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

Original article by Jennifer Rankin in Brussels

The Nato secretary general, Mark Rutte, was typically blunt when he met members of the European parliament this week. From the dais of the blond-wood committee room in Brussels, he was clear: “If anyone thinks that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming. You can’t. We can’t.”

And if Europe wanted to supplant the US nuclear deterrent, existing spending commitments would have to double, he added – “so hey, good luck!”

His comments left some MEPs fuming. The former Dutch prime minister – who provoked mockery when he called Donald Trump “Daddy” – had already irritated some deputies with his robust defence of the US president’s interest in the Arctic.

France’s foreign minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, chided Rutte a day later on social media: “Europeans can and must take charge of their own security. Even the United States agrees. It is the European pillar of Nato.”

Spain’s foreign minister, José Manuel Albares, suggested a different approach: “We must go for a ​European army,” he told reporters in Brussels this week, adding, “I’m very much aware that you don’t do that from one day to ​another”. Europe, he said, needed “all sort​s of deterrence – economic, political, security deterrence – in our hands”.

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

Sophia Besch, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, observed: “To supporters, it is a very visionary goal, and then to critics it is the symbol of overreach – and it’s just vague enough that we never have to really discuss details.”

Behind the discordant public tones, however, lies a consensus that Nato’s European members need to pull their weight. Nato must “become more European” to maintain its strength, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said this week. “Europe must step up,” she told a defence industry audience. “No great power in history has ever outsourced its survival and survived.”

The Nato alliance last year pledged to increase defence spending to 5% national income by 2035. The EU, which includes 23 Nato countries among its 27 members, has embarked on an €800bn defence spending plan. But after a long holiday from history, can Europe get its act together?

“The Europeans are moving in the right direction and can do it,” Camille Grand, a former Nato assistant secretary-general, told the Guardian. “It is a matter of a sustained effort over a few years. It is a matter of buying and acquiring the right set of capabilities to reduce their dependency on the US,” said Grand, now secretary general of the Aerospace, Security and Defence Industries Association for Europe.

Europe’s ability to stand on its own two feet does not have a precise launch date. “It is not as if we could say on the 1st of January 2030: the Europeans will be completely autonomous,” Grand said.

But the date matters because policymakers, responding to warnings from the security services about a possible Russian attack, say Europe should have “credible deterrence” to put off potential invaders by 2030.

From the point of view of military planners, 2030 is “tomorrow”, said Grand, but Europe could achieve “significant progress” by then in acquiring stronger capabilities across a swathe of “strategic enablers”.

This refers to a mixed bag of critical capabilities where the US dominates, such as intelligence, satellites, long-range missiles, airlift and ballistic missile defence. Europe probably would not “tick every single box by 2030” but “we can achieve significant progress”, Grand said. Although, he added, it would also require an “honest conversation with the US” that Europe would need some American assets beyond 2030.

But Trump’s threats over Greenland and hot-cold support for Ukraine that often tips into Russian talking points, have called into question Washington’s commitment in a crisis.

Tobias Billström, a former foreign minister of Sweden who helped negotiate his country’s Nato entry, retains confidence that the US would come to Europe’s aid if the collective defence clause, article 5, was triggered. He pointed out the US benefitted from Nato, citing the location and military capabilities of Arctic members, such as Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland.

Billström, who now works for Nordic Air Defence, a startup developing low-cost drone interceptors, said Europe would have to be ready to defend itself for years to come. “Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be, graphically, where it is. It will be revanchistic. It will be set on hybrid actions. It wants to disrupt. It’s going to have a very, very clear incentive to be aggressive against us for a foreseeable future.”

Not everyone is so sure about US guarantees. Besch, the defence expert at the Carnegie centre in Washington, thinks trust has gone. “I don’t think that there is very much illusion among any European policymakers now that they can trust in US security guarantees.”

Europe, she suggested, had to shake off decades-old habits about defining its defence interests. Europe’s capability planning – “what we buy and what we develop” – is derived from Nato’s regional capability plans, which still rely on a substantive contribution from the US, she said.

“The risk of what I believe is happening right now, is that we’re all spending huge amounts of money and will not actually be much more independent from the US in 10 to 15 years’ time, because that money is not being spent in a coordinated and directed way to actually replace these US enablers.”

Money alone is not the answer to Europe’s defence weakness, as illustrated by the troubled €100bn Franco-German fighter jet project, beset by disagreement and mistrust between the developers. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, indicated this week that the project could be scaled down to joint systems, without an aircraft. A fighter-jet system without a fighter jet would be an emblem of European defence for all the wrong reasons.

Meanwhile, Europe has long struggled to join up its defence spending, meaning costly duplication and a mishmash of different systems that hinder effectiveness on the battlefield. EU countries, for instance, have provided 10 different types of howitzer capable of firing 155mm shells to Ukraine “creating serious logistical difficulties for Ukraine’s armed forces”, according to a report by the former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi. In another example of fragmentation, Draghi noted EU member states operated 12 different types of battle tanks, while the US used one.

For Besch, the problem runs 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 US does now with European capabilities, militaries, enablers etc, we are bound to fail,” she said.

Europe, she said, needed to figure out its own strategic interests, for instance a European version of nuclear deterrence or how to safeguard its interests in regions from the Arctic to the Pacific, which could mean “cheaper, faster” systems.

“My fear is that we are still caught up in this conversation around ‘can we replace the US’, rather than trying to decide what are we actually trying to do without them.”