If anyone still needed proof that the United States is an unreliable military partner, Donald Trump’s dizzying changes of mind about American troop deployments to Europe have gold-plated the evidence.
Within just one week, the United States first said it was canceling the deployment of a 4,700-strong “Brigade Combat Team” to Poland; Washington then said that it was withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany; and then, suddenly, to the apparent surprise of America’s own defense officials, Trump announced America would be sending 5,000 soldiers to Poland, after all, because he likes the Polish president.
Friday’s meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Helsingborg, Sweden, will have been entertaining, if only for the enjoyment of hearing America’s Marco Rubio, who combines the jobs of Secretary of State and National Security Adviser, trying to explain what is going on.
The reality is that he doesn’t know, because he cannot read Trump’s mind. But the deeper reality is that everyone now knows that for as long as Trump is president American security policy will be capricious, volatile and subject to the personal whims of Trump himself.
This means that as they look ahead to NATO’s next summit of government leaders on July 7-8 in Turkey the European members of this 77-year-old military alliance will have to treat NATO not as being central to their defense and security, as in the past, but as peripheral.
They will all want to stop Trump’s tantrums from endangering the alliance because they want to keep NATO alive in hopes that whoever occupies the White House after 2028 will be a lot more reliable and more devoted to America’s traditional alliances. But, for the time being, the real work of protecting Europe’s safety is having to take place outside NATO.
On a superficial level, this is exactly what Trump, his vice president J.D. Vance and other advocates of “America First” wanted to achieve. They have argued, like many previous US administrations did, that Europe needs to take more responsibility for its own security. The fact that it is now doing so owes more to Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago than to American lectures, but nonetheless it is happening.
Yet the deeper problem is not one of American pressure but of American disruption.
During all its long and successful life, NATO has been based on shared long-term planning, shared work to ensure that members’ forces can operate easily together, and a shared system of command-and-control.
The United States has sought to direct all those three aspects, partly because it has the largest and most technologically advanced armed forces, but mainly because it is the most powerful country in the world and does not feel it needs to follow anyone else’s lead.
European NATO members lack some important military capabilities, including in satellite communications, missile defense and heavy-lift transport, not simply because they have spent too little money on defense but because America chose to provide those capabilities itself.
Abrupt changes of policy in Washington, such as last week’s announcement that a planned deployment of long-range Tomahawk missiles to Germany was being canceled, make a nonsense of supposedly shared planning and raise doubts about the reliability of other capabilities provided by the United States.
NATO’s secretary-general, the former Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte, likes to shake up the organization’s European members by warning them not to fantasize about operating without the Americans: Their annual defense budgets will have to increase not just to 5% of GDP, as is now planned, but to 10%, he says, if Europe is to replace what America currently provides.
No one, except perhaps the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, would be willing or able to make the sacrifices necessary in other public spending to make budgets of 10% of GDP affordable.
Yet Europe would not really need to spend 10% of its GDP on defense to be able to defend itself without American help, at least not in the foreseeable future.
The European members of NATO, which include the United Kingdom and Norway, face just one serious military threat, namely Russia. And Ukraine, which is not a member of NATO, has shown during its four years of war how Russia can be resisted.
In early June the length of Russia’s war in Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin claimed was “a special military operation” that would last just three or four days, will have surpassed the 1,569 days of the First World War from 1914-18.
Europe’s military forces are already more capable than Ukraine’s military was in February 2022. What they lack is the three aspects that NATO has provided: shared planning, full inter-operability and shared command-and-control.
But they have an embryonic organization that could provide those key ingredients: the Joint Expeditionary Force, which was set up independently of NATO in 2014 by the United Kingdom, the three Baltic States, the Netherlands and five Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden), in anticipation of a growing Russian threat to northern Europe.
At present, the Joint Expeditionary Force is a rather hollow, empty organization, albeit one with a command headquarters in the UK. But it could become more real quite quickly, especially if it were to start holding regular military exercises and if this operational structure could be tied together with new entities geared to the joint funding of defense procurement, notably the “SAFE” fund (Security Action for Europe) being set up by the European Commission.
The most important way to transform the Joint Expeditionary Force from theory into reality would be to widen its membership to include Europe’s most successful military, Ukraine, as well as its two biggest militaries, in Germany and Poland.
A danger with defense planning is that a beautiful long-term program of defense procurement and reorganization can become disconnected from immediate and real threats.
Russia’s army and its economy have become too weakened by the Ukraine war to make a full-frontal attack on another European country likely in the near future. However, that is not Putin’s only option: he could use smaller attacks and increase his existing provocations to try to distract European countries from supporting Ukraine or to try to exploit or widen the existing divisions within NATO.
It is those sorts of distractions and provocations that Europe needs to be ready for. It needs to put in place a rapid process for political decision-making on how to respond and a clear and robust command-and-control structure to carry out whatever orders the politicians provide.
Europe has these on paper, but not in practice; and, like a NATO saddled with an unreliable America, the 27-member European Union is a difficult forum through which to make speedy decisions. A wider version of the Joint Expeditionary Force could be a better vehicle for Europe than either NATO or the EU.
Appeasing and cajoling Trump may be unavoidable but it is no longer the main issue. In fact, perhaps the best way of dealing with Trump during the run-up to NATO’s July 7-8 summit might be to make this clear to the Americans both privately and publicly: Sorry, Donald, they could say, but you are no longer the most important task on our agenda.
This English original of an article first published in Italian translation by La Stampa is republished with kind permission. The article and many more can also be found on Bill Emmott’s Global View.
