Europe in 2025 is walking a tightrope: It is the site of a major conflict between Russia and Ukraine, it is juggling its own autonomy while maintaining its special relationship with the power that is the United States, and it is working out how to ride the AI wave while keeping the technology in check. <\/p>\n
Leaders of Europe have tough choices ahead warned Croatia\u2019s former president, Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovi\u0107, on stage at Fortune Global Forum in Riyadh this weekend. Their decisions during this \u201cinflection point,\u201d she said, will determine whether the region sinks or swims.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the moment of taking existential choices that are ahead of us,\u201d Grabar-Kitarovi\u0107 said. Those choices \u201cwill determine whether Europe will continue and build itself as a global player or it will become a geopolitical playground.\u201d <\/p>\n
Those factors are well known. Grabar-Kitarovi\u0107, who led the Croatian nation between 2015 and 2020, said for \u201cway too long\u201d Europe has been overly dependent on its relationship with the U.S. for its security and defense needs. <\/p>\n
\u201cI witnessed personally the very famous moment at the NATO summit in 2018 when President Trump threatened to walk out, and I have to say that I fully agree with what he said at the time,\u201d she added. <\/p>\n
She explained: \u201cHe said: \u2018How do you expect me to go back to America and justify to the American people why the United States is spending billions of dollars on European defense, whereas Europe is not living up to its commitments to spend, at the time, 2% of the GDP, when Europe is paying billions of dollars for cheap Russian gas and energy?’\u201d <\/p>\n
Trump has threatened to withdraw from NATO on several occasions, but the U.S. is yet to step back from the alliance. Upon his return to the White House this year, President Trump increased <\/a>focus on what European nations were spending on defense and called for raising the 2% GDP commitment to defense spending.<\/p>\n His request was granted: In June this year, The Hague announced that its allies had committed \u201cto invest 5% of GDP annually on core defense requirements as well as defense-and security-related spending by 2035 to ensure our individual and collective obligations.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the seven-year delay between the call from Trump and action from NATO should have been swifter, said Grabar-Kitarovi\u0107. The 2018 threat \u201cshould have been a wake-up call\u201d she explained: \u201cHowever, we spent the years in-between the two Trump mandates discussing mostly how we\u2019re going to Trump-proof the relationship if it comes back\u2014and we knew he was going to come back with a vengeance. So what we should have done is to actually prove it with the measures and action that are aimed at providing for our own defense.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n