Growing Conflict and Uncertain Alliances: On the Future of European Security

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On this morning, eighty-one years ago, Allied forces led by the United States stormed the beaches at Normandy to begin the liberation of Europe from Nazi rule. Today there is a new war on the continent in the east, between Russia and Ukraine—and a new rift in the west, between the United States and its European allies.

The Trump administration has made clear that it seeks a swift end to the Russia-Ukraine war and wishes to avoid making major new military, financial, and political commitments to that cause. This approach is rooted in the president and his advisors’ desire to stop the bloodshed, but also in a belief that the war is a largely European problem with minimal implications for the United States, which ought to ultimately be reconciled by the Europeans.

Just yesterday, in an Oval Office meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, President Donald Trump provided the clearest articulation yet of his growing apathy toward U.S. involvement in the conflict: “Sometimes you see two young children fighting like crazy. They hate each other, and they’re fighting in a park, and you try and pull them apart. They don’t want to be pulled. Sometimes you're better off letting them fight for a while and then pulling them apart.”

Trump’s inclination to potentially disengage from the peace process altogether is also playing out on the ground. This week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth decided to skip the monthly Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting of defense ministers—a first by the United States since the group was established three years ago—and the U.S. diverted advanced anti-drone technology from Ukraine to the Middle East. Nor has Trump floated additional military aid to Ukraine, which is quickly running out, or followed through on his threats to levy additional sanctions on Russia to bring them closer to the negotiating table.

But washing his hands of the largest land war in Europe since World War II is proving to be a rather thorny proposition. Amid rounds of peace talks in Istanbul, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s sweeping bombing campaign against Ukraine continues. This past weekend, Ukraine also struck deep inside Russia—destroying numerous strategic bombers and other high-value platforms—in a drone-based attack now dubbed “Operation Spider’s Web.”

Amid this deadly back and forth and the Trump administration’s diminishing appetite for European security affairs, Europe’s major continental powers and smaller front-line states are endeavoring to rearm in a bid to achieve some measure of strategic autonomy and provide additional support to Ukraine.

To analyze the future of European security, and the latest developments in the Russia-Ukraine war, I sat down with CFR senior fellows Michael Horowitz, Charles Kupchan, and Stephen Sestanovich:

FROMAN: Putin is not easily cajoled, including on Truth Social. In this week’s phone call with Trump, he vowed to respond forcefully to Ukraine’s drone attack on strategic Russian military targets. Steve, you’ve said trying to read Putin’s mind is risky business, but how might he respond?

SESTANOVICH: We can’t read the guy’s mind, but we can try to write his options memo. There’s the retaliatory track: bigger, more brutal attacks on cities and infrastructure. That one’s a near certainty—and last night, Russia launched 407 drones and decoys, nearly 40 cruise missiles and six ballistic missiles from land, air and sea at towns and cities across Ukraine. Then there’s the escalatory option: something to make NATO governments nervous, like attacks on weapons-supply routes or putting more troops in Moldova to scare Romania. Finally, there’s the de-escalatory option: find a way, perhaps after pushing forward and taking more territory this summer, to wind the whole thing down. Putin is a somewhat indecisive guy, and he’s bad at extricating himself from messes he’s created, so he may play with all of these. Remember, it was Russians who coined the phrase “escalate-to-de-escalate.” Putin will say killing a lot of Ukrainian civilians is just his way of trying to make peace. And from the way Trump has been talking this week, he might even buy it. Or at least shrug his shoulders and ask how Putin intends to help him get an Iran deal. 

FROMAN: Charlie, on the potential for de-escalation, what should we take away from ongoing negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey? Are any negotiations happening in good faith?

KUPCHAN: Little to no headway has been made on the core issues at hand. As expected, there’s no sign that Putin is negotiating in good faith. Putin has a prime opportunity to engage in serious discussions about a ceasefire. Instead, he appears to be playing Trump. Putin hasn’t limited his military attacks on Ukraine, nor has he indicated that he is willing to scale back his maximalist war aims, which include the effective subjugation of Ukraine. Putin also passed on an opportunity to negotiate directly with Zelensky and Trump in Turkey, instead sending a low-level delegation to negotiate with the Ukrainians. The only progress produced by the talks in Turkey has been prisoner swaps. Trump is rightfully beginning to feel like he is being taken for a ride. If this pattern continues, the diplomatic playing field could tilt in Ukraine’s direction. Because Putin is over-playing his hand, Trump may grow increasingly frustrated with him and move in the direction of supporting Ukraine. But let’s wait and see.

