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.

Through many crises over the past two decades, EU member states have repeatedly promised to reform the bloc’s elaborate institutional structures and procedures,........

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