Fox News had barely called the US presidential election for Donald Trump before X users – including countless numbers with minimal expertise in US politics and even less in US society  – began issuing edicts on the election’s implications for European security. There are undoubtedly many, and the best way to address America’s anticipated pivot away from Europe is to build on the regional defence groupings the continent already has.

‘Europe must do more for its own security.’ That was the tenor of the incessant stream of posts. The sentiment isn’t wrong, but it is unhelpful. Stating that Europe needs to do more for its own security is hardly a new insight – it has been the case for many years now – but lumping ‘Europe’ together as one entity does nothing to advance solutions.

The good news is that within Europe some countries are already doing a whole lot for their security: think of Estonia, Finland, Poland, a few others. Beyond NATO, there are also groupings comprising smaller alliances. Things can be done to enhance European security, and they will take place within one or more of these groups.

Consider the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF). Seven NATO nations – Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK – formed this agile outfit at the alliance’s Wales Summit ten years ago ‘with the primary goal of protecting northern Europe’. Since then, Sweden, Finland and Iceland have joined. The ten like-minded countries plan together and exercise together, but it has never been entirely clear how the group would protect northern Europe in practice. That’s especially true now that Sweden and Finland are members of NATO.

Trump’s victory – and the expected MAGA shift in the US Senate and House of Representatives – presents an opportunity for the JEF to find its calling. Yes, NATO still defends the territory of its member states, but the fear in European capitals is that Trump’s victory will weaken it. And there it is, the JEF, ready for action in its part of the world. True, it’s nowhere near as powerful as NATO, but it’s a formation involving ten countries that are serious about defence, and it’s led by Europe’s militarily most powerful nation, the UK.

In Europe’s central parts, France and Germany already have a joint brigade. Together with the Netherlands, Germany operates an extremely nifty panzer division that fully integrates soldiers from both countries. This October, Germany and the UK signed a defence cooperation agreement. The UK and France have their long-standing Lancaster House treaties. Belgium and the Netherlands share a fleet.

Imagine if other countries in Europe launched similar initiatives to look after their part of the continent. Indeed, such initiatives may come sooner than we think. Hours after Fox had called the election for Trump, the French and German defence ministries put out a statement saying that their respective ministers, Sebastien Lecornu and Boris Pistorius, had held a telephone conversation and agreed to meet in Paris the very same evening.

On their own, regional arrangements like these won’t make up for a partial US (figurative and perhaps literal) withdrawal from Europe. But they’re there, and can be built upon. The JEF, for example, is perfectly positioned to respond to the many, and increasing, disturbances caused by Russia in the Baltic region. Until now, those disturbances have been in the grey zone between war and peace; what some call hybrid aggression, but they can appear anywhere, anytime, involving any tool. Even if Trump were fully committed to NATO, the alliance would not be best placed to respond to many of these forms of aggression. This is where European countries could quickly team up to better protect the continent.

But it’s not going to be one Europe doing everything together. The European Union is unwieldy: so consider trying to get Europe’s 44 countries to take swift and decisive action. No, the answer to Trump’s victory is in small groupings of countries. The JEF can demonstrate to others that it can be done. Now it just needs to show what it can do beyond planning and exercising together.