German soldiers unloading a US-made surface-to-air missile system last month in Jasionka, Poland. Photo / Getty Images
German soldiers unloading a US-made surface-to-air missile system last month in Jasionka, Poland. Photo / Getty Images
European leaders will gather this week to plot a rough path forward on defence. Wavering support from President Trump is likely to drive the debate.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago convinced Europe’s leaders that they needed to spend more money on defence. On Monday (Tuesday NZ time), leaders from across the European Union and Britain will meet in Brussels to debate a vexing question: how to pay for it.
The United States is the largest military funder of Ukraine’s war effort, but Trump has suggested he will rapidly withdraw US financial and military support and leave it to the Europeans. He has also insisted that Nato nations ramp up defence outlays to 5% of their annual economic output, a drastic increase from the 3% or 3.5% Nato plans to make its goal at its next summit this summer.
The United States itself spends only about 3.4% of gross domestic product on defence.
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And security is only one of the arenas in which the Trump administration is striking a more confrontational stance. Trump pledged Sunday night to slap new tariffs on European trading partners “pretty soon”. That is intensifying a sense in Europe that it needs to be able to fend more for itself in a world where the United States is a less reliable partner.
With the war in Ukraine, the European Union, which was founded on free trade and termed itself a “peace project”, has become more committed to deterrence and defence. It is now scrambling to expand its defence industries and make spending more efficient and collaborative. Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will attend Monday’s gathering, the first time since Britain left the European Union that a British leader has met with the 27 leaders of the bloc in Brussels.
Part of the debate will be whether the European Union will be able to raise more money to pay for defence through common debt, as it did to fight Covid-19.
But the issue is thorny: such joint fundraising might impede the efforts of member countries to meet the individual demands that the Nato alliance is already making of them in terms of raising military budgets. Of the 27 EU countries that will meet in the closed-door session Monday, 23 are members of Nato.
Nato’s supreme allied commander in Europe, General Christopher G. Cavoli, has already set capability targets for the first time since the Cold War. The American general has given Nato member countries specific requirements for equipment and force levels, as well as instructions on how to respond in case of a Russian invasion.
There is consensus among officials and analysts that Europe lacks crucial elements of defence like integrated air and missile defence, long-range precision artillery and missiles, satellites, and air-to-air refuelling tankers that only the United States currently provides. Replacing those systems would take Europe at least five or perhaps 10 years, the analysts say.
European nations also want to reduce duplication. Ukraine, for example, has been sent at least 17 different kinds of howitzers, not all of which use the same type of shell.
As Russia threatens from the East and Trump’s support wavers from the West, Europe’s leaders agree that they need a plan to both coordinate and expand their military resources. But diverging national interests and competing budget priorities mean that reshaping European defence will be difficult, expensive and lengthy.
And important countries on the eastern flank, like Poland and the Baltic nations, want to do whatever they can to keep the United States engaged in Nato and the defence of Europe.
The summit Monday is a first step. The EU leaders will discuss military financing and joint procurement, and be joined by Starmer and by Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary-general. The goal is to hash out priorities, which will inform the continent’s top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, and its new defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, as they work to draw up a more concrete plan, especially for weapons production.
The meeting also has symbolic importance, defence analysts said, as a demonstration that Europe is taking seriously a long-term threat from Russia and the need to reduce its military dependency on the United States.
“This is critical for Europeans,” said Alexandra de Hoop Scheffer, acting president of the German Marshall Fund, a think tank. “They don’t have a choice, because war is taking place on their own continent.”
Deterring Russia, which wants to split the United States from Nato and divide both the alliance and the European Union, is “a generational struggle,” she said. “But our political leaders have failed to explain to a younger generation why the alliance is important and why it’s important for Ukraine to win this war,” she said.
Europe’s relationship with Washington is also on Monday’s agenda, including how to cope with Trump’s demands. Officials expect the discussion to address his insistence that he wants to acquire Greenland. The island is an autonomous territory of Denmark, both an EU member state and a Nato ally. Danish and Greenlandic leaders say the territory is not for sale and will not be handed over to the United States.
The Greenland issue underscores just how drastically Washington’s relationship to Europe may be changing, as Trump seems more willing to put economic and military pressure on US allies than on its adversaries.
But there is still a degree of shock in Europe.
“Nobody takes it seriously or literally,” said Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at Bruegel, a think tank in Brussels, who studies European economies and trans-Atlantic relations. “Nobody wants to do so, because it would require rethinking the world as we know it.”
While leaders like Rutte have emphasised that the continent cannot realistically go it alone without the United States, the goal is to be more self-sufficient.
EU nations have increased military outlays in recent years. They spent an estimated US$340 billion on defence in 2024, a 30% increase compared with 2021. At least 23 of Nato’s 32 members now spend 2% or more of their gross domestic product on defence, in line with Nato goals. Rutte has made it clear that 2% is a floor, not a ceiling, and that a new, higher standard will be set this year.
Ukrainian soldiers at a frontline position outside Toretsk, Ukraine, in October. Photo / Tyler Hicks, The New York Times
With President Vladimir Putin of Russia busy with Ukraine and his military battered, European and Nato officials believe there is a window of perhaps three to seven years before Putin might be tempted to test the Nato alliance.
Finding a fix that boosts and coordinates European defence outlays will not be easy.
“The logic tells us that you need to have joint procurement,” said Janis Emmanouilidis, director of studies at the European Policy Centre. But there are barriers, including a lack of trust among nations and conflicting national self-interest.
When it comes to joint procurement, there is also the issue of how to finance it. Joint funding programmes are clearly on the agenda, but exactly what that could look like varies.
It could mean a collective pot of money like Europe raised during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Funding could also come from a vehicle supported by the European Investment Bank, which is the lending arm of the European Union, or from a group of nations outside the structures of the bloc.
In a joint letter last week, 19 European countries said the bank “should continue exploring further ways to take an even stronger role in providing investment funding and leveraging private funding for the security and defence sector”.
The letter suggested a serious discussion of “specific and earmarked debt issuance” for defence projects. For now, key member states like Germany and the Netherlands reject the idea of collective borrowing for defence, and the EIB is prohibited from making loans for strictly military uses.
Any serious European defence would have to include Britain, a nuclear power and member of the United Nations Security Council, the main reason Starmer has been invited to attend. He has emphasised security cooperation with the European Union as a way to bring post-Brexit Britain closer to the bloc.
