President Trump’s choice of running mate is sparking a new wave of European anxiety about “weakened security ties” if the GOP candidate wins a second term, the Financial Times reports. “The American security blanket,” Senator Vance grouses, “has allowed European security to atrophy.” It’s gotten so that the Europeans are, in their alarm, contemplating drastic measures: rebuilding their own anemic militaries. Is that such an all-fired terrible prospect?

It’s not that the Europeans can’t tell which way the wind is blowing. “We understand what it means if Trump comes back as a second-term president,” one European Union diplomat told the BBC, “regardless of his running mate.” So continental leaders have been plotting, the Times reports, “to restore more credibility” as far as their military “deterrence against Russia.” There’s just one problem, per the Times: “Nothing happens without money.”

With the Europeans fretting over “a window of three to seven years” before a resurgent Russia could threaten them, the Times wonders, will our allies across the pond cough up the spondulix they need to “reduce their dependency on the United States for their own defense”? The signs are, so far, not all that promising. Of the 32 members of the North Atlantic Treaty, but two-thirds are on track even to meet their vow to spend 2 percent of GDP a year on defense. 

That leaves a third of the alliance not pulling its weight — never mind meeting the continent’s own military needs. As the outgoing NATO secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, reminds, spending 2 percent on defense “is a floor, not a ceiling.” Neither France, nor Britain, nor Germany have pledged to spend that much “in the long term,” the Times warns, even “while 2.5 percent or even 3 percent is what European defense really needs.” 

It’s no wonder NATO officials have long derided the once-mighty militaries of Europe as “bonsai armies.” The armed forces of Britain and Denmark, one ex-Department of Defense official says, “would not be able to sustain intense combat for more than a couple of weeks.” Germany, despite big talk after Russia invaded Ukraine, has fallen short on its ambitions, the Times says, as a $7.25 billion defense budget boost was pared by lawmakers to but $1.3 billion.

One European nation that grasps the urgency of the moment, and is responding to it constructively, is Poland. Faced with “the threat from Russia and its satellite Belarus,” our James Brooke reports, Warsaw will next year spend 5 percent of GDP on defense, “the highest portion of the 32 NATO member countries.” The idea is to build “Europe’s largest land army” — the kind of deterrent force, one imagines, that Trump and Mr. Vance envision for Europe.

Poland could yet inspire the other nations of Europe by the example of its self-sufficiency. While the continent groans under waves of migration that the EU superstate seems unable to prevent, in part due to lax border controls, Poland, Mr. Brooke writes, has just voted to allow its military to defend its frontiers with live ammunition. What a contrast with the French left, which proposes to send boats out to meet migrants at sea for a “respectful welcome.” 

If the rest of Europe follows Poland’s lead it could assuage Trump’s concerns about footing the bill for our allies’ defense. That, though, could prove to be a, as it were, double-edged sword. After all, a Europe that no longer relies on America as its “security blanket” would also feel freer to set its own agenda on the global stage. In that event, would an emboldened, rearmed Europe remain content to follow Washington’s lead on foreign policy?