While Washington demands European defense self-reliance, its simultaneous empowerment of far-right movements undermines the continent's capacity for collective action.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, an opinion piece titled "Turmoil in Europe's Social Contract: America's Contradiction Between Defense Autonomy and Backing the Far Right" by Utku Asker has been published in Anadolu Agency. The piece argues that the gradual withdrawal of the US security umbrella has placed European welfare states in a severe fiscal squeeze, while Washington's ideological backing of far-right movements prevents the formation of a unified defense capacity across the continent. Below is an abstract of the piece.
Following World War II, European states built their welfare models beneath the US military umbrella, leaving the bulk of the defense bill to Washington while channeling domestic resources into social peace and prosperity. However, the Russia-Ukraine war and Donald Trump's demands that allies carry their own defense weight have raised serious doubts about the reliability of this shield. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's June review of the American military presence in Europe and the emerging rhetoric around "NATO 3.0" signal that Washington is shifting a 75-year security burden back onto European shoulders.
Although US Secretary of State Marco Rubio argued in an October 7 speech in Athens that Europe's crisis stems from a lack of will and civilizational self-confidence, the root of today's turmoil lies in the fracturing of the post-war social contract. With the superpower security subsidy being pulled away, European governments are caught in a tight trilemma between building a credible defense deterrent, preserving the welfare state, and maintaining fiscal stability—a challenge compounded by the fact that European militaries operate 178 different types of major weapon systems compared to roughly 30 used by the US military.
European nations have taken divergent paths to fund rising military costs, each leaving a different social group to pay the price. The Netherlands financed its defense hike directly at the expense of the welfare state by failing to adjust tax brackets for inflation—imposing an indirect burden on lower-income groups—and cutting healthcare spending. Conversely, Spain has kept defense as a secondary priority, while Italy used an accounting maneuver by renaming existing budget items as "defense spending" to cross NATO's threshold on paper. Centrist parties' hesitation between these hard choices is steadily eroding public trust in mainstream politics.
Exploiting this impasse, far-right movements avoid telling voters that economic sacrifices are unavoidable and instead question who should benefit from the welfare state, promoting "welfare chauvinism" and the politics of fear against immigrants. Herein lies the major contradiction in US policy: on one hand, Washington wants Europe to stand on its own two feet and shoulder the security burden; on the other, Trump and his Republican allies lend ideological legitimacy to the very nationalist movements that make collective European burden-sharing impossible.
Security in Europe is no longer a temporary crisis but a core question of national budgets. If mainstream political actors fail to negotiate a new social contract that distributes costs fairly and instead leave the field to those drawing political, ethnic, and cultural dividing lines, the post-war European order will fracture into a system stripped of both its welfare ambitions and the idea of a shared future./ Source
