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 industrial base, which necessitates coordinating and pooling military capabilities and investments.
The rhetoric of “strategic autonomy” has ceased to be theoretical; it’s increasingly and imperatively becoming a practical objective to ameliorate uncertainties on the east side of the Atlantic.
France has long advocated a Europe that can defend itself, while Germany, especially after questioning episodes under recent US administrations, has joined calls for reducing overreliance on American security guarantees.
Various commentators, most notably American economist Richard Wolff, frame this not only as a military issue but as an economic problem: outsourcing security to the US and buying American systems means exporting high‑value industrial capacity, technology, and jobs. In that view, Europe’s military dependence reinforces industrial atrophy and ties its long‑term security to a foreign power whose interests do not always align with European social and economic priorities.
Recently, NATO Chief Mark Rutte felt a lot of heat after he said during his address in front of the European Parliament, “If anyone thinks here … that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the U.S., keep on dreaming. You can’t.”
This statement came less than a week after Rutte agreed on a “framework” for enhanced Arctic security cooperation, which would oblige NATO members to elevate their military deployment in the Arctic region to fend off “threats” from Russia and China!
Former European Council President Charles Michel responded through Euronews to Rutte’s previously mentioned remarks by saying that the NATO Chief “should stop being an ‘American agent’ and unite the fraught military alliance in the face of the United States “hostile rhetoric” and “intimidation.”
So much for a European “UNION”!
Financial and Economic Dependence: The Dollar’s Shadow
The malady also has a financial dimension. While the euro has become a regionally dominant invoicing currency within European trade corridors, especially inside the EU and its immediate neighborhood, the dollar still enjoys overwhelming global primacy in trade settlement, reserves, and financial markets.
This exposes Europe to US monetary policy spillovers, from interest rate cycles to liquidity shocks, and makes European firms vulnerable to extraterritorial application of US sanctions through dollar‑denominated payment systems. This asymmetry is a symptom of a broader pattern: Europe’s economic model has tied itself to structures it does not control.
Cheap Russian energy and convenient imports from China, while at the same time operating within a dollar-centric financial architecture dominated by US “rule-based” institutions, was the name of the survival game for Europe for decades. But this game quickly turned into an entrapment as soon as the geopolitical status turned more overtly confrontational over trade, tech, and Ukraine.
Europe quickly felt arm-twisted to follow suit with sanctions that burden their own economies, electrocuting them with energy shocks and revealing their susceptibility to deindustrialization, all to show their alignment with strategic agendas that are shaped elsewhere and benefit somebody else!
The emerging talk in Brussels and major capitals about “euro internationalization” in targeted sectors, creating alternative payment channels, and insulating European companies from secondary sanctions is an attempt to rebalance this landscape. But concrete progress has been slow, reflecting the weight of the tension between the convenience of the existing order and the vulnerability it entails.
Digital Sovereignty: Regulating Without Owning
If we talk digitally, Europe poses as a regulatory superpower, while in reality, it is a technological middle power. Europe’s GDPR, the Digital Markets Act, and the AI Act are marks of regulatory sovereignty and signals of protecting their citizens’ data and disciplining Big Tech as they try to stretch their regulatory standards to a global level to govern online platforms and AI mechanisms.
Through these frameworks, Europe is basically saying, We’re not just consumer markets with purchasing power of foreign tech; we are an autonomous, independently regulated entity. But this superficial unruliness does not negate their structural US/China dependency, especially when it comes to fundamental digital infrastructure.
The European Commission did not lie when it described their situation as a “vulnerability,” as Europe continues to depend on foreigners for big data storage, cloud computing capabilities, and microchip technologies.
In effect, Europe sets rules for platforms and models largely built elsewhere, hoping that its market size will suffice to shape their behavior.
Europe’s future increasingly seems defined by this friction between technological dependency and regulatory prevalence. As any region that does not control and own its tech health, it will unavoidably be infected by the “information wars” virus.
This is why Europe is now seeking to establish sustainable political momentum and financial commitment to institute sovereign cloud initiatives, increase investments in semiconductor manufacturing capability, and push for Eurocentric cybersecurity systems and AI capacities.
The Monroe Doctrine Analogy and Its Limits
The framing invoked by many, about a renewed Monroe Doctrine to describe US behavior, suggests that Washington is seeking to control the “Western Hemisphere” and beyond as part of a hegemonic project to remain the sole global pole against China and Russia. Historically, however, the Monroe Doctrine referred specifically to the Western Hemisphere, asserting that the Americas were off‑limits to renewed European colonization.
It did not target Europe itself directly but rather sought to exclude Europe from the New World. Still, the analogy captures something about contemporary US strategy. The US has long leveraged its structural advantages — financial, military, and technological — to shape global alignments and limit rivals’ room for maneuver.
Today, this manifests in efforts to consolidate blocs, harden supply chains, and realign allies under the banner of “Democracy vs. Autocracy.” This looks less like a stable alliance system and more like a stressed empire, increasingly willing to offload costs and risks onto dependent partners. European calls for “Strategic Autonomy” need to be understood in this light.
They are not, in mainstream policy discourse, anti‑American; rather, they express concern that overreliance on a single patron in an age of volatile US domestic politics and intensifying great‑power competition is itself a strategic risk.
The experience of abrupt policy shifts in Washington over recent administrations has made clear that transatlantic solidarity cannot be the only pillar of European security and prosperity.
Europe’s Path: Neither Capitulation nor Fantasy Realignment
Europe’s options are often caricatured as either full capitulation to US leadership or a dramatic pivot toward Russia and China. In reality, neither extreme seems plausible or desirable. Realigning with Russia on any significant scale is, at least in the near term, constrained by the war in Ukraine, domestic political dynamics, and deep mistrust across Central and Eastern Europe.
At the same time, a simple continuation of the status quo, which can be summarized as: outsourcing security to NATO, absorbing economic and technological shocks, and hoping for benign US leadership, risks institutionalizing Europe’s subordinate role in a more fragmented world. The more likely and viable path is what might be called calibrated diversification.
On the security front, that means deepening EU defense industrial cooperation, ensuring that increased spending strengthens European capabilities rather than merely boosting imports from abroad.
While on the financial and economic front, it necessitates the internationalization of the euro in specific target sectors, boosting alternative payment and settlements infrastructure, and resisting self-injurious sanctions decided outside Europe.
Lastly, in the digital domain, Europe needs to invest in its sovereignty, in tech infrastructure, cloud computing, semiconductor foundries, and AI models, without letting go of its regulatory mantle to keep the market behaviour in check.
But are these European assignments achievable?
A lot of knowledgeable voices today warn that a world of intensifying great‑power rivalry will be unforgiving to regions that lack strategic agency.
Yet, 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.
Whether Europe can turn its vulnerability into resilience depends less on external constraints than on its own willingness to confront the “Malady of Reliance,” not as an inevitable fate, but as a political choice that can still be revised.
Tamer Mansour, Egyptian Independent Writer & Researcher
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