russia’s military is now considerably larger, more experienced and better equipped than the force that invaded Ukraine in 2022. The Russian army and general staff now possess invaluable battlefield experience unmatched by any other military – apart from Ukraine.⁴

A more recent Bruegel study describes these broad options:

First, the role of the European Defence Agency could be broadened, possibly in combination with a new lending instrument similar to the EU’s 2020-22 SURE programme.

Second, a European Defence Mechanism (EDM) could be created: an institution similar to the European Stability Mechanism, based on an intergovernmental treaty. The EDM would undertake joint procurement and plan for the provision of strategic enablers in specified areas, with a capacity to fund these roles. It could own strategic enablers and charge usage fees to EDM members, reducing the budgetary impact of rearmament. EDM membership would entail prohibition of both state aid and procurement preferences that benefit national defence contractors at the expense of contractors from other EDM members.

Of the two options, the second is preferable, as it would (1) create a defence industry single market among EDM members, (2) create a financing vehicle that might make large-scale projects fiscally feasible, and (3) include non-EU democracies such as the United Kingdom on an equal footing, while also giving an opt-out to EU countries that lack the political appetite for more defence integration, or that have national constitutional constraints.⁵ [my emphasis]

Deutsche Welle reports⁶:

1. Snyder, Timothy (2025): Trump's Psychological Vulnerability. Thinking about … 04/10/2025. (Accessed: 2025-11-04).

2. Jones, Seth (2025): Russia’s Shadow War Against the West. Center for Strategic and International Studies 03/18/2025. <https://www.csis.org/analysis/russias-shadow-war-against-west> (Accessed: 2025-11-04).

3. Tidey, Alice (2025): UK defence industry calls for quick security pact with Brussels to access EU money. Euronews 04/09/2025. <https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/04/09/uk-defence-industry-calls-for-quick-security-pact-with-brussels-to-access-eu-money> (Accessed: 2025-11-04).

4. Burilkov, Alexandr & Wolff, Guntream (2025): Defending Europe without the US: first estimates of what is needed. Bruegel website 02/21/2025. <https://www.bruegel.org/analysis/defending-europe-without-us-first-estimates-what-needed#footnote2_auhkkfp> (Accessed: 2025-11-04).

5. Burilkov, Alexandr et al (2025): The governance and funding of European rearmament. Bruegel website 04/07/2025. <https://www.bruegel.org/policy-brief/governance-and-funding-european-rearmament> (Accessed: 2025-11-04).

6. Where exactly is the UK positioning itself in this changing world order? DW News YouTube channel 04/10/2025. (Accessed: 2025-11-04).