‘Keep on dreaming’: could Europe really defend itself without the US? | Europe

TNATO secretary general Mark Rutte was generally outspoken when he met with members of the European parliament this week. From the lectern in the blond wood committee room in Brussels, he said bluntly: “If anyone thinks that the European Union or Europe as a whole can defend itself without the United States, keep dreaming. You can’t. We can’t.”

And if Europe wants to replace the US nuclear deterrent, it will need to double its current spending commitments, he added: “Well, good luck!”

His comments angered some lawmakers. The former Dutch prime minister, who was ridiculed when he called Donald Trump “Dad”, had already irritated some lawmakers with his strong defense of the US president’s interest in the Arctic.

French foreign minister Jean-Noël Barrot rebuked Rutte on social media a day later: “Europeans can and must take responsibility for their own security. Even the United States agrees. This is the European leg of NATO.”

Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares has suggested a different approach: “We must move towards a European army,” he told reporters in Brussels this week, adding: “I am very aware that you do not do this from one day to the next.” He said Europe should have “all kinds of deterrence at our disposal: economic, political, security deterrence.”

But a European army has always raised more questions than answers. Is this an EU or a Europe-wide army? A brand new force commanded from Brussels, or a strengthened version of existing structures?

Sophia Besch, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, observed: “To supporters, this is too far-sighted a goal, to critics it is a symbol of overreach—and so vague that we never really need to discuss the details.”

But behind the discordant public tone lies a consensus that NATO’s European members must do their part. The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said this week that NATO needed to “become more European” to maintain its power. “Europe must step up,” he told an audience in the defense industry. “No great power in history has been able to survive without relying on outside help.”

The NATO alliance last year pledged to increase defense spending to 5% of national income by 2035. The EU, which includes 23 NATO countries among its 27 members, has launched a defense spending plan of 800 billion euros. So, after a long break from history, will Europe be able to take action again?

“The Europeans are moving in the right direction and they can do this,” former NATO deputy secretary-general Camille Grand told the Guardian. “It’s a matter of sustained effort over several years. It’s a matter of buying and acquiring the right set of capabilities to reduce their dependence on the United States,” said Grand, who is now secretary general of the European Aerospace, Security and Defense Industries Association.

Europe’s ability to stand on its own feet has no definitive launch date. “We cannot say that Europeans will be completely autonomous on January 1, 2030,” Grand said.

But the date is important because Europe must have a “credible deterrent” to repel potential invaders by 2030, say policymakers responding to security services’ warnings of a possible Russian attack.

From the perspective of military planners, 2030 is “tomorrow” but Europe could make “significant progress” in acquiring stronger capabilities across the spectrum of “strategic enablers” by then, Grand said.

This represents a mixed bag of critical capabilities dominated by the United States, such as intelligence, satellites, long-range missiles, airlift and ballistic missile defense. Grand said Europe probably “won’t tick every box by 2030” but “we can make significant progress.” However, he added that Europe’s need for some American assets after 2030 would require “an honest discussion with the United States.”

However, Trump’s threats over Greenland and hot-cold support for Ukraine, often pointing to Russian talking points, have led to questioning Washington’s commitment to the crisis.

Tobias Billström, Sweden’s former foreign minister who helped negotiate his country’s accession to NATO, remains confident that the United States will come to Europe’s aid if Article 5, the collective defense clause, is invoked. He noted that the United States benefits from NATO, citing the location and military capabilities of Arctic members such as Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland.

Billström, who now works for Nordic Air Defense, a startup developing low-cost drone interceptors, said Europe must be ready to defend itself in the coming years. “Whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will graphically be where it is. It will be vindictive. It will focus on hybrid actions. It wants to stir up trouble. It will have a very, very clear incentive to be aggressive against us for the foreseeable future.”

Not everyone is so confident about US guarantees. Besch, a defense expert at the Carnegie Center in Washington, thinks trust has been lost. “I don’t think there is much illusion that European policymakers can now rely on US security guarantees.”

He argued that Europe needed to break away from decades-old habits in defining its defense interests. He said Europe’s capability planning (‘what we buy and what we develop’) was derived from NATO’s regional capability plans, which still relied on a significant contribution from the United States.

“The risk of what I believe is happening now is that we’re all going to spend huge amounts of money, and we won’t actually be much more independent from the United States in 10 to 15 years because that money is not being spent in a coordinated and directed way to replace U.S. enablers.”

Money alone is not the solution to Europe’s defense weakness, as evidenced by the troubled €100 billion Franco-German fighter jet project beset by discord and mistrust among developers. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz stated that the project could be implemented this week. scaled down to common systemswithout plane. A fighter jet system without a fighter jet would be an emblem of European defense for all the wrong reasons.

Meanwhile, Europe has long struggled to consolidate defense spending, meaning costly duplication and a hodgepodge of disparate systems that hinder effectiveness on the battlefield. For example, EU countries provided Ukraine with 10 different types of howitzers capable of firing 155 mm rounds, according to a report by former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi; this situation “creates serious logistical difficulties for the Ukrainian armed forces”. Giving another example of fragmentation, Draghi noted that EU member states operate 12 different types of battle tanks, while the USA uses one of them.

According to Besch, the problem goes deeper than national industrial rivalries. “The key question here is who is Europe, what is Europe, and then what are we actually trying to do?… If our standard for success is to replace everything the United States is doing now with European capabilities, militaries, enablers, etc., we are bound to fail,” he said.

He said Europe needs to figure out how to protect its own strategic interests, such as a European version of nuclear deterrence or interests in regions from the Arctic to the Pacific, which could mean “cheaper, faster” systems.

“My fear is that without them we’re still stuck in the debate of ‘Can we replace the United States’ instead of deciding what we’re actually trying to do?”