Europe is Whistling Past the Graveyard on Defense

Why aren't European policymakers hedging more aggressively against the vagaries of U.S. domestic politics?

This week marked the Halifax Security Forum. Held in chilly Canada, this forum is similar to Aspen and Munich in its appeal to politicians who wish to be seen as serious on defense, and the hawkish commentators and think tanks that want to enable them. The HSF agenda included a variety of – well, let’s call them “creatively-named” – panels on security and defense, but I was more struck by one observation from attending journalists in Politico:

“The five U.S. Senators and one House member in Halifax, often holding private sessions with foreign officials in what their staff called the “command center,” said they didn’t hear any skepticism about American resolve behind closed doors.” 

As the Economist editor Shashank Joshi put it over on X, that’s a statement that makes “you wonder whether U.S. lawmakers are being fed, and are willfully drinking, Kool-Aid.”

It doesn’t surprise me, though. During visits to several European countries in the last couple of months, I kept hearing similar sentiments. Foreign policy folks across the pond might agree that U.S. domestic politics is increasingly risky, but tend to argue that America will still able and willing to step up if needed. When asked about backup plans – the ways in which U.S. allies are hedging against the worst outcomes – they mostly demur.

To close observers of U.S. domestic politics, however, the idea that America today is the basket in which one would wish to put all one's eggs is somewhat stupefying. Congress just defenestrated one speaker of the house and took three weeks to find a new one; it remains unclear whether the new speaker will be willing to put a Ukraine aid package on the floor. Donald Trump is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in early 2024 polls, and even if Biden is re-elected, there are strategic and budgetary headwinds that call into question the ability of the US to stay committed in Europe for the long-term.

So why aren’t European states hedging more?

Where’s the Plan B?

It’s not that they don’t recognize the problem. There has clearly been at least some shift in attitude among policymakers across Europe, and states have made significant progress on defense in the last few years, perhaps more than anyone could have imagined prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But the question of whether that response has been sufficient is a different one. The German Zeitenwende, for example, though initially promising a significant investment of $100 billion in defense, turned out to be a smaller commitment in practice: split over multiple years, and time-limited, with no guarantee of renewal after the first four years. The European Union’s commitment to supply Ukraine with a million artillery rounds by the end of 2023 will fall short.

Europe’s progress on defense is real. It’s also slow, fragmented and perhaps too little, too late. Consider this recent news:

“Several countries — including Germany, Britain and Norway — are increasing production of weapons, especially the artillery ammunition that Ukraine so badly needs. Germany, once a laggard in providing aid to Ukraine, announced a week ago that it planned to double its support to $8.5 billion in 2024 and would deliver more crucial air-defense systems by the end of this year and European Union states are gearing up to train an additional 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers, bringing the total so far to 40,000.”

This shift has come as doubts rise about future U.S. funding, with congressional battles over the speakership and a rolling, looming government funding and shutdown threat. It’s still unclear whether – or in what form – further funding to Ukraine might make it to the floor for a vote, prompting a mad scramble by European states to fill whatever gaps they can. The chaos looks remarkably similar to the post-February 2022 European pivot on defense, when it took the Trump presidency plus a full-blown Russian invasion of Ukraine to push even moderate European investments in defense.

It’s worth taking a step back to ask just why it is that Europe cannot get its act together on defense until the situation is truly dire. Perhaps, as some argue, Europeans are simply unwilling to commit the resources necessary to provide for their own defense, preferring to rely on Uncle Sucker? Perhaps some believe even in a post-Ukraine, post-Trump world that there is no need for a strong homegrown defense? Or perhaps, as Bob Kagan once infamously argued, it’s because Europeans are from Venus and Americans are from Mars?

Nah.

The attempt to build a coherent, centralized Europe-wide defense tends to fail because of a unique set of pathologies almost entirely encapsulated by Henry Kissinger's famous remark about Europe. Even as it has become far clearer who to call with regard to monetary policy, migration, or trade, there’s still no obvious answer on defense and foreign policy.

The European Union is, to put it bluntly, a bunch of states in a trenchcoat pretending to be a foreign policy superpower. Here are the basic problems:

1.     Smaller nations inside Europe – primarily those added to NATO since the end of the cold war – trust their Western European neighbors less than they do the United States, and fear abandonment in the case of a conflict. The Baltic states, for example, view French and German willingness to treat with the Russians after the 2014 seizure of Crimea as evidence of Western European fecklessness. With the countries that are richest and most capable of providing defense predominantly located in Western Europe, and smaller, poorer countries most in need of defense in Eastern Europe, the stage is easily set for fears of abandonment.¹

2.     Institutional and bureaucratic turf wars make it harder to figure out which institutions should be responsible for coordinating European defense. NATO and the European Union do not play as well together as one might assume, and fears about either duplicating NATO capabilities or undermining the alliance have often undermined nascent attempts to build EU capacity over the years. More generally, there are bureaucratic incentives for both institutions to lay claim to important programs, which can be high-profile and potentially lucrative, at least in terms of budgetary share. The result has been a tangled mess of strategic and tactical divisions between NATO and nascent European union programs.

