The Transatlantic Freakout

Justin Logan and Sumantra Maitra on NATO and Europe taking their medicine this week

Feb 21, 2025

This past weekend at the Munich Security Conference it would be an understatement to say that sparks were flying, or even fireworks. More like bombs going off. It started last week with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegeth saying that Ukraine would not be given membership in NATO in any peace agreement and said NATO’s European members would have to provide the lion’s share of funding for their defense. On the sidelines, the U.S. set the stage for a direct meeting with Russia in Saudi Arabia, which took place Tuesday, leaving Europe and Ukraine out. The BBC came to the conclusion that “after this week the post-World War Two security architecture for Europe is no more. America is still in NATO but Europe can no longer automatically rely on the US to come to its aid.” There seems to be some recognition of this in remarks by NATO Secretary Mark Rutte who said in response to some of the teeth gnashing and garment rending at the confab: “To my European friends, I would say: get into the debate, not by complaining that you might, yes or no, be at the table, but by coming up with concrete proposals, ideas, ramp up [defense] spending.”

That seemed to be the spirit of the Paris summit on Monday, though it is not clear if anything was achieved.

Here to talk about how NATO and European partners are reacting to all of this are two scholars who have been quite adamant all along that the NATO alliance has not only outlived its Cold War mission but in its desperation to remain relevant has actually escalated the conflict that it is supposedly providing security for today, namely Ukraine. Sumantra Maitra is the author of The Sources of Russian Aggression: Is Russia a Realist Power? And a 2023 policy brief, Pivoting the US Away from Europe to a Dormant NATO.

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