General Dwight Eisenhower, NATO’s first supreme allied commander in Europe, believed strongly that his mission was to get Europeans back on their military feet — not to make American troops the permanent bodyguard for Brussels and Berlin. In 1951, he wrote about NATO, “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”
But now, as leaders of NATO allies gather for the alliance’s 75th anniversary, some 90,000 U.S. troops are still stationed in Germany, Italy, Britain, and elsewhere. They make up a significant portion of the 500,000 NATO troops on high readiness. America’s presence isn’t just about troops. Of the $206 billion in military and nonmilitary aid allocated to Ukraine by countries around the world, $79 billion has come from the United States. Since about 1960, the United States’ share of allied GDP has averaged roughly 36 percent, while its share of allied military spending has been more than 61 percent.
It’s now becoming clear that Europeans need to take more responsibility for their own defense. This isn’t just because Donald Trump and an isolationist wing of the Republican Party complain about having to defend wealthy countries that can afford social safety nets because they don’t spend as much on their militaries. It’s also because U.S. officials are focusing more on the challenges posed by China, which will require more attention and resources in the years ahead.
The United States can’t do everything everywhere all at once, by itself. The future needs well-armed, capable allies. America has to be a bit less indispensable. European leaders understand that they need to contribute more. Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide said Republicans told him that Europeans have to take much more responsibility for the war in Ukraine because the United States has “bigger fish to fry.”
It’s starting to happen, but not quickly enough. The NATO summit will celebrate the fact that 23 NATO members are expected to spend at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense, up from just three members a decade ago. But it’s stunning that nearly a third of NATO’s 32 members still fell short of that spending goal, agreed upon in 2014. If Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Trump’s threats to abandon freeloaders haven’t convinced them to pay more for their own defense, what will?
European reliance on U.S. troops runs counter to what many Europeans and Americans say they want. Majorities in the United States, Britain, France, and Germany believe Europe should be “primarily responsible for its own defense while aiming to preserve the NATO alliance.” Only 7 percent of German and 13 percent of French respondents felt that the United States should be primarily responsible for Europe’s defense.
Europe’s dependence on the United States is causing unease on the continent. Finland’s former president Sauli Niinisto has called for a “more European NATO,” and President Emmanuel Macron of France has warned that “however strong our alliance with America is, we are not a priority for it.”
Why does this dependence persist? Part of the reason is human nature. Why would allies invest in defense if Uncle Sam always picks up the tab? But another reason is structural. When NATO was created, European allies were just emerging from devastating wars that left them suspicious of one another. Somebody had to herd the cats.
That’s how the U.S. role in NATO changed from a temporary helper to a permanent protector. At first, NATO was like a policeman watching over a construction site; the alliance went hand in hand with the Marshall Plan. If Americans were going to help rebuild Europe, they had to make sure that Moscow didn’t steal their investment.
But by the 1960s, it became obvious that U.S. troops wouldn’t be leaving anytime soon. The Soviet Union had swallowed up much of Eastern Europe, including eastern Germany. That made West Germany key to stopping the Soviets, but few in Europe could stomach the idea of a strong German military after what had happened under the Nazis. So the Americans stayed put and protected Germany with their own troops and nuclear umbrella.
Once Washington realized it couldn’t leave, it started calling the shots. “We are bound to pay the price of leadership,” McGeorge Bundy, President John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser, said in 1962. “We may as well have some of its advantages.”
That meant juicy defense contracts for American firms, which became a powerful financial incentive to keep a big footprint in Europe. It’s one reason Poland buys American tanks that are too heavy to cross Polish bridges and Romania buys fighter jets that are extremely expensive to operate and maintain. The U.S. military-industrial complex profits from dependency. About 63 percent of the military equipment that European Union countries purchased in 2022-23 came from the United States.
At the end of the Cold War, Europeans tried to wean themselves off U.S. military might. In 1998, Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain and President Jacques Chirac of France attempted to create a European security system capable of acting on its own. But Secretary of State Madeleine Albright nipped that in the bud, warning against diminishing NATO’s role and duplicating NATO’s efforts.
In 2017, 23 European countries started the Permanent Structured Cooperation on Security and Defense to work together on practical projects such as cyber defense. That, too, got a negative reaction from the Trump administration, which warned against excluding American firms.
Today, Europe lacks the capacity to deploy the soldiers and equipment NATO needs to defend its members, especially specialized units like air defense and surveillance. John R. Deni, the author of a new report on NATO readiness, said NATO planners routinely come up short when they seek contributions of sophisticated systems, partly because so much has already been sent to Ukraine.
Some European leaders are treating this with urgency. At the summit, NATO allies are expected to endorse a new defense industrial pledge to scale up the production of weapons and ammunition. But NATO’s procurement plan relies heavily on American arms makers. That clashes with the new European Defense Industrial Strategy, which envisions spending half of its military procurement budget on items produced in Europe by 2030. There’s a dire need for both institutions to get on the same page.
If they do, it will be a great step forward for Europe’s ability to assist in its own defense. In the past, Americans might have seen a threat to their authority and sabotaged this effort to build up a European defense industry. But today, Americans, who are also struggling to ramp up their own industrial defense production, need all the help they can get.
“A stronger Europe means a stronger NATO and ultimately a more equal partnership between the U.S. and Europe,” said Rachel Rizzo, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. “You want a peer relationship. You don’t want a client.”
Europeans are finally stepping up, as General Eisenhower dreamed they would. Let’s not stand in their way.