By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Europe’s Real Test Is Yet to Come

Whether Ukraine will win the war is unclear, but Russia is losing. On every metric of national power, Moscow’s position has worsened since the invasion began, and that change has already shifted the position of other global powers. The United States and NATO have grown more credible. China has gained a Russian vassal and is now the clear leader of the autocratic world. The European Union has done much better than many anticipated, but it may yet be the biggest loser, thanks less to an overaggressive Russia than to an overconfident China. The EU can likely weather the fallout from this war, but it could be critically challenged in the next one.

Most Americans think of the EU as a free trade area with frills. Nothing could be further from the truth. Forged in the aftermath of World War II, the institutions that would become the EU were designed to bind the continent so tightly that another war among Europeans would become unthinkable. In this, the bloc has succeeded brilliantly, helping deliver Europe’s longest period of peace in centuries.

But Europeans made a mistake in assuming that others shared their worldview. Neither Russia, Middle Eastern powers, nor China ever believed that war was impossible, a position most European leaders found hard to accept. Eastern Europeans who warned their friends in Western Europe about Russian President Vladimir Putin were haughtily dismissed. Since February 2022, the reality of the Russian threat has become clear, as has the weakness of the European defense. Although Europe has made significant military and humanitarian contributions to Ukraine, from German tanks to Polish and Slovak fighter jets, the United States has been the main organizer and coordinator of the response to Russia’s invasion, providing intelligence and managing the operation supporting Kyiv.

That Washington has mounted such a spirited defense of Ukraine is partly a matter of luck. If Donald Trump had been in office when Putin invaded, the U.S. president might have made a triumphant trip to Moscow instead of Kyiv. But even with Joe Biden in the White House, the United States might not have reacted so forcefully if its withdrawal from Afghanistan had been less humiliating. Ukraine was not, after all, a formal ally. The United States could easily have dismissed the war as Europe’s problem—and in the future, it still could. Trump might well be the next U.S. president. But even if he is not, the isolationism he has encouraged among American voters will influence U.S. policy regardless of who wins in 2024. There is no guarantee of future U.S. support for Ukraine. And even if there were, China might one day carry out its official policy and attempt to reintegrate Taiwan by force, leaving the United States without the political bandwidth or the resources to come to Europe’s assistance in a crisis. The Pentagon has formally abandoned the goal of being able to fight two major wars at once. Next time, Europe might be on its own. 

For that reason, the EU must get serious about defense. As a confederation of sovereign states that have often pursued their own security and foreign policies at the expense of the union’s—and have very different perceptions of the threat posed by Moscow—the EU still lacks a strong defense capability and a common approach to security. As long as that is the case, the bloc will remain a hybrid power: an equal to the United States and China in regulating trade, standards, and investments but a bit player in defense and security. It will remain a toothless superpower—which is to say, not a superpower at all.

 

All Bark And No Bite

Europe has been here before. At the start of the wars of Yugoslav succession in 1991, Luxembourg’s foreign minister, Jacques Poos, announced, “The hour of Europe has dawned.” But it took more than 100,000 deaths (mostly of Bosnians) and a belated U.S. intervention for the slaughter to end in 1995. Four years later, EU members declared that by 2003 they would be able to deploy a force of up to 60,000 troops within 60 days and sustain it for at least a year. But nothing of the sort materialized. Although soldiers have served under the EU flag in dozens of countries, they have mainly conducted low-intensity operations that did not prepare them for anything more ambitious. Perhaps the EU’s most successful operation was an aerial strike against Somali pirates in 2012, which deterred hijackers in the Horn of Africa for a while. For the most part, however, the up to 4,000 personnel serving in EU civilian and military missions help monitor borders, train the army and police forces, and observe elections—mainly in Africa.

