The Vassal

I. The Message That Changed Everything

In December 2025, Washington published its new National Security Strategy. It contained a sentence that had to be read several times in European capitals to be believed: European partners must assume "significantly greater responsibility" for regional defence. Russia was dangerous to Eastern Europe but manageable — not because the threat had disappeared, but because Europe was deemed "rich, capable and therefore responsible" for handling it. The United States would remain in NATO, maintain its nuclear deterrent, and provide high-end enablers. But the conventional defence of Europe — that would henceforth be Europe's affair.

It was the most explicit break with eighty years of transatlantic security architecture ever delivered by a US president. Not framed as a threat but as a statement of fact: Europe is a secondary theatre. The Pacific takes priority. Those who wish to defend themselves must do it themselves.

At the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, the US security strategy even warned European allies of "civilizational erasure" through immigration, vowing that the United States would "cultivate resistance" against mainstream political forces in Europe. Simultaneously, Trump repeatedly demanded control of Greenland, the territory of NATO ally Denmark — and did not rule out the use of force.

The message was no longer coded. It was open: America regards its European allies not as partners but as clients. And clients who do not deliver lose their protection.

II. Military Dependency

The numbers are sobering. EU member states spent 343 billion euros on defence in 2024 — a 19 percent increase over the previous year. In 2025, the figure is projected to reach 381 billion. At NATO's 2025 Hague summit, allies committed to 3.5 percent of GDP for defence plus 1.5 percent for defence-related expenditure — 5 percent combined by 2035. Twenty-three of 32 NATO members now meet the old 2 percent target.

But Europe is spending its money wrong. Between 2022 and 2024, notified US Foreign Military Sales to European allies rose from an annual average of 11 billion dollars to 68 billion — a fivefold increase. FMS purchases accounted for over half of European equipment spending in 2022–2024, up from 28 percent in the preceding three years. Poland alone bought 55 billion dollars' worth of US weapons. Europe is spending more — and buying American.

This is more than a trade flow. It is technological lock-in. Platforms like the F-35 or the PATRIOT air defence system create long-term dependencies: on US training pipelines, software updates, spare parts, maintenance contracts. Washington thereby gains strategic leverage over European capability development. The irony: the more Europe spends on defence, the more dependent it becomes on the country telling it to defend itself.

The critical enablers Europe lacks — integrated intelligence, strategic airlift, missile defence, suppression of enemy air defences — will not emerge in a few years. Neither France nor the United Kingdom, the only European nuclear powers, is on track to meet NATO spending targets before 2035. Italy, Europe's fourth-largest economy, met the 2 percent target by reclassifying existing spending, not through new investment. Fragmented procurement across 27 national systems costs Europe between 18 and 57 billion euros annually in efficiency losses, according to the European Parliament.

III. The Energy Trap

Europe has dismantled its energy dependency on Russia — and replaced it with a dependency on the United States. Russia's share of EU gas imports fell from 45 percent in 2021 to 12 percent in 2025. In the same period, US LNG imports quadrupled: from 21 billion cubic metres in 2021 to an estimated 81 billion in 2025. The United States now supplies 57 percent of all LNG Europe imports — a quarter of European gas demand, up from five percent in 2021.

Under the July 2025 trade deal that spared Europe higher tariffs, the EU committed to purchasing 750 billion dollars' worth of US energy by 2028 — oil, LNG, and nuclear technology. Individual member states — Italy, Greece, Spain — subsequently signed long-term contracts with US LNG producers. If all these contracts materialise and others follow, analysts project that 75 to 80 percent of European LNG imports could come from the US by 2030.

Russian gas flowed through pipelines under state contracts with Gazprom — vulnerable to a political decision by the Kremlin to shut the valve. American LNG is sold by private companies on a liberalised market — but Trump could use export controls or emergency powers to throttle or halt deliveries. The 2025 US National Security Strategy frames "Energy Dominance" as a means of American power projection. The Greenland dispute — including the threat of force against a NATO ally — demonstrates that this power is not theoretical.

EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen called Trump's Greenland threats a "clear wake-up call." The European Parliament suspended its approval of the trade deal. But in the short term, there is no alternative to American gas. Europe has changed its supplier. The dependency remains.

IV. The Digital Colony

Ninety percent of Europe's digital infrastructure — cloud, computing power, software — is controlled by non-European, predominantly American companies. Two thirds of the global cloud market belongs to three US hyperscalers: Amazon AWS (30 percent), Microsoft Azure (20 percent), Google Cloud (13 percent). Europe's largest provider, OVHCloud, holds less than one percent of the global market.

This is not merely an economic issue. The US CLOUD Act gives American authorities access to data stored by US companies — even when the servers are located in Europe. A single executive order from Washington can cut access to systems running European hospitals, administrations, and elections. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court was temporarily locked out of his Outlook email account — the ICC subsequently migrated to a European open-source solution.

GAIA-X, the Franco-German project for European cloud infrastructure, has failed — "technically sound, politically celebrated, economically irrelevant," as Internationale Politik Quarterly put it. "An industrial disaster," according to DGAP. The problem: US companies were invited to participate in GAIA-X. Microsoft, Google, and AWS joined. The initiative then lost its purpose. Once inside, the hyperscalers co-opted the language of sovereignty — sovereignty-washing — while deepening the dependency.

Meanwhile, Trump threatens "substantial" tariffs against any country regulating US technology companies. Europe cannot set rules in its own market without risking economic punishment. This is not a trade deficit. It is a sovereignty deficit.

