It’s easy to laugh at the likes of Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell for complacently insisting that Donald Trump would lose. It’s fantastically easy! It’s one of the easiest things in the world to do. 

Plus, it’s fun.

But one must admit that Trump’s success, if and when it is made official, will have serious consequences. Those consequences could be dangerous for Europeans. Trump has implied that he will focus less on Europe and will seek a deal with Putin over Ukraine. He will not withdraw from NATO, he has said, but only if Europeans pay up.

Western and Central European nations spent decades cheerfully neglecting their own national defence

As someone who is rather pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances in the conflict but still very much a sympathiser with its cause against an aggressive gangster state, I’m concerned that Trump — who has eccentrically suggested that President Zelensky was responsible for the initiation of the war — will not even back the Ukrainians to the point of seeking favourable terms. The idea that Trump is Putin’s stooge is preposterous but the idea that he considers Eastern Europe to be an irritating distraction from China and the Middle East is very plausible.

Still, Europeans should be mature enough to accept that when it comes to Trump’s annoyance with other NATO members, well — the man has a point.

Western and Central European nations spent decades cheerfully neglecting their own national defence while enjoying the warm bubbly bath of NATO membership. I’m proud to say that Poland, where I’m fortunate enough to live, is NATO’s biggest spender on defence relative to its GDP, but other nations have been lagging behind, sleeping soundly in the knowledge that American power will be there to protect them if disaster strikes. 

Donald Trump was by no means the first American to have complained. In 2006, President George W. Bush urged his European allies to spend more on defence. In 2011, Robert Gates, President Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense, said that NATO was becoming a “two-tiered alliance”:

Between those willing and able to pay the price and bear the burdens of alliance commitments, and those who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership – be they security guarantees or headquarters billets – but don’t want to share the risks and the costs.

Progress has been made but problems have persisted. Don’t take this generalist’s word for it. Earlier this year, Matthew Kroenig, Dan Negrea and Tod Wolters wrote in Foreign Policy that Trump wasn’t wrong about European powers:

Defense spending translates into concrete capabilities needed for transatlantic defense. In 2023, NATO agreed to new “regional plans” under which all members were given specific capability targets, but inadequate spending is resulting in capability shortfalls. In other words, NATO’s supreme allied commander does not have what he needs to properly defend Europe. 

So complacent were European elites about their good sense in the face of idiot Americans that when Donald Trump warned against reliance on Russian oil, in 2018, German diplomats laughed at him. Who’s laughing now? Of course, the Germans have changed direction since then — being a major contributor of aid to Ukraine — but Europeans should not err once more in celebrating their supposed superiority while sleepwalking into dangerous and avoidable mistakes.

It must — and I do mean must — be remembered that the US does not have as much of a direct interest in Europe’s safety as Europeans. That might sound obvious but the Cold War has made us liable to forget about it. Of course, the US has interests here — economic, political and cultural — but Putin simply doesn’t pose as much of a threat to Washington D.C. as he does to Kyiv, Tallinn, Warsaw and even London. As much as we hope to have the backing of the US — and will make the case that we should have that backing — we have to represent a sizeable deterrent by ourselves.

That means investing in our militaries, yes. But it also means having energy security. It also means protecting our borders. It also means focusing on growth as well as regulation. This is how to be more independent and it is how to earn the respect that leads to more favourable partnerships.

I remember well how during the Bush years, Europeans — myself included — congratulated ourselves on not being “American idiots”. Bush was an idiot, yes, but we were also ambling towards a financial crisis, a migrant crisis and the avoidable decay of our infrastructural capacities. It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump will do idiotic things in his second term (and I’m certainly not counting it out). But let’s not be European wastrels ourselves.