Europe’s real punch was supposed to come from so-called battle groups: reinforced battalions of roughly 1,500 troops capable of being deployed to hot spots on short notice. The trouble was that EU member states had shrinking expeditionary capacity and more urgent commitments during NATO’s extended mission in Afghanistan. Moreover, the subunits of the battle groups had to come from and be paid for by EU member states, which led to shirking, particularly by smaller countries. And the battle groups ultimately remained under the political control of contributing member states rather than the EU itself, so it proved impossible to reach a unanimous decision to act, even in dire emergencies such as the 2011 crisis in Libya. The first battle group became active in 2007, but none have ever been deployed, and the concept seems to have gone into hibernation.

Another attempt to get serious about European security was the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) mechanism, EU-speak for a coalition of the willing. In 2009, Poland and France proposed creating a vanguard group of countries ready to act when the rest of the EU would not. The group would welcome only countries that spent two percent of their GDP on defense, agreed to standard rules of engagement, and deployed their soldiers under joint command. The history of the EU contains plenty of examples of pioneering groups of countries establishing areas of integration that others eventually joined: the common travel area known as Schengen, the EU prosecutor’s office, and, indeed, the euro currency. This is arguably the primary way the bloc evolves. But PESCO did not turn out to be a groundbreaking initiative. Thanks to pressure from Germany, the program launched in 2017 included almost all member states. That meant the convoy would move at the pace of the slowest ship, or not at all, given that some EU member states consider themselves militarily neutral. PESCO has shriveled into a joint spending program on military capabilities and technologies.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU adopted a Strategic Compass for Security and Defense, which aims to enhance military mobility within the EU, facilitate live exercises on land and at sea, and, above all, establish a so-called rapid deployment force of roughly 5,000 troops. The initiative promises a “quantum leap forward” in European security, building on the European Peace Facility, a defense fund worth more than $1 billion annually. Originally conceived as a mechanism for paying for the typical costs of EU operations, mainly in Africa and the Balkans, it has evolved into the European equivalent of the U.S. Foreign Military Financing program, bankrolling the purchase and repair of weapons for Ukraine as well as military assistance for Nigeria, Jordan, and North Macedonia, among others.

By delivering such assistance, the EU crossed a significant barrier. Two years ago, it would have been unthinkable for the bloc to buy lethal equipment and give it to nonmembers at war. Now that it has done so, the main limiting factor is money. Aid to Ukraine has eaten up most of the fund’s annual allocations, necessitating tough decisions by the European Council. But even if the European Peace Facility is expanded and the rapid deployment force becomes operational, Europe can hardly defend itself if the United States is otherwise engaged. The EU could perhaps secure a Libyan port if it fell to human smugglers. It could sort out a Balkan warlord or a small rogue state. It could even deter Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko from sending saboteurs, terrorists, and migrants across the EU’s eastern border. But the bloc could not deter Putin.

That, of course, is NATO’s job. Biden’s forceful reaction to Putin’s aggression has restored the credibility of an alliance French President Emmanuel Macron dismissed as brain dead not long ago. Washington’s courageous use of intelligence to warn the Ukrainians of Russia’s impending invasion has wiped away most of the stain of its misuse of faulty intelligence to make a case for the Iraq war. And Putin’s criminal megalomania has reunited the West. According to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, U.S. contributions to Ukraine total more than $70 billion—roughly equivalent to overall EU contributions (those of EU institutions and member states added together). But it remains to be seen how long that unity will last and what will happen if Europe is less lucky next time.

 

Divided We Fall

One would think that the sight of apartment blocks and power stations being hit by missiles would galvanize Europeans to demand more action, but it hasn’t. Defense companies have had to wait over a year for contracts to replenish Europe’s dangerously low ammunition stocks. They have not even begun to produce new weapons systems. And despite appeals by Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, to create a defense union worthy of its name, progress has been glacial. The reasons for this are not personal but historical, geographical, psychological, political, and, above all, constitutional.