V. The Geometry of Dependency

Military, energy, digital — three pillars of sovereignty, and in all three, Europe is a client of the United States. This would be acceptable if the client could trust its patron. But that trust has been revoked.

An American president demands control over the territory of a NATO ally and does not rule out the use of force. The US security strategy warns European allies of "civilizational erasure" through immigration. Washington demands that Europe spend more on defence and sells it the weapons. Washington supplies the LNG that is supposed to guarantee Europe's energy security and simultaneously threatens tariffs if Europe does not align its behaviour with American wishes. Washington controls the digital infrastructure on which Europe operates and punishes Europe when it attempts to regulate that infrastructure.

The geometry is not that of an alliance. It is that of a vassal relationship. Europe pays, buys, obeys — and receives in return a protection conditioned on terms that can change at any moment.

VI. What Europe Does — and What It Does Not

Europe is responding. Since the Russian invasion, the EU and its member states have provided 177.5 billion euros for Ukraine — far more than the US when financial and military aid are combined. Since spring 2025, US financial support for Ukraine has effectively dried up. Europe's defence spending is rising. The European Sky Shield Initiative is building integrated air and missile defence. Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein are migrating government systems from Microsoft to open-source solutions. France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands founded a European consortium for digital commons in 2025.

But the structure of dependency is not changing. The European Commission's Readiness 2030 initiative, which aimed to centralise procurement, was rejected by the European Council in October 2025 — in favour of intergovernmental mechanisms that perpetuate precisely the fragmentation costing 57 billion euros annually. Germany, which as Europe's largest economy should drive the transformation, refuses to include the EU in its defence procurement. Sweden prefers NATO mechanisms over EU structures. Italy struggles to justify 2.5 percent of GDP by 2028.

The fundamental problem is not unwillingness but structure. Twenty-seven national procurement systems. Twenty-seven national industrial policies. Twenty-seven different threat perceptions. Poland sees Russia as an existential danger and buys wherever delivery is fastest — US, South Korea, Europe. Italy sees Mediterranean migration as its primary threat. France and Britain consider themselves world powers and structure their armies accordingly. There is no European defence problem. There are 27 national defence problems that add up to a continental vacuum.

VII. The Honest Reckoning

Europe cannot end its dependency on the United States overnight. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying or does not understand the scale. The F-35 programme ties a dozen European air forces for decades. The LNG infrastructure currently being built creates long-term contracts running into the 2040s. Migrating cloud systems would cost billions and take years — and even then, Europe would remain dependent on US software for the foreseeable future.

What Europe can do is three things simultaneously: in the short term, identify and hedge against the most dangerous dependencies; in the medium term, build its own capabilities; and in the long term, create an architecture that does not make sovereignty contingent on the grace of a single country.

Short term means: diversifying energy sources — Canada, Qatar, North Africa, accelerated renewable expansion. Securing critical digital systems through European providers for sensitive applications. Accelerated procurement of European weapon systems like IRIS-T and Eurofighter.

Medium term means: a European defence industry that does not consist of 27 national champions but of a coherent strategic ecosystem. A cloud sector that does not set standards and then invite US corporations to undermine them. An energy policy that does not replace thirty years of Russian dependency with thirty years of American dependency.

Long term means: a European security architecture that does not depend on the next US president being more reasonable than the current one. Because that is the real lesson of recent years: the problem is not Trump. The problem is a system in which a single change of power in Washington can call into question Europe's entire security, energy supply, and digital infrastructure.

VIII. Why Europe Does Not Free Itself

The diagnosis is not new. Since the Suez Crisis of 1956, Europe has known that American interests and European interests are not identical. Since the Kosovo War of 1999, Europe has known it cannot operate even in its own neighbourhood without US logistics and intelligence. Since the Iraq War of 2003, Europe has known that Washington is willing to act without and against European allies. Since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Europe has known that Russia is not a partner. Since 2022, it has known that Russia is an enemy. Since 2025, it has known that America is not an unconditional ally.

Seventy years of diagnosis. No therapy.

Why? Because dependency is comfortable. It delegates responsibility, reduces costs, and avoids the painful internal compromises that autonomous defence would require. It allows Germany to prioritise its export economy. France to cultivate its world-power status. Italy to pursue its domestic politics. And all of them together to enjoy the feeling of security without paying the price.

Dependency is not an accident. It is a business model. And like every business model, it works — until the terms of business change.

IX. Europe's Hour

The 2026 US National Defense Strategy does not signal America's withdrawal from Europe. It signals the end of automatic American primacy. Europe is seen as capable — and therefore accountable. US troops in Europe will become thinner, more rotational, more conditional. The assumption that large US ground forces would rapidly reinforce Europe in a major contingency becomes less reliable.

Europe's hour has arrived — "perhaps inconveniently soon for anxious European governments," as an analyst at the European Policy Centre put it. If Europe builds military power commensurate with its economic weight, overcomes industrial fragmentation, and takes the lead in its own defence, this shift could finally produce a credible European pillar within NATO. If not, it remains a vassal — of a country that openly says it has other priorities.

68 billion dollars in US arms sales to Europe in a single year. 57 percent of European LNG from the United States. 90 percent of digital infrastructure under non-European control. 57 billion euros in annual efficiency losses from fragmented procurement. And an ally that threatens force against the territory of a NATO member.

Europe has the engineers, the economic power, the technology, and the institutions to defend itself, supply its own energy, and operate its own digital infrastructure. What it lacks is the same thing it lacks with bridges, railways, and demographics: the will to translate diagnosis into action. The readiness to give up comfort. The courage to trust itself.

Being a vassal is a choice. So is sovereignty.