European Rearmament

One of the increasingly prominent new themes in world politics is the rearmament of Europe. From Deutsche Welle¹:

Al Jazeera (first 9 ½ minutes)²:

We will continue to hear a lot about it. Here are a couple of my reference points in thinking about this.

Percentage of GDP as a measure of defense spending adequacy

The discussion right now is about the GDP percentage targets for NATO European members and Canada. It’s understandable why this measure is used. Because it’s a kind of measure of fairness among NATO members.

But it’s not an actual measurement of whether military spending is enough or too much. According to current IMF data, the GDP in US dollars of the US for 2025 is forecast to be $20.5 trillion (5%=$1.0T), German GDP $4.7 trillion (5%=$1.0T), Italy $2.4 billion (5%=$1.0T), Russia $2.2 trillion (5%=$1.0T).

But Russia is physically the largest country in the world, spread over two continents. It’s also a nuclear power. What it needs to maintain basic defense, even absent whatever expansionist ambitious it may have or may adopt, is simply a lot more in physical equipment and facilities than what Italy would need. But if Italy and Russia spent the same portion of their respective GDPs on defense, Italy alone would be spending more than Russia.³

GDP, in other words, does not equate directly to a physical measure of the adequacy of the country’s defense spending. (It’s also not a particularly helpful measure of to what extent a country’s economy is “militarized.”)

The ”Trump Daddy” schtick

European leaders crassly pandering to Trump as their “daddy” at this week’s NATO summit was inherently a bit sickening and pathetic.

But they also know that Trump eats up this kind of symbolic pandering. And, sure, they are glad to praise Trump for pushing them to boost military spending.

Here’s where reporters and commentators could use a healthy dose of Wilsonian provincial cynicism about the devious practitioners of Old World diplomacy. Seriously: anyone who has been paying attention to him – professional diplomats most of all – can see that Trump is a shallow narcissist and is remarkably clueless about the language of diplomacy. He also has no strategic foreign policy perspective beyond finding ways to get other countries to bribe him with hotels, cryptocurrency purchases, or whatever.

But the long-practice has been that the US bitches and moans that the Europeans and freeloading on the US by not spending more on military defense. And the Europeans respond by saying, okay, yeah, we’ll spend more, don’t worry about it. And then they continue more-or-less as usual. The US has considered this an annoyance but not so much an actual problem, because NATO has been a major multiplier of American power.

But Trump talks about NATO as though he sees it as a literal Mob protection racket on a grand scale. He consistently talks about the 5% GDP goal as though it involves payments by the NATO member countries to the US government. Take his infamous statement on the campaign trail:

Former President Donald Trump on Saturday said he would encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member country that doesn’t meet spending guidelines on defense in a stunning admission he would not abide by the collective-defense clause at the heart of the alliance if reelected.

“NATO was busted until I came along,” Trump said at a rally in Conway, South Carolina. “I said, ‘Everybody’s gonna pay.’ They said, ‘Well, if we don’t pay, are you still going to protect us?’ I said, ‘Absolutely not.’ They couldn’t believe the answer.”

Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”⁴ [my emphasis]

This from a guy who was notorious for stiffing contractors he had hired.

But the reason European NATO members are declaring in apparent seriousness that they are boosting their defense spending is not that they’re awed by Trump’s bluster. It’s because they no longer believe they can count on the United States to live up to its obligations under the NATO Treaty.

It’s not that they are awed by the Orange Anomaly’s “Daddy” energy. It’s because they don’t believe they can trust the US for mutual self-defense against Russia in the way they could for decades. The rest is theatrics. The Europeans also know it’s to their advantage to keep the US involved in European defense for as long as it’s possible to do so without taking actions they believe will undermine their own security.

Military buildups do not equal foreign policy

We’ll be talking and hearing about the Russian threat to Europe for God-only-knows how long. Russian writers and propagandists aren’t entirely wrong when they say that Western countries have been irrationally obsessed about the Russian threat for more than a century.

