Europe’s Security Dilemma: Trump, Putin - and Gen-Z!
Much focus this week has been on how America is demanding that Britain & Europe do more for their own security. Yet a recent poll showed that Gen-Z doesn’t want to fight as their masters want them to.
This is the week Europe got the message that Trump first gave many years ago: They have to do more - to spend more - to look after their own security. They got the message that Biden hoped they’d learn for themselves when he allowed Russia to invade Ukraine and did not empower Ukraine to liberate its eastern territories.
Lectured by US Vice-President JD Vance and Defence Secretary Peter Hegseth at the Munich Security Conference, Europe leaders were told they were a bigger threat than Russia or China.
Worse still, they - and the Ukrainian President - came to learn that the fate of Ukraine (and hence Europe) would be decided solely between Trump and Putin in a separate summit.
Aside from approximately one hundred thousand military personnel in Europe, the USA has underwritten Europe’s security since World War Two - mainly during the Cold War Era.
According to Fabrice Pothier, former Director of Policy Planning at NATO, Europe needs to go on a pre-war footing now - to prioritise defence and critical infrastructure to prepare for potential threats. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s World at One, he said that Europe would need to double its defence budget in order to compensate for the lack of an American security guarantee.
This will be a huge strain on European economies, who have been struggling for some time. Public sector debt has risen from 43% of GDP (2007) to a peak of 77% (2020) in the UK & EU states due to large economic shocks - not least the global financial crisis of the late 2000s and Covid-19 pandemics.
When one adds the energy challenges that have peaked since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, economic sluggishness in Europe comes at a time when it expected to invest heavily in its future.
Yet Fabrice Pothier also pointed to another phenomenon affecting Europe - which is that even if they spent more on defence, across the continent it is hard to recruit people into the armed forces.
This has been brought into sharp focus in the UK where a poll published in the Times in February 2025, has suggested that “Gen Z think UK is racist and would not fight for their country”.
The found that only 41% of young people today were proud to be British and the same proportion could think of NO circumstances in which they would fight for their country. Only 11% said they would fight for their country.
If these attitudes are shared across Europe, the economic challenges of rearming are not the greatest challenge.
National identities are not what they once were. Trust in governments is not what it was. They cannot be relied upon to expect people to fight - particularly when political opinion is so polarised.
Trump’s presidency will only last for 4-years. But that is what they thought first time round. Europe is perhaps now realising that it has to act since Biden’s term did little to reassure Europe about being able to depend on the US.
Abdul Wahid has been active in Muslim affairs in the UK for over 25 years. He has been published on the websites of Foreign Policy, Open Democracy, the Times Higher Educational Supplement, and Prospect Magazine. You can follow him on X/Twitter @AbdulWahid_X and elsewhere: https://linktr.ee/abdulwahid101010