Unlike the continental United States, which is pretty evenly secured from foreign threats, the European Union is much more vulnerable in some regions than others. Residents of Narva, Estonia, for instance, live across a narrow river from the Russian town of Ivangorod, established by Ivan the Terrible. They know that Narva has changed hands a dozen times: Denmark, tsarist Russia, Sweden, Germany, and the Soviet Union have all ruled it at various points. They know that it looks the way it does—sprinkled with modern buildings that replaced older ones destroyed by bombs—because of a vicious battle between occupying German forces and the Red Army. And they worry that Russia never fully acquiesced to “losing” Estonia in 1991 and might try to retake it, which is why Estonia supplies one of the biggest per capita contributions to Ukraine of all the NATO allies.

By contrast, Lisbon, Rome, and Brussels residents have never seen a Russian soldier in their cities who wasn’t invited—and neither have any of their ancestors. Soviet communism was an ideology with global ambitions, but Russian nationalism is not a product that travels well. So most Portuguese, Italians, and Belgians support efforts to halt Putin’s trampling of postwar taboos, but they hope the conflict between Russia and Ukraine can be resolved through compromise. They think Putin is a criminal and pity and admire the Ukrainians. But they are unwilling to change their way of life due to a distant threat. 

Preparing Patriot missile systems for transport to Poland from Gnoien, Germany, January 2023

In Germany, however, it is a different story altogether. The Russians came to Berlin as conquerors within living memory and even ruled a quarter of Germany by proxy until 1991. Yet the Germans mostly refused to recognize Russia as a threat until 2022, perhaps out of gratitude for peaceful unification, which they credited to the moderation of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In 2018, I had surreal conversations with German journalists, think-tank analysts, and politicians after Russia finished upgrading its nuclear forces in the Kaliningrad exclave, gaining the ability to strike Berlin for the first time. “Aren’t you worried?” I asked. They weren’t because they had persuaded themselves that it wasn’t NATO, U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the Polish Solidarity movement, or the pope that won the Cold War but their Ostpolitik, or opening and dialogue with the communist bloc. What worked with the much more powerful Soviet Union could work with Putin’s Russia, they thought: strategic patience, persuasion, and trade—cars and turbines for oil and gas—would eventually convince Putin to mellow.

European politicians must have known that public attitudes toward Russia would shift when the first bombs fell on Kyiv. Still, they declined to adopt the clear language of power politics that Putin might have understood and respected. Even after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made his historic speech spelling out the transformation of Germany’s defense posture, it took many months for the German political establishment to accept that there was no going back to business as usual with Putin. Some Germans probably still hope there might be.

If it wasn’t enough for Europe’s largest country to be ambivalent about defense, the EU’s structure and lack of a constitution also militate against collective security. This is something that Americans should grasp since their war of independence was fought under the Articles of Confederation before the United States adopted its constitution. Without a central budget or an executive authority that could force states to provide the necessary men and provisions, the war was sometimes shambolic; the colonists barely won their independence. 

The EU is a confederation, not a federation. Treaties and joint decisions bind its members, but the ultimate power lies with the member states. If a country does not fulfill its obligations to the bloc, it can be criticized, have its funds suspended, or even be taken to the European Court of Justice, but it cannot be compelled to do anything. This is especially true regarding intelligence, internal security, and defense. 

In theory, the EU has a standard foreign and security policy. Article 26 of the Treaty on European Union, signed in Lisbon in 2007, says, “The European Council shall identify the Union’s strategic interests, determine the objectives of and define general guidelines for the common foreign and security policy, including for matters with defense implications.” In addition, the article states, “The common foreign and security policy shall be put into effect by the High Representative and by the Member States, using national and Union resources.” 

The idea was that EU foreign ministers would coordinate their national interests at the monthly meeting of the bloc’s Foreign Affairs Council, and the EU’s highest officials would then implement their joint positions. Unfortunately, the reality has been that on issues that matter—Iran, China, Russia, Ukraine—groups of self-appointed countries make policy on their own and treat joint EU policy as an afterthought. The ill-fated Minsk process initiated after Russia’s initial 2014 invasion of Ukraine is a prime example: Germany and France usurped the role of the EU and not only failed to resolve the crisis but also sowed mistrust across Eastern Europe. 

