Europe Wants ‘Strategic Autonomy,’ but That’s Much Easier Said Than Done
When NATO leaders meet next week in London, one phrase will be on everybody’s lips: European strategic autonomy. While the ambiguous concept is open to competing interpretations, its general thrust is clear. It connotes a growing aspiration among many countries in Europe to set their own global priorities and act independently in security and foreign policy, and to possess sufficient material and institutional capabilities to implement these decisions, with partners of their own choosing. The notion is at the heart of President Emmanuel Macron’s vision of a “sovereign” Europe, and of the ambitions of the incoming president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, to create a “geopolitical commission.”
Strategic autonomy has obvious appeal to Europeans at a time of fraying trans-Atlantic bonds and deepening great-power competition. Aspiring to self-reliance is one thing, however. Achieving it will require much more from the European Union. The heterogeneous bloc will have to develop a coherent strategic culture and come to some agreement on a shared assessment of threats—and on how the EU should pursue its interests and promote its values internationally. Europeans must also reassure the United States that any new EU military capabilities will complement rather than undermine NATO.
Europe’s strategic reappraisal is largely, though not entirely, a function of President Donald Trump. While his predecessors in Washington often pressed the Europeans to ramp up defense spending, Trump has upended the trans-Atlantic alliance in several ways. He has depicted it as obsolete, questioned America’s commitments to NATO’s mutual defense as outlined in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, and taken precipitous actions without consulting allies in Europe—such as his recent unilateral withdrawal of U.S. troops from northeastern Syria. Confronting such uncertainty, Europeans naturally want to hedge their bets. One way to do so is by developing autonomous military capabilities that permit them to act outside NATO, including with a post-Brexit United Kingdom.
Washington’s own identification of China as America’s primary economic, technological and strategic adversary reinforces these instincts. Few Europeans share such a zero-sum assessment, seeking instead to pursue what Beijing terms “win-win” relations. While Americans seem bent on a new Cold War with China, Europeans must confront a more immediate military and political threat: an aggressive Russia under Vladimir Putin, right on their doorstep.
Beyond defense matters, Trump’s disruption of U.S. foreign policy has persuaded a growing number of Europeans that they need to pursue strategic autonomy across the board. America’s abdication of global leadership has thrust the EU into an unaccustomed role—that of chief defender of the rules-based, liberal international order. As Trump has embraced unilateralism and protectionism, cozied up to dictators and ignored climate change, the EU has become the primary champion of collective security, multilateralism, human rights and the preservation of the global commons.
That said, recent European steps toward strategic autonomy have been most tangible in military affairs. EU member states have created a permanent EU military headquarters, located in the same building as the External Action Service, the EU’s diplomatic arm. They have committed to a coordinated, EU-wide annual defense review. They have launched an initiative to promote the joint defense capabilities among 25 EU member states, known as Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO. They have announced a new Directorate General for Defense Industry and Space, to complement the existing European Defense Agency. The Commission has proposed a €13 billion ($14.3 billion) budget for the European Defense Fund from 2021 to 2027 to stimulate cross-border research and development. If approved by the EU Council of Ministers, it would constitute the fourth-largest defense budget in a post-Brexit Europe, trailing only those of France, Germany and Italy. Finally, Macron has sponsored an ad hoc program called the European Intervention Initiative, to function outside both NATO and the EU, that counts 15 nations as members, including the U.K.
While all these moves remain tentative and incomplete, they are consistent historically with the venerable “community method” of European integration first pioneered by Jean Monnet, the French economist and diplomat considered one of the architects of European unity. As Stephen Blockmans of the Center for European Policy Studies recently explained to me, the European Commission is taking incremental, technical and practical steps to advance integration, with the ultimate goal of realizing a European Defense Union.
The challenge for Europeans is to develop these EU capabilities without destroying the Western alliance. Although Macron may consider NATO to be experiencing a “brain death,” as he put it in a recent interview with The Economist, the vast majority of NATO members ultimately rely on the U.S. military for their defense. So they are sensitive to repeated warnings from American figures, from Madeleine Albright to Kay Bailey Hutchison, the current U.S. ambassador to NATO, that any EU military capabilities must not duplicate existing NATO capabilities, discriminate against U.S. defense industries, or “decouple” European and U.S. security.
Such hectoring increasingly rankles Europe, though, especially when it comes from an “America First” administration that seeks to undermine the EU itself. Under pressure from Trump, NATO’s European members have committed to spend 2 percent of their GDP on defense—and 20 percent of that on developing new defense capabilities. America’s insistence that these capabilities be employed only in the service of NATO seems designed to perpetuate a sort of “paternal tutelage” and keep the EU in a state of arrested development, incapable of acting independently in its own interests.
With these anxieties in mind, the EU’s immediate priority should be to make prompt progress among all its member states—particularly Germany, which is lagging badly—in building national defense capabilities that can be used for either NATO or EU purposes. Simultaneously, EU leaders should deliver a coherent message at the summit in London and after it: namely, that Europeans are finally responding positively to longstanding burden-sharing demands dating back to the Eisenhower administration.
European countries would then be more credible in NATO operations, while also able to address non-Article 5 contingencies on their periphery, including in Africa and the Middle East, thus freeing up demands on U.S. resources. The result will be a healthier, more balanced relationship between the trans-Atlantic pillars of the Western alliance. Such a message could even allow Trump to declare victory.
Ultimately, the EU’s struggle for internal coherence may be a trickier problem to resolve than its relations with the United States. True strategic autonomy requires more than enhanced defense capabilities. It implies a common strategic vision and culture, grounded in a shared conception of interests and values. The 2016 EU Global Strategy was an important step in this direction, but it is only a beginning.
Even after the United Kingdom departs the EU, whenever it does, the bloc will contain nations as diverse in their outlooks and threat perceptions as Portugal and Poland, Ireland and Estonia, Finland and France. The biggest challenge may be forging agreement among all of them about what strategic autonomy really means and for what ends.
Stewart Patrick is the James H. Binger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of “The Sovereignty Wars: Reconciling America with the World” (Brookings Press: 2018). His weekly WPR column appears every Monday.
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