This is improving over time, with NATO increasingly tending towards actual defense and contingency management (which requires command structures), and the EU increasingly focusing on procurement of capabilities and the development of a defense industrial base. But it should be no surprise to anyone that these two approaches sometimes conflict, and the departure of one of Europe’s most militarily capable states from the EU leaves UK-EU-NATO cooperation as another potential bureaucratic morass.

3.     There is no common “European” threat perception, and therefore no common European strategy. The EU is a sprawling, cross-national entity that stretches from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Carpathian Mountains. For states in the south, Mediterranean security and the migrant crisis are the predominant concern; for those in the east, it remains Russia; and Finland, Norway and impending member Sweden add concerns about Arctic security. Unsurprisingly, the EU’s Strategic Compass, published last year for the first time, mimicked an American National Security Strategy by simply including every threat, moving no closer to agreement on this question.

4.     A lack of common threat perceptions and fears of abandonment means states may invest in defense systems that are best suited to their own defense needs – or more cynically, in systems that are high-profile and appeal to politicians. This leaves capability gaps on a Europe-wide basis. The plug-and play-model of defense proposed in the strategic compass – particularly the EU “Rapid Deployment Capacity” – is one potential solution to the technical side of this problem, but it does not reduce the fears of abandonment that might lead to states to prioritize redundant systems.

[As an aside, I should note here that it’s true that generations of U.S. policymakers actively worked to enhance these concerns. They made it more difficult for European states to work together on defense, while sustaining the U.S. presence in Europe in the hopes of prolonging American military primacy. But U.S. policy was never the only problem. Just as Russian election-meddling highlights divisions that are already there in countries around the world, the U.S. was simply capitalizing on existing European divisions. Meanwhile, NATO and EU expansion made these problems more acute. The more useful and interesting question for today is whether Europe can overcome these problems even in the absence of U.S. opposition.]

5.     The defense industrial base and military procurement offer specific, problematic incentives to policymakers across the continent. Just as “Buy American” creates pathologies in the U.S. procurement system, parochialism in purchasing across European states leads to substandard distribution of production across Europe. The worst of this is the frequent duplication of high-profile programs like fighter jets, but there are also significant inefficiencies in the distribution of production of ammunition and arms. The political fallout from choosing the wrong system – along with a desire to keep the United States hooked into European defense for the long-term – has often led policymakers in European states to simply opt for American equipment instead. As Jeremy Shapiro and Jana Puglierin put it, such choices keep the European defense industrial base weak, and “create dependencies that will last for decades.”²

6.     A final problem is speed: European elites are relatively comfortable with gradual processes of agglomeration that place increasing regulatory and administrative power in the hands of Brussels, while making trade-offs that allow member-state elites to sell those shifts at home. The common market, for example, was a victory over the forces of parochialism in agriculture and trade; the Euro was the culmination of a several-decade process of negotiation over how much sovereignty states might be willing to cede on fiscal and monetary policy. The current project of European defense development actually looks remarkably like these other processes. If policymakers believe that defense will be similar to other parts of the European project - a decades-long gradual shift towards evermore shared responsibility for defense - then their time-horizons may well be out-of-step with reality.

The list of problems isn’t endless, but it’s pretty damn long. Europe has been able to manage these disagreements on defense for decades, thanks largely to the American willingness to paper over European collective action problems in the name of the common defense. Today, they’re resurfacing.

And even with newly found willpower and the prospect of losing the U.S. backstop to European defense, these problems will not be easily overcome. They help to explain why, even faced with the prospect of a second Trump presidency, many European foreign policy hands are still whistling past the graveyard on defense, hoping instead for a second Biden administration, and praying that they will have the time to construct European defense as a generational project, without too many costly political and economic choices.

It seems an increasingly risky bet.  

1. Not to mention budgetary issues. It’s not quite as simple as offering Eurobonds or taking on debt to build a common defense. https://www.csis.org/analysis/who-ultimate-european-taxpayer-understanding-problem-european-sovereign-debt

2. https://warontherocks.com/2023/06/the-art-of-vassalization-how-russias-war-on-ukraine-has-transformed-transatlantic-relations/