Europe is facing a transformative moment. Both Russian aggression and the Trump administration’s political and economic antiliberalism are threatening the continent’s cohesion and stability. In response, Europe is considering quick fixes, such as gathering more money for defense—through spending by individual countries and loans from the European Union—and forming smaller coalitions of states to bring together like-minded governments. These patches will help Europe muddle through immediate turmoil but will not solve the continent’s most fundamental political and security challenges. Instead, European governments must design a new regional order through which they can achieve a more secure Europe.
The two main alliances of European states, the European Union and NATO, are too often paralyzed. The EU has struggled to implement much-needed reforms and is hobbled by growing differences among its member states. NATO, for its part, has relied on the United States to organize European security as the alliance’s first among equals. An effective security and defense policy depends on a shared sense of political community, which a successive string of crises—including the eurozone financial crisis, Brexit, the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine—has depleted. Without the disciplining power of U.S. leadership, Europeans must agree among themselves on exactly what they are defending and why.
Solutions thus far do not reflect the depth and complexity of the adjustments required to safeguard the European order. On one hand, there are state leaders, policymakers, and analysts who continue to insist that the continent can achieve greater unity only through deeper integration within the EU. On the other hand, European governments are trying to advance their defense and security interests quickly through ad hoc coalitions of the willing, in which small groups of states convene to address specific policy challenges—most recently, to discuss solutions for the conflict in Ukraine. Although these coalitions may get around the bloc’s lack of political cohesion and offer speed and flexibility to meet urgent challenges, they lack accountability, oversight, and access to institutional budgets and integrated planning, all of which limit their impact.
European governments must instead embrace a different regional order. Without a systemic shift, the continent will not be able to weather the geopolitical storms that have unsettled many of its long-standing strategic assumptions, including the notion that it will always enjoy the military backing of the United States. To ensure Europe’s long-term security and to address other pressing political challenges, European governments need to craft more fluid and flexible alliances. Instituting a new system parallel to the EU in which different clusters of European states can cooperate on select areas of policy would cut through many of the bloc’s current bureaucratic and ideological roadblocks and allow Europeans to form a new, more self-sufficient, more democratically accountable alliance that better protects Europe’s liberal order.
COME TOGETHER
Through many crises over the past two decades, EU member states have repeatedly promised to reform the bloc’s elaborate institutional structures and procedures, including those related to decision-making, budgeting, and citizen participation. Yet such changes have not materialized. Although all European governments believe the EU needs reform, they can’t agree on the nature of it. Some member states benefit from the current setup more than others and thus resist a redistribution of power and resources, and most national governments are reluctant to fully cede their sovereignty. EU institutions, furthermore, favor technocratic management over disruptive change; bureaucratic inertia and legal complexity block ambitious efforts. As a result, the much-criticized status quo endures.
To get around the fact that the EU and NATO both struggle to respond to the kind of political disorder emanating from U.S. President Donald Trump’s second administration, European governments have been drawn to building coalitions of the willing. This strategy has its appeals: leaders get to pick and choose whom they want to consult on any specific issue and can bypass slow and bureaucratic institutional processes. A prominent recent example is the coalition focused on Ukraine, which began with small meetings of European leaders hosted by France and the United Kingdom in March 2025 to coordinate military aid, training, and postwar planning for Ukraine outside EU or NATO frameworks. This model is now often discussed as a silver bullet to circumvent Europe’s strategic paralysis. But in reality, coalitions of the willing are best suited for politics, not policy. Narrow caucuses composed of countries that can mobilize significant political and economic resources often end up excluding small and medium-sized states, leaving them alienated and marginalized. This is precisely what happened with the Ukraine grouping: after pushback from excluded states, the coalition was rapidly expanded to include 31 countries. As a result, it now includes several members that are either unwilling or unable to contribute significantly, which dilutes its effectiveness and illustrates how a mechanism designed for speed and cohesion can become just as unwieldy as the institutions it seeks to bypass.
What is more, ad hoc coalitions are too flimsy to organize long-term policy discussions and are not able to manage the overlaps between different areas of policy—for example, between climate change and security—because they tend to address single issues in isolation. Coalitions also do not benefit from the kind of blocwide intelligence sharing or command-and-control structures that are necessary to coordinate multilateral military deployments. Nor do they have access to the institutional EU funding critical to financing core objectives, including stronger security. What on paper may look like a breakthrough—European governments setting up meetings quickly—is in reality another instance of muddling through problems arising from systemic deficiencies.
European governments need to craft more fluid and flexible alliances.
