Europe has a curious capacity to be surprised by what it has seen coming for decades. Now it seems to discover, with a mixture of alarm and bewilderment, that the United States may not be eternally willing to bear the cost of Western security. A late revelation, comparable to discovering that water is wet or that dependence, when prolonged too long, eventually looks like an acquired right.
The E5 meeting in Berlin - Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Poland - held at the end of June and the upcoming NATO summit in Ankara on July 7 and 8 are not minor episodes of Atlantic protocol. They are not another Atlantic liturgy of prefabricated smiles, solemn declarations, and photographs where everyone looks at a map with a grave expression. This time the fundamental issue is much less ornamental.
The new division of roles within the Western bloc is being negotiated, although no one puts it that way: who guarantees, who pays, and, above all, who decides. For more than seventy years, the arrangement was extraordinarily comfortable. Washington provided nuclear deterrence, technological superiority, strategic intelligence, and global intervention capability. Europe, meanwhile, invested in welfare, institutional expansion, and a certain moral pedagogy about the end of power conflicts.
The arrangement worked reasonably well. At least for one of the parties. But History - that artifact that Europe declares overcome every so often for its own peace of mind - has a habit of reappearing when it is least convenient.
First Crimea. Then Ukraine. Meanwhile, China has been silently occupying the center of the global strategic chessboard with that historical patience that only ancient civilizations and creditors possess. And there lies the real shift. Europe continues to think of risk in terms of its eastern border. The United States is beginning to think of it in terms of global systemic competition.
It is not exactly the same. For Washington, Russia is a serious but contained problem. China is another category: a dispute for primacy in the century. And that reorganizes priorities.
Trump did not invent this process. He simply removed the diplomatic wrapping. Obama initiated the pivot to Asia. Biden maintained it. Trump, as he usually does, limited himself to verbalizing it with that delicacy that turns every phrase into a controlled demolition: Europe will have to start taking more care of itself. European surprise is curious. Not because the message is new, but because it has been delivered for twenty-five years in increasingly unambiguous ways.
And the uncomfortable truth is that it makes sense. The extraordinary thing is not that the United States wants to redistribute burdens. The extraordinary thing is that Europe acts as if this were an unexpected betrayal. It is not. It is the logical consequence of almost thirty years of strategic displacement. Ankara may be the moment when this transition takes political shape: a NATO where Washington retains the technology, intelligence, nuclear capability, and doctrinal framework, while Europe assumes a larger share of conventional muscle, industrial effort, and, naturally, the bill. And here appears the first anomaly. Because paying more does not necessarily equate to deciding more. And that difference, which for decades was tolerable, is beginning to become uncomfortable.
NATO and the habit of redefining enemies
Europe has reduced the debate on defense to a simple matter of GDP percentages: two percent, three percent, five percent. As if security were an accounting operation and not a political decision. The real question is not how much to spend, but for what, how, and under what strategic logic.
NATO continues to define itself as a defensive alliance. Formally it is. But its historical evolution has been much more flexible than its self-description suggests. After the fall of the USSR, there was an opportunity - at least theoretically - to think about a European security architecture. One that was less expansive, less rigid, less based on the permanent logic of blocs, and more supported by structures like the OSCE, perhaps even capable of integrating Russia into some functional balance, however imperfect.
None of that happened. The opposite was chosen. Expansion. Then more expansion. And then turning expansion into identity. Kosovo opened up the legitimacy of out-of-area intervention. Afghanistan transformed the Alliance into an expeditionary tool. Libya confirmed that the conceptual elasticity of the term "defense" could be considerable. Ukraine has returned NATO to its original logic: territorial containment.
Each phase was different. But they share a constant: the structural need to redefine threats to justify continuity. And that deviates from the original concept: from a defensive Alliance to an offensive Organization. That does not absolve Russia of its responsibility - which is immense and evident - but it also does not allow us to pretend that thirty years of military expansion towards the East did not produce political effects. International politics has a simple rule: all pressure generates reaction. And normally cumulative reaction.
