Despite Europe’s external reliance syndrome, it still holds institutional, regulatory, and material resources to turn its dependencies into partnerships, namely with the US, but not one with an antagonistic posture towards an increasingly multipolar world order.

The question is whether this dependence can be turned into a managed partnership or whether it locks Europe into a trajectory of decline as the global order shifts toward multipolarity.

Historical Roots and the Need for Precision

Europe’s reliance on the US emerged out of catastrophe rather than free choice. During WWI and WWII, America played a role in tipping the military balance in favor of the Allied Powers, and afterwards, the US has shaped the post-war order through a mixture of security guarantees, institutional architecture, and, of course, economic aid.

But the Allies’ victory in WWII was not an American soliloquy; rather, it was a collective action choir, in which the Soviet Union’s voice was the loudest and most decisive on the Eastern Front, as it succeeded in both weathering and inflicting enormous losses on Nazi Germany, which eventually led to its dissolution. As were the results of WWI, which led to the dissolution of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires.

After 1945, the reconstruction and reorganization of Western Europe and Japan became assignments that fell into the hands of the United States, on multiple levels. The Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods system, and NATO were among the major tools that made US power the organizing principle of the “West”.

This asymmetry embedded dependence into Europe’s post-war model: prosperity and security in exchange for strategic subordination to Washington’s leadership. In this sense, what is called the “West” can be seen as a contingent configuration born of Europe’s devastation and America’s unique post-war strength, rather than an eternal civilizational bloc.

Military Dependence: NATO and Strategic Autonomy

Nowhere is the malady more visible than in defense. NATO allowed European states to externalize security for decades, underinvesting in their own armed forces while relying on American logistics, intelligence, nuclear deterrence, and high‑end capabilities. Even today, the alliance’s internal balance reveals a deep asymmetry. Despite NATO allies in Europe collectively reaching 2% of GDP in defense spending for the first time in 2024 (around 380 billion dollars), the United States still accounts for roughly 70% of total alliance expenditure.

This discrepancy is a stark illustration of how lopsided the security architecture is and how dangerously tilted it is to the Western side of the transatlantic region. A gap that pushed Brussels towards trying to effectuate a more assertive security agenda.

The EU’s “Strategic Compass” agenda was the first step in that direction, which surfaced in 2022, aiming to enhance defense integration to reduce strategic dependency. PESCO, which stands for Permanent Structured Cooperation, is the framework through which most EU member states seek to build a more coherent........

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