Can Europe defend itself without America?

economist.com/briefing/2024/02/18/can-europe-defend-itself-without-america

The Economist

It would need to replace military aid, a nuclear umbrella and

leadership

Feb 18th 2024|Munich

The second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, on February

24th, and the continuing menace Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president,
presents to Europe, were always going to overshadow this year’s
Munich Security Conference. But as the annual gathering of bigwigs
got under way, a series of additional blows fell. First came the death
of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s foremost opposition leader, in a Siberian
gulag on February 16th. The next day Ukraine’s army withdrew from
the town of Avdiivka, handing Mr Putin his first military victory in
almost a year. America’s Congress, meanwhile, showed no sign of
passing a bill to dispense more military aid to Ukraine, which is
starved of ammunition and therefore likely to suffer more setbacks
on the battlefield. The auguries could scarcely have been more
awful.

The deadlock in Congress reflects the baleful influence of Donald

Trump, whose opposition to aid for Ukraine has cowed Republican
lawmakers. It was the spectre of Mr Trump’s potential return to office
in November’s presidential election that cast the darkest pall over
Munich. A week earlier Mr Trump had explained what he would say
to an ally in nato that had not spent as much as the alliance urges on
defence and then suffered an invasion: “You’re delinquent? No, I
would not protect you. In fact, I would encourage them [the invaders]
to do whatever the hell they want.”

Combined harms

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Russia’s ever-deepening belligerence, Ukraine’s deteriorating
position and Mr Trump’s possible return to the White House have
brought Europe to its most dangerous juncture in decades. The
question is not just whether America will abandon Ukraine, but
whether it might abandon Europe. For Europe to fill the space left by
America’s absence would require much more than increased
defence spending. It would have to revitalise its arms industry,
design a new nuclear umbrella and come up with a new command
structure

In Munich the mood was fearful, but determined rather than

panicked. American and European officials remain hopeful that more
American munitions will eventually get to Ukraine, but they are also
making contingencies. On February 17th Petr Pavel, the Czech
president, said his country had “found” 800,000 shells that could be
shipped within weeks. In an interview with The Economist Boris
Pistorius, Germany’s defence minister, insisted that European arms
production was increasing “as fast as possible” and said he was
“very optimistic” that Europe could plug any gaps left by America.

image: The Economist

Not everyone is so sanguine. If American aid were to evaporate

entirely, Ukraine would probably lose, an American official tells The
Economist. Mr Pistorius is correct that European arms production is

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rising fast; the continent should be able to produce shells at an
annual rate of 1m-2m late this year, potentially outstripping America.
But that may come too late for Ukraine, which needs some 1.5m per
year according to Rheinmetall, a European arms manufacturer. A
sense of wartime urgency is still lacking. European shell-makers
export 40% of their production to non-EU countries other than
Ukraine; when the European Commission proposed that Ukraine
should be prioritised by law, member states refused. The continent’s
arms firms complain that their order books remain too thin to warrant
big investments in production lines.

A Ukrainian defeat would inflict a psychological blow on the West

while emboldening Mr Putin. That does not mean he could take
advantage right away. “There is no immediate threat to NATO,” says
Admiral Rob Bauer, the head of NATO’s international military
committee. Allies disagree over how long Russia would need to
rebuild its forces to a pre-war standard, he says, and the timing
depends in part on Western sanctions, but three to seven years is
the range “a lot of people talk about”. The direction of travel is clear.
“We can expect that within the next decade, NATO will face a Soviet-
style mass army,” warned Estonia’s annual intelligence report,
published on February 13th. The threat is not just a Russian
invasion, but attacks and provocations which might test the limits of
Article 5, NATO’s mutual-defence clause. “It cannot be ruled out that
within a three- to five-year period, Russia will test Article 5 and
NATO’s solidarity,” Denmark’s defence minister recently warned. But
the concern is less the timing than the prospect of confronting
Russia alone.

Change of station

Europe has thought about such a moment for years. In 2019

Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, told this newspaper that
allies needed to “reassess the reality of what NATO is in the light of
the commitment of the United States”. Mr Trump’s first term in office,

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in which he flirted with withdrawing from NATO and publicly sided with
Mr Putin over his own intelligence agencies, served as a catalyst.
The idea of European “strategic autonomy”, once pushed only by
France, was embraced by other countries. Defence spending, which
began rising after Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, has
increased dramatically. That year just three members of NATO met
the alliance’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence. Last year 11
countries did, ten of them in Europe (see chart 1). This year at least
18 of NATO’s 28 European members will hit the target. Europe’s total
defence spending will reach around $380bn—about the same as
Russia’s, after adjusting for Europe’s higher prices.

