Yesterday, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented her 2026 work programme to the European Parliament—a document with the eyebrow-raising title “Europe’s Independence Moment”. Welcome to 2025, where day is night, black is white, and the EU president who is locking our union into ever-more American dependence has the nerve to go to the parliament and claim she is leading an independence moment. It is just more gaslighting from our European leaders, who claim to be lessening Europe’s dependencies when they are actually entrenching them.
“The grandiose title ‘Europe’s Independence Moment’ is unlikely to convince anyone,” noted Euractiv’s Eddy Wax in yesterday’s Rapporteur newsletter. “Wherever the EU wants to project influence, it is penned in by the American President, caught between its weakness and fear of spooking Washington,” he wrote. “When the US whistles, the EU comes padding over. 5% on defence? Sure we’ll spend it. Lopsided trade deal? Fine. Buy our weapons to send to Ukraine? Deal.” To make matters worse, what’s actually in the work programme isn’t real measures to make the EU independent from the US but rather a deregulation push being made as a “peace offering to Trump”. “How does von der Leyen intend to attain independence? By essentially de-regulating the Union, which will prove self defeating as this is already building new and old dependency,” observed the Italian academic Alberto Alemanno.
If you’re looking for Europe’s independence moment, you’ll be hard pressed to find it in the actions of von der Leyen or any of Europe’s main leaders at the moment. The only European leader who has been refusing to surrender to Trump’s extortion is Spain’s Pedro Sanchez. He was the only NATO leader who refused to acquiesce to the non-sensical spending target of 5% GDP in June (a level even the US doesn’t come close to). For that he was literally (physically) ostracised by the other leaders in the now-famous photo above. Sanchez is also one of the few leaders who has spoken out vocally against von der Leyen’s surrender deal in July, and he has refused to obey the US command for European countries to pay America in order to transit weapons from the US military-industrial complex to Ukraine. Sanchez says that Europe needs a plan to build independent sovereign defence, and he has called for the establishment of an EU army (which would really be a coordinated group of 27 armies that would resemble the state militaries of the US National Guard). Sanchez has been pointing out, correctly, that Europe’s main problem is not a lack of spending but rather a lack of sovereign decision-making power. All of these are things French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated for in the past (as have French presidents before him), but he has gone relatively silent on them recently as he is hobbled by domestic political chaos and fear of upsetting his bromance with Trump.
For daring to stand up to America, the knives are out for Sanchez. A number of obviously Washington-influenced hit pieces have been run against him in the Anglo-American and German press recently, notably last week’s hit job by Politico:
“Frontline states enduring Russia’s hybrid assault on Europe think Donald Trump is right: Spain and other supposed allies far away to the south are failing to back them up,” Politico wrote. “They regard it as deeply unfair that Spain—especially with its strong economic growth—has not contributed more to Europe’s efforts to support Ukraine and reinforce its own defenses. When leaders meet in Brussels for a summit to discuss deeper defense cooperation next week, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez will be expected to fall in line. If he doesn’t, he’ll face a showdown with his counterparts, said one diplomat involved in preparations for the summit, speaking on condition of anonymity because the topic is sensitive.”
Last week Trump threatened to impose tariffs on Spain as punishment for not falling in line and buying the US weapons—something which would violate July’s EU-US surrender deal because the EU is one country for the purposes of trade (which Trump still cannot seem to get through his head even after all these years). “I think it’s unbelievably disrespectful,” Trump said, “and I think they should be punished for that.” He reportedly instructed Starmer, Meloni, Macron and Merz while at the Gaza ceasefire signing ceremony in Egypt last week to lean on Sanchez to make him agree to buying US weapons. “Maybe you should throw them out of NATO, frankly,” Trump told Finland’s President Alexander Stubb. “I think you people will have to start speaking to Spain.”
The EU’s ultra-Atlanticist governments in the East and North then fell over themselves to back up Trump’s criticism for the Politico hit piece. “It’s very, very important that all our allies abide by the commitments that we all agreed…including Spain,” said Sweden’s defence minister Pål Jonson. “We are now hoping that the NATO commitment of 5% is really speeding up fast because we are running against time,” said Finland’s defence minister Antti Häkkänen. “That’s what we are emphasising as a frontline country — that other countries must do their fair share, and fast.”
But this isn’t really about spending. Just two weeks ago, Spain announced it is going to spend €6.9 billion on its defence sector. Most of the money will go to the Spanish defence contractor Indra rather than to the US, reports Euractiv. Obviously, the US military-industrial complex isn’t very happy about that.
As Pascal Lth from the Substack European Tomorrow has pointed out, the main thing needed right now isn’t European military spending but rather European military coordination. Europe needs to spend more on defence. But if it doesn’t do so in a new context of European command and control, then that spending will only further entrench US military dependence, not lessen it.