The world would be enormously better off today if we had collectively used the period after the end of the Soviet Union to establish a Europe-wide cooperative system like in Mikhail Gorbachev’s famous phrase of a common European home.⁵

The ”realist” approach to foreign policy would strongly suggest that in the “multipolar world” of China, the US, and Russia as the three major powers, it would be in the interest of the European NATO members (and probably Canada, too!) to maintain a mutual defense alliance and to pursue a collective foreign policy. Russia and the EU nations are currently in an adversary position, which will continue until something like a stable peace or long-term ceasefire agreement is in place between Russia and Ukraine. And the US under Trump 2.0 is basically hostile to the EU and to the norms of liberal democracy on which it is based. The US is also actively promoting far-right parties in the EU to undermine both the EU. And the more literate MAGA types like J.D. Vance or Peter Thiel generally hate democracy.

Traditional power-balancing considerations would see this as incentive for the EU to improve relations with China as much as possible to balance against the US and Russia. At the same time, the EU countries also have a strong interest in moving to some form of a common-European-home arrangement with Russia. Germany has a history especially since the 1970s of trying to find peaceful accommodations with Russia. Which in itself is a good thing.

The post-2024 defense paradigm for Europe

There have been a couple of serious but popular books in German recently on the broad subject of how the public needs to think about the new world of a “wartime” Europe. One by Franz-Stefan Gady, Die Rückkehr des Krieges: Warum wir wieder leranen müssen, mit Krieg umzugehen [The Return of War: Why We Have to Re-Learn How to Handle War] (2024) is kind of a primer for a general audience on the vocabulary of military planning and war, including the inevitable Clausewitz theory of war as politics by other means and the broad concepts of war planning and war doctrine in the current moment.

Another is a somewhat more academic book by the German historian Herfried Münkler, Macht im Umbruch [Power in Upheaval] (2025) on the topic pf “Germany’s Role in Europe and the Challenges of the 21^st Century.” This one is more a primer on broad concepts of strategic thinking from Germany’s perspective in particular. With perhaps a bit too much emphasis on the concept of Mitteleuropa, a long-standing theme historically in German foreign policy thinking which basically focused on Central and Eastern Europe, not necessarily including European Russia. Timothy Garten Ash wrote about the tangled history of what he called the “diffuse and inchoate” discussion around the concept in 1990.⁶

A lot of the news articles tend not to emphasize the magnitude of the shift towards a European defense structure. So far. They are following the lead of the political leaders of the NATO countries who prefer to strike the public posture of the NATO countries who prefer to stick with the polite fiction that the rest of the alliance members still believe the Trump 2.0 regime takes its defense commitments seriously. But the reality is different, though it may take a bit of extra focus at the moment to see that.

If there was one moment that suddenly brought the curtain down on the old European view of NATO, it was the infamous February 28 Oval Office meeting of Volodymyr Zelensky with Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Marco Rubio, during which Trump and his team publicly bullied and berated him and repeated current Russian talking points in the process. Combined with J.D. Vance’s separate public encouragement of the far-right parties in Germany and Rumania.

European leaders generally seem to have understood after that moment that they really had to prepare for defending themselves against Russia without the active participation of the US. The question of how likely it may be that Russia would attack any NATO member is a related but different question. Russia is currently taking an adversarial position toward the EU and both the NATO and EU treaties do commit all members to supporting any member nation attacked by an outside power. (How that might play out in the case of the US attacking Denmark or Canada is another question!)

The entire structure of the current NATO defense against potential Russian engagement is based around a US-led defense. The current nuclear-deterrence strategy is based on the United States responding with its own nukes against any Russia use of nukes against NATO. The European allies rely heavily on American-made military equipment and weaponry. (In that sense, a lot of European defense spending goes to American companies, but they don’t pay it directly to the US government in the way Trump’s protection-racket conception would have it.)

Even battlefield intelligence is heavily based on US equipment and contractors. Do European countries really want to depend on private companies of creepy rightwing billionaires like Elon Musk?