Those numbers flatter Europe, however. Its defence spending yields

disproportionately little combat power, and its armed forces are less
than the sum of their parts. The continent is years away from being
able to defend itself from attack by a reconstituted Russian force. At
last year’s summit, NATO leaders approved their first comprehensive
national defence plans since the cold war. NATO officials say those
plans require Europe to increase its existing (and unmet) targets for
military capability by about a third. That, in turn, means Europe
would have to spend around 50% more on defence than today, or
about 3% of GDP. The only European members of NATO that
currently reach that level are Poland and Greece, the latter flattered
by bloated military pensions.

Anyway, more money is not enough. Almost all European armies are
struggling to meet their recruitment targets, as is America’s.
Moreover the rise in spending after 2014 delivered alarmingly little
growth in combat capability. A recent paper by the International
Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS), a think-tank in London, found that
the number of combat battalions had barely increased since 2015
(France and Germany each added just one) or had even fallen, in
Britain by five battalions. At a conference last year, an American
general lamented that most European countries could field just one

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full-strength brigade (a formation of a few thousand troops), if that.
Germany’s bold decision to deploy a full brigade to Lithuania, for
instance, is likely to stretch its army severely.

Even when Europe can produce combat forces, they often lack the
things needed to fight effectively for long periods: command-and-
control capabilities, such as staff officers trained to run large
headquarters; intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, such as
drones and satellites; logistics capabilities, including airlift; and
ammunition to last for longer than a week or so. “The things that
European militaries can do, they can do really well,” says Michael
Kofman, a military expert, “but they typically can’t do a lot of them,
they can’t do them for very long and they’re configured for the initial
period of a war that the United States would lead.”

Poland is an instructive case. It is the poster boy for European

rearmament. It will spend 4% of its GDP on defence this year, and
splurges more than half of that money on equipment, far above
NATO’s target of 20%. It is buying huge numbers of tanks,
helicopters, howitzers and HIMARS rocket artillery—on the face of it,
just what Europe needs. But under the previous government, says
Konrad Muzyka, a defence analyst, it did so with little coherent
planning and utter neglect of how to crew and sustain the equipment,
with personnel numbers falling. Poland’s HIMARS launchers can hit
targets 300km away, but its intelligence platforms cannot see that far.
It relies on America for that.

One option would be for Europeans to pool their resources. For the
past 16 years, for instance, a group of 12 European countries have
jointly bought and operated a fleet of three long-range cargo aircraft
—essentially a timeshare programme for airlift. In January Germany,
the Netherlands, Romania and Spain teamed up to order 1,000 of
the missiles used in the Patriot air-defence system, diving down the
cost through bulk. The same approach could be taken in other areas,
such as reconnaissance satellites.

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The hitch is that countries with big defence industries—France,
Germany, Italy and Spain—often fail to agree on how contracts
should be split among their national arms-makers. There is also a
trade-off between plugging holes quickly and building up the
continent’s own defence industry. France is irked by a recent
German-led scheme, the European Sky Shield Initiative, in which 21
European countries jointly buy air-defence systems, in part because
it involves buying American and Israeli launchers alongside German
ones. When Olaf Scholz, Germany’s chancellor, recently called for
Europe to adopt a “war economy”, Benjamin Haddad, a French
lawmaker in Emmanuel Macron’s Renaissance party, retorted, “It’s
not by buying American equipment that we’re going to get there.”
European arms-makers, he argued, will not hire workers and build
production lines if they do not get orders.

These twin challenges—building up military capability and

revitalising arms production—are formidable. Europe’s defence
industry is less fragmented than many assume, says Jan Joel
Andersson of the EU Institute for Security Studies in a recent paper:
the continent makes fewer types of fighter jets and airborne radar
planes than America, for instance. But there are inefficiencies.
Countries often have different design priorities. France wants carrier-
capable jets and lighter armoured vehicles; Germany prefers longer-
range aircraft and heavier tanks. Europe-wide co-operation on tanks
has consistently failed, writes Mr Andersson, and an ongoing
Franco-German effort is in doubt.

The scale of the required changes raises broader economic, social

and political questions. Germany’s military renaissance will be
unaffordable without cutting other government spending or junking
the country’s “debt brake”, which would require a constitutional
amendment. Mr Pistorius says he is convinced that German society
backs higher defence expenditure, but acknowledges, “We have to
convince people that this might have an impact on other spending.”
Thierry Breton, the EU commissioner in charge of defence, has

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proposed a €100bn ($108bn) defence fund to boost arms production.
Kaja Kallas, Estonia’s prime minister, backed by Mr Macron and
other leaders, has proposed that the EU fund such defence spending
with joint borrowing, as it did the recovery fund it established during
the covid-19 pandemic—a controversial idea among the thriftiest
member-states.

