The world order that emerged after the Cold War is undergoing a profound transformation. In this interview, Robert Tyler discusses the shifting nature of US–European relations, the future of NATO, Europe’s defence capabilities, the rise of China, energy security, and the challenges facing the liberal international order.
About the Guest
Robert Tyler is Senior Policy Advisor at New Direction – Foundation for European Conservatism. Prior to joining New Direction, he worked as a policy advisor in the European Parliament, focusing on security, counterterrorism, and geopolitics.
Interview
Simon Sarevski: Brexit happened. Donald Trump was elected, then re-elected, and his rhetoric on trade — even toward America’s European allies — has often been confrontational. How would you describe the current state of US–EU relations? Are we still looking at a strategic partnership, or are we entering an era of managed competition, with tariffs, subsidies, reshoring and industrial policy gradually pulling the two economies apart?
Robert Tyler: What the Trump administration is doing with tariffs is unfortunately not new. It is representative of a global shift away from the principles of globalised free trade as we imagined it in the 1990s. People — rightly or wrongly — feel left behind by globalisation, and the natural impulse is to seek the protection of the state. This trend was already starting in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the 2014 Eurozone crisis. But what accelerated things was the COVID-19 pandemic, where it became the automatic response of every government around the world to start ‘protecting’ their own industry by putting up artificial barriers and pouring subsidies into everything. I sometimes jokingly refer to it as the post-COVID Keynesian consensus, just as we had the post-war Keynesian consensus.
When I see that this administration, the EU, or anyone else for that matter, contemplating tariffs or retaliatory tariffs, I can’t help but think that it’s just a race to the bottom. And above everything else, it’s a dangerous distraction that sows division amongst Western allies at a time in which we need to be unified and benefit from trade with each other.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine appears to have revitalized NATO, yet questions remain about its long-term cohesion. Is the alliance genuinely stronger today than it was a decade ago, or have recent events merely exposed underlying tensions? At the same time, Europe is increasingly discussing “strategic autonomy.” Is there a genuine need for a stronger independent European defense capability, or would this simply duplicate NATO’s role?
Robert Tyler: Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine provided the much-needed wake-up call that NATO needed. For a long time, the only countries that took their NATO commitments seriously were those that shared a frontier with Russia and its allies. That is to say that Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland were the most serious about defence spending, whilst countries like Germany and Spain that sit further away from the threat acted far more complacently. However, since 2022, many European countries have started to take security more seriously. Germany has committed billions towards its own military industrial base; countries like Italy are finding new partners to work on defence development with; the Alliance itself has even enlarged to include Sweden and Finland, closing off the Baltic Sea to Russia. That said, there is still a long way to go when it comes to re-armament, and the EU has a role to play.
What has to be made clear is that the EU’s role isn’t in pursuing ‘strategic autonomy’ or an ‘autonomous defence force’ as many Eurofederalists might want, but rather in supporting defence procurement, for example, supporting countries that want to work on joint procurement to get better deals from defence manufacturers. It makes no sense for the three Baltic States, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, to put in three sets of individual orders which would cost more, when instead they can put in a joint order, underwritten by the EU, that allows them to buy equipment at a discount.
Equally, the EU could play more of a role akin to DARPA in the US, underwriting risky development projects. We have seen from the conflict in Ukraine how drone warfare has reshaped the battlefield, with Ukrainians having to adapt and develop new equipment on a shorter development cycle than we have seen before, and yet Europe is far behind. We must start taking much greater risks in imagining what new technology we may need in the future to face the threat from Russia, China, or other adversaries.
Finally, I believe there is value in the EU helping to update infrastructure for dual-use purposes – ensuring that motorway bridges can support the weight of armoured vehicles, that train platforms are large enough to deliver logistics, that harbours are designed in a way that disembark large numbers of troops if needed. These aren’t cheap projects, and perhaps the EU can support Member States more in developing those kind of things.
What would realistically test NATO’s unity if Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the recent Middle East crises haven’t already?