This means that European countries have to revitalize and expand their own domestic defense industries in a massive way. If European leaders want to avoid some of the problems the US military-industrial complex creates, they might want to look closely at the work my former Congresswoman Jackie Speier has done of the shabby oversight and (often legal) bribery involved in the truly scandalous US military spending.⁷

It is already leading them to loosen some of the ridiculously conservative spending restrictions justified by austerity dogma rather than by reality-based economic concepts. They might even want to consider the option of publicly-owned defense industries. Some EU leader should mention the concept at a convention of defense-industry lobbyist just to see how much of the audience would faint immediately.

There is also a geopolitical challenge in that the EU as an organization can’t currently replace the NATO structure in coordinating a general European defense. Both Britain and France will be needed to at least partially replace the nuclear-deterrence function. The EU countries with the biggest armies are Poland, Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Britain, not currently an EU member, has already been publicly pursuing military cooperation with the EU countries. And the European countries will also surely try to engage NATO member Turkey as an ally in defending against Russia. Turkey with 355 thousand active soldiers has the second largest army in NATO (after the US).

Problems are inevitable

Even some of the less-dim bulbs in the Trump 2.0 regime will inevitably notice that the European move toward greater defense independence and much more extensive defense cooperation outside of NATO will mean a real diminishment of the US ability to use NATO as multiplier of US power and influence.

If the hypothetical but not impossible case that the US actually does militarily attack Canada or Denmark (Greenland), the reshuffle in defense plans will become even more drastic.

And while increased military spending can and will have some spillover benefits for the European economies as a whole, the new emphasis on military spending will lead the billionaires’ lobbyists to push even harder for drastic cuts in civilian spending. There are always political fights over resources. And some of them are likely to become much more intense.

Obviously, some criticisms of the higher military spending will be more substantive and realistic than others. And both the US and Russia will have their own reasons to try to use related issues to influence EU politics.

But actual critical thinking and debate about European defense spending will become increasingly important. While there may not be a one-to-one tradeoff between “guns and butter” in the new environment, the various military-industrial complexes involved will figure that the potential profits for “guns” will benefit them far more than the “butter.” And if they are allowed to operate in the shamelessly corrupt way their US counterparts do, there will be big disputes, and for good reason.

And, since human beings are who we are, there are built-in hazards in military buildups. Generals will be tempted to seek out smaller conflicts to provide combat experience for their armies. Nationalist politicians in places like Hungary and Rumania will see new opportunities to revise territorial borders established by the two world wars. And, the more bombs that are dropped, the more missiles used or shipped to allies to be used, the scarier the external threat is, the more likely military contractors will see profit opportunities in encouraging the kind of policies and fears that lead to ever-bigger military expenditures.

And will be important for citizens, journalists, and politicians to keep in mind I.F. Stone famous observation about countries’ approach to war: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”⁸

1. What Trump's power over Europe really means. DW News YouTube channel 06/27/2025. (Accessed: 2025-27-06).

2. Why is NATO boosting defence spending and can Europe afford it? Al Jazeera English YouTube channel 07/27/2025. (Accessed: 2025-27-06).

3. A quick look at the charts in this Wikipedia article will show that there are various ways to calculate GDP, which is one of the complications in using % of GDP as a measure for military contributions: List of countries by GDP (nominal). Wikipedia 06/15/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)&oldid=1295715876> (Accessed: 2025-27-06).

4. Sullivan, Kate (2025): Trump says he would encourage Russia to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any NATO country that doesn’t pay enough. CNN 02/11/2024. <https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato> (Accessed: 2025-27-06).

5. Pick, Hella (2025): Gorbachev outlines common home plan. The Guardian 07/07/1989. <https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2019/07/09/7_July_1989.jpg> (Accessed: 2025-27-06).

6. Ash, Timother Garten (1990): Mitteleuropa? Daedalus 119:1 Winter 1990, 1-20.

7. Graham, Michael (2021); DOD Contractor Dealt Legal and Financial Blow. Inside Sources 03/24/2021. <https://insidesources.com/dod-contractor-dealt-legal-and-financial-blow/> (Accessed: 2025-28-06).

8. I.F. Stone. Wikipedia 09/04/2024. <https://en.wikiquote.org/w/index.php?title=I._F._Stone&oldid=3574288> (Accessed: 2025-28-06).