Munich Security Conference confronts Trump's rupture of transatlantic order

The Munich Security Conference opens this week under a shadow that has lengthened since US Vice President JD Vance's speech a year ago stunned the audience into silence. Since then, the Trump White House has imposed punitive tariffs on allies and foes alike, pursued a Ukraine peace settlement on terms favourable to Moscow, floated the annexation of Canada as a "51st state", and pressed a territorial claim on Greenland that Denmark's prime minister warned would end the NATO alliance. US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio leads a delegation to Bavaria while more than 50 other world leaders attend, but the question hanging over the Bayerischer Hof is no longer whether the transatlantic relationship has changed. It is whether the damage is structural.

Greenland crisis tests the alliance's fabric

The dispute over Greenland has done more to fray transatlantic trust than any defence-spending argument. Greenland is a self-governing territory within the Kingdom of Denmark, a NATO founding member. Donald Trump has repeatedly said he "needs to own" Greenland for US and global security and for months did not rule out the use of force. Denmark's prime minister responded that a hostile US military takeover would spell the end of the alliance that has underpinned European security for 77 years. The White House has since been distracted by other priorities, but the episode left a structural question: if a NATO member cannot count on its largest ally to respect its territorial integrity, what does the collective defence guarantee mean?

The crisis also revealed a diplomatic asymmetry. European capitals issued careful statements affirming Denmark's sovereignty while avoiding direct confrontation with Washington. In private, officials acknowledge that the episode has forced a reassessment of contingency planning that was previously unthinkable. The NATO treaty's Article 5 commits members to collective defence, but it has never been tested against a scenario where the aggressor is the alliance's own leader.

Burden-sharing numbers that explain Washington's resentment

The Trump administration's frustration with European defence spending is not without foundation. Russia currently spends more than 7% of GDP on defence, according to NATO's latest defence expenditure data. The United Kingdom, Europe's most capable military power after France, spends just under 2.5%. Several major allies, including Spain, have persistently failed to meet the alliance's 2% guideline. Sir Alex Younger, who ran MI6 from 2014 to 2020, put the imbalance bluntly: "You've got a continent of 500 million [Europe], asking a continent of 300 million [US] to deal with a continent of 140 million [Russia]. It's the wrong way around." He argued Europe should take more responsibility for its own defence, a view shared across the US political spectrum long before Trump's return.

Yet the burden-sharing debate has moved beyond percentages. The US National Security Strategy (NSS), published late last year, called on Europe to "stand on its own feet" and take "primary responsibility for its own defence." The Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) described the document as "a real, painful, shocking wake-up call for Europe" and "a moment of cavernous divergence between Europe's view of itself and Trump's vision for Europe." The NSS does not merely demand higher spending; it signals a strategic reorientation that treats European dependency as a liability to be reduced rather than an alliance to be nurtured.

A strategy document that targets European governments

The most striking passage in the NSS is not about troop numbers. It states as a priority a new policy of "supporting groups hostile to those very European governments that are supposed to be Washington's allies." The document speaks of "cultivating resistance to Europe's current trajectory within European nations" and warns that Europe's migration policies risk "civilizational erasure." At the same time, it maintains that "Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States." The contradiction is deliberate. The administration wants a Europe that is strong enough to defend itself but politically aligned with a nationalist, anti-immigration, sovereignty-first worldview, and it is prepared to intervene in European domestic politics to achieve it.

Tobias Bunde, director of research and policy at the Munich Security Conference, argues that the Trump administration has weakened or openly questioned all three pillars of post-1945 US strategy toward Europe: belief in multilateral institutions, economic integration, and the conviction that democracy and human rights are strategic assets, not just values. "Under the Trump administration," Bunde writes in the conference's pre-published report, "all three of these pillars have been weakened or openly questioned." The conference organisers have made that assessment the intellectual framework for this year's gathering.

Trade, migration and free speech: the widening policy gulf

The splits extend well beyond defence. On trade, the Trump administration's tariff-first approach clashes with the EU's regulatory model and its reliance on the single market. On migration, European governments, many of them centre-right, have been alarmed by White House rhetoric that frames European asylum and integration policies as civilisational suicide. On free speech, the US vice president's 2025 Munich speech attacked European content-moderation laws as censorship, a theme that resonates with parts of the European right but appalls mainstream parties. These are not tactical disagreements. They reflect a fundamental divergence over what the Western liberal order is for, and who gets to define it.

Sophie Eisentraut of the Munich Security Conference captured the mood: "We are currently seeing the rise of political actors who do not promise reform or repair, but who are very explicit about wanting to tear down existing institutions, and we call them the demolition men." The phrase has circulated in European capitals as a shorthand for a transatlantic relationship in which one side no longer sees the institutional architecture, NATO, the EU, the WTO, the rules-based trading system, as an asset to be preserved but as an obstacle to be removed.

Article 5 and the Narva Test

The ultimate question, voiced in corridors across Europe's foreign ministries, is whether Article 5 still works. NATO officials insist it is alive and well. But Article 5's credibility has always rested on the certainty of American military power backing European territory. Trump's unpredictability, combined with his administration's disdain for European allies, has introduced a variable that did not exist during the Cold War or the post-1991 era.

This is what analysts have termed the "Narva Test." Narva is a majority Russian-speaking town in Estonia, sitting on the river that forms the border with Russia. If Russia were to seize it under the pretext of protecting Russian speakers, would this US administration ride to Estonia's defence? The same question applies to the Suwalki Gap, the narrow corridor between Belarus and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad that connects the Baltic states to the rest of NATO, and to Svalbard, the Norwegian-administered Arctic archipelago where Russia maintains a settlement at Barentsburg. Given Trump's stated willingness to seize Greenland from a NATO ally, no European capital can answer the Narva Test with confidence. In a period when Russia is waging full-scale war in Ukraine, that uncertainty invites miscalculation.

European responses: strategic autonomy or strategic hedging?

European governments have not been passive. The EU has accelerated work on defence industrial cooperation, the European Defence Fund, and joint procurement. Germany's Zeitenwende, the shift announced by Chancellor Olaf Scholz in 2022, has produced a 100 billion euro special fund for the Bundeswehr, though delivery of capability lags behind the rhetoric. France has long advocated European strategic autonomy, a concept that now looks less like Gaullist aspiration and more like necessity. The UK, outside the EU but inside NATO, has pledged to raise defence spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, with an ambition to reach 3% thereafter.

Yet these efforts suffer from three constraints. First, time: rebuilding credible conventional deterrence takes a decade, not an electoral cycle. Second, coordination: 27 EU members plus the UK, Norway and others have different threat perceptions, industrial bases and political timetables. Third, the nuclear umbrella: only the US, UK and France possess nuclear weapons, and the US arsenal remains the backbone of NATO's deterrence. No European combination can replace it quickly. The result is a hedging strategy: Europeans deepen their own capabilities while praying the American guarantee holds, because the alternative is a security vacuum they cannot yet fill.

What Munich will, and will not, resolve

This year's conference will produce no communiqué that repairs the transatlantic bond. Rubio's meetings with European counterparts will be closely watched for tone as much as substance: does the US delegation signal continuity with the NSS's confrontational language, or does it offer reassurance that the alliance's core commitments are intact? European leaders will test the limits of coordination on Ukraine, on China, on the Middle East, and on the defence industrial base. The conference's value lies not in announcements but in the private conversations that reveal whether a workable modus vivendi exists.