For the past 75 years, Washington has not only supplied the bulk of the continent’s conventional and nuclear deterrent but also designed, through NATO, the strategic security consensus around which European states have coalesced. Now, Europe is faced with a U.S. government that is at best apathetic and at worst antagonistic and that appears set on unilaterally shifting the burden of the continent’s security onto its European allies, who must reorganize to fill the gaps. They have agreed to spend more money to build up European capabilities and ammunition stores. But a truly European defense requires strategic coherence on how to organize this effort: where, how, and to what ends this money should be spent. Recent objections from some member states to the EU’s ReArm proposals to boost defense spending—in particular to the initiative’s aggressive branding and focus on conventional military buildup over other priorities, such as border defense or cybersecurity—illustrate how a failure to find such common ground can undermine important progress.
The way forward must have some roots in current institutions. For instance, NATO’s command-and-control structures and defense planning processes currently make up the backbone of Europe’s defense, and the EU’s defense-industrial policy levers, such as loans and grants, are essential to effectively organize European and Ukrainian rearmament. But these processes can take Europe only so far. NATO doesn’t function without the United States, and EU member states do not fully trust their institutions in Brussels or one another. Ultimately, neither organization is set up to satisfy the myriad needs of European security.
A common defense, furthermore, must be based on shared political values and objectives. Neither EU nor NATO membership today suggests a state’s commitment to the basic notions of liberal order. The EU has debated the issue of its members not sharing the same foundational values for many years, and the cost of its nonresolution has now become damagingly high. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s actions, such as supporting Russian positions and styming cooperation with Ukraine, are becoming more disruptive, not only to democracy in Hungary but to core norms of Europe’s liberal order. The EU has in vain sought to persuade the Hungarian government to mend its ways. The emerging practice of EU leaders issuing statements on behalf of 26 states—the whole bloc excluding Hungary—is not a durable solution, either. The Slovakian government is moving in a direction similar to Hungary’s, and other states may do so in the future. More radical ways are needed to move such countries away from vitally important areas of cooperation.
Conversely, some non-EU and non-NATO members should be closer to the heart of the European order. The EU and the United Kingdom, for instance, would benefit from brokering a new political and security alliance to urgently bridge the rifts caused by Brexit. There have been moments of cooperation, including around mobilizing military, humanitarian, and economic support for Ukraine and imposing sanctions on Russia. A relatively modest EU-British security pact is currently in the works. A better way is also needed to formally include Ukraine within the European order. NATO membership is out of reach and EU accession is too slow, uncertain, and bureaucratically burdensome to be of tangible help to Ukraine’s immediate security imperatives. Brussels has pledged to reform the accession process to make it quicker and more immediately beneficial but has yet to fulfill this promise.
OUT WITH THE OLD
To ensure both strategic autonomy and inclusivity, Europe needs a reformed order centered on treaty-based cooperation among the continent’s liberal democracies, including both EU members and nonmembers. It should be built around an innovative institutional structure in which different clusters of states participate to varying degrees across all areas of policy. Unlike ad hoc coalitions of the willing, this model would be anchored by an institutional core. Each cluster would establish its own governance arrangements led by the governments of participating states and would be subject to oversight—by an appointed intergovernmental secretariat, perhaps, or a parliamentary body composed of representatives from the cluster’s member states. Countries would join these clusters voluntarily—likely through agreements on certain areas of policy—allowing for some overlap in memberships to different clusters. Nordic and Mediterranean states with complementary energy profiles could unite in a climate cluster, for example. Ukraine could cooperate fully with European states on foreign and security policies without having to wait for the result of formal EU accession talks.
There is no need to abandon EU institutions, laws, and processes that function well for certain policy areas. The body should continue to govern the continent’s tech, digital, and trade policies, for instance. But the cluster model offers a way to break persistent deadlocks on other, more controversial areas of policy, such as defense or climate action, by allowing groups of like-minded European states to cooperate more deeply without the constraint of needing EU-wide unanimity. Although the core clusters—especially the one focused on security—would require a firm commitment to liberal democratic values, the memberships of others could be broader. Crucially, membership would not be static: governments could be suspended or expelled by the cluster if they violate foundational norms. And decisions made within a cluster would be binding only to the members of that cluster.
The flexibility of this model can help the continent establish clear obligations and joint decision-making mechanisms. European security experts have been calling for this kind of integration for many years. Yet in practice, policymakers have doubled down on protecting their own institutions rather than fashioning a much-needed new template for European order. The shock of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine led Europeans to launch a broad rearmament effort to defend the continent against military invasion. The shock of the Trump administration’s ideological attack against European values—expressed most vividly by Vice President JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference, in February—invites European governments to rethink the basic parameters of their regional order. It is a highly welcome development that European leaders seem to be stepping up to take over more responsibility, but this is not the same thing as comprehensively preparing Europe for a new, more challenging era. Without big and tangible steps, the “new European beginning” that these leaders have so confidently announced will likely prove to be another false dawn.
Loading…
