NATO’s Existence Prevents European Independence
Just a quick intervention after reading a well-reported piece in the Financial Times, about a rift in European military security thinking. The upshot:
The EU and Nato are at odds in what officials describe as a “turf war” over how to manage an extra $1tn a year rearmament drive prompted by Donald Trump’s threats to European security…“It’s becoming increasingly clear that we need this stuff quickly, in large quantities and cost-effectively,” said one of the EU officials. “And the way to do that is to manufacture it at home.
NATO and the EU both agree on securing themselves more “strategic autonomy,” but only the EU wants to do so by creating a degree of actual independence, in the form of making weapons development and acquisition and intra-European process rather than one that continues to rely on the United States. It seems obvious that Europe should not trust US arms production any more than it would trust Chinese arms production (arguably the US should be even less trusted since its weapons-making and sales are connected to a global coercive apparatus that China lacks and could never replicate).
The EU has not exactly covered itself in glory in recent years, and I have a low opinion of Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission. But Mark Rutte, NATO secretary-general, is a real bootlicker. His America-philia does not speak on behalf of the European interest, and there is no hope of realizing a meaningfully Independent Europe if the continent is dependent on US weapons procurement.
Meanwhile, in Washington, there has long been a conventional wisdom that NATO is apple pie—uncontroversial, everyone loves it, etc. Like many things Washingtonians believe, it’s not quite true, but no matter. The fig leaf such fiction affords is just large enough to obscure what lies underneath—the shriveled truth, that NATO is primarily a stand-in for American power.
“NATO is good!” is a premise that more policy people should resist, or at least critically question…especially when it’s on the wrong side of war crimes. I supported a (non-expanded) version of NATO as recently as 2022, but the world has changed, and the veneration of this imperial institution directly stands in the way of Europe becoming independent and capable of managing its own relations with the world.
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