Europe Mulls What Mutual Defense Looks Like Outside NATO

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Europe Mulls What Mutual Defense Looks Like Outside NATO

European Union nations have a little-known obligation to protect one another. Experts caution it is no replacement for NATO.

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A meeting of NATO defense ministers at the group’s headquarters in Brussels in February. Europe is reconsidering its options for collective defense, as President Trump continues to threaten to leave the NATO alliance.

Credit...

John Thys/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

By

Steven Erlanger

and

Jeanna Smialek

Steven Erlanger covers European security and diplomacy and reported from Berlin. Jeanna Smialek covers the European Union from Brussels.

April 24, 2026,

12:01 a.m. ET

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Europeans have increasing doubts that President Trump remains committed to the NATO alliance and the mutual defense it ensures. And so they are talking more seriously about their own little-known guarantee for collective defense, an article buried in the European Union’s governing documents.

Long dismissed by many as unworkable and even unnecessary given the well-established NATO alliance,

Article 42.7

of the E.U.’s

Treaty of Lisbon

obliges member states to provide military, humanitarian and financial aid to other members in case of attack. Meant to complement NATO, it has been used only once, when France invoked it after the November 2015 terrorist attacks in and around Paris.

But with Mr. Trump intermittently threatening to leave NATO over member countries’ refusal to support the war in Iran, this moment is profoundly reshaping both the alliance and the European Union, said Camille Grand, a former NATO official who is the secretary general of ASD Europe, a trade association for defense industries.

He said the Trump administration’s evolving position “creates the need to defend Europe with less America.”

As E.U. leaders gathered for an informal meeting in Cyprus this week, their agenda included a discussion of the Lisbon Treaty provision. They plan to conduct an exercise next month, when senior diplomats who deal with security matters will think through how it might work in practice.

Radoslaw Sikorski, Poland’s foreign minister and former defense minister, is skeptical that it would work very well.

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