There are some dissenters, especially French President Emmanuel Macron, who has called for European defense “sovereignty” regardless of who occupies the Oval Office, now or in the future. But there also is intense opposition to his call on other European Union (EU) members to take security issues more seriously and develop a credible, independent European defense capability. Washington’s client states in Eastern Europe seem all-too-willing to perpetuate the current system of overwhelming reliance on the United States for their security. Worse, the EU’s leading member, Germany, appears content to do the same.
That attitude creates the very real danger that Europe’s long-standing habit of free-riding on America’s security exertions will resume after a brief (and partial) interlude during the Trump years. The foreign policy team that President-elect Biden is assembling has a lengthy track record not only of being tolerant of such behavior but eagerly encouraging it. However, such a development would be unhealthy for Americans, and ironically, for Europeans as well.
Berlin’s response to Macron’s stance, while unsurprising, bordered on pathetic. Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defense minister asserted: “Without America’s nuclear and conventional capabilities, Germany and Europe cannot protect themselves. Those are the plain facts.” Those are “plain facts” only if one accepts several popular but questionable or blatantly absurd Atlanticist propositions.
One is that that the European Union, with a collective population larger than America’s and a highly sophisticated economy nearly as large, cannot build a capable continental defense. nother is that Russia, despite being a pale shadow of the defunct Soviet Union with an economy barely one-tenth the size of the EU’s economy, poses a dire threat that the EU cannot hope to deter. A third faulty assumption is that Russia is hell-bent on an expansionist binge despite reducing its military expenditures in both 2017 and 2018 and barely increasing them in 2019. Moreover, even the 2019 figure ($65.1 billion) is far less than the annual defense outlays (nearly $300 billion) of NATO’s European members. Finally, one has to accept the implicit assumption that the EU powers cannot handle on their own the threats that ragtag, stateless terrorists, and weak Middle East countries pose.