Robert Tyler: The real test for NATO already started long before the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the war with Iran in the Middle East. It started about two decades ago when the KGB turned into the FSB and GRU, and Russia began to refocus its efforts on hybrid warfare in Europe. The signs of this have been in plain sight for a long time, but people perhaps haven’t taken them seriously enough — dissidents murdered in major capitals, political campaigns meddled with, fringe groups given an elevated platform on Russian-backed TV stations, migrants encouraged to cross illegally into Europe from Belarus and Russia. These kinds of things were happening back before Russia crossed into Ukraine, and since then they’ve been far more aggressive, bombing military depots, sabotaging infrastructure, and some of their assassinations have become more brazen and dangerous. Some member states are more exposed than others, and it’s hard not to argue that these actions should constitute an attack on our free societies. NATO so far has not acted openly against them, and it could be an argument that it’s time for NATO members to start responding in kind.
Of course, the problem isn’t just Russia; Iran as well has carried out a string of terror attacks across Europe. A few years ago, an Iranian cell in Germany was exposed that had been collecting details on Synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses, and even on Jewish primary schools — they were planning on attacking children. We need to be much more resilient and show a lot more solidarity as an Alliance.
President Trump, who was widely criticized for arguing that European allies were not paying their fair share for defense. Looking back, was he highlighting a genuine structural weakness within NATO? Has Europe fundamentally changed its defense posture since then, or does it still ultimately rely on long-term American security guarantees?
Robert Tyler: The Trump administration wasn’t wrong to criticise European Allies for their lack of preparedness. A large part of the problem stems from the naïve belief in the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War. Many European policy makers became complacent, believing that with the end of communism in Central and Eastern Europe there would be no threat to our western way of life. As a result, policy makers in the West failed to see why defence mattered. European conventional armed forces numbers decreased, defence industrial capacity was hollowed out, and citizens were led to believe that security was no longer a priority.
The first challenge to that came from 9/11 and the War on Terror; however, again Europe treated it more as something that happens somewhere else. Whilst there were terror attacks on European soil, they weren’t met with the same response that the US dealt to its adversaries. The Second challenge to the post-Cold War Consensus has come from Russia, as already stated.
However, all of this isn’t to say that the US doesn’t have a vital strategic interest in playing a role in Europe’s security infrastructure. The US, as one of the largest and most powerful democracies in the World, had a key role in the shaping of modern Europe, including in helping to set up the European Union itself; therefore, it has a responsibility to maintain the system of order it helped to establish. Every President until Obama understood that responsibility; however, since the late 2000s-early 2010s, both Republican and Democrat administrations have abdicated from this responsibility.
Who are Europe’s principal strategic challengers today — Russia, China, Iran, or perhaps even an increasingly unpredictable United States? Does Europe actually share a common understanding of the threats it faces, or do member states increasingly view the world through different strategic lenses?
Robert Tyler: I will address the last point first, which has been the primary problem with the EU’s ‘Common Foreign and Security Policy’ (CFSP) from the beginning. Within the EU, you have competing world views. If I am a policymaker from Central and Eastern Europe, my primary concern is Russia. If I am a policy maker from Greece or Cyprus its Turkey. If I’m from Spain or Portugal, it’s the Maghreb and Latin America. Different Member States have different histories and experiences that have helped to frame their foreign policy outlook. In political science, we call this a nation’s ‘Ontological Security’. So that is the problem of foreign policy-making at a European level: you will never truly have a unified position because you’re trying to reconcile 27 different positions. And on top of that there are internal variations when it comes to foreign policy inside Member States — you might have parties that are softer on Russia, or some that take a harder line on Iran than others, and so when they come to power foreign policy shifts.
From an external point of view, however, it is clear that Russia, China, and Iran all view the EU as their rival. And none of this is new; what’s new is that Western Europeans have finally started to listen to what these countries have to say about them. Russian and Iranian state media are visceral in their hatred of the West — every night the citizens of those countries are exposed to propaganda that demonises our way of life. The problem, in many ways, is that the West has realized too late. Thanks to figures like Angela Merkel, we were completely exposed to the risk of conflict with Russia and Iran by the fact that we imported our natural gas and oil from those two countries, instead of developing our own. And what’s worse is that because Germany had shut off its Nuclear Power, it has left the European energy market even more exposed.
The EU has experienced profound energy shocks over the past few years. What does a realistic path toward long-term European energy security look like? Is diversification sufficient, or does Europe need to rethink domestic production — including nuclear energy? More broadly, is energy primarily an economic challenge or a geopolitical vulnerability?
