FUTURE OF EUROPE’S COLLECTIVE SECURITY ARCHITECTURE

This study examines Europe’s collective security architecture amid an increasingly uncertain transatlantic relationship and gaps within Europe’s defence base. Drawing on Stephen Walt’s structural realist alliance theory, it evaluates how geography, shifting power distributions, evolving threat perceptions, and divergent political trajectories are reshaping European security behaviour. The study finds that Europe’s long-standing bandwagoning with the United States was enabled by threat perceived from Russian aggregate power and intentions, and post-Cold War institutional socialisation within NATO. However, the dual pressures of an increasingly assertive Russia and an unpredictable United States, especially under the second Trump administration, have created a strategic dilemma for Europe. Despite significant increases in defence spending and ambitious recruitment plans, European militaries remain far from achieving the conventional capabilities required to deter or defeat major-power aggression independently. A widening “transatlantic rupture” may drive the emergence of a new political alignment in the form of an “alliance of revisionists,” elements of the US and European right-wing. While such a coalition could preserve NATO, its viability depends on political convergence across Western capitals. The paper concludes that European security will remain tied to the United States in the near term and that any future project for strategic autonomy in Europe shall be deeply complicated.