Law, Power, and Justice

open.substack.com/pub/davekeating/p/rubios-absence-shows-nato-is-now

Washington and London block EU defence
As conflicts in the Balkans began in the 1990s with the disorderly breakup of Yugoslavia, the EU came to the painful realisation that it couldn’t project power independently. The United States chastised Europe for being unable to solve the conflict in its own backyard, but at the same time it had moved to block any attempts to build the capability for Europe to act independently in situations like this. Washington may not have moved to block the EDC in 1954, but as the years went by and Europe became increasingly central to US power projection throughout the world (particularly as a stopover for its military adventures in the Middle East), the Americans came to actively resist attempts to build European defence. The United States begrudgingly stepped in to resolve the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, something that US politicians have complained about for years ever since. But for all their complaining, these same American officials are the ones who in the years before and after those wars actively blocked European attempts to develop independent military capacity.
Each time the idea for an EU competence in defence was brought up, it was fiercely lobbied against by Washington (via their allies in London) because it would ‘undermine NATO’. Most notoriously, this came in a sternly worded rebuke by US Defence Secretary William S. Cohen in 2000 when he pre-emptively commanded the other ministers at a NATO summit in Brussels that “there will be no EU caucus in NATO”. In other words – don’t you dare try to establish a two-pillar NATO made up of the EU and US as equal partners. He was referring to efforts to insert a defence union into the EU constitution that was being drafted at the time.
British officials were stunned and alarmed by the US defence secretary’s remarks. But instead of being outraged at being dictated to by Washington, they blamed France for provoking the Americans’ anger. British officials immediately rallied around Cohen’s statements, calling them “valedictory remarks” for their own efforts to keep defence out of the EU constitution. One British government official in Prime Minister Tony Blair’s orbit told The Guardian that Cohen was talking to the “5% of anti-US French public opinion”. “That 5% has to be suppressed,” the Blair government official said.
The EU constitution later transformed into the Lisbon Treaty after it was rejected by French voters, and the idea was removed in the process as a result of pressure from the US and its Atlanticist supporters in Europe. What the EU ended up with instead was the creation of the European Defence Agency, a completely toothless body that only provided incremental capability-building rather than strategic autonomy. That was all the British were willing to sign up to. While it was a member of the EU, the UK consistently blocked attempts to establish EU-shared defence. But, as became evident after Brexit, other national governments had also been resisting, only more quietly. In truth, the opposition to EU defence for fear of undermining NATO wasn’t just coming from London. It was also coming from the Nordics, Eastern Europe and Berlin. France was virtually alone all these years in warning about the overreliance on NATO (though they’ve had a sympathetic audience in Italy and Spain whenever governments from the left have been in power there).
After the attempt to bring EU defence into the new constitution, London and Washington weren’t content to just see the idea dropped. They needed an affirmative rejection of the idea by EU governments. The British first forced the issue onto the agenda of a summit in Nice in 2000 and got European leaders to sign on to conclusions stating that EU peacekeeping tasks would be based on the “sovereign decisions” of member states and would not be directed by the EU.[iv] They also forced conclusions that said there would never be a separate European command structure. Such efforts by London to block EU defence continued for the next 20 years until the UK left the union.
A half-hearted push for sovereign European defence re-emerged in 2016. Donald Trump’s shock win (after a campaign in which he had cast doubt about whether he would honour NATO’s mutual defence commitment) prompted a call for urgently putting together EU defence. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker proposed a “European Defence Action Plan” shortly after Trump’s 2016 election to boost defence spending and cooperation among EU member states. This plan included the creation of a European Defence Fund (EDF) to support joint research and development of defence equipment and technologies. The plan also aimed to strengthen the single market for defence and foster investments in small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups in the defence industry.
Given that it came just months after the UK voted to leave the EU in the Brexit referendum, Nigel Farage’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) party was quick to paint the proposal as the creation of the dreaded “EU army” they had aways warned was coming. Thank god the UK is leaving, they said, just as the EU starts creating its army.
The reality was that this wasn’t an army of any kind, nor was it even an attempt to coordinate EU armies. It was limited only to the money side, trying to make European military spending more efficient and avoid overlaps. The EDF would finance joint R&D and capability development with roughly €1.5 billion annually (a meagre amount when we’re talking about the military spending of 27 countries), half from the EU budget, half from member state budgets. Alongside this lay the Coordinated Annual Review on Defence (CARD), a Brussels-level capability scanner aiming to reduce overlaps and drive economies of scale.
France and Germany, rather than instantly embracing the plan, approached it with caution. Germany thought it went too far while France thought it didn’t go far enough. NATO officials, led by Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, warned against creating parallel defence architectures. EU capabilities had to complement NATO, not compete – “no duplication” was Washington’s command since the Saint-Malo declaration in 1998.
The Americans maintained the same opposition that had been expressed by William Cohen in 2000. Even as Trump remained preoccupied with the idea of European countries shouldering the burden for the continent’s defence, the old guard around him continued to resist any effort at building European defence capability. The sole focus was the spending, and anything beyond that which would involve changes to the structures of European defence was fiercely resisted. National defence budgets rose, yes. But funds for EU-shared projects remained a sliver within budgets. Member state politics, bilateral rivalries and US military-industrial complex lobbies (who worried ‘buy European’ meant ‘buy French’) resisted deeper integration. No EU army emerged – nor did any EU military coordination. As Trump’s first term went on and EU leaders felt they had learned the way to manage him by dealing with the old guard ‘adults in the room’ around him, even Juncker’s small ideas for building EU involvement in defence were abandoned.
But then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 revived the efforts. Taboos were broken and there was increased talk about European military autonomy. But as I will outline in Chapter 10, the initial impetus toward EU defence has again fallen back into inertia since then. Over all these years, the political incentives for European leaders to lead on this issue have not been there, particularly because there was little public appetite for such a project. European politicians kept their populations largely in the dark about how militarily dependent they were on the US and what kinds of risks were involved in the trade-off between welfare and security. The public wasn’t demanding a solution to a problem that they didn’t know existed.