\Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, and US President Donald Trump (AP file photo)

Europe is in a fix.
As European leaders scramble after the blow-up between US President Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky last week, they are faced with the grim realisation they cannot currently deter – let alone fight – Russia without the American security umbrella that has been in place since the end of WWII.
Any peace plan by countries like the UK and France to help Ukraine seems untenable without adequate security guarantees being provided by the US. But Trump has now even suspended military aid to Ukraine, which accounted for almost half such assistance Kyiv was getting, in a move that obviously has been welcomed by Russia. Enmeshed in the debilitating and costly conflict, Russia of course wants to seize this godsend opportunity, the first such one it has got since invading Ukraine in February 2022. Amid the ongoing geopolitical upheaval, China, too, is waiting to see if it can exploit the situation.
European countries may be cranking up their defence budgets but they simply do not currently have the military capabilities on their own to stop Russia in its tracks. Over-dependence on the US for decades has left Europe weak in terms of military teeth on several fronts like air defence and long-range ballistic missiles as well as requisite force-enablers like space-based ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance), command and control, satellite communications and the like.
“India needs to learn a lesson from all this. It will have to deter, and if required fight, its adversaries, especially China, largely on its own. No one will come rushing to our aid in a crunch situation. And if someone does, it will extract great concessions or costs,” a top Indian military officer said.
As the unquestioned Nato leader with an annual defence expenditure of almost $1 trillion, the US has over 80,000 combat-ready soldiers deployed in Europe along with heavy weaponry like tanks, armoured vehicles, air defence missile systems, fighter jets, warships and the like as well as around 100 tactical nuclear bombs. While European countries collectively do have over 1.5 million troops, they would require at least 2,00,000 more for self-defence if the US withdraws its soldiers, as per one estimate.
Then there is military hardware and software. Take, for instance, the manufacture of advanced multi-role fighters. Roughly around 600 Eurofighter Typhoons (by a consortium of the UK, Germany, Italy and Spain), 300 Swedish JAS 39 Gripen and 260 French Rafale jets, which are all 4.5-plus generation jets, have been built over the last 25 years or so. The US, in turn, has produced around 1,100 of the world’s most advanced fifth-generation F-35 Lightning-II stealth fighters, apart from 195 of the same generation F-22 ‘Raptors’, in last 10 years. The US, of course, has also produced over 4,600 variants of the F-16s and over 2,000 of the F/A-18s. There is as yet no European substitute for F-35, which several European countries like the UK, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway, Finland and Poland have inducted or ordered.
Ukraine has managed to protect its people in no small measure with the help of American Patriot and NASAMS advanced air defence systems and stall deeper Russian advances with long range weapons like the high-mobility artillery rocket systems (HIMARS), the ATACM supersonic tactical ballistic missiles and around 4.5 million rounds of artillery ammunition, among others. Now, Europe may well need to provide military aid and a security umbrella to Ukraine solely by itself. But it will take a lot of doing, if at all it’s possible.