The United States needs militarily strong European allies that are capable of holding Europe’s frontiers in the east and south against the threats of an imperial Russia and unstable North Africa.
Successive U.S. administrations have called on European allies to do more for their own defense, including higher spending, improved capabilities, and more serious deterrence. These entreaties have been met with some positive responses, especially among NATO’s eastern frontier states, including Poland, Finland, and the Baltic countries. Most other European governments, however, continue to drag their heels. Europe’s largest economy, Germany, is already backtracking from the military upgrade it promised after Russia’s attack on Ukraine in 2022. There is a large and widening gap between the Europeans’ rhetoric of opposing Russia’s territorial ambitions and their ability to actually do something about it.
One much-discussed solution to these lagging efforts is for the European Union to take on a bigger security role. By pooling resources, centralizing defense procurement, and setting a common strategy, the EU would solve the problem of the various member states not pulling their weight on defense. Some even see this as culminating in the creation of a joint European military. The EU would thus adopt the ultimate marker of a modern polity: the provision and management of national security.
But the desire for more Europe in military affairs is unlikely to boost European security. On the contrary, it may be detrimental to it for two reasons. First, there is no shared threat assessment among the EU’s 27 member states. Widely divergent views on the ends and means of security policy would inevitably produce a series of watered-down compromises or an ineffective spread of resources across 27 sets of objectives, which is the usual way that Brussels works. Second, even if the EU did manage to run a serious defense policy, there is no guarantee that it would be robust in its opposition to Russia and other revisionist powers. A closer union that incorporates defense may thus be incompatible with improved security on the continent.
The absence of a common threat assessment in Europe is neither new nor surprising. Rome is concerned about migration from North Africa, whereas Warsaw is focused on the Russian menace. Paris has interests in sub-Saharan Africa that Berlin does not share. Even if states see eye to eye on the threats—which they usually don’t—they may take opposite views on how to prioritize or address them. There is no way around these profound differences, no matter how efficient EU institutions become. The perception of threats will remain very diverse for the simple facts of geography, history, domestic politics, and a host of other reasons.
European officials may speak of solidarity among member states, but this in itself is an admission of the transactional nature of EU policy. Deep differences in security outlook can only be mitigated by charitable offerings or exchanges: France may help Poland militarily in exchange for Warsaw’s acceptance of African migrants, or Germany may aid Italy in stabilizing the Southern Mediterranean for continued Italian support for the eurozone. But these are tenuous, contingent exchanges that are unlikely to hold in the case of a dramatic collapse of security.
As a result of these deeply divergent priorities—not just in foreign policy—the EU has formulated a series of nebulous, trendy, even fantastical policy goals that assume a continent at peace and plentiful funds to pursue a smorgasbord of lavish aspirations. For example, the first priority of the European Commission for the past few years has been the European Green Deal, a wildly expensive and economically risky project to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 with “no person and no place left behind.”
The other five priorities are hardly more attuned to achieving regional or global security: “A Europe fit for the digital age,” “An economy that works for people,” “A stronger Europe in the world,” “Promoting our European way of life,” “A new push for European democracy.” Such a catalogue of motherhood and apple pie reflects the lowest common denominator among the EU’s 27 members. Even the goal of a “stronger Europe” is nebulous and impractical—a long laundry list of lofty ambitions with little strategic focus and too few resources to back them up. The list provides no real hope that the EU as an institution will get serious about hard-power threats to the continent.
The other reason why elevating the European Union to a security actor would be detrimental to the continent’s stability is that some of the EU’s individual member states could push the entire bloc to pursue a grand strategy of appeasement.
Germany—with its long history of mercantilism, naïve notions of “change through trade,” and a penchant for ignoring Russia’s smaller neighbors—likely prefers continued engagement to competition with rivals. Even if French President Emmanuel Macron has recently adopted a surprisingly hard line toward Russia, France has an even longer tradition of engaging Russia in a concert-of-powers approach. Berlin, Paris, and their supporters in the EU could blame conflict with Moscow on the supposedly bellicose nature of Europe’s front-line states rather than Russia’s resurgent imperial ambitions.
An EU-wide security policy could thus end up being less than the sum of its 27 parts—by giving a potential pro-appeasement bloc the power to veto the Central and Eastern European countries favoring more robust defense.
So far, the signs are not encouraging. Since the Russian invasion, the EU has undoubtedly managed to free up some funds for training Ukrainian soldiers and purchasing weapons, the first time that the bloc has armed a country at war. But the step from these small actions to becoming a significant security actor is a huge one, and it presumes a coherence of strategic vision and persistence of policy that can be achieved at the EU level only by centralizing decision-making and silencing dissenting national views.
Bluntly, even if the EU undertakes a serious defense and security policy, it may not pursue what is actually needed to deter and defeat Russian imperialism or to stabilize the wider Mediterranean area. Instead of an Atlantic Europe, a geopolitical EU could well drift toward closer association with Russia and China.
The greatest threat to the trans-Atlantic relationship is therefore not that Washington will be less supportive of Europe—whether due to a potential return of former President Donald Trump to the White House or the U.S. preoccupation with China’s expansion in Asia. The risk, rather, is that Europe will eschew deterrence, abandon a trans-Atlantic grand strategy, and seek accommodation with the United States’ adversaries. Security policy that is centralized at the EU would greatly raise the likelihood of this outcome.
An EU that remains fragmented on security—whereby member states continue to make independent decisions on their individual national security concerns—is more likely to increase deterrence and maintain Europe’s trans-Atlantic orientation. At minimum, there is a solid bloc of countries, from the Nordic states to the Black Sea, for whom the neo-imperialist threat from Russia is the primary security concern. These nations are already aligned on the need to arm up, deter the Kremlin, and maintain a tight connection with the United States. EU centralization could dilute and overrule their strong defense policies.
On defense procurement, individual European nations are also more likely to make better investments. Without collective decision-making at the EU level, they will be free to procure the weapons that they urgently need, even if that means buying U.S. aircraft and South Korean tanks, as Poland has done, much to the chagrin of the French defense industry. Procurement at the national level would circumvent an inefficient, laborious EU process likely to be restricted to hardware manufactured by European companies.
The 2024 European Defence Industrial Strategy, for instance, laments that 63 percent of members’ defense acquisitions have gone to suppliers outside the EU and prods members to “spend at least half of their defence procurement budget on products made in Europe.” Given the immediacy of the threat, this is unrealistic. Allies need to fill up armor parks and ammunition stores quickly if they are to deter Russia. As important as it is to raise production capacity on both sides of the Atlantic, those European countries that are taking defense seriously cannot wait for a defense industrial policy made in Brussels to catch up.
It is in Washington’s interest to have a firm European frontier that will not require mass deployment of U.S. forces and the constant expenditure of scarce resources. The United States is more likely to achieve this outcome if it continues to bet on individual allies.
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