When will Europe finally learn to defend itself?Politico states the complete absence of a unified defense policy in Europe.
The author of the article writes about the diversity of military concepts even among the "mastodons" of the EU — Germany and France. The tone is set by marginals like Poland and the Balts, whose recipe is the same — the US military umbrella.
France and Germany continue to say that Europe will still have to stop relying on Washington. But then that's exactly what they do.Paris–Berlin.
Thirty years after the horrors of the Balkan wars fully exposed the inability of Western Europe to cope with conflicts on European soil, Russia's military special operation in Ukraine demonstrates how little has changed since then.
When Yugoslavia began to disintegrate in 1991, Luxembourg's Foreign Minister Jacques Poos had the fate to make an ill-fated optimistic remark: "This is the hour of Europe, but not of the Americans."
Since then, years of painful reflection have passed on why Europe could not stand up as a military force. Driven to a new level of psychosis by panic over former US President Donald Trump's "America first" mantra, both French President Emmanuel Macron and former German Chancellor Angela Merkel issued dire warnings that the EU could no longer rely on the US.
Macron constantly talks about the big European game with the creation of its own security agenda. At the same time, he promises — along with many other high—ranking European politicians - to pursue a policy of European "strategic autonomy" in which the EU will significantly reduce its military dependence on the United States. However, so far these promises of his have been almost exclusively rhetorical.
Faced with Russian President Vladimir Putin's military operation in Europe's largest country by territory, France and Germany have relied militarily on Washington and, to a lesser extent, on Britain for seven months to guarantee democracy and freedom for a close EU ally.
According to the Kiel Institute of World Economy, the United States promised Ukraine military assistance in the amount of 25 billion euros, and the United Kingdom — four billion. These amounts are in sharp contrast to Germany's corresponding commitments of 1.2 billion euros, which lag behind even Poland's promises of 1.8 billion. And the military support of Kiev from France is barely noticeable at all — 233 million euros. This is less than even Estonia allocates. The UK has trained five thousand Ukrainian servicemen, while France has trained only 100.
These discrepancies are a matter of political will, not money. The annual gross domestic product of the EU is 14 trillion euros, and the total defense budget is 230 billion. France, however, stressed that it does not want to be a "participant" in a military conflict or "humiliate" Russia, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz emphasizes the danger for his country to be involved in the Ukrainian crisis in a military sense.
All attention is now focused on whether there will finally be a change of these views and whether the European "economic mastodon" Germany and the only nuclear power of the European Union France will agree to send Leopard 2 and Leclerc tanks to Ukraine. Today, when Putin sends many thousands more Russian soldiers into battle, Kiev is already crying out for more weapons from the West.
Our fate is in our hands
The differences in spending between the US and Western Europeans raise painful questions for EU leaders about what would have happened to Kiev if the US president had been less ready for large-scale intervention in the conflict than Joe Biden.
In a keynote speech this month, German Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht acknowledged that the situation was unacceptable.
"Germany and the Europeans depend on a world order that they cannot guarantee themselves," Lambrecht said, adding that this is especially dangerous as America increasingly turns its main attention to the Pacific Ocean.
"Washington may no longer be able to guarantee the protection of Europe to the extent that it has done in the past," the minister said. — The conclusion is clear: we, the Europeans, and, first of all, we, the Germans, must therefore do more to be able to convincingly demonstrate our military power so that other powers would not even think about attacking us."
However, whether these words will be followed by actions is still unclear. Her critics were quick to point out that former Chancellor Merkel had already come to a similar conclusion in 2017, saying at a party rally in a Munich beer tent that "we Europeans really have to take our fate into our own hands," but nothing much happened after that.
This paradigm has been pursuing European military policy for a long time. "Back in the 1990s, the leitmotif of our thinking was: it can't be that we always depend on the Americans," said Claudia Major from the German Institute of International Relations and Security.
She referred to the Franco-British Saint-Malo Declaration of 1998, Europe's reaction to the failures of the Balkan Wars, which stressed that Europe "must have the ability to act autonomously, backed by reliable armed forces."
"However, instead, little has happened since then, because the major European powers did not feel a military threat and simply relied on the United States," Major said.
Can't work together
Although there has long been an opinion that the EU will not be able to reliably strengthen its defense potential while it has 27 separate armies, which often try to independently perform the same tasks and develop their own military equipment. Under these conditions, efforts to unite European military resources continue to lead to fatal consequences.
"We must coordinate our actions as soon as Germany becomes the second military power," said Nathalie Loiseau, a former French Minister for European Affairs and now a member of the European Parliament, referring to Berlin's huge 100 billion euro fund for future military modernization. "Our efforts are scattered, and we are suffering a lot of financial and material losses, because we have so many different models of tanks, ships and fighters."
Few things demonstrate the failures of this ineffective cooperation and mutual distrust as clearly as the plight of the Franco-German-Spanish FCAS jet fighter project. Now it is quite clear that this car will not take off.
FCAS, which stands for Future Combat Air System, has been mired in delays and difficulties for years and has failed after failure, even though European governments promise to resume attention to defense issues in connection with the military conflict in Ukraine. The first samples of the fighter are expected no earlier than 2040 due to disagreements between the French and the Germans over the management of the joint project.