The problem for Europe is that today it faces a real Russian threat within an architecture whose deep logic continues to be defined from Washington, precisely when Washington begins to look in another direction. That is the paradox.
Europe and its different ways of understanding NATO
If the United States gradually reduces its material involvement, but maintains the intellectual monopoly and doctrinal centrality of the Alliance, Europe could end up in a rather unique position: assuming more costs without necessarily assuming more sovereignty. That is, paying more to obey the same.
That is not strategic autonomy. That is an accounting update of old vassalage. But the problem is not just American. It is profoundly European.
For Poland and the Baltics, NATO is an existential guarantee. The Alliance is not a security structure: it is the difference between tranquility and History. Their relationship with the Organization is almost biological because they believe - probably rightly so - that History always returns to their border and that geography rarely forgives.
For Germany, for decades, it was the comfortable way to reconcile rearmament and containment. Today it is also beginning to be the instrument of its strategic return after awakening from its long post-war geopolitical anesthesia, but with the historical caution of one who knows that when it moves too quickly the continent becomes nervous, especially when its rearmament is rumored. France has always maintained an ambiguous relationship with NATO: indispensable, but uncomfortable. It has never fully accepted a military architecture where European autonomy is subordinated to Washington. Its insistence on strategic autonomy is not born of European idealism, but of an old tradition of national sovereignty projected onto Europe.
Italy looks at NATO from a different geography. It knows that the South exists, even though the Alliance often seems to remember the Mediterranean only when the problem has already crossed the border.
And then there is Spain.
Spain has historically experienced NATO with a very Spanish mix of pragmatism, distance, and a certain comfortable delegation. It has occupied a very common place in its foreign policy: the comfortable periphery. It has never seen it as Poland - an existential issue - nor as France - a sovereignty issue. Rather, as a stable framework to which to contribute without excess or the need to define it.
That explains many things. While Eastern Europe and Germany think of the Alliance as protection against Russia, Spain continues to look primarily to the South: Sahel, Maghreb, migration, energy, maritime insecurity. The problem is that it has rarely managed to turn this agenda into an Atlantic priority.
And there lies its structural limitation. Spain participates, accompanies, contributes, but rarely conditions. It continues to conceive of its membership as a contribution, not as design, direction, and leadership. And at a time when NATO is redefining its internal balance, that difference matters. Because in international politics there is something worse than not being there: it is being there without weight.
Ankara and the end of European strategic comfort
Ankara's central issue will not be how much more Europe will spend. Not even how much more it will support Ukraine. That matters, but it is not decisive. The real question is another: what kind of alliance does Europe want in an era when the United States no longer considers it the center of its strategic architecture? Because for decades Europe has lived in a singularly comfortable position: protected by an external power, but free to build a political identity based on law, multilateralism, peaceful dispute resolution, and a certain normative superiority. All of that is easier when someone else guarantees the last line of security.
Now that comfort is beginning to erode and with it the essential question arises: if Europe is going to pay more, risk more, and assume more military responsibility, the question is, does Europe simply want to finance the continuity of the logic, until today, existing within NATO, or does it want to take advantage of this transition to redefine it according to its interests and principles?
Because that is sovereignty. Not just spending, but thinking, prioritizing, and autonomously choosing its strategic interests. Assuming its own risks and not just inherited ones. This implies that it will have to decide more. Which threats it prioritizes, which borders it considers vital, what degree of confrontation it is willing to sustain, and what political costs it is prepared to assume. That is sovereignty, the rest are budgets.
Perhaps Ankara will not resolve any of this. Most likely it will not. Great alliances rarely reformulate their nature in a single summit, but it can mark something more important: the moment when Europe begins to understand that strategic autonomy and its participation in the Alliance do not consist simply of spending more. It consists, above all, of thinking collectively for itself, defending its independence and interests, and above all, its principles.
And for a continent that has been accustomed for eighty years to delegating that essential part of politics, that may prove much more difficult than increasing the defense budget.