FROMAN: Beyond rhetoric, Trump hasn’t played hardball with the Russians yet. Steve, why hasn’t the administration imposed new, meaningful sanctions on Russia? Could pressure from Congress, including Senator Graham and Senator Blumenthal’s new bill, begin to move the needle? 

SESTANOVICH: You’d think a bill with eighty-two cosponsors would be bound to pass, and it certainly expresses strong Congressional support for Ukraine. Unfortunately, the big threat made by the bill—to impose 500 percent tariffs on any country that imports Russian energy—can never be implemented. It’d wreck the global economy. I’ve written this week about some ways the Senate could turn the bill into something more effective—including sanctioning Russian oil majors Rosneft, Gazprom, and Lukoil; imposing secondary sanctions on Chinese and Indian entities that buy Russian oil and the banks that handle the transactions; and seizing hundreds of billions in frozen Russian central bank assets. But with Trump and Putin back to chatting on the phone, I’m skeptical that the president will agree.

But not tightening the sanctions regime would be a huge mistake. This war still has the potential to turn into a strategic disaster for the United States. If so, Trump will not be able to escape blame. He needs to bring to bear the tools that might make Putin rethink the whole enterprise.

FROMAN: As I like to say, Nobel Peace Prizes aren’t awarded for capitulation. Nor for walking away from a tough negotiation for that matter. And Charlie, as you and I have written, anything short of a sovereign, secure Ukraine, embedded in the West, risks turning the country into a failed state, which would be a major headache for the United States in the long run.

KUPCHAN: That’s right. A ceasefire in place is the way to go. But any deal that is acceptable must ensure that the 80 percent of Ukraine that is still free emerges as a sovereign, secure, and prosperous democracy.

FROMAN: Let’s zoom out a bit. In the fall, we traveled in the fall to Belgium, Finland, and Poland as part of a CFR fact-finding mission on the transatlantic relationship, security guarantees, and NATO enlargement. On our trip, we met with political leaders, diplomats, military officers, and civil society representatives, and their primary concern was the threat posed by Russia. You traveled back to Europe last month. How have conversations around European security changed since then? What concrete steps has Europe taken to bolster its military capabilities and readiness, including in support of Ukraine?

KUPCHAN: The animating force of European politics right now is beefing up security and becoming less dependent upon the United States, full stop. 

When it comes to the war in Ukraine, there is awareness that additional U.S. military aid for Ukraine beyond the Biden administration’s $61 billion package may not be forthcoming. That aid package, which the Trump administration continues to use to deliver additional weaponry, is poised to run out this summer. The Trump administration has yet to indicate whether it intends to ask Congress for new appropriations. The cessation of U.S. aid would have a material impact on the ability of Ukrainians to defend themselves, and there are quiet discussions among our European allies about their potential to buy American weapons to ship to Ukraine as well as to step up supply of their own European weapons.

Frontline states are also looking beyond Ukraine, and beginning to wonder what Putin’s next gambit will be. In Finland, for example, Russia is upgrading infrastructure along the border and the Finns could face more Russian troops along that border when the war concludes. Hence, the Finnish government is in the process of extending the age of reserve duty from sixty to sixty-five to raise the size of the peacetime army. It is also doubling down on what the Finns call a “whole of society” approach to security. As Steve notes, there is also talk in Russia of sending a sizable contingent of troops to Transnistria—a breakaway region of Moldova. This is all to say that the Europeans are preparing for a prolonged period of security challenges from Russia, both in Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe. At this point they don’t know what role the U.S. will play in responding to these challenges. It is of course conceivable that Trump will decide to downsize the U.S. troop presence in Europe.

