The U.S. Role in Supporting a Strategically Autonomous EU
A familiar chorus resounded as NATO members sloppily evacuated their personnel from Kabul and abandoned many of their Afghan allies to the victorious Taliban — not just the American one protesting the fallacy of ending the ‘forever wars,’ but the European one urging yet again for strategic autonomy. The EU’s de facto foreign minister, Josep Borrell Fontelles argued that the Kabul evacuation showed the need for an EU rapid reaction force. European Council President Charles Michel echoed Borrell’s reasoning when he rhetorically asked, “What other major geopolitical event do we need to lead Europe to aim for more […] autonomy?”
Unfortunately, the likeliest answer is that the shock from Afghanistan alone will not spur a deepening of European defense cooperation. In the three decades since the Maastricht Treaty introduced a Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) for the EU, there has been a cycle: a crisis erupts, ideas for cooperation are proposed and approved, only for there be nothing to show when the next crisis demands a coordinated European response. For example, the stabilization operations in the Balkans contributed to developing EU Battlegroups of a few thousand soldiers, but the decision-making processes to launch a deployment promote indecision over practicality. Additionally, the Russian invasion of Ukraine led to the European Defense Fund and PESCO projects — respectively, they are underfunded and unable to meet Europe’s biggest military capability gaps. The realization of the CSDP falls short because it lacks clear strategic and operational end goals, which dampens enthusiasm for implementing programs.
This stems from the Janus-like nature of European strategic culture: one head, Europeanist and French, looks South and prioritizes counter-terror and stabilization operations, seeing little need for the United States’ involvement; the other head, Atlanticist and Eastern European, looks East and sees an existential threat from Russia that only the United States can deter. The vulnerable Eastern Europeans’ trust in the U.S. rests on an assumption of a lack of “reciprocity on the part of some European allies,” as Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki phrased it in response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s now-infamous assessment of NATO as experiencing “brain death.”
The U.S. should help broker an understanding between these two orientations. A compromise would see a reformed, strategically autonomous EU take over NATO’s out-of-area role. The EU would carry out stabilization and counter-terror operations and NATO would return to solely deterring Russian revisionism. However, the U.S. has, at best, ignored European efforts at strategic autonomy over the last 30 years and, at worst, actively hindered their development. The U.S. has assumed that strategic autonomy would needlessly duplicate NATO or end the U.S.’ indispensable role in the continent’s security. This zero-sum calculus plays into Eastern Europeans’ fears that a European approach to defense would undermine the transatlantic approach. The U.S.’ fears are baseless: first, the U.S. could participate in shaping European defense cooperation to avoid excessive overlap with NATO. Second, even if the transatlantic military imbalance began to shrink, Europe lacks the ambition and capability to catch up to the U.S. nuclear umbrella and blue water navy. The U.S. will remain, for the foreseeable future, a militarily valuable partner to Europe. The U.S. should look beyond its fears and recognize that European strategic autonomy would serve long-standing U.S. interests.
First, strategic autonomy could enable burden-sharing. As the U.S. pivots to Asia, it has signaled a desire to draw down the pace of its operations in the Middle East and Africa. Currently, the U.S. plays a key supporting role in France’s counter-terror Operation Barkhane in the Sahel, whose commander noted that “What takes us a month right now would take us a month-and-a-half without the U.S. help.” In the shorter term, a reformed EU with qualified-majority decision making on force deployments and pooled strategic support assets (tanker and cargo aircraft and UAS intelligence assets) could in its near-abroad of Africa and the Middle East independently evacuate individuals from a hostile environment or secure a safe-zone to protect refugees before they attempt the perilous journey to Europe.
Second, strategic autonomy could allow the EU and NATO to specialize in different mission sets and areas. Whereas the EU could focus on stability and peacekeeping operations in unstable nations in the Middle East and Africa that are potential sources of migrants and refugees, NATO could return to Great Power competition. Beginning in the 1990s, the alliance sidelined that under the mantra of either ‘going out of area or out of business.’ It restored peace in the Balkans, intervened in Libya, and tried nation-building in Afghanistan. Only the Balkan operations count as a success story for NATO. The debacle of the Afghanistan pull-out demonstrates that the alliance lacks the collective decision-making apparatus to manage dynamic, offensive operations. Instead, the alliance’s member states were at the whim of the United States, and they became entangled in what could have been unilateral foreign policy mistakes. This weakened the alliance’s cohesion and distracted it from its half-century of success as a deterrent to revisionist Russian aggression. Unlike NATO, the EU could work towards developing a collective security identity capable of managing dynamic, time-sensitive overseas operations. Strategic autonomy could allow NATO with continued U.S. participation to focus eastward, and the EU to focus southward.
What concrete measures can the U.S. take to realize this dualistic picture? First, it should address Eastern European fears. The U.S. should concretely demonstrate its commitment to the defense of NATO’s eastern flank with permanently based U.S. forces in Poland, and it should link that to Eastern European support for providing the EU the capabilities outlined above. Second, the U.S. should support behind closed doors the formation of a coalition within the EU willing to form a collective security structure able to act swiftly, decisively, and unilaterally. As those reforms progress, the U.S. could follow up with a push to formally delineate the relationship between NATO and what would be for all intents and purposes a nascent European military.
Will enthusiastic U.S. support alone break the EU out of its cycle of halfhearted reforms toward becoming a geopolitical security actor? Of course not, the reforms hinted at above would require bold and determined leadership from Germany and France that refuses to take no for an answer. The resulting reforms would force the participating member states and the EU to question and reshape their identities, their security strategies, and their institutions. Is the struggle worth it? Longer-term, the member states have no choice but to coalesce and develop a European security identity if they wish to handle major crises. Economic allure only goes so far, and some crises require a military response that only EU member states acting in concert could muster.
