Letting Europe develop strategic autonomy in the military field at the expense of NATO will just add a new threat to American interests while increasing the existing risk from Russia.
Discussion of European strategic autonomy peaked during the Trump administration when it became abundantly clear that the U.S. president viewed Europe as not doing enough for its own defense. The ongoing Ukraine crisis is a stark reminder that our wealthy and capable European allies cannot afford to ignore defense matters. While some dismiss the concept as a “pipe dream” or as “dead”, strategic autonomy remains the only, albeit difficult, path to making Europe an attractive partner and thus strategically relevant in the modern day.
Crucially, a conventional—but contained—war in Europe, interminable and destabilizing conflicts in the Middle East, and great power competition across the globe all mean that it is in America’s and Europe’s interest to shore up European defense and enable the U.S. to focus on higher priorities elsewhere.
Oh, please. Europeans recognized they weren't doing enough for their own defense when they pledged in 2014--during the Obama administration--that NATO states, largely European, should increase defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2024.
This EU partner foolishness is a variation of the "Dormant NATO" fad that pretends America can safely walk away from defending Europe. The "strategic autonomy" argument pretends that the EU is the proper partner for letting us pretend America isn't walking away from defending Europe.
And the partner folly uses that "higher priorities elsewhere" argument. It never ends:
I've long noted that the Left has a history of opposing the current threat we are resisting in order to focus like a laser beam on the "next" vitally important threat. Obviously, when the current threat defeats us, that "next" threat becomes the current threat. Lather, rinse, repeat. The "bad war" versus "good war" dance of two decades ago is the most obvious example of this process.
The right has adopted this "we need to focus on the real threat" approach to advocate a pivot to Asia in order to abandon Europe and/or the Middle East to their fates. It'll be fine, they say.
This author's denial that America has pivoted to Asia ignores the departure of hundreds of thousands of American troops from Europe since the Cold War. The denial of a pivot ignores the massive reduction in American military power in the Middle East after winning in Iraq and losing in Afghanistan. As I observed in this post[.]
Walking away from Europe will just cause America to lose influence in Europe through NATO about what Europeans do.
And if Russia fought Europe, we'd still need to fight.
I don't mind defense production cooperation across Europe, but that's a means and not an objective for the EU (back to that initial article):
The EU Commission’s strategy aims to create an industrial foundation for European strategic autonomy.
Using that production objective to obscure "strategic autonomy" separation of America from Europe in military cooperation which is now done through NATO is harmful to American national security interests.
And it gets worse. The EU is designed to thwart democracy in favor of a pan-European ruling elite that does what it wants through opaque Byzantine power levers:
Even Brussels insiders can’t predict which European party group the largest national delegations from France, Italy, Hungary, the Netherlands or Austria will belong to after all the behind-the-scenes deal-making.
And this adds to the disconnect between voters’ choices and EU politics.
Defense ties with Europe through NATO don't create a risk of war. It's designed to prevent that risk. Two world wars when we had no defense ties indicates that, no? That's one reason why I wanted to keep a corps in Europe (see pp. 15-20) back when the post-Cold War peace dividend still had that new car smell.
The proto-imperial EU bureaucrats and fanboys never miss a chance to strip away the prefix. Nobody who values American security and Western liberty should advocate throwing away a robust NATO insurance policy.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
NOTE: I'm adding updates on the Last Hamas War in this post.