Europe’s manpower shortages are driving similarly fraught

discussions. In December Mr Pistorius said that “in retrospect”
Germany had erred in ending compulsory national service in 2011. In
January General Sir Patrick Sanders, the head of the British Army,
said preparing Western societies for a war footing would be a
“whole-of-nation undertaking”, and that Ukraine showed that “regular
armies start wars; citizen armies win them”. His remarks prompted a
national furore over conscription, though he never used the word.
Several western European countries are studying the “total defence”
models of Sweden, Finland and other northern European countries,
which emphasise civil defence and national preparedness.

image: The Economist

Perhaps the hardest capability for Europe to replace is the one

everyone hopes will never be needed. America is committed to using
its nuclear weapons to defend European allies. That includes both its
“strategic” nuclear forces, those in submarines, silos and bombers,
and the smaller, shorter-range “non-strategic” B61 gravity bombs
stored in bases across Europe, which can be dropped by several
European air forces. Those weapons have served as the ultimate

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guarantee against Russian invasion. Yet an American president who
declined to risk American troops to defend a European ally would
hardly be likely to risk American cities in a nuclear exchange.

During Mr Trump’s first spell in office, that fear revived an old debate
over how Europe might compensate for the loss of the American
umbrella. Britain and France both possess nuclear weapons. But
they have only 500 warheads between them, compared with
America’s 5,000 and Russia’s nearly 6,000 (see chart 2 ). For
advocates of “minimum” deterrence, that makes little difference: they
think a few hundred warheads, more than enough to wipe out
Moscow and other cities, will dissuade Mr Putin from any reckless
adventure. Analysts of a more macabre bent think such lopsided
megatonnage, and the disproportionate damage which Britain and
France would suffer, give Mr Putin an advantage.

Nuclear posturing

This is not just a numerical problem. British nuclear weapons are

assigned to NATO, whose Nuclear Planning Group (NPG) shapes
policy on how nuclear weapons should be used. The deterrent is
operationally independent: Britain can launch as it pleases. But it
depends on America for the design of future warheads and draws
from a common pool of missiles, which is kept on the other side of
the Atlantic. If America were to sever all co-operation, British nuclear
forces “would probably have a life expectancy measured in months
rather than years”, according to an assessment published ten years
ago. In contrast, France’s deterrent is entirely home-grown and more
aloof from NATO: uniquely among NATO’s members, France does not
participate in the NPG, though it has long said that its arsenal, “by its
existence”, contributes to the alliance’s security.

Within NATO, nuclear issues were long on the “back burner”, says
Admiral Bauer. That has changed in the past two years, with more
and wider discussions on nuclear planning and deterrence. But
NATO’s plans hinge on American forces; they do not say what should

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happen if America leaves. The question of how Britain and France
might fill that gap is now percolating. On February 13th Christian
Lindner, Germany’s finance minister and head of the pro-business
Free Democratic Party, called in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
a German newspaper, for a “rethink” of European nuclear
arrangements. “Under what political and financial conditions would
Paris and London be prepared to maintain or expand their own
strategic capabilities for collective security?” he asked. “And vice
versa, what contribution are we willing to make?”

Such musings have a long history. In the 1960s America and Europe
pondered a “multilateral” nuclear force under joint control. Today, the
idea that Britain or France would “share” the decision to use nuclear
weapons is a non-starter, writes Bruno Tertrais, a French expert
involved in the debate for decades, in a recent paper. Nor is France
likely to join the NPG or assign its air-launched nuclear forces to
NATO, he says. One option would be for the two countries to affirm
more forcefully that their deterrents would, or at least could, protect
allies. In 2020 Mr Macron stated that France’s “vital interests”—the
issues over which it would contemplate nuclear use—“now have a
European dimension” and offered a “strategic dialogue” with allies on
this topic, a position he reiterated last year.

The question is how this would be made credible. In deterrence, the

crucial issue is how to make adversaries (and allies) believe that a
commitment is real, rather than a cheap diplomatic gesture that
would be abandoned when the stakes become apocalyptic. Mr
Tertrais proposes a range of options. At the tame end, France could
simply promise to consult on nuclear use with its partners, time
permitting. More radically, if the American umbrella had gone
entirely, France could invite European partners to participate in
nuclear operations, such as providing escort aircraft for bombers,
joining a task force with the eventual successor to the Charles de

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Gaulle aircraft-carrier, which can host nukes, or even basing a few
missiles in Germany. Such options might ultimately require “a
common nuclear planning mechanism”, he says.

