Commentary: Europe debates the bomb

Last weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio traveled to Germany for the annual Munich Security Conference, where he delivered a speech that was both reassuring to the European dignitaries in the audience and nerve-wracking because of its references to the kind of MAGA culture-inspired war themes that Europe generally shivers at. After the remarks, European leaders were left obsessing about the same question they came in with: Is the United States still committed to Europe’s defense?

Ordinarily, that question wouldn’t even be asked. Since NATO was established in 1949, Europe’s security has depended on America, which deployed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops to the Continent to keep the Soviet Union from expanding and also covered the part of Europe west of the so-called Iron Curtain with its nuclear umbrella. Once the Soviet Union collapsed and NATO expanded east, taking in former Soviet satellite states, the U.S. nuclear umbrella grew with it.

The Europeans, however, aren’t as confident now about the U.S. nuclear umbrella. President Donald Trump’s administration has spent the first 13 months of its second term browbeating European allies for penny-pinching on their militaries, opening their borders to migrants and making peace talks between Ukraine and Russia harder than they need to be.

Some of those critiques are fair. European governments are now increasing their defense budgets, though this wouldn’t have happened if Trump didn’t press the matter by threatening to make U.S. security assurances more conditional.

Nor is Trump necessarily wrong when he lashes out at European leaders over the Ukraine portfolio. The Continent’s expectations for what a peace deal should consist of, including a full Russian withdrawal from Ukrainian territory and tens of billions in Russian compensation, are entirely unrealistic given the facts on the ground.

Even so, Europe is now coming to terms with the fact that Washington’s foreign policy priorities are changing. For some, this means kicking off discussions, like whether to increase Europe’s own nuclear deterrent, that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. As a recent report from the European Nuclear Study Group put it, “Trump’s impulsive and erratic decision-making, combined with the systematic weakening of domestic institutional constraints on presidential decision-making, raises questions about the reliability of extended deterrence.”

While those conversations are still in the early stages, more European leaders are open to having them. French President Emmanuel Macron, representing one of only two states in Europe (the other being Britain) with nuclear weapons capability, is pushing for intra-European debates on reinforcing nuclear deterrence — with or without the United States. Wary about the Trump administration’s endgame, Germany is increasingly interested in coming under the French nuclear umbrella and is reportedly in discussions with Paris about the matter. Latvia and Lithuania, which share a border with Russia, are becoming more sympathetic to the idea as well. Meanwhile, Polish President Karol Nawrocki went so far as to openly surmise that it might be appropriate for Warsaw to develop its own nuclear capability. This all comes at a time when the New START accord, the last major arms control agreement between the United States and Russia, officially expired.

On one level, Europe getting out from under the U.S. nuclear umbrella would be the ultimate example of the burden-shifting the Trump administration is so interested in. What better way to demonstrate the intent of taking primary responsibility for your own security and cutting dependency on the United States than by building your own nuclear weapons or relying more on the French and British nuclear shield? This might even appeal to Trump — recall the 2016 presidential campaign, in which he suggested that Japan, another U.S. treaty ally, should acquire nuclear weapons of its own.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to envision Washington encouraging nuclear proliferation, even if the ones doing the proliferating are allies. Covering Europe with the U.S. nuclear shield provides Washington with a certain degree of leverage, and if there’s anything Trump understands, it’s leverage. Preserving U.S. extended deterrence could also make a large-scale U.S. troop drawdown from the Continent (if such a decision is taken) more palpable to European leaders who would otherwise be apoplectic at such a scenario.

Yet in the grand scheme, Trump might not have to worry about any of this. For starters, nuclear proliferation is an extremely expensive enterprise. The United States is projected to spend about $1 trillion over the next decade just maintaining its own nuclear arsenal. Europe could come up with an equivalent amount of cash collectively to build its own nukes, but there inevitably would be some European governments opposed to contributing because their budgets are already stretched thin. European voters won’t want to sacrifice their social safety net for the world’s most dangerous weapon, which means deficits would have to rise substantially to finance any project.

Then there’s the question of whether more nukes would even improve Europe’s security in the long run. Would Germany, Poland, the Baltic states and the rest of the Continent really feel more assured if they shifted from a U.S. nuclear umbrella to a French-British one? In the event of a Russian conventional attack or a Russian nuclear strike along NATO’s eastern flank, Paris and London would be expected to step up and respond with nuclear strikes of their own. But this isn’t a sure thing, since any nuclear strike on Russian territory would leave both capitals vulnerable to retaliation from a larger nuclear weapons power.

In essence, Britain and France would have to be willing to sacrifice their own cities to defend others. Otherwise, the entire arrangement would be a bluff of historic proportions.

Like it or not, Trump has forced European policy elites to reconsider old security assumptions. Business as usual is increasingly a paradigm of the past.

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Daniel DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities and a foreign affairs columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

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