European leaders face a puzzle that defies the usual political logic. As U.S. reliability collapses under the second Trump administration, one might expect those Europeans most alarmed by American hostility to become the strongest advocates for autonomous European defense. Instead, the opposite pattern prevails. The constituencies most willing to invest in European rearmament are precisely those that still believe NATO can be salvaged—while those who have concluded that the United States is now an adversary are the least willing to bear the costs of replacing American protection.
The numbers tell the story. As of November 2025, only 16 percent of Europeans surveyed by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) still considered the United States an ally, down from 22 percent eight months earlier. Twenty percent now view the United States as a “rival” or “adversary,” approaching 30 percent in Germany, France, and Spain. Yet this growing anti-American sentiment has not translated into enthusiasm for European strategic autonomy. Far from it.
European leaders face a puzzle that defies the usual political logic. As U.S. reliability collapses under the second Trump administration, one might expect those Europeans most alarmed by American hostility to become the strongest advocates for autonomous European defense. Instead, the opposite pattern prevails. The constituencies most willing to invest in European rearmament are precisely those that still believe NATO can be salvaged—while those who have concluded that the United States is now an adversary are the least willing to bear the costs of replacing American protection.
The numbers tell the story. As of November 2025, only 16 percent of Europeans surveyed by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) still considered the United States an ally, down from 22 percent eight months earlier. Twenty percent now view the United States as a “rival” or “adversary,” approaching 30 percent in Germany, France, and Spain. Yet this growing anti-American sentiment has not translated into enthusiasm for European strategic autonomy. Far from it.
Italy exemplifies the paradox in its purest form. Italians recognize that U.S. President Donald Trump’s United States is unreliable. Yet Italy possesses, as analysts at the Center for European Policy Analysis observed, “a deeply rooted pacifist tradition that struggles to understand the importance of deterrence and sees higher defense spending as a root cause—rather than a response to—escalating tensions and conflict.” Italy spent just 1.54 percent of GDP on defense in 2024—well below the 2 percent NATO target it first pledged to meet a decade earlier. Rome claimed to reach 2 percent in 2025, but this was largely achieved through accounting reclassifications rather than real increases.
Italy has vowed to reach 2.5 percent by 2028 and to meet NATO’s new 3.5 percent target by 2035, but Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti has expressed reluctance to use the EU’s “escape clause” that would exempt defense spending from deficit rules—suggesting that even these modest pledges may prove aspirational. Italian public opinion reinforces the government’s hesitancy: 57 percent of Italians surveyed by ECFR opposed increased defense spending, making Italy a European outlier. When the European Commission unveiled its €800 billion ($950 billion) Readiness 2030 plan—originally branded “ReArm Europe” until backlash from Rome and Madrid forced a renaming—54.6 percent of Italians opposed it. Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, soft on Russia, claimed that Italy’s greatest threat is domestic Islamic terrorism, not Russian President Vladimir Putin.
France presents a more complicated case, and one haunted by an uncertain future. Since 2017, President Emmanuel Macron has been the most prominent advocate for European “strategic autonomy,” arguing that Europeans must ensure their own security rather than rely on Washington. He has backed this rhetoric with real spending increases: France’s defense budget rose from 32 billion euros in 2017 to 47 billion euros ($56 billion) in 2024 (2.06 percent of GDP), and Macron announced in July 2025 that it would reach 64 billion euros ($77 billion) by 2027—three years ahead of schedule. “To be free in this world, one needs to be feared,” Macron declared. “And to be feared one must be powerful.”
Yet Macron is now a lame duck with approval ratings as low as 11 percent, matching the nadir of his predecessor François Hollande. He also lacks a parliamentary majority. The French Constitution grants the president substantial powers over defense and foreign policy, but his domestic weakness limits what he can deliver.
More troubling for European defense: The 2027 French presidential race is wide open, and the constellation of likely successors offers little reassurance. Jordan Bardella of the far-right National Rally leads polls with 35 percent to 37 percent support in first-round projections and would defeat all tested opponents in a runoff. Bardella has moderated his party’s previous stance on NATO—abandoning the party’s 2022 promise to leave the integrated command and saying the party would not do so “while we are at war”—and pledged to continue French rearmament. But he opposes sending troops or long-range missiles to Ukraine and chairs the European Parliament’s Patriots for Europe group alongside Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, founded on a platform of refusing military aid to Kyiv.
The centrist alternatives—former Prime Ministers Édouard Philippe and Gabriel Attal—would likely continue Macron’s defense trajectory but face pressure from both flanks: On the right, the National Rally’s nationalism comes paired with historical sympathy for Moscow; on the left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, which consistently polls around 12 percent, combines anti-Americanism with opposition to military spending as such, denouncing NATO as an instrument of U.S. hegemony and opposing increased aid to Ukraine. Any French president pursuing robust European defense will confront a parliament in which both the nationalist right and the anti-militarist left resist the costs and commitments that genuine strategic autonomy requires.
France’s Gaullist tradition reveals how rhetoric and reality can diverge. Charles de Gaulle built an independent nuclear deterrent precisely because he doubted U.S. reliability, withdrew from NATO’s integrated command, and accepted the high costs of securing French autonomy. Today’s French position is more ambiguous. France maintains roughly 290 nuclear warheads and retains its independent “force de frappe,” but its conventional forces remain modest—two main army combat divisions and around 200,000 active personnel across all services—and the Europeanization of French nuclear deterrence remains, as one analyst put it, “largely rhetorical, as hollow today as it was nearly 60 years ago.” The Gaullist commitment to hard power was real; today’s talk of strategic autonomy often amounts to Gaullist rhetoric without Gaullist sacrifice.
