As Trump’s America shuns former allies and Russia exploits division for its own gain, can Europe overcome a security crisis years in the making?Well before Russia’s renewed assault on Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, Europe was struggling to contend with a challenging defense environment: eroding economic competitiveness, chronic underinvestment and the rise of populism. Trump did not create Europe’s problems so much as expose and accelerate them. Drawing on vivid episodes between NATO’s 2024 Washington Summit and the Ankara Summit two years later, Joshua C. Huminski shows how each moment illuminates long-running trends in European defense. Russian aggression turned latent weaknesses into a strategic emergency, while Trump’s systemic shocks made it harder for Europeans to assume that the United States would always fill the gaps. Blending reporting, strategic analysis and interviews with policymakers and experts, Continental Drift explains how European governments, NATO and the European Union are scrambling to adapt to this changing security environment, rethinking deterrence, rebuilding industrial capacity and debating what ‘strategic autonomy’ should really mean. Offering a nuanced perspective, Huminski shows what is at stake for Europe’s security, and how these crises are pushing Europeans to take on greater responsibility for continental defense. In detailing a long history of underinvestment, the author highlights that Trump did not create Europe's security crises so much as expose and accelerate themConsiders how Europe can rethink deterrence in a swiftly changing security environmentWritten by a Euro-Atlantic defense expert who blends reporting, strategic analysis and interviews with policymakers from the USA and Europe to provide a nuanced perspective
