The Fatal Gap: why Europe needs to think seriously about its own defence
Speaking in the alliances’ early days, Lord Hastings, NATO’s first secretary general, is credited as stating the purpose of the group was to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” In 2024 with an increasingly unpredictable presidential election on the horizon, the Americans might be out.
Over the course of his presidency Donald Trump was a divisive figure at NATO summits, publicly clashing with Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg on what he saw as a Europe freeloading off American defence. Fast forward to the present and a second Trump presidency looks increasingly likely. What that will mean for Europe has been made crystal clear by Trump’s own words on the campaign trail, threatening not to honour NATO’s Article 5 pledge and indeed, to “encourage” Russia to invade member states that do not pay their fair share. Even the threat of an American withdrawal from NATO seems possible, at least according to John Bolton, Trump’s former National Security Advisor.
For its part, many European states seem to grasp that some change in the continent’s relationship with the United States is inevitable. At the recent Munich security conference, former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte responded to Trump’s comments, telling the media, “We should stop moaning and whining and nagging about Trump,”. Rutte, the favourite to succeed Stoltenberg for NATO’s top job, suggested that Europe had to take ownership of its own defence instead of relying on the US. Similar calls have been increasing from European heads of state. Emmanuel Macron has drawn attention recently over calls for European ‘Strategic Autonomy’ and discussions seem to have intensified over the idea of a European Army made up of EU member states.
However, Europe has been slow to match these words with action and has failed to address systemic issues leaving the continent sleepwalking towards disaster. This fatal gap reflects a crucial disconnect between the reality of a new unstable world and policymakers who continue to pretend the post Cold War era never ended.
A prime example of this disconnect between international rhetoric and facts on the ground can be seen in Britain. Since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, the UK has been at the forefront of NATO’s response. On the anniversary of the beginning of the war Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reaffirmed British commitments to Ukraine pledging to stand with its people for “as long as it takes” even as other allies wavered. However, this strong rhetoric has been accompanied by a wilful neglection of Britain’s own conventional forces. Since 2010 the Conservative government has reduced the army down to their smallest size since the Napoleonic wars. The force is plagued by a litany of structural failures including high profile procurement scandals, such as the troubled AJAX armoured vehicle, which has run costs into the billions and delivered years behind schedule. There have also been notable recruitment and retention problems leading to sizable personnel deficits threatening to leave the nation dangerously underdefended. Despite the threat posed by Russia, made wholly clear by its actions in Ukraine, there have been no significant increases in defence spending. Instead, Grant Shapps, the current defence secretary, has embarked upon a crusade against a “woke” culture in the military.
Britain’s military atrophy acts as a microcosm for a wider European trend of defence being outsourced to the United States, allowing systemic issues to grow in the continent’s own militaries. Many of these wider trends remain underreported often relating to less visible parts of European defensive strategy such as industrial policy. On Ukraine, the west has remained broadly united condemning Putin’s illegal invasion and sanctioning Russia’s key industries. Arguably the linchpin that held this fragile alliance together was the United States, the largest individual contributor to Ukraine’s defence, supplying some $44 billion in aid by the end of 2023. Much of America’s ability to sustain this aid is down to its strong military industrial base with state owned munition factories allowing the US to rapidly ramp up production. In contrast, European production has fallen short with a large bulk of munitions factories being owned by private companies with production being subject to market conditions. Lacking the industrial capacity to make war at scale. The EU’s 155mm artillery shell procurement scheme, aimed at producing 1 million shells for Ukraine, fell short of that target by 500,000. With American aid currently held up by Republicans in Congress, Europe has been unable to make up the shortfall and Ukraine has suffered in result.
However, there are signs of change as some states look to bridge the fatal gap. Where in western Europe countries have been slow to act decisively, on NATO’s frontier nations are already on the warpath. Poland now has the highest spending in NATO proportional to GDP and looks set to have the most powerful land army on the continent. Latvia has reintroduced conscription and the addition of the capable Scandinavian militaries of Finland and Sweden have turned the Baltics into a NATO lake. Nevertheless, broadly speaking the trend remains sluggish at best. European states remain dangerously underprepared for a possible US withdrawal from NATO or even simply a US pivot away from the region. In the face of this uncertainty key alliance members including France and Spain, remain stubbornly unwilling to meet the 2% pledge, despite the strong words of their leaders. It remains unclear what it will take to change this apathetic posture, but history tells us that it is only disasters that wakes the west up.
Image courtesy of World Armies via Flickr, ©2014. Some rights reserved.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