Mr Lindner’s talk of a European deterrent was largely dismissed by

German officials who spoke to The Economist in Munich. But the
nuclear question, involving as it does the deepest questions of
sovereignty, identity and national survival, points to the vacuum that
would be left if America abandons Europe. “There will be a European
nuclear doctrine, a European deterrent, only when there are vital
European interests, considered as such by the Europeans, and
understood as such by others,” pronounced François Mitterrand,
France’s president, in 1994. “We are far away from there.” Today
Europe is closer, but not close enough. The same doubt that drove
France to develop its own nuclear forces in the 1950s—would an
American president sacrifice New York for Paris?—is replicated
within Europe: would Mr Macron risk Toulouse for Tallinn?

The seemingly dry question of military command and control brings

such issues to the fore. NATO is a political and diplomatic body. It is
also a formidable bureaucracy that spends €3.3bn annually and
operates a complex network of headquarters: a Supreme
Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Belgium, three big
joint commands in America, the Netherlands and Italy, and a series
of smaller ones below. These are the brains that would run any war
with Russia. If Mr Trump withdrew from NATO overnight, Europeans
would have to decide how to replace them.

An “EU-only” option would not work, says Daniel Fiott of the Elcano
Royal Institute, a Spanish think-tank. In part that is because the EU’s
own military headquarters is still small, inexperienced and incapable
of overseeing high-intensity war. In part it is because this would
exclude Britain, Europe’s largest defence spender, as well as other
non-EU NATO members such as Canada, Norway and Turkey. An
alternative would be for Europeans to inherit the rump NATO

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structures and keep the alliance alive without America. Whatever
institution was chosen, it would have to be filled with skilled officers.
Officials at SHAPE acknowledge that much of the serious planning
falls on just a few countries. Among Europeans, says Olivier Schmitt,
a professor at the Centre for War Studies in Denmark, only “the
French, the Brits and maybe the Germans on a good day can send
officers able to plan operations at the division and corps level”,
precisely those needed in the event of a serious Russian attack.

The question of command is also intrinsically political. Mr Fiott

doubts that EU member states could agree on a figure equivalent to
the Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the alliance’s top general
and, by custom, always an American. That epitomises how American
dominance in Europe has suppressed intra-European disputes for
decades, as captured in the cold-war quip that NATO’s purpose was
to keep “the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans
down”. Sophia Besch of the Carnegie Endowment observes
caustically that Europeans still defer to America on the biggest
questions of European security: “My impression is that Americans
often think more strategically about EU membership for Ukraine than
many Europeans.” She sees little hope that Europe will bring bold
new ideas to this year’s NATO summit in Washington in July, which
will mark the alliance’s 75th anniversary.

It is certainly possible that the shock to European security will be

less dramatic than feared. Perhaps America will pass an aid
package. Perhaps Europe will scrape together enough shells to keep
Ukraine solvent. Perhaps, even if Mr Trump wins, he will keep
America in NATO, claiming credit for the fact that a majority of its
members—and all of those along the eastern front, and thus most in
need of protection—are no longer “delinquent”. Some European
officials even muse that Mr Trump, who is fond of nuclear weapons,
might take drastic steps such as meeting Poland’s demand to be
included in nuclear-sharing arrangements. For the moment, there
are still intense debates over how far Europe should hedge against

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American abandonment. Jens Stoltenberg, the secretary-general of
NATO, has repeatedly warned that the idea is futile. “The European
Union cannot defend Europe,” he said on February 14th. “Eighty per
cent of NATO’s defence expenditures come from non-EU NATO allies.”

Forward-operating haste

Advocates of European self-sufficiency retort that building up a

“European pillar” within NATO serves a triple purpose. It strengthens
NATO as long as America remains, shows that Europe is committed
to share the burden of collective defence and, if necessary, lays the
groundwork in case of a future rupture. Higher defence spending,
more arms production and more combat-capable forces will be
necessary even if America remains in the alliance and under current
war plans. Moreover, even the most Europhile of presidents could be
forced to divert forces away from Europe if, for instance, America
were to be pulled into a big war in Asia.

The difficult questions around command and control, and its

implications for political leadership, are probably here to stay. In the
worst case of a complete American exit from NATO, a “messy”
solution would be needed, says Mr Fiott, perhaps one that would
bring Europe’s overlapping institutions into greater alignment. He
suggests some radical options, such as giving the EU a seat on the
North Atlantic Council, NATO’s main decision-making body, or even a
fusion of the posts of NATO secretary-general and president of the
European Commission. Such notions still seem otherworldly. But
less so with every passing week. ■

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