In the face of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against Ukraine and Donald Trump’s destabilisation of the Atlantic alliance, an embryonic European security council is taking shape on the hoof. Whether it will prove strong enough to protect Europe’s liberal democracies and deter Russia without US military support may be tested all too soon.
Nato was created under US leadership to keep the Soviet Union at bay while suppressing centuries-old rivalries among European powers. The alliance stayed united through the cold war and attracted new central European members after communist rule collapsed. But the spectre of US disengagement now threatens to leave Europe without its nuclear-armed protector.
As Trump races to seek an accommodation with Putin at the expense of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, European leaders have discovered to their dismay that neither Nato nor the EU is in a position to provide security guarantees for Kyiv. Trump has nixed any Nato role in Ukraine and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán has blocked any EU consensus.
A “coalition of the willing” has brought nations together in varying configurations to try to bolster Volodymyr Zelenskyy and pull together a possible security force for Ukraine in case of a ceasefire. At its core is a group of five European powers – the UK, France, Germany, Poland and Italy – dubbed the E5, which has the makings of a durable if informal security council.
Between them, these five nations have most of Europe’s economic output, military forces and political clout. Britain and France are Europe’s only nuclear powers and permanent members of the UN security council. Germany has Europe’s biggest economy and has just loosened its constitutional debt brake to unleash a massive surge in defence spending. Poland is Nato’s biggest defence spender proportionate to gross domestic product and will soon have Europe’s biggest army.
The E5 is not an ideal format. The eight Nordic and Baltic states that are leaders in European defence and resilience deserve a voice. On the other hand, Italy’s seat at the top table owes more to its legacy status as a southern founder member of the EU, and to the prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s political ties to Trump, than to Rome’s willingness to take any military risks for Ukraine.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, first raised the need for a European security initiative in 2017 to mitigate the geopolitical damage from Britain’s vote to leave the EU. Nothing came of it then because the wounds of Brexit were too raw. Macron tried again after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, leading to the creation of a 44-nation European political community that brought together leaders of “free Europe” for strategic discussions. Without executive powers or a secretariat, the forum has so far been more a photo opportunity than an effective continent-wide security body, but at least it gathers the European family.
In a Guardian column last September, I noted that Europe appeared to have settled into a holding pattern of helping Ukraine just enough to keep its head above water but not enough for it to prevail. A Nato official told me it may take a “second shock” of the magnitude of Russia’s full-scale invasion to jolt Europeans out of their complacency and spur them to take more radical collective steps to boost their own defences.
Trump’s return to the White House has delivered that shock. Within a few short weeks, he adopted Moscow’s narrative on the origins of the war, branded Zelenskyy a dictator, subjected him to a humiliating ambush in the Oval Office, and cut off arms and intelligence for Kyiv. He riled allies with demands that the US take over Greenland, part of EU member Denmark, retake control of the Panama canal and absorb Canada as the 51st state of the US.
Trump undermined Nato by saying he would not defend countries that did not meet their defence spending targets. His vice-president, JD Vance, excoriated European democratic values in a hostile speech at the Munich Security Conference, and his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, told European allies the US was shifting its military focus to Asia and they would need to take care of their own security in future. The shock sits deep and some European governments are still in denial, at least publicly.
London and Paris have taken the lead in trying to moderate Trump and prevent him selling out Ukraine while organising a European mobilisation to support Kyiv. The European Commission has put forward a collaborative rearmament plan centred on €150bn in EU loans. There are now reports that the UK, France, Germany and Nordic countries are working on a plan for a phased European takeover of US Nato responsibilities over five to 10 years, to be put to Trump before a Nato summit in June.
All this suggests that a de-facto European security council is already at work trying to limit the damage from Trump’s geopolitical wrecking ball and prevent a security vacuum in Europe. However, reports that his administration is also considering vacating the top Nato military post of Supreme Allied Commander Europe, which has embodied the transatlantic security guarantee since 1951 (with Eisenhower in the role), suggest the transition may be sudden, unilateral and chaotic rather than gradual, consensual and negotiated.
That would be a true stress test of whether Europeans can handle their own security in an increasingly lawless world of predatory great powers.