Ignoring the Treaty on European Union undercuts the effectiveness of EU foreign policy. When Macron and von der Leyen visited China in April 2023, the French leader received a state banquet and military parade. In contrast, the European Commission president was given a lukewarm welcome. The EU has the legal and institutional basis for a common defense and security policy, but critical member states need help to bring themselves to act in unison. Washington might face a similar problem if Texas and California had been major powers for centuries before they joined the United States.

 

The Nightmare Scenario

Putin is unlikely to win militarily in Ukraine, and Western sanctions will prevent Russia from building a new army capable of threatening Europe for half a decade or so. But even that outcome would not protect Europe from its worst nightmare: a conflict between the United States and China that consumes Washington and leaves Europe to defend itself. The European People’s Party’s position paper on China, which I drafted, envisages a testy cohabitation between Europe and China: collaborate where possible, compete where needed, and confront where necessary. Such a policy could persist indefinitely for mutual benefit. It is also the U.S. policy, minus the bellicose rhetoric. But the EU cannot control its future relationship with China. European countries are status quo powers, whereas China is a revisionist one that will decide if, when, and how it will upend the existing order. Europe has no intention of taking any Chinese territory; China is threatening to take what it does not control today.

Europe is aligned with the United States in recognizing the nature of the challenge posed by China, and the EU is already working with Washington to prevent Beijing from acquiring sensitive technologies, for instance, through the EU-U.S. Trade and Technology Council. But for the EU to be able to defend itself and thereby free up most U.S. forces from a possible conflict in Asia, it will have to make the difficult decision to invest severe resources in defense—and soon. A new weapons system takes about a decade to progress from conception to contracting and production to use on the battlefield. If China is preparing to take Taiwan by force by the end of the decade, as some analysts claim, Europe is already way behind the curve.

The scenario that should keep Europeans awake at night is a Chinese assault on Taiwan that forces Europe to choose between its largest trading partner in goods and its most powerful ally. Macron was widely criticized in April 2023 for saying that Europe faced a “great risk” of getting “caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its strategic autonomy.” Yet he was only expressing out loud what many Europeans whisper. A war between the United States and China over Taiwan would devastate Europe. According to Santander Bank, the cost of Putin’s war on the EU’s economy was roughly $190 billion, or between 1.1 and 1.4 percent of the union’s GDP in 2022. Russia was always a relatively small economy on which Europe depended mainly for more than a third of its oil and gas needs. But abruptly replacing those supplies has depressed growth, caused a spike in inflation, and delayed Europe’s recovery from the pandemic. A sudden decoupling from China would be much more expensive because Europe was much more dependent on China than Russia before the war. Not only is China the EU’s largest source of imported goods, but it is also a leading destination of European exports across the board. The combination of having to buy more expensive natural gas from Qatar and the United States and losing access to China’s lucrative market for European cars, machinery, and luxury goods could cause Europe to deindustrialize. The continent could become a cross between a theme park and a hospice—not in a matter of generations, as demographers have long warned, but in years.

Joint U.S. and European military exercises in Novo Selo, Bulgaria, May 2023

Macron correctly expressed Europe’s anxiety, but he was wrong to think that Europe could remain on the sidelines of a hot U.S.-Chinese conflict. True, the EU has no legal obligation to back the United States in such a scenario; mutual NATO guarantees only apply to the North Atlantic area. But politics and economics would likely trump all. Regardless of who was president, the United States would do what it always does when faced with a monumental challenge. It would ask, Are you with us or with our enemies? And when faced with such a choice, could Europe remain on the sidelines for long? Would most European states risk the loss of the U.S. alliance and the U.S. market? Would Europeans continue to trade with China as American soldiers were dying in defense of friendly democratic states in Asia? I doubt it. If nothing else, Europe would risk splitting along the east-west axis, as it did over the ill-conceived Iraq war. Europe cannot be united based on anti-Americanism or even aloofness from the United States. Europe can become strategically relevant—and more integrated—only in alignment with the United States. France’s vision of a more united Europe should be appreciated, but it needs to be cured of its Gaullist fantasies.