The Italian and French cases reveal the deeper structure of the paradox. Those who distrust the United States most are least willing to build an alternative. Anti-Americanism in Western and Southern Europe comes packaged with broader pacific commitments—a post-World War II settlement in which prosperity was built on outsourcing hard security to Washington. To reject the United States is also, for many Europeans, to reject the entire framework of military thinking that U.S. hegemony represents.
The opposite pattern prevails on NATO’s eastern flank. Poland devoted 4.7 percent of its GDP to defense in 2025—the highest share in the alliance, exceeding even the United States. The Baltic states have committed to 5 percent defense spending in the next few years, leading Europe by example. Estonia plans to spend more than 10 billion euros on defense between 2026 and 2029. Lithuania is building a NATO-integrated division with expanded conscription and a growing reserve.
Yet these front-line states remain the most pro-American in Europe. A survey conducted by Le Grand Continent after the disastrous Oval Office confrontation between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in February 2025 found that only 29 percent of Poles viewed Trump as “Europe’s enemy”—far below the 51 percent average across EU countries. For Poland and the Baltics, Russia poses an existential threat that requires overwhelming conventional deterrence, making U.S. involvement nonnegotiable. Their enthusiasm for defense spending flows from their faith in the alliance system, not in spite of it.
This creates the Atlanticist rearmament paradox: European defense spending is driven by populations that believe rearmament strengthens NATO. The populations most skeptical of the United States (who might, in theory, see the case for autonomous defense) are precisely those least willing to bear its costs. This reluctance reflects both postwar pacifist convictions and the hard budgetary constraints facing Southern European governments, whose debt burdens make increases in defense spending politically and financially painful.
The paradox reflects incompatible threat perceptions rooted in geography and history. For Poland and the Baltics, Russia represents an immediate, territorial danger. For France and Southern Europe, the threat appears diffuse—migration, terrorism, economic coercion—making expensive conventional rearmament seem disproportionate.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez captured this when he declared that Russia will “never reach the Pyrenees.” He is not wrong, strictly speaking. But if Russian forces occupy even a single Baltic village for a month, the EU’s credibility as a security community collapses.
Several structural factors deepen the trap. First, nuclear dependency: France and the United Kingdom possess arsenals far smaller than the United States’ and cannot replicate extended deterrence. Second, industrial dependency: Europe operates 178 different weapons systems compared to 30 for U.S. forces. The critical equipment delivered to Ukraine—HIMARS, Javelin missiles, Patriot batteries—comes almost exclusively from the United States. This dependency extends to electronic components, software, and command-and-control systems.
Third, the political coalitions that might support autonomous defense are internally contradictory. On the European left, anti-Americanism comes bundled with opposition to military spending as such. Parties such as Greece’s Syriza have, as ECFR notes, accused EU governments of “prioritising militaristic spending above investments in education and health.” For these movements, rejecting U.S. hegemony means rejecting militarism entirely.
The populist right presents its own contradictions. Poland’s Law and Justice party strengthened Polish military capacity while in power, but it voted against the ReArm Europe plan in the European Parliament. Austria’s Freedom Party combines anti-Americanism with sympathy for Russian policies. These parties want national defense spending to reinforce domestic sovereignty, not to build European collective goods. Their nationalism makes them unreliable partners for any genuinely European defense project.
What might break the paradox? Germany offers one template. Chancellor Friedrich Merz secured the parliamentary majority to unlock a trillion-euro defense package—a significant shift from the country’s postwar pacifism. German politicians have merged security arguments with economic ones, promising investments not just in defense but in ailing infrastructure. This “second Zeitenwende” presents rearmament as economic stimulus rather than sacrifice. Since Germany is home to major defense companies, its politicians can credibly present Europe’s rearmament as an opportunity.
Yet even this approach has limits. Southern European governments fear that EU defense plans will disproportionately benefit German and French industry while burdening their treasuries. If European rearmament is perceived as a transfer from the south to the north, it will face the same resistance that has plagued other EU fiscal initiatives.
For now, many Europeans appear to be waiting out Trump rather than preparing for U.S. abandonment. Polling shows widespread expectation that trans-Atlantic relations will improve once Trump leaves office—62 percent of respondents in Denmark believed so, as did 54 percent in Portugal, and majorities in Germany, Spain, and France. Only 22 percent believe that Trump has inflicted lasting damage. This optimism may prove justified. It may also prove a dangerous form of denial.
The fundamental problem is that collective security generates perverse psychological incentives. Those who feel protected by an alliance tend to value and invest in it. Those who distrust the alliance lack motivation to build an alternative—their distrust extends to the entire enterprise of military preparedness. The free-rider problem has given way to something stranger: a split between willing contributors who want the alliance to work and “dreamers” who see no peril in having no ride at all..
Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp declared in February 2025 that “we have all turned into Gaullists”—embracing strategic independence from Washington. But Gaullism required France to build an independent nuclear deterrent and maintain substantial conventional forces, accepting significant costs and a rupture with comfortable assumptions. Today’s anti-American Europeans have embraced Gaullist rhetoric without Gaullist commitment to hard power.
Until that changes—until those who distrust the United States become willing to replace what Washington provides—Europe will remain caught in its rearmament paradox: the countries most skeptical of the United States least inclined to arm, those most prepared still hoping to be rescued by it.