“The Spanish have a point,” he wrote in June after the Hague Summit. “The American demands are unreasonable and the implicit threats are not the way that allies should treat with each other. There is an element of hypocrisy too; just like Europe, America also slashed its defence spending as a percentage of GDP after the Cold War. It only ramped up again for the Global War on Terror, a military campaign that they designed, led and lost of their own accord. US defence spending peaked in 2010 and then fell again in the years after.”
“Europe needs to ramp up its defence spending not because Trump is a good faith actor who will respect the deal we make with him, but because he isn’t. Europe needs a failsafe, an ability to defend itself even if the US chooses to look away, and unfortunately that will cost money.”
“As Europe gears up for a massive rearmament programme, the need to rethink our defence spending is more urgent than ever. A pro forma increase to assuage Washington will not meet our needs in a world where the American security guarantee can no longer be taken for granted. To protect our peace and freedom, we need a rearmament process that can be relied upon to deliver real military capacity and deterrence value against an active hostile power, not just numbers on a spreadsheet. We need a new procurement strategy; simpler, cheaper and more European.”
But our European leaders are not pursuing this strategy of new spending under a new framework. They are protecting the old framework. There is a lot of hot air being blown in Brussels right now about better coordination of military procurement, and we will hear it again tomorrow when the Commission presents its defence white paper to the European Council. That initiative is good but it lacks the urgency and focus required in this dangerous moment. The EU’s national governments are still insisting they should be “in the drivers seat” for these EU military spending efforts and that the Commission should not be given any new power to lead it. That shows that these national governments still don’t get it. They still don’t understand that the most important thing to do right now is not to spend more but to as quickly as possible give Europe the ability to defend itself without (or from) the United States.
NATO is still viewed as the only defence game in town, even if the EU is now allowed some minor involvement in military purchasing. “There is no alternative to NATO,” Secretary General Mark Rutte keeps saying. In other words, the famous command by US Defence Secretary William S. Cohen in 2000, “there will be no EU caucus in NATO,” still applies. There is no alternative because no alternative has been allowed, and leaders like Rutte (who was Dutch prime minister from 2010 to 2024) have dutifully obeyed this command. I write about this 2000 sliding doors moment (Cohen’s admonishment came in response to the idea, later dropped, to insert the creation of an EU defence union into the EU constitution that was being drafted at the time) in my book The Owned Continent, which will be published in December.
EU countries are still obeying the US diktat all these years later. Eastern and Northern EU countries are currently blocking the French effort to insert a ‘buy European’ clause into the Commission’s new EU military spending coordination plan. Emmanuel Macron, hobbled domestically and growing increasingly irrelevant on the European stage, does not have the political capital at the moment to fight for it. So it will most likely be scrapped. Indeed, the reason why Sanchez has been left out in the cold in his calls for European sovereignty is because Macron, who has expressed the same views about military sovereignty in the past as have many French presidents before him, no longer has the heft to make this case.
Out of the 29 prime ministers and presidents who will file into the Europa Building tomorrow for the summit, there is only one person who truly seems to understand the danger Europe is in. Or at least, there is only one of them who is willing to say it out loud. But that leader is being ostracised and criticised, and he is even being briefed against, it seems, by the leaders at EU and NATO headquarters. As The Economist noted last month, Sanchez is the “lonely leader of Europe’s anti-Trump resistance”. At the European leaders’ table, nobody is willing to put their head above the parapet and defend him. So he is being shunted out of the room, as we saw in September when the leader of the EU’s fourth-largest country (Spain) was barred from attending the White House gathering with Zelenskyy in favour of the leader of the EU’s 17th-largest country (Finland), simply because Trump likes the latter and dislikes the former.
Not only are most European leaders wedded to their strategy of Trump appeasement, but they are piling pressure on anyone who dares to suggest that dependency on Trump might not be a good idea. Will they successfully force Sanchez to “fall in line” in this apparent “showdown” in Brussels tomorrow? It seems unlikely, as Sanchez has no domestic motivation to surrender to Trump. The US president is as unpopular in Spain as he is in most other countries in Europe. Unlike the other EU leaders, Sanchez is actually listening to his citizens who say they don’t want Europe to be Trump’s vassal. Polls show that a majority of Spanish citizens support Sanchez’s refusal to cave in to Trump’s military spending demands. A Eurobarometer survey this year found that 66% of EU citizens want the EU to take control of defence (72% in Spain). A European Council on Foreign Relations survey earlier this year found that only 22% of Europeans still consider the US an ally.
But our leaders in Europe don’t seem to be feeling like they need to listen to their citizens right now. They are behaving as if they are accountable to only one man: the president of the United States.
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