To prepare for the nightmare scenario, Europe must augment its defenses, find closer sources of raw materials, and restore its industries and supply chains. Such “de-risking” will be incredibly difficult to enact. For example, it will not be easy to find new markets for half the luxury cars that Germany produces each year. Moreover, Europeans must ask themselves how they can afford to ban new cars with combustion engines by 2035, as they have pledged to do when China has gained the upper hand in making affordable electric vehicles. Only the rich can be a global conscience of climate change. And Europe must meet these economic challenges while also managing its enlargement, porous external borders, and authoritarian-leaning member states. 

A conflict with China is not inevitable, and Europe should do its utmost to prevent it. The country has already peaked demographically and might finally have the debt crisis analysts have predicted for years. It might also withdraw its support from Russia (or Russians might get rid of Putin and exit the Ukrainian quagmire altogether). Judging by the paltry results of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Moscow in March 2023, the alliance of autocracies is not as solid as previously thought.

China is happy to give Putin political and propaganda support while denying Moscow the military supplies it craves. It is a safe bet that Russian capabilities in East Asia, which were never sufficient to take on China, have deteriorated further. China, by contrast, is arming itself at a breakneck speed, including in the nuclear sphere, where Beijing must reach parity with Moscow and Washington to credibly deter the United States from defending Taiwan. 

Military capabilities built for one scenario can usually be used in others. The Chinese government has kept quiet about it. Still, Radio France International reported in March 2023 that China’s Ministry of Natural Resources had issued new guidelines for maps, requiring the addition of old Chinese names alongside Russian geographical names in eight places along the Russian-Chinese border, including Vladivostok, which should now be referred to as Haishenwai. As if bowing to Beijing, Moscow has said it will open the port of Vladivostok to Chinese transit trade for the first time in 163 years. Russia gained control of the bay on which it built that port and the rest of Outer Manchuria in 1860 during the Second Opium War while threatening to torch Beijing. Xi might reasonably conclude that Chinese honor could more easily be restored—and his place in history assured—by recovering a province lost to Russia than by risking a world war over Taiwan.

Great powers have made similar calculations in the past. In 1939, imperial Japan fought the Soviet Union in the battle of Khalkhin Gol at the confluence of Mongolia and Manchuria. Commanded by a then-obscure general named Georgy Zhukov, Soviet forces roundly defeated the Japanese, finally agreeing to a cease-fire on September 15. Only then did the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin give the order to fulfill a pact with Nazi Germany and invade Poland. But the most significant consequence of the battle was that it convinced Japan that the Soviet Union was more robust than it seemed and that Japan had better try its luck to the east instead of to the north. The eventual result was the attack on Pearl Harbor.

This time, it could be Russian weakness, not strength, that is exposed. Putin’s reckless decision to invade Ukraine has revealed Russia to be much weaker than many believed and accelerated the divergence between Moscow’s and Beijing’s trajectories as world powers. China is already taking Russia’s discounted energy and raw materials. If Russia continues to decline at the present rate, Beijing may eventually buy Moscow’s gold reserves and ultimately make claims on its land. Putin thought he would gain Kyiv but might instead lose Vladivostok. As the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski used to say, Russia can choose to be an ally of the West or a vassal of China. Putin decided not what was good for Russia but what was good for him and would most likely preserve his dictatorial power. Many patriotic Russians, not just those in exile, already anticipate disaster at the hands of China. A post-Putin Russia might reverse its disastrous course. But as long as he remains at the helm, Russia will remain a problem instead of part of the solution.

Europe’s post–Cold War illusion of having reached the plateau of eternal peace has sadly been shattered. The continent’s strategic outlook has darkened both in its near abroad and globally. Its future security, power, and prosperity now depend on whether and how quickly it acts to address its vulnerabilities. The scale of the challenge is undoubtedly beyond the capability of any European country acting alone. It can only be met by working together and finally getting serious about defense. To survive and prosper in a world of battling giants, Europe must transform itself from a militarily weak confederation into a genuine superpower.

 

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