This year’s Munich Security Conference felt noticeably different from the confrontation that dominated the same meeting twelve months ago. In 2025, US Vice-President JD Vance shocked European leaders by arguing that Europe’s greatest threat came not from Russia or China but from within, attacking European governments over migration, free speech and democratic culture. This weekend, Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a far more reassuring message. He said the United States did not want to destroy the transatlantic alliance and described America as a “child of Europe”, while still insisting that Washington wanted European allies capable of defending themselves. European leaders welcomed the change in tone, but they did not behave as though the old relationship had simply returned. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, French President Emmanuel Macron, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU foreign-policy chief Kaja Kallas all argued in different ways for a Europe capable of exercising substantially more power independently. The most important change is therefore psychological rather than diplomatic: Europe increasingly understands that American friendship remains enormously valuable, but American permanence can no longer be treated as the organising assumption of European security.
This distinction between an alliance and dependence is important. Alliances are arrangements between political communities that remain capable of making independent decisions. Dependence exists when one side cannot realistically protect its essential interests without the other. Europe has spent decades somewhere between the two. NATO formally consists of sovereign equals, but American nuclear weapons, intelligence, logistics, strategic airlift and military scale made the United States functionally indispensable to European defence. That arrangement was efficient because Europe could spend less on military capability while America gained bases, allies and geopolitical influence. The problem is that efficiency created vulnerability. Once Trump demonstrated that American commitments could become more transactional, European governments discovered that they had outsourced not merely military capability but part of their freedom of political choice. A state is not fully strategically autonomous if disagreement with an ally becomes impossible because the ally supplies capabilities without which the state cannot defend itself.
This is why Rubio’s friendlier speech should reassure Europe without reversing its rearmament. If European governments respond to one conciliatory address by returning to the assumption that Washington will always provide whatever capability Europe lacks, they will reproduce the dependency that created the current anxiety. Conversely, treating America as an adversary would be equally irrational. The United States remains Europe’s most powerful security partner, and replacing American military capabilities completely would require enormous expenditure. The sensible objective is therefore interdependence without indispensability: preserve NATO while ensuring that a future American president choosing to reduce involvement would create difficulty for Europe rather than strategic paralysis. That is a more mature alliance because cooperation becomes a choice supported by mutual benefit rather than something one side cannot realistically refuse.
Macron’s argument that Europe must become more capable of defending its own interests fits this logic, although “strategic autonomy” often becomes vague once translated into budgets. Europe already possesses enormous aggregate economic resources. The EU economy plus Britain is vastly larger than Russia’s. The problem is converting wealth into usable military power through ammunition production, air defence, drones, intelligence, logistics and integrated command. Europe’s weakness therefore is not fundamentally poverty but collective-action failure. Twenty-seven governments can each rationally protect national defence industries and procurement preferences while collectively producing duplication, incompatible equipment and insufficient scale. A Europe spending more without coordinating better could therefore become considerably more expensive without becoming proportionately stronger.
Ukraine remains the immediate test. Zelenskyy used Munich to argue that Russia still lacks genuine interest in ending the war and needs additional pressure, while European leaders insisted that Europe must participate directly in decisions determining the continent’s future security architecture. This is more than a question of diplomatic respect. If European governments expect to finance Ukrainian reconstruction, provide much of the post-war military guarantee and live permanently beside Russia, then a settlement negotiated principally between Washington and Moscow would separate decision-making authority from the distribution of consequences. Political legitimacy becomes weaker when those bearing the long-term cost possess too little influence over the bargain.
The same principle applies to Ukraine itself. Great-power diplomacy has always involved stronger states negotiating over smaller ones, but the normative achievement of the post-1945 order was supposed to be that sovereignty limited this practice. Ukraine does not acquire equal military power to Russia merely because international law recognises it as sovereign; sovereignty instead creates a presumption that Ukrainians possess the authority to decide which compromises governing their territory are acceptable. This is where realism and liberalism need not be opposites. Realism tells us Russia’s power constrains Ukraine’s available choices. Liberal political theory tells us constraint does not transfer authorship of those choices to Moscow or Washington. A mature settlement has to acknowledge both facts.
Munich also exposed an increasingly important disagreement over China. European officials broadly accept Washington’s argument that excessive dependence on Chinese supply chains creates strategic risk, but Europe is not prepared simply to reproduce America’s approach towards Beijing. The Munich Security Conference’s chief executive Benedikt Franke described Europe as not ready to “choose” completely between the United States and China. That reluctance is rational. China is simultaneously a strategic competitor, an enormous market, a manufacturing centre and an essential participant in global issues from climate to trade. Europe benefits from reducing dangerous dependencies in semiconductors, critical minerals and other strategic sectors without converting every commercial relationship into a security confrontation. De-risking becomes strategically useful precisely because it sits between naïve dependence and economically destructive decoupling.
This is also where Europe should be careful not to replace dependence on America with an abstract ambition for self-sufficiency. Strategic autonomy does not mean producing everything domestically. Autarky reduces the productivity that ultimately finances military and technological power. Genuine autonomy means possessing enough alternatives that another state cannot threaten an essential national interest by withholding one indispensable input. Europe can therefore remain deeply integrated with America, China and the wider world while diversifying the specific dependencies whose disruption would become politically intolerable. Autonomy is not the absence of interdependence; it is the absence of a single point of coercive failure.
The philosophical issue underneath Munich is therefore the meaning of sovereignty in an interdependent world. Classical sovereignty imagines states as autonomous political units exercising authority within defined borders. Modern states depend constantly on foreign technology, energy, capital, security guarantees and supply chains. Formal sovereignty can therefore coexist with practical vulnerability. A country may possess complete legal independence while lacking the material capacity to exercise meaningful choices. This is why economic productivity, technological capability and defence capacity are not separate from political freedom. Power determines how expensive it is for others to ignore your consent.
Europe appears finally to understand this. The Greenland confrontation, Trump’s tariffs, uncertainty over Ukraine and years of American demands for greater defence spending have made the old model politically unsustainable. Rubio’s speech may improve the relationship considerably, and it should. Alliances benefit from reassurance. But reassurance is healthiest when it complements capability rather than replacing it.
The transatlantic alliance therefore is not necessarily ending. It may be undergoing the more difficult transition from American protection with European participation towards genuinely shared responsibility. That would require Europe to spend more, coordinate more and occasionally accept that strategic autonomy carries real economic costs. It would also require Washington to accept the consequence of getting what it has demanded for years: allies capable of defending themselves will eventually become allies more capable of disagreeing with America.
That is not alliance failure. It may be what political equality inside an alliance actually looks like. The real test after Munich is whether Europe can transform the language of sovereignty into the material capacity required to exercise it, while resisting the opposite mistake of treating independence as isolation. A mature alliance should make its members stronger together without making any of them incapable of standing when the others step away.
