Donald Trump’s message to the United States’ historic allies in Europe and beyond is clear: you have relied on the American security umbrella too much and for too long.
The US no longer wishes to support Ukraine in its fight for survival against Russian aggression. We must pay our way, and can no longer expect that Uncle Sam will guarantee our safety.
The implications for the Ukrainians are clear, too: Trump believes they cannot fight on without his backing, and that we in Europe cannot support them to do so now that he has quit the field.
As I’ve written before, some of his complaints about slacking by Nato member states are merited. For too long, too many members fell short of their defence spending commitments.
Trump’s sabre-rattling on this in his first term had the desired effect. As my friend the foreign policy commentator Daniel Hamilton has noted, defence spending across Nato has grown significantly since his 2017 Brussels speech, rising in every country except the US.
The result is that 23 of Nato’s member states now meet or exceed their obligation of 2 per cent of GDP. Of the major nations, only Spain, Canada and Italy (awkward, given Giorgia Meloni’s closeness to the President) fall short.
Encouraging greater defence spending across the West is good – but it is counterproductive to then act in ways that embolden Russia, weaken the mutual defence principle, and undermine the deterrence which preserves peace.
Whatever Trump’s rationale, he has chosen to pull the rug on western defence solidarity. That is all the more clear from the US opting to vote with Russia and against Ukraine at the UN yesterday. In so doing he has simultaneously ramped up the risk of wider war, and thrown down a gauntlet to the rest of us to take care of ourselves. Whether it was provoked by European freeloading or motivated by American selfishness doesn’t matter much. What’s done is done.
We can choose to meekly submit, and go along with whatever deal he wishes to grant to Vladimir Putin. Or we can take up his challenge to back Ukraine more strongly ourselves – a challenge he apparently believes other Nato members lack the will or capacity to do.
Whichever we opt for, we will need to re-arm, because the world has just become far less secure.
This means a reversal of the “peace dividend” which came at the end of the Cold War, when Nato countries benefited by saving on defence after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Americans were no exception, cutting defence as a share of GDP from over 6 per cent in the 80s to 3.4 per cent today (a decision criticised a year ago by Marco Rubio, now Trump’s Secretary of State and the man charged with negotiating with the Russians).
You can only have a peace dividend in peaceful times. We are now in the fourth year of a major land war in Europe; even if America had not bailed on its role as the free world’s lynchpin, it should be clear that the time of defence savings is over.
The challenge for the rest of Nato is how to reverse position – and, more specifically, how to afford to do so. Had the dividend been treated as a temporary windfall, it might have been set aside and invested. Had our leaders been more wary, they might have moderated it, maintaining their defence capacity for the day it might be needed.
That didn’t happen. Instead, it was pumped into day-to-day spending by nations which continued borrowing. Spending on defence is popular, but less so if pitched against tax increases, cuts to welfare, or reductions in health budgets.
This appears to be Trump’s assumption: he calls the shots, because nobody else has any money to do otherwise. But he made an invitation for European nations to look to their own defence, so we may take him up on it if we wish.
How? Since 2022, G7 and EU nations have frozen Russian state and central bank assets estimated to be in excess of $300bn (£237bn) – excluding the private assets of Putinist oligarchs, which we also froze.
This resource is untouched. The interest was used to back a loan for Ukraine in late 2024, but the assets themselves remain intact, kept in case they could be used to bargain for reparations or to secure peace one day. Reuters has reported that Russia raised them in talks with the US last week – but the assets aren’t held by the Americans, and those who do hold them were excluded from the talks. The time has come to put them to good use.
The good news is that the vast bulk of these assets – well over $200bn (£158bn) – are held in Europe, so they are a resource uniquely available to the nations being told by Washington to fend for themselves.
There are various options for this game-changing amount of money. We could give some or all of it to Ukraine outright, to bolster its defences. We could use it to commission equipment from our domestic defence industries to supply to Ukraine, increasing our own manufacturing capacity. We could give more of our existing stocks of tanks, planes and materiel to Ukraine, and then use some or all of this money to restock, modernise and re-arm. Or we could do a mix of all three.
Donald Trump prides himself on telling what he believes are hard truths. On defence, his message is that the USA is shutting up shop and calling time on the security structure which has kept the West at peace for 80 years.
He says we must look out for ourselves, and make provision for our own defence. Very well then, let’s do so – and the Russians can pay for it.
Mark Wallace is Chief Executive of Total Politics Group
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