European self-defense capabilities and the shifting strategic balance
Fred Kaplan provides a summary of the current politics in Germany on military spending.
This is a key part about the larger strategic environment:
One of the big lessons of the war in Ukraine is that the security of Europe—old or new—remains dependent on the United States. Without U.S. weapons to Ukraine (worth $37 billion and rising), along with training and the sharing of real-time intelligence of the Russian army’s movements and orders, Kyiv would have fallen long ago. [German Chancellor Olaf] Scholz agreed to send Germany’s Leopard tanks to Ukraine only after President Biden agreed to send the U.S. Army’s Abrams tanks. Europeans stood up to Russian aggression in support of Ukrainian freedom, but they might not have done so, or been able to do so as efficiently or effectively, without leadership from Washington.
French President Emmanuel Macron has often advocated “strategic autonomy” for Europe, but Scholz has brushed this off as a pipe dream, and not a desirable one in any event—an attitude that has alienated Macron. While most EU leaders agree with Scholz’s dismissal of Macron’s idea, some complain that the chancellor ignores them too, bringing no German ideas to EU conferences. In part, this is because it’s hard for his coalition government to agree on new ideas. In part, it’s because Germans still feel reluctant—a hangover from their post–World War II guilt—to take a leadership role in Europe. But in part it’s also because Scholz prefers to deal with Biden. Except for Macron, this is true of many European leaders, who understand the true locus of their security.
The whispered worry in Berlin is that Biden may be the last American president who cares deeply about trans-Atlantic relations—and that the most prominent Republicans seem not to care much at all. [my emphasis]1
Kaplan's article doesn't address the rising status of Poland as a military power inside the EU. As Politico EU reported last November:
Poland’s paranoia about Russia prompted it to eschew the prevailing Zeitgeist across much of Europe that conventional warfare was a thing of the past. Instead, it is building what are now on track to become the EU’s heftiest land forces.
“The Polish army must be so powerful that it does not have to fight due to its strength alone,” Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on the eve of Poland’s independence day.
It’s a shift that has resonated with Poland’s indispensable ally.
“Poland has become our most important partner in continental Europe,” a senior U.S. Army official in Europe said, citing the crucial role Poland has played in supporting Ukraine and in shoring up NATO defenses in the Baltics.2 [my emphasis]
The EU has struggled to try to create a unified military force, so far without great success. But the Russian invasion of Ukraine has spurred additional activity to get more serious about a common European defense command.3 (It’s always helpful to keep in mind that any EU initiative like this will produce a plethora of committees and agencies. It can easily induce dizziness in trying to follow them. But this is how the EU’s muddling-through process works. And it can produce surprisingly substantial results. (Sometime it doesn’t, which is less surprising!)
As Sophia Besch writes of the 2002 efforts, “Without the necessary resources and political attention, what feel like giant steps forward inside the union look small in the context of war in Europe.”4
As she also notes, Germany and French leadership would be needed to move the unified defense project along faster, but there are conventional obstacles in the way, not least of which over who gets the biggest cuts of arms purchases. And the US wants to be in that picture, too, of course.
She gives this sketch of the possibilities of common European defense that gives the member nations incentive to build it up:
[T]he union’s defense industrial initiatives are only one piece in the puzzle of Europe’s emerging defense and security architecture. NATO’s defense and deterrence efforts remain essential. But the EU itself must eventually look beyond defense industrial policy and toward shaping its role as a security provider in Europe’s neighborhoods to the south and east. Amid a war in Ukraine, Washington now has once more committed itself to the acute threat that Russia poses, and the alliance has found renewed purpose. But a healthy NATO does not automatically obviate the potential utility of the EU as a defense actor. The United States is still looking to eventually reallocate resources away from Europe.
In the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, however, the EU’s value proposition on defense is that it can use its budgetary and regulatory tools to help forge a European defense industrial base that can produce much-needed capabilities to modernize European arsenals, alleviate the dependency on third-country suppliers and security guarantors [i.e., the US], and expand Europe’s capacity to stabilize its own neighborhood. [my emphasis]
Since the US has formally considered China its primary strategic challenger since the Obama Administration, it seems near-inevitable that China’s growing power will draw more and more diplomatic and strategic attention from the US, which puts pressure on the EU countries to focus on the perceived Russian threat. Which in turn creates a stronger incentive for the common EU defense effort.
And if a new Trump Administration comes to Washington in 2025, the EU nations would and should treat that as an all-hands-on-deck alarm signal for the future of the NATO military alliance with the US.
But France and Germany will also be wary of Poland becoming the biggest military power in the EU. Not because they expect a replay of the Holy Roman Empire, where rival kingdoms in the same empire made war against each other. But because a militarily much stronger Poland would not only be a better position to cooperate with the US against other EU countries, a course that the Bush-Cheney Administration pursued with their notion of allying with “new Europe” (particularly Poland) against “old Europe” around the Iraq War.
It would also mean that Poland would be in a stronger bargaining position in its on-going dispute with the EU over the deficiencies in its adherence to EU standards of democratic practices and observing the rule of law.5
Kaplan, Fred (2023): How the Russia-Ukraine War Has Changed Europe. Slate 05/16/2023. <https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/russia-ukraine-war-changed-europe.html> Accessed 2023-16-05).
Karnitschznig, Matthew & Kość, Wojiech (2022): Meet Europe’s coming military superpower: Poland. Politico EU 11/22/2022. <https://www.politico.eu/article/europe-military-superpower-poland-army/> Accessed 2023-16-05).
Besch, Sphia (2022): EU Defense and the War in Ukraine. Carnegie Endowment 12/21/2022. <https://carnegieendowment.org/2022/12/21/eu-defense-and-war-in-ukraine-pub-88680> (Accessed 2023-16-05).
Ibid.
Buras, Piotr (2022): The final countdown: the EU, Poland and the rule of law. Social Europe 12/21/2022. <https://www.socialeurope.eu/the-final-countdown-the-eu-poland-and-the-rule-of-law> (Accessed 2023-16-05).