Is It Time for an EU Army?

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, February 25, 2022

 

It is too late to start building the European army. It will be too late five years from now, too, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not going to be Europe’s last security crisis.

 

Russian caudillo Vladimir Putin plans to use Ukraine as the stage for an opera in three acts: Blitzkrieg, Anschluss, Kolonisation. Ukraine is a nation that has slipped — and sometimes been pushed — through the cracks of Europe’s security architecture: It has an “association” agreement with the European Union but is not an EU member; it is — was — on track to join NATO (and has — had — been on that hamster wheel for years) but is not a NATO member.

 

That being the case, the European Union and the United States have responded to the invasion of Ukraine with stern language and limited economic sanctions that were being hobbled and watered down before they were even formally announced. The Ukrainians, it seems, are on their own. Surely they will appreciate our hashtags and flag emojis.

 

NATO has been a two-edged sword for Europe, both edges cutting the wrong way at times. American domination of NATO has provided a permission slip for European sloth and parsimony — If it’s Washington’s show, why not let Washington do the heavy lifting? — but that same American domination has in recent years been a source of deepening anxiety for Europeans who see the United States as an increasingly erratic and undependable security partner, one whose attention is focused on the Indo-Pacific rather than on the trans-Atlantic.

 

A possible partial solution to that problem is the formation of an EU-wide military to replace Europe’s reliance on national militaries (most of them currently underfunded and ill-provisioned) working under the aegis of NATO or the unwieldy and largely untested instruments of the Common Security and Defense Policy. Within most of the nations of the European Union, there is little popular support for increased military spending at the national level; at the same time, there is widespread support for the European Union’s taking a more active and direct role in common defense. There is surely an element of buck-passing in that (with everyone hoping to live safely at everyone else’s expense) but also a sense that the security needs of the peoples of the European Union have become genuinely collective, that “European security” is something more than a figure of speech.

 

And now there is war in Europe.

 

The proposal to build a European army has some high-profile supporters — Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Olaf Scholz, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Shocked by the sudden collapse of the U.S. project in Afghanistan under the Biden administration, von der Leyen called for European leaders to muster the guts to build up a European force — both practically and politically. “You can have the most advanced forces in the world,” she said, “but if you are never prepared to use them — of what use are they? What has held us back until now is not just a shortfall of capacity — it is the lack of political will.”

 

The proposed European army also has one very important opponent: the United States.

 

Washington has consistently opposed building a European force at the EU level. Washington may see its leadership of NATO as a financial and political burden, but it is not prepared to see that leadership supplanted or diminished. Proponents of the European army argue that it would be a complement to NATO, not a replacement for the alliance — a way of deploying European resources for collective security in a more unified and integrated way. When Merkel and Macron started talking as though they were serious about the possibility of a European army, the Trump administration went as far as to threaten to impose sanctions to stop it, mostly out of fear that U.S. defense contractors would lose out. The threat came in an extraordinary letter from Ellen Lord, at that time the undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and sustainment, i.e., the Pentagon’s ambassador to the nation’s defense industry. The letter made it clear that commercial rather than military considerations were driving the antagonism.

 

Then-EU foreign-affairs representative Federica Mogherini was surprised by the vehemence of Lord’s letter, and noted in response that U.S.-based firms already win 81 percent of the EU’s international defense contracts. “The EU is actually at the moment much more open than the U.S. procurement market is for European Union companies and equipment,” she said. “In the EU, there is no ‘Buy European’ Act.” The U.S. in effect demanded guaranteed access to EU markets for U.S. defense contractors without offering reciprocal terms.

 

Lord’s letter complained that building up a proper EU army would mean “duplication, non-interoperable military systems, diversion of scarce defense resources, and unnecessary competition between NATO and the EU.” All of those are, in fact, legitimate concerns — precisely the sort of thing one would expect a competent and responsible government to deal with. If anything, Washington should be pushing Brussels to build up European capabilities as fast as is reasonably possible, and providing technical and practical assistance to make that possible. Maintaining interoperability and avoiding duplication are technical matters and should be approached as such.

 

Pushing the European Union to do more for itself — but only on Washington’s terms — is a policy that is bound to fail. If the United States wishes to be relieved of some of the burdens of leadership, we are going to have to give up some of the perks, too.

 

Yet instead of taking a proactive course, the United States remains mired in defensive, nickel-and-dime thinking — something that has not changed very much from the Obama administration to the Trump administration to the Biden administration. Of course resources are finite, and we cannot proceed as though money were no object. But we also cannot proceed — successfully — as though provisioning the free world’s armies were a matter for world leaders to approach like a bunch of grouchy old men in a restaurant arguing over the dinner bill.

 

Currently, European military integration is pursued under PESCO (Permanent Structured Cooperation), which is a series of binding mutual agreements and protocols — i.e., not a matter of military exercises but one of committee meetings. For an indicator of just what PESCO entails, consider that in 2017, Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar assured legislators voting on the agreement that it would involve only such uncontroversial tasks as counterterrorism and digital-security work. “What we are not going to be doing is buying aircraft carriers and fighter jets,” he promised.

 

Someone is going to have to.

 

Because the fact is that within a few days, the Russian army is going to be in a position from which it can reach Vienna in nine hours — by public transit. This is a new era, and not a safer one.