More broadly, in terms of the transatlantic relationship, I don’t think, and the Europeans, by and large, don’t think that the United States will pull out of NATO. Too much is at stake and President Trump does not want to go down in history as the president who lost Ukraine or dismantled the West. But it is a safe bet that the alliance in the future may allocate more responsibility to Europeans and less to Americans. Europeans are preparing for this future in haste, including through ambitious new defense spending targets for the entire bloc, made possible in part by Germany’s unprecedented decision to release their longstanding debt brake. The German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius recently announced plans to substantially increase the size of the German military. 

Whether the Europeans spend their monies wisely on the most effective military systems and whether they agree to pool sovereignty on defense procurement and defense policy is another question. But Europe is passing through an inflection point on the defense front; the war in Ukraine has been a wake-up call. 

FROMAN: Mike, on the topic of procurement and European rearmament, the Russia-Ukraine war has been the ultimate proving ground for a new set of military technologies, especially unmanned systems. When I sat down with all the U.S. service chiefs at CFR to discuss the future of the armed forces at the last month, one of the core themes that emerged was how to best respond to the pace of technological change accelerating, including the need to combine autonomous platforms and more traditional weapons as well as cancel and drop programs that are no longer relevant to the mission. 

Fast forward to this week, some military analysts have gone so far as to call the Spider’s Web attack Russia’s “Pearl Harbor.” CFR’s own Max Boot argued in the pages of the Washington Post this week that Ukraine’s drone attack not only damaged Russia’s bomber fleet, it also exposed the vulnerabilities of air bases around the world, even claiming that “Ukraine just rewrote the rules of war.” What lessons can we learn about the latest tactics and technologies on the battlefield from Ukraine’s attack last weekend?

HOROWITZ: As I wrote for CFR earlier this week, Ukraine’s devastating Operation Spider’s Web attack demonstrates once again that we have entered the era of precise mass in war. This is a change in the character of warfare that is reshaping the battlefield. The combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapons, precision guidance, and commercial manufacturing mean that low-cost precision strikes are now accessible to almost any state or militant group.

Russia apparently had no idea the attack was coming, which is a tremendous intelligence victory for the Ukrainians, and the strikes once again demonstrated Ukraine’s ability to be at the cutting edge of technology and tactics. Ukraine has consistently and successfully leveraged and integrated everything from old military technology and off-the-shelf commercial systems to AI for its military operations. On AI specifically, there are reports that algorithms Ukraine used for at least some of the attack were trained on images of models of Russian aircraft found at museums in Ukraine, and may have used open-source autopilot systems. Ukraine's ability to innovate successfully and rapidly in general has been a difference maker in the war since its early days, giving Ukraine new and unexpected vectors to attack Russian forces and territory again and again.

In this case, one-way attack drones of different sizes and ranges at speed and scale have helped Ukraine maintain an edge throughout the war. For example, the use of shorter-range one-way attack drones and first-person view (FPV) drones now generate up to 80 percent of the casualties along the front lines, helping Ukraine compete with larger Russian forces and providing additional options for generating firepower.

FROMAN: All this begs a daunting question, to what extent might U.S. and allied bases in Europe and beyond be vulnerable to similar attacks?

HOROWITZ: Operation Spider’s Web makes clear that critical and military infrastructure face vulnerabilities more broadly around the world, making concrete a threat already illustrated by the drone overflights of U.S. military bases over the last few years. Ukraine’s latest attack clearly shows that even targets deep in a country’s territory could now be at risk. This will create new incentives for countries to focus on hardening by building shelters to protect assets from simple attacks, enhancing resiliency by spreading out assets so that an attack on one site does not endanger all assets, and developing counter-measures by investing more in lower-cost ways to defeat one-way attack drones, such as using directed energy. In particular, the United States military already made countering these kinds of systems the second big bet of the Replicator initiative, focusing on scaling solutions to defend U.S. bases at home and abroad over the next year. Ukraine’s attack shows the necessity of these investments. The time to act is now—particularly to scale more cost-effective defense systems.

We welcome your feedback on this column. Let me know what foreign policy issues you’d like me to address next by replying to [email protected].