These have not been good days for European integration. The NATO summit, which Trump attended, was given a spectacular gift, and soon afterward, the country scolded itself for not having given it a gift like the others. It was a historic step backward for the European Union, but Trump's objective. The year 2024 was the year of the Letta and Draghi reports, which respectively proposed objectives of greater integration of the single market and the development of ambitious industrial and technological policies to foster a leap forward in investment and productivity. The objective that Trump imposes on NATO partners to assume the obligation to reach 5 percent of their GDP in defense spending in the coming years represents a budgetary challenge of an order of magnitude very similar to Draghi's proposal, but without any of its virtues. It is also important that this effort be used to purchase state-of-the-art weapons manufactured by the powerful US arms industry. Draghi Inverted. Where there were aspirations to recover Europe's innovative and technological capacity, nothing has changed since then, as if they were abandoning any ambition and paying the toll demanded by the emperor of the Western world.
How do the most pro-Trumpist forces in Europe position themselves in the face of this blackmail? Their impression is that they are enjoying the weakening of pro-European impulses. The less attractive the prospect of European integration is, the more opportunities there are for the recovery of national policies, free from European commitments. This is what the most nationalist forces, on the far right and the far left, want. Of course, the more diverse national policies become and the less committed they are to coordinating at the European level, the weaker the Union will be and the more useless it will appear. The danger of dissolution, which became a real possibility during the euro crisis, reappears on the horizon. Europe has several countries that are more pro-American than pro-European, either because of the number of their emigrants who ended up in the US or because of political and strategic proximity. They will always be willing to put the US ahead of the EU. Others are Euroskeptics because they have lost their initial enthusiasm or because they mistakenly believe that what they have gained in the EU can no longer be lost. There are also those who are Euroskeptic, who have lost their bearings, or simply their compass for moving forward. There are many of these as well.
The increase in defense spending, if it does not prove immediately useful, and even more so if it must be massively allocated to purchases in the U.S., will only be a policy of budgetary restriction. The worst that can happen. Austerity policies are very unpopular and tend to generate a radicalization of voters, who want to punish the politicians in charge of their management. Simultaneously in Washington (the One Big Beautiful Bill Act Trump's policies), focused on tax cuts and largely financed by an increase in debt.
Trump's choice of the strategy of forcing his European allies to buy weapons has all the virtues for him but all the defects for the Europeans. It is a lesson learned from the Reagan presidency: accelerate the construction of military capacity to demoralize the enemy. Reagan, who had promised to reduce Carter's public deficits, borrowed more than any US president had ever done in peacetime, but everyone was willing to buy his debt because he convinced savers around the world that it would be the US who would win the arms race and the Cold War. In just a few days, the EU has become weaker and more vulnerable. If you do not react forcefully and implement the recommendations of the Draghi report, you will see your future vanish. Bad news for everyone, even those who would thoughtlessly prefer that the EU did not exist.
