Solving Europe’s Greatest Security Dilemma
How to build an independent, post-NATO Europe that neither arms-races nor strengthens the far right.
It’s become conventional wisdom that Europe needs a collective defense force. Building up national militaries is inefficient, the region’s geography creates natural interdependencies, and NATO—because of its imbrication with the US—can’t be relied upon. The challenge is how to go about such a project given the connection between the growth of far-right political power and the growth of militarism.
Military buildups plunder democracy. Politicians everywhere use military spending as an excuse to impose austerity on their people. In the US, this practice has reached absurdist, gratuitous levels, but the UK, Australia, and New Zealand have been going through a version of the same. Centrist liberal politicians throughout Europe are posturing now about the “tough choices” that need to be made and the need to adapt to a dark, uncertain world by investing in the weapons that make it more so. This is the path to ruin.
Trading austerity for bombs is inevitable because the only alternative is to raise taxes—which politicians hate to do—or take on debt financing for military expenditure, which simply defers austerity at the price of even more expenditure. And austerity-for-bombs is easily the greatest threat facing Europe because austerity politics is what fuels far-right movements. As AOC explained in Berlin:
When you have economic stagnation for the working class, especially in an environment where GDP is growing, that is the stuff of populist movements…The choice is what direction those populist movements can go…when you have populist movements rising up, almost regardless of their ideology, it’s telling us something: The ascent of populist movements is telling us that governments have strayed too far from being responsive to the working class.
The rise of far-right politics is the outgrowth of neoliberalism, the global financial crisis it wrought, and the failed economic recovery of most rich countries, which people experienced as anti-worker austerity politics. To starve social democracies in order to feed the militarist imagination is a promissory note to hand over Europe to the far right.
But you can’t build a collective defense force without upping your military spending, right? Well, let’s revisit Europe’s threat environment.
European elites have been guilty of systematically inflating the threat China poses to…everything. European governments have been unhelpfully maximalist on Russia, girded both by the misplaced beliefs that 1) liberalism’s vindication lay in “just war,” and 2) Russian military aggression will only stop when “the West” matches Russia’s bloodlust. Worst of all, Europe, blinded by some combination of ideology and the politics of convenience, have completely misunderstood the United States—a superpower that now actively threatens Europe, undermining European claims to democracy and sovereignty at every turn.
Europe has cast its lot with a violent, declining imperialist power that wants to dominate a world that can expect neither reciprocity nor “public goods” like stability, order, or reliable systems of economic intercourse. Only predation.
One of America’s demands on Europe, which is not new, is to spike European military spending. Trump’s State of the Union speech described how Europe is now going to spend 5% of GDP—an impossible target—on the military. While that’s not going to happen, spending is going up and everyone seems to accept the “reality” that Europe ought to undertake a significant military buildup.
If you talk to the average think tanker, they’re likely to be very excited about all of this. The US technically hasn’t withdrawn from NATO, so they can still go to conference and participate in the kabuki of trans-Atlantic “deterrence.” At the same time, the Trump administration has been painfully clear that Europe can’t rely on the US, and so Europe must assemble more military capability to be less dependent. That creates so much opportunity for defense-contractor grift that some defense intellectuals have recently boasted that even politics can’t stop the business of the trans-Atlantic arms trade.
Again, if this is how’s it’s going to be, you might as well hand the keys over to the fascists.
But it doesn’t need to be this way. Collective security can be done much more effectively, in terms of both outcomes and cost, if European elites could right-size their threat perceptions—which means waking up to the menace to their West, fashioning a non-provocative approach to their East, and getting along with their Far East.1
The key here is the long-dormant tradition of non-offensive defense (NOD).2 NOD prescribes credible defenses and a logic of denial rather than the projection of power. One of the distortions of modern government thinking about the military is that they’ve all been infected with the American way of war. Everyone places a premium on long-range systems and stealth because the US does, but a) that doesn’t make sense for most geographies and b) those kinds of weapons are inherently very provocative to enemies. Mostly importantly, it’s a very expensive way to approach the problem of war.
One NOD scholar I respect who happens to specialize in Europe, Lutz Unterseher, has a proposal for a collective defense force that helps resolve Europe’s far-right dilemma by keeping spending under control while transforming how European elites should think about their own security.
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You can read the full proposal here, but the gist is that European security can be had for 1.5% of GDP, not 5%, not 3.5%, not even 2%. For $200 billion Euros, less than current European spending, the EU could have an all-volunteer defense force organized into:
One million personnel divided across five districts, 550k of which would be ground forces;
40 combat brigades and 40 support brigades (including a mix of special forces, armoured reconnaissance, mechanized infantry, and heavy units);
10 regiments of ground-based air defenses;
1,000 tactical aircraft;
17 squadrons for air transport/lift; and
A navy with 35 destroyers and large frigates, 75 light frigates, 35 submarines, and 90 anti-mine vessels.
Missing from this are estimates of drones, which could realistically substitute for some of the capability here and which can easily conform to the principle of non-offensive defense because most drones are short-range. What’s missing here—in a good way—is long-range strike weapons and amphibious assault ships in favor of ground forces (inherently defense-oriented) and defense-dominant weapons like mine-clearing capabilities and air defenses.
This is a lot of nerd accounting work but the point is that if Europe prioritizes Russia as the military threat, which it does, then there are ways to organize a combined force capable of credibly defending European territory against Russia in almost any conceivable scenario. With Russia as the “pacing threat,’ this force structure would be capable of swinging toward Greenland to fight limited US operations if necessary.
The upshot of all this nerd math is that military buildups can be done intelligently or not. If you want to avoid the far-right takeover of Europe, some version of the above plan could cost even less than current European military spending while unifying the continent…as long as elites are willing to be non-provocative, foreclose on offensive operations in Russian territory, and divest of a power-projection mindset. Literally reimagine how to do defense.
The idea underneath all this is not that the military will solve political problems; quite the opposite. Military threats—even when latent—undermine the ability to cooperate with adversaries in the form of reciprocal military restraint, arms control, and the making of buffer zones. By fashioning a force capable of defensive defense but not offensive defense, you make it possible to realize a more benign geopolitics. And you do it without feeling the far right.
Europe must dial back its threat perceptions of China. I’m not as sanguine about China as some of my peers; the recent escalation of repression in Hong Kong should caution against glazing China as humanity’s savior. But China’s extraterritorial ambitions are quite limited. It does not seek to be global hegemon. And it has no ability to establish itself as even a regional hegemon in the foreseeable future. So NATO should stay out of Asia; it has no business helping American militarists strategy-wash preparations for World War 3. And it should distance itself from America’s critical-minerals cartel, which is accelerating the world-destroying trend of primitive accumulation in the name of futilely trying to counter China. By distancing itself from the US and playing nice with China, Europe reduces its real geopolitical problem down to Russia, which makes its security puzzle easier to solve.
NOD is sometimes referred to as confidence-building defense or non-provocative defense.