Transatlantic Security

The difficulty is it's [security guarantees] have been spoken of as an NATO Article 5 like arrangement, this is the one-for-all idea, but what's written on paper has to be backed up by a belief that actually the countries will deliver on this. It's not an automatic process. There will always be considerations about what type of forces to commit, when to commit them and in what way. And this is the difficulty, I think, for the Ukrainians, is can they trust Trump? Up until now, of course, the US has not been willing to commit forces. Before Trump, Biden made that clear as well. So the Ukrainians need to make a judgement call as to whether this is actually going to be not just in Trump's interest, but in long-term US Interests. And up to now, we haven't really seen that commitment from Washington."

Equivocation from Washington weakens deterrence, emboldens Moscow, and risks persuading soldiers on the ground that NATO no longer carries the saliency or seriousness it once did,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a defense and security think tank in London. “While the remarks change little for soldiers fighting in Ukraine,” he said, “strategically, they are deeply corrosive.”

Bleddyn Bowen, co-director of Durham University’s Space Research Centre and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank, said the Americans would struggle to exclude the Europeans from their GPS navigation system even if they wanted to, and the alternative service provided by Europe’s Galileo constellation was steadily improving. He is also hopeful about ICEYE, a Finnish firm that builds world-class microsatellites.