Robert Tyler: There are two very unpopular answers to this question: the first is nuclear power, the second is natural gas. The problem, of course, as always, is political will power. In the case of nuclear power, it is an expensive long-term investment. Nuclear power plants take a long time to construct, with costs running into the billions of Euros. Whilst with natural gas it is a question of shifting the narrative away from the one set by European Greens. By some estimates, the North Sea continental shelf still has around 100 years’ worth of natural gas that can be extracted at current rates. There are large untapped natural gas deposits off the coast of Cyprus, likewise of the coast of Italy and Poland. We have ways of capturing excess CO2 from burning gas, and it can be done in a much cleaner way than ever before. Likewise, extraction techniques in Europe are far more developed and less invasive than those in the rest of the world. It makes no sense to import natural gas from unreliable partners like Qatar, or hostile powers like Iran and Russia, when we sit on such rich deposits of our own. What needs to change is the mindset about what we do with our own critical materials.
Back in the nineteenth century, the declining Ottoman Empire became known as the “Sick Man of Europe.” Looking at today’s European Union — with demographic decline, low birth rates, sluggish economic growth, migration pressures, energy challenges and growing regulatory burdens — I can’t help but wonder whether that metaphor applies once again. Is that a fair comparison, and if so, which of these challenges poses the greatest long-term threat?
Robert Tyler: The European Union today is less like the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and more like the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth. That is to say that it is increasingly bureaucratic, lacking a coherent and unifying vision, and is being pulled apart by rising nationalism on the peripheries. The question then is how to avoid the same mistakes that led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire? Well, part of the answer is to return to a system of greater autonomy for EU member states. In The Constitution of Liberty, F. A. Hayek speaks in favour of competitive federalism, in which dispersed political power allowed for local communities to better govern themselves, whilst limiting the ability for one entity to centralise too much power. Hayek liked the Austrian Empire because it meant that many nationalities shared a common market and all lived under the same rule of law; the EU is itself moving away from that vision. If Europe is to survive, it needs to take the principle of subsidiarity seriously — never do at a higher level what can be done competently at a lower level — and return decision-making powers to the Member States.
To what extent are Europe’s institutions capable of addressing these challenges? Does the EU’s consensus-based decision-making strengthen Europe through cooperation, or does it make the Union too slow and fragmented to act as an effective geopolitical power? What would meaningful European renewal require?
Robert Tyler: The fact is that the EU needs to take a moment of introspection and decide whether it wants to do a lot of things poorly, or whether it would like to do a few things very well. A slogan used in conservative circles in Brussels is that we want a Europe that does less but better. If the EU were to take more time focusing on completing the single market or in pursuing more international free trade agreements, it would be in a much stronger position. Trade is the EU’s greatest foreign policy tool in its arsenal. The question then is what else should it be doing from a foreign policy perspective?
Sanctions, for example, are something that the EU has focused on, but they take too long to negotiate, and by the time they’re implemented, they’re redundant. Military aid? Again, given how long it took the EU to find funding for arms for Ukraine, member states did it much faster on their own.
The question isn’t about what kind of decision-making process the EU uses; it’s a question of whether it is even possible to get 27 nations with very different world views to align in a timely manner, and for the most part the answer has been no. It is far better to allow nations to cooperate with one another
How should Europe think about China today? Is the relationship still primarily one of economic interdependence, or has it become a strategic vulnerability? How should Europe balance economic interests with security concerns?
Robert Tyler: For the first part of the twenty-first century, there was this view that China could be somehow changed through the introduction of a market-based system. The argument was that a free market would create a vibrant middle class that would naturally gravitate towards democracy, as was happening in many other post-communist countries. And so, China was let into the WTO and other international institutions. The problem is that everyone underestimated how much the Chinese Communist Party was willing to exploit the marketisation of their economy. Rather than a free-market capitalist system, China has ended up with a state-run corporatist system.
What does that mean for Europe? Well, in the first instance it means that we aren’t dealing with them on a level playing field economically. China, by virtue of the size of its population and the amount of raw materials it has, will always be able to undercut European manufacturing. It doesn’t follow the same environmental standards as us. It doesn’t have the same respect for intellectual property rights as us. And it doesn’t have a regard for the rule of law in the same way as us. So to consider China as some kind of equal economic partner is already wrong, because they won’t play by the same rules, and have developed a system to entirely undercut our ability to operate.
