What It Means for Europe to Fend for Itself
Apr 22, 2025
Anders Fogh Rasmussen
For too long, Europe has relied on cheap Russian energy, cheap Chinese goods, and cheap American security and technology. Now that this naive dependency is no longer an option, Europeans must be open and honest about what it will take to defend their values and interests in a dangerous new world.
COPENHAGEN – The US-led global order as we have known it is gone. As the tectonic plates of geopolitics continue to shift beneath us, the challenge for Europe is to keep its institutions alive and prevent the world from returning to an era of might makes right – where power accrues to strongman leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing.
Rising to this challenge requires a fundamental reconsideration of long-held assumptions and beliefs. Clinging to old orthodoxies is not an option. Europeans cannot preserve democracy and our way of life with soft power alone. We must dispense with entrenched taboos and relearn the language of hard power. That is the only way to deter and defend against those who directly threaten our values and interests.
Yes, since US President Donald Trump’s return to power, hundreds of billions of euros in new spending have been earmarked for defense. But these commitments are not enough. Spending 2% of GDP on defense was a reasonable ambition for NATO in 2014, when the United States still played the role, however reluctantly, of global policeman. But those days are gone. Merely to keep pace with Russia’s military development, Europe must at least double its investment in defense. Indeed, I would go much further and say Europe should aim for 4% by 2028. Incoming German Chancellor
Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister
Donald Tusk’s ambitions for their own countries must be replicated across the continent.
Bigger armies and more equipment will deter direct attacks, but guns and tanks are only one part of the equation. If Europe’s extra spending is confined to military procurement, it will miss an opportunity to spark its own high-tech revolution. Technological innovation is what underpins US and Chinese hard power. From AI and quantum computing to critical infrastructure and biotech, Europe is at risk of ossifying as the major powers sprint further ahead. In this scenario, our strategic dependencies on the US and China would only increase.
To defend the rules-based system, we must rethink the composition of our community. While old formats like the G7 can still serve an important purpose, we will need new ways of convening like-minded democracies. A coalition of such democracies – a D7 – can build new tools to promote open trade and economic cooperation, defense partnerships, intelligence-sharing, and access to critical minerals. They can even create new security arrangements that cover both cyber-kinetic attacks and economic coercion by major powers, akin to an economic version of NATO’s Article 5 mutual-defense provision.
To that end, the European Union should work closely with traditional partners – like the United Kingdom – and seek even closer relations with Canada, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia. It also should explore new ways to collaborate with India, a democracy whose GDP has doubled in the past decade, putting it on track to become the world’s third-biggest economy before the end of this decade. The point is not to replace America, but to ensure that Europe will remain resilient with or without US support.
For too long, Europe has relied on cheap Russian energy, cheap Chinese goods, and cheap American security and technology. But this naive dependency is no longer an option. In addition to mobilizing fiscal resources for defense and technology, Europe also must forge a new social contract.
Though we should not abandon what makes us European, we do need to revisit some tenets of the old welfare state. Freedom is not free. European leaders must be honest and open about the challenge we face, and about what it requires of us. The solutions will not all be popular, but we must remember that we have entered an era of crisis. Europeans must be equipped with the skills and resources to fend for themselves. We can learn a lot from the Ukrainians and the Taiwanese about building resilience and paying the price for freedom.
Each year, I convene the Copenhagen Democracy Summit under my Alliance of Democracies Foundation. When I created the Foundation in 2017, it was my long-held belief that the US would and must remain at the center of a global democratic alliance. Now, we must prepare for a world in which America is not only unreliable but even adversarial and expansionist.
New circumstances demand new strategies. Defending democracy is not a spectator sport. We will have to make some sacrifices, because the alternative is unimaginably awful. Europe has an opportunity to assume the mantle of leader of the free world. Our descendants will not forgive us if we fail to seize it.
Writing for PS since 2002
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Anders Fogh Rasmussen, a former NATO secretary-general (2009-14) and former prime minister of Denmark, is Founder of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation.
