The first article in this series looked at the changing landscape that even before the return of US President Donald Trump to the White House in January imposed on Europe the necessity of taking the security of the Continent into its own hands. The second article analysed the notion of European strategic autonomy. This last looks at two approaches that Europe could take in responding to the new strategic landscape confronting it.
A key determinant of Europe’s decision will be the state of the European will. This is a function of successes and weaknesses, as well as of the desire to materialise potential versus the seduction of attempting to remain in the same comfort zone.
As elaborated earlier in this series, the European project is by far the most successful socio-political project that the world has seen over the past seven decades and since the end of World War II. The point is that if Europe has managed to transform the European continent from being the theatre of the worst calamity in human history in which tens of millions of people were slaughtered in the span of just a few years to being arguably the world’s brightest beacon of beauty, refinement, and sophistication, then it can imbue its project with what it takes to take its security into its own hands.
This is not to underestimate the major challenges presented in the previous article concerning Europe’s strategic autonomy, but neither does it underestimate Europe’s willpower.
However, entailed in any serious assessment of European will is the question of whether it sees itself as a global power, or merely as the inheritor and expression of the world’s richest civilisation. This is an important distinction, since whereas the latter leads to an opportunistic mindset, including in the realm of defence and security, the former necessitates a comprehensive approach not only to European security, but also to the European project in its entirety.
Opportunism here means that if Europe looks at itself as a civilisational bloc with beauty and wealth to defend, but not necessarily as a global power that needs to project strength in its neighbourhood and beyond, it will embrace elements of the strategic autonomy that was discussed in the previous article without eschewing its strategic attachment to the Western alliance led by the United States.
It will look at where the Trump administration is diluting US commitments to European security and attempt to replace such areas with incremental European capabilities. These would be incremental because, in this line of thinking, many in Europe assess the Trump administration, and behind it powerful currents on the US right, as thinking that Europe continues to hold strategic benefits for US global strategic positioning.
In this line of thinking, the US right will never lose sight of the civilisational dimension of Europe. This means that Christianity, as the civilisational framework of America, will continue to be a key anchor of the US right’s view of the world, including in how it scopes out the nascent strategic confrontation with China. Europe, the key expression of Western civilisation to which the US belongs, would continue, despite the Trump administration’s rhetoric and knee-jerk reactions, to be at the core of America’s strategic thinking.
All this is very different from a comprehensive reimagining of the European Union, including of course European security, in ways that are detached from assessments of the US strategic calculus and transcend civilisational aspects. In this line of thinking, Europe will see itself as a global economic power facing threats to its interests across the world, as well as security challenges in different neighbourhoods.
Europe would look at these challenges in these neighbourhoods and assess how it can mitigate these risks without inherently basing its thinking and potential ways of operation on the US political and military presence in them. This approach would impose on Europe a difficult geopolitical question: is it for or against a multi-polar world? America will carefully observe how Europe answers that question, especially as the US-China strategic confrontation unfolds.
However, the most difficult task that would face a fresh reimagining of the European project would be scoping out the purpose of that project in the clear and blunt terms that a solid majority of Europeans would subscribe to and be willing to commit to fund and defend, following this with equally clear objectives in the near, medium, and long terms.
This is the most difficult aspect of this approach, because, as discussed in the first article of this series, today’s Europe includes diverse and often opposing interests, worldviews, and crucially different value systems amongst the European Union’s member states. A truly unified Europe acting as a solid power on the international scene will necessitate transcending the legalistic approach of attempting to bridge internal differences towards a far more ambitious undertaking that defines common interests and, crucially, some shared worldviews.
In this line of thinking, Europe would need to see itself through the prism of the ultimate goal behind the project of the European Union, namely as a continent that is on the road towards political union.
Demurring from this would result in Europe walking on the road of opportunistic and selective autonomy, always under the umbrella of the Western alliance led by the United States. There is nothing wrong with this approach, and it would certainly be easier than coming up with real, blunt, and realistic objectives for the European project that a majority of Europeans would subscribe to in an approach that seriously aspires to materialise the ultimate objective for which the European project was created.
Amidst the turbulence and uncertainty that Europe currently faces, taking the road towards truly European security anchored in the realisation of the European project would be one of the best ways in today’s world of putting Europe’s willpower into action.
The writer is the author of Islamism: A History of Political Islam (2017) and Egypt on the Brink (2010).
* A version of this article appears in print in the 17 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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