European leaders have gotten the message from Washington about doing more for their own defense and for Ukraine, too. They are talking tough when it comes to supporting Ukraine and about protecting their own borders, and they are standing up to a demanding and even hostile Trump administration.
But there is an inevitable gap between talk and action, and unity is fracturing already, especially when it comes to spending and borrowing money in a period of low growth and high debt.
The Dutch and others are not fans of raising collective debt for defense. Keeping Hungary on board is ever more difficult.
And when the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, announced a plan for billions more for the military, called “ReArm Europe,” two of the bloc’s largest countries, Italy and Spain, thought that was all a bit aggressive. So now the plan has been rebranded as “Readiness 2030.”
That’s a year after Donald J. Trump is no longer expected to be president. But it is also a realistic understanding that Europe’s new commitment to self-reliance will take time, billions of euros, political deftness and cooperation with the United States.
Kaja Kallas, the former prime minister of Estonia who is now the chief foreign and security official for the European Union, has been a forceful advocate for supporting Ukraine as a first line of European defense against an aggressive, militarized Russia.
But it has been a rocky start for Ms. Kallas. Her effort to get the E.U. to provide up to 40 billion euros (more than $43 billion) to Ukraine through a small, fixed percentage levy on each country’s national income has gone nowhere.
Her backup proposal, for an added €5 billion as a first step toward providing Ukraine two million artillery shells this year, was also rejected by Italy, Slovakia and even France, an E.U. official said, speaking anonymously in accordance with diplomatic practice. The countries insisted that contributions to Ukraine remain voluntary, bilateral and not required by Brussels.
And her recent response to Mr. Trump’s effort to push Ukraine into a cease-fire without security assurances rubbed many the wrong way, both in Europe and Washington, as dangerously premature. “The free world needs a new leader,” she wrote on X. “It’s up to us, Europeans, to take this challenge.”
But in fact the Europeans are working hard to respond to Mr. Trump in a convincing fashion. Ms. von der Leyen sold her rearmament or readiness plan with a headline figure of €800 billion. But only €150 billion of that is real money, available as long-term loans for countries that wish to use it for the military. The rest simply represents a notional figure — a four-year permission from the bloc for countries to borrow even more for military purposes out of their own national budgets.
For a country like Germany, which has low debt, that is likely to work, especially now that the next chancellor, Friedrich Merz, got Parliament to agree to loosen its own debt rules to allow for huge spending on the military, civilian infrastructure and climate.
But for countries like Italy and Spain, which can feel far away from Russia and have their own fiscal problems, that may not be an easy choice. France, despite President Emmanuel Macron’s strong words about European “strategic autonomy” and his desire to lead the Continent, is itself deeply indebted, and piling on more debt is politically and economically hazardous.
France, too, is insisting on a high percentage of European content and manufacture for any weapons bought with the new loans, and is so far working to keep American, British and Canadian companies from participating. And other issues are intruding; an E.U. effort to draft a defense agreement with Britain is being held up by Paris over squabbles about fisheries.
But Europe will spend considerably more on defense, as it has known it must, said Ian Lesser, director of the Brussels office of the German Marshall Fund. “The advent of the Trump administration has given history a shove,” he said. “We’re not in a linear environment, with a linear spending trajectory.”
On NATO, too, major European countries are beginning to talk seriously about how to replace the vital American role in the alliance — both in terms of sophisticated arms and political and military leadership. But there is little desire to accelerate any rupture with Washington, since any such transition is likely to take five or even 10 years.
Now, 23 of 27 E.U. states are also NATO members, including about 95 percent of E.U. citizens, and NATO has its own requirements for new military spending. European states are discussing what they can propose to Mr. Trump at the next NATO summit in June, in The Hague, that will ensure American cooperation in any transition.
But while Trump officials have privately reassured Europeans that the U.S. president supports NATO, will retain the American nuclear umbrella over Europe and remains committed to collective defense, Mr. Trump’s views are famously changeable, and he persists in viewing NATO as a club where members pay for American protection.
In his first term, he often mused about leaving NATO while saying the United States will defend only countries that pay enough for defense. This month, he repeated that warning. He has demanded that NATO members pay up to 5 percent of gross domestic product on defense, significantly more than the United States, which spends about 3.4 percent of G.D.P. on its global military.
NATO officials want to set a new spending goal at the summit in June, but one closer to 3.5 percent of G.D.P., up from 2 percent now.
In response, Sweden’s center-right government announced plans on Wednesday to increase defense spending to 3.5 percent of G.D.P. by 2030, an ambitious goal. Sweden is currently projected to spend 2.4 percent this year.
Reinforcing concerns in Europe that the United States may no longer be a reliable partner was the extraordinary discussion among top Trump administration officials of the American strike on Yemen, revealed by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, who was inadvertently added to the group chat on the messaging app Signal.
The discussion was replete with comments like this one from Vice President JD Vance: “I just hate bailing out the Europeans again.” And there were boastful messages about finding a way to get Europe to pay for the operation — but nothing about China, which benefits hugely from the trade passing through the straits near Yemen, including much of its oil imports and its exports to Europe.
Mr. Trump’s sudden suggestion last week that a future American fighter plane might be sold to allies in a downgraded version has also reinforced these concerns.
Prompted by Mr. Trump’s stated intention to leave Ukraine’s defense to Europe, Britain and France are working on a proposal for a European “reassurance force” to be on the ground in Ukraine once a peace settlement is reached between Kyiv and Moscow, if one ever is. But so far, no other E.U. country has publicly volunteered to serve in such a force, which is largely undefined and unfinanced, and which Russia has consistently rejected.
Mr. Macron is to meet with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on Wednesday night. Then on Thursday, he is scheduled to be host at another meeting of this “coalition of the willing,” guest list unclear. But Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, called the idea “simplistic” and “a posture and a pose.”
Efforts at creating a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine continued, with the announcement on Tuesday that the two countries had agreed to stop attacks on ships in the Black Sea. But even that agreement was subject to a Russian demand that Western countries drop restrictions on Russian agricultural exports.
Ms. von der Leyen talks of making Ukraine “a steel porcupine,” too difficult for Russia to swallow in the future, an echo of an early plan for Ukrainian defense drafted by a former NATO secretary general, Anders Rasmussen.
But even a steel porcupine is not a security guarantee, and it implies an endless commitment to supporting Ukraine.
Prime Minister Bart De Wever of Belgium summed up the European problem nicely last week. He praised Mr. Macron for drumming up a “coalition of the willing” to boost military aid for Ukraine as U.S. support dwindles. But he said he had pleaded for a bit more structure in the group.
“We are willing — but willing to do what, exactly?” he asked.