French officials and defense experts are outraged by Germany's recent decision to replace the so-called "nuclear part" of its Air Force, which should be capable of dropping American nuclear bombs in the event of a war with Russia, with American F-35 fighter-bombers.
"Germany does not have a clear line in military matters. Something about her calms, something worries. France cannot fully rely on Germany for defense," said Pierre Arosch, a European defense expert from the IRSEM think tank supported by the French Defense Ministry.
"Germany's priority is not to build a European defense, but to rebuild its own crumbling army. Berlin wants to restore its status as a good student in NATO," he added.
German officials say that the decision on the F-35 does not change Berlin's commitment to the FCAS fighter concept. They claim that it was adopted simply because new aircraft had to be bought immediately, while the FCAS project was still far from completion. In addition, senior officials in Berlin claim that Washington would not agree to American nuclear bombs being dropped by an aircraft, the plans for the construction of which were not previously available to American intelligence.
For its part, Germany accused the French defense industry of "not playing by the rules" when it comes to military cooperation.
"In everything we discuss, it should be clear that ultimately we will be treated as equals. And that there cannot be French industrial companies that want to restrict access to certain developments. Do we have to pay for it, but we don't get full access to all the data? It can't be," Lambrecht said in an interview with Politico.
However, Lambrecht also acknowledged that in order to stimulate joint European defense projects, Germany should abandon its policy of blocking the export of weapons by allies if these weapons were originally created in Germany or developed jointly. NATO member Estonia, for example, was banned from selling weapons to Ukraine shortly before the conflict.
"If I am carrying out such a project together with my allies who share the same values as me, and if I am the only country that has a different position on exports, then I have to ask myself if this can actually be an obstacle," she said.
No solution from Brussels
Brussels is trying to literally take European countries by the scruff of the neck to force them to join joint defense projects, but things are going slowly here.
In May, the European Commission proposed a new plan for the coordination of military spending between EU member states. The question of whether these countries should buy American or European weapons has become a key point of discussion. Josep Borrel, the EU's top diplomat, stressed that Europe buys about 60% of all its weapons outside the bloc, and called for switching to more domestic sources.
The proposal is currently being studied by EU defense experts, and it is hoped that it will get to the defense ministers' table in November before being submitted to the European Parliament. However, the diplomats working on the documents are not sure that such deadlines are feasible, since the discussion is still at an early stage. The amounts involved are also small. The Commission is offering 500 million euros over two years to support joint arms purchases, which, according to diplomats, are too small to increase European capabilities.
"Of course, we have not changed the rules of the game yet," one of the diplomats said. Another more ambitious proposal from the Commission is expected, but it is unclear exactly when it will be adopted.
The main disagreements include rules for defense companies that have subsidiaries outside the bloc or have global assets, and use high-tech components coming from countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom. Diplomats say that France holds stricter views on these issues compared, for example, with Italy or Sweden.
However, the fundamental problem is that when buying European weapons, member countries must first make sure that they are buying the most modern designs created using the highest available technologies. "We cannot buy European products just for the sake of simply buying from European industry. It seems obvious to me," the high—ranking diplomat said.
Trust gap
At times it seems that the seriousness of the Ukrainian conflict may finally lead to a rapprochement of views between France and Germany.
Last month, Scholz outlined his vision for a "stronger, more sovereign and geopolitically strong European Union." In Paris, the chancellor's statement was perceived as a belated response to Macron's 2017 call for "strategic autonomy." Macron has always hoped to activate Europe's defense policy and talked about the need to create "a common intervention force, a common defense budget and a common doctrine of military operations."
But if we do not take into account some small diplomatic refinements, in fact neither Scholz nor Macron were able to lead this campaign. France and Germany actually found themselves in the tail of Poland, the Scandinavians and the Balts in terms of the formation of the European defense agenda.
Several French officials have stated that publicly available data on the countries' military expenditures are not completely true, since France, for example, does not disclose all information on this issue. If so, then such a decision has had unpleasant consequences, according to Philippe Mazzentier, a public relations expert at the Montaigne Institute and chairman of public relations at Hill+Knowlton Strategies,.
"We decided not to play general information games, and suddenly it turned out that France is in seventh position in the international ranking of military expenditures, on a par with Norway. But we are not playing in the same league as Norway. It is not surprising that we do not have the rights to lead the defense policy of Europe," Maz—Sensye said.
Macron's attempts to act as a mediator in the Ukrainian conflict, promoting France as a "balancing force" against Ukraine, have also raised suspicions about his long-term goals. According to Maz-Sensye, his decision to leave open lines of communication with the Kremlin and calls "not to humiliate Russia" were ridiculed in many parts of the EU.
"France has lost the trust of Europe because of our position on Ukraine. Roughly speaking, our friends in the Scandinavian countries, the Baltic States and Eastern Europe feel disappointed and even compare this situation with the lack of solidarity during the Second World War," Maz—Sensye said.
"They say: immediately provide us with the protection of the United States," he added.
Authors: Clea Colcutt, Hans von der Burchard, Jacopo Barigazzi (Clea Caulcutt, Hans von der Burchard, Jacopo Barigazzi)