That’s just the economic side; you then have the question of other freedoms. As I’ve said before, China belongs to this axis of disruptive nations with Iran and Russia. From the start of the war in Ukraine and the war in Iran, China has been backing their partners both economically and materially. Equally, they have shown their support for left-wing narco regimes in Latin America, for the Islamist Taliban regime in Afghanistan, for proxies of Iran such as the Houthi in Yemen, or for corrupt dictators in Central Africa. Our continued dependence on China is partially funding their support for these regimes — so I think it is right that lawmakers are waking up to the reality that we are in a new Cold War with China.
Similarly to his NATO spending comments, President Trump was widely ridiculed when he spoke about Greenland. And yet, the Arctic is becoming increasingly important as ice melts, new shipping routes emerge, and great-power competition intensifies. Was he pointing to a genuine long-term strategic reality, even if his rhetoric overshadowed the message? More broadly, how important is the Arctic to become in the geopolitics of the twenty-first century?
Robert Tyler: As is often the case with Trump, he is not wrong about the symptom, but he is way off when it comes to the treatment. It is undeniable that the Arctic is a strategic blind spot for the West. I wrote a paper a few years ago where I talked about Arctic policy being a key area to watch in the coming decade, precisely because of what you have just mentioned. As you rightly point out, with ice caps receding, the North-East Passage is now navigable for more of the year, and it takes almost a month of the journey from China to Europe compared to going through the Suez Canal. But Russia has set up for itself a monopoly on traversing the route. They’ve passed laws similar to the US Jones Act that give preferential treatment to Russian-flagged vessels. And this isn’t just to the advantage of Russia; the regime there has signed deals with China to allow Chinese vessels to navigate the passage. So when Iranian proxies such as the Houthi start to threaten the southern access point to the Suez Canal through the Bab-el-Mandeb straits, China and Russia can simply switch shipping routes while the rest of the world has to navigate around the Southern tip of Africa.
But the US occupying Greenland doesn’t fix that, nor would the US occupying Svalbard or any other Arctic territory. What is needed is a stronger joint military presence in the region — working directly with partner countries such as Canada, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, and the UK. The US should make use of its pre-existing treaty with Denmark over hosting bases on Greenland and use them to host NATO joint operations to combat Russian and Chinese interference in the region.
We’ve spent much of this conversation discussing Europe’s challenges. Looking ahead twenty years, what would a successful European strategic model look like? And where do you think Europe still possesses underestimated strengths that give you reason for optimism?
Robert Tyler: At this stage it is hard to imagine what the world might look like in one year’s time, let alone twenty. But Europe does have a path towards making itself an important actor in the coming struggle; it just has to be willing to look beyond its own borders.
The emerging relationship between Canada and Europe is a good example, and European policy makers should look to find more allies like that in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, and other democracies that share our values. A rediscovery of free trade would be a good start, but also working on some of the other issues I’ve discussed, such as procurement and development.
For readers outside academia and foreign policy circles, what books best help make sense of Europe, geopolitics, and the changing international order?
Robert Tyler: There are so many good books out there at the moment, but as a historian by background I always find that it’s easier to understand the world by looking for patterns in the past. For example, if you wanted to understand hybrid warfare better, I would recommend Active Measures by Thomas Rid, or The Weaponisation of Everything by Mark Galeotti. To understand how we got to where we are with Russia, I would recommend The Road to Unfreedom by Timothy Snyder, or The New Cold War by Edward Lucas. To understand authoritarianism, I always turn to F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. I know they are somewhat of a cliché to add to a reading list at this point, but they were written within a year of each other and were both ahead of their time in warning of the risk of the Soviet Union and the self-absorption of authoritarian leadership.
I end every interview with the same question: how do we find freedom in an increasingly unfree world?
Robert Tyler: This is one of those questions that keeps me up at night, and I reflect on it a lot. The answer that I’ve found is this: we must not ever take the freedoms we already have for granted. And by that I don’t mean the big and intangible freedoms; I mean the small freedoms that we can enjoy in the West. I always use the example of going to a café as the perfect microcosm of what I call ‘trivial freedoms.’ I can decide right now to meet a friend at a café; we can meet safely, talk about whatever we want, and there will be no repercussions. Now think about how many places there are in the world where that is not possible, because authoritarian regimes track your movements or ban you from meeting, or where certain topics of discussion are off limits, or where what you spend money on is controlled. It is a privilege to be able to go and enjoy a cup of coffee. Just as it is a privilege to decide what we want to wear during the day, or what music we want to listen to, or where we would like to work, or who we would like to speak to, or what religion we want to practice. And so long as those small freedoms continue to exist, there is space to defend the bigger ones as well.