The Biden administration has committed an impressive amount of aid to Ukraine in the 18 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion — roughly $75 billion, not counting the administration’s recent request for an additional $21 billion. That sum is fast approaching more than half of all U.S. assistance to Israel since its founding in 1948. Astonishingly, though, Europe has collectively committed even more to help Ukrainians survive, fight and stave off financial collapse.
That will make sense to many Americans. Vladimir Putin’s illegal invasion triggered what is, after all, a European war — the continent’s biggest, bloodiest and most shape-shifting conflict since World War II. Plenty of Europeans grasp that Kyiv, even as it fights for its own existence, is also holding off an aggressor that poses a threat beyond Ukraine’s borders.
But the continent’s intensifying efforts should not obscure the fact that Ukraine’s prospects for survival would plummet without a continued supply of U.S. weapons, financial support and political leadership. For the foreseeable future, it is fantasy to imagine that Europe could plug the gap if Washington scaled back its support.
The fact that a “plug-the-gap” conversation is taking place at all arises mainly from the dawning realization among U.S. allies that Donald Trump could retake the White House. When Trump says he would end the war in “24 hours” if reelected, the implicit threat — that he would veto further aid to Ukraine, a stance already backed by a majority of Republicans — is lost on no one in Europe.
A drastic reduction in Washington’s backing for Ukraine would be a major boost for Putin’s hopes of imperial revival — and a signal that the United States is turning its back on Europe after more than 75 years of American leadership. It would imperil the viability of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, to which the United States is the biggest contributor, and jeopardize the defense of NATO front-line states in the face of Moscow’s revanchist ambitions.
It could also lead to a bloodbath in Ukraine by weakening the country’s defenses.
Alarm bells are ringing across Europe. But so far, they aren’t leading to a replacement for U.S. aid to Ukraine were it to evaporate, let alone hastening Europe’s long-term “strategic autonomy,” which French President Emmanuel Macron has pushed as an alternative to U.S. security guarantees. Indeed, France has been a European laggard in equipping Ukraine, both in terms of the quantity of arms it has supplied directly and the percentage of gross domestic product its aid represents.
For all of Europe’s efforts to help Ukraine, its qualitative contributions do not measure up to those of the United States, despite the headline numbers. It is not remotely realistic that the Europeans could roughly double their contribution to make up for a halt to U.S. funding in the Trump redux scenario.
European assistance to Ukraine includes large stocks of decades-old Soviet equipment from Eastern European arsenals — useful weaponry, but no substitute for modern U.S. arms and munitions. And European pledges of financial backing for Kyiv, including a $55 billion pledge over four years, consist often of loans, unlike U.S. support, which is mainly grant funding.
A longer-term problem in boosting European aid is rooted in the continent’s economic, industrial and logistical problems. Limiting factors include stuttering growth in Europe’s two biggest economies, Germany and Britain; anemic weapons stockpiles across the continent that have been further depleted by the war; and shuttered factories and production lines only now gearing up to manufacture weapons Ukraine will need for a war likely to drag on.
The deepest impediment to European security leadership is political will, or rather the lack of it — a deficit starkly on display last winter when Chancellor Olaf Scholz for weeks dragged his feet on greenlighting German-made Leopard 2 battle tanks for Ukraine. Only when Biden moved first, by promising to send U.S.-made Abrams tanks, did Scholz give his own thumbs-up.
Nor has the war erased Europe’s own security fault lines, even if some changes — such as France’s recent support for Ukraine’s membership in NATO — entail remarkable pivots. There remains a deep chasm between much of Western Europe, which covets eventual rapprochement with Russia, and many Eastern European nations whose Soviet-era subjugation left them with viscerally anti-Russian views.
Despite recent efforts to galvanize Europe’s military power, only 10 of NATO’s 29 European members currently meet the alliance’s target of spending 2 percent of annual economic output in defense. Of those, just three are Western European nations: Britain, Greece and Finland. Even sizable countries such as Italy and Spain are nowhere near meeting the NATO mark.
By contrast, the United States spends roughly 3.5 percent of GDP on defense, dwarfing outlays of all other NATO members combined. The number of U.S. troops stationed in Europe exceeds that of active-duty personnel in the entire British army.
After decades of relying on the U.S. security umbrella, many European policymakers are aware that an investment in Ukraine’s security is a down payment on their own. Their efforts are accelerating, but not fast enough to negate the potentially catastrophic fallout of a U.S. withdrawal.