At the CAP website, Max Bergmann, James Lamond, and Siena Cicarelli are credited as the authors of The Case for EU Defense: A New Way Forward for Trans-Atlantic Security Relations 06/01/2021.
This is certainly an interesting development! It looks like a trial balloon. A safely establishment Democratic think tank like the Center for American Progess wouldn't go this far off the farm without some encouragement from the Biden-Harris Administration. I assume it will at least make some long-comfortable clichés a little more complicated.
After the 1989 revolutions in eastern Europe, the US began to pursue a policy of encouraging the rapid expansion of the European Union and of NATO. The EU nations also wanted to expand the Union. And their desire to do so had similar motivations as those of the US: to provide assistance in development, to expand the EU free trade zone under the neoliberal rules of the EU agreements, to create and incentive for former Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavian countries to set up liberal democratic systems with imparital rule of law structures.
But the US also saw EU expansion as a way to weaken the cohesion of the EU as an independent power bloc in order to protect the United States new status as the "unipolar" world's hegemon. All this was what classical "realist" theory would have led one to expect. Once the Cheney-Bush Administration took power and the 9/11 attacks became the justification for the Global War on Terror, their determination to strengthen the US as the unipolar power. That was the era when Republicans re-christened French fries as "freedom fries" as a display of contempt for the European allies of the US.
A similar calculation was seen in NATO, in an even more pronounced way. NATO was expanded to include the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland in 1999; Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia in 2004; Albania and Croatia in 2009; Montenegro in 2017; and North Macedonia in 2020. The new countries were eager to gain access to NATO. During the Cheney-Bush years, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld famously mocked the older NATO allies who criticized the invasion of Iraq as "old Europe", while the aspiring members were more willing to provide nominal support to the invasion. This obviously increased tensions within the NATO of 2003, where Britain was faithfully, even slavishly supportive of the Iraq War, and reduced the liklihood of the EU building a strong common European defense force separate from NATO. AS the CAP report relates of this period, "the eastward expansion of the EU further complicated efforts to push ahead on EU defense, as eastern EU members remained acutely aware of their dependence and reliance on American military power to ensure their independence."
The Obama-Biden Administration had friendly relations with the European allies. But it didn't abandon the basic policy of regarding the EU as a potential "peer competitor" whose increased political and especially military cohesion would be unwelcome to the EU.
The CAP report suggests a definite shift in that perspective. As Politico EU reports:
There is general agreement among critics and proponents of EU military integration that national armed forces in Europe are not up to scratch — especially in Germany, the EU’s richest and politically most powerful member.This implies a shift to regarding the EU's potential as a "peer competitor" as a danger to be avoided to not only less of a risk, but potentially promoting American interests in some significant degree. The CAP report is blunt on this point: "U.S. opposition to EU defense efforts since the 1990s has been a strategic mistake that has undermined both the EU and NATO." That is a frank criticism of Democratic and Republican administrations.
On this point, the authors of the new report readily agree. “Today, much of Europe’s military hardware is in a shocking state of disrepair,” they wrote. “European forces aren’t ready to fight with the equipment they have, and the equipment they have isn’t good enough.”
But the authors also insist the U.S. should accept its part of the blame. “This is a European failure,” they wrote. “But Washington has played a critical, if underappreciated, role in precipitating this failure.” And they pointed to the unsparing push for increased NATO spending — something Donald Trump did louder and more aggressively than his predecessors — as central to the flawed outcome.
“For more than two decades, both Republican and Democratic administrations have vigorously pressed European capitals to bolster their national forces in support of NATO,” they wrote. “But this focus on national defense spending levels, embodied by the 2014 commitment by NATO members to spend two percent of their GDP on defense, simply hasn’t worked. European defense today remains anemic, despite noticeable increases in spending.”
I would assume that part of the consideration here is that the Trump Administration and its MAGA policy, which included notable hostility toward EU countries, led to a realization among many European leaders that they could no longer count on the kind of close support that the NATO countries had maintained for decades, despite significant tensions at time, such as the Anglo-French-Israeli attempt to seize the Suez Canal in 1956.
But the CAP report also suggests that its authors are drawing a similiar lesson from the American perspective, i.e., that a future MAGA administration might be happy to use US dominance in NATO to sabotage the EU's ability to defend itself in a potential confrontation with Russia or in other situations judged to require military intervention to protect European security. And there is an implied calculation that the longterm common security interests of the US and European might be better served with an EU military arrangement that would not be so subject to disruption by a new MAGA government in Washington. They write:
There is ... an increasing sense that Europe must stand up for its owninterests in an era of greater geopolitical competition and questions about American reliability. A ECFR survey, conducted after the 2020 U.S. residential election, revealed that “[o]ne of the most striking findings … is that at least 60 per cent of respondents in every surveyed country—and an average of 67 per across all these countries — believe that they cannot always rely on the US to defend them and, therefore, need to invest in European defence.” [my emphasis]There are some significant reservations I have about the CAP analysis. One is that they argue that because citizens of EU countries are also citizens of the EU as such, e.g., they vote directly for members of the European Parliament. And that therefore EU citizens seem to see defense as much more an EU responsibility than a national responsibility. I'm not at all sure how well founded that assumption is.
Another concern is the report's stated hope for the result that more US support for EU self-defense efforts: "It would no doubt win admiration within the EU and put the United States where it should be, which is on the opposite sides of China and Russia." Being on the "opposite" side of Russia and China is hardly a sensible goal. Russia and China won't be on the same side of all issues. And there are issues like nuclear arms control and nonproliferation and climate change where the US and the EU have the strongest incentive to find effective ways of cooperating with those two countries, even when serious disagreements on other important issuews continue.
A third is that the report does not engage with the issue of EU democratization, or addressing the "democratic deficit," as it is often called. The EU's integration strategy has relied on the hope that economic integration would lead to greater political integration and reinforce democracy and the rule of law in individual nations. But EU laws and institutions are far more effective in enforcing economic regulations than political ones. The EU is currently struggling with serious democratic and rule-of-law backsliding in Poland and even more so in Hungary. The economic ties complicate enforcing the EU treaty requirements in such situations. Strenthening military integration without first improving the mechanisms for requiring member countries to maintain the minimal democratic and rule-of-law requiresment for intial membership would likely make the democratic-deficit problem even more difficult to solve.
The CAP report briefly argues that pushinhg for a military union might actually facilitate the securing of democratic norms in EU countries.
It also addresses the austerity-policy problem, but seems to assume that austerity economics is a particular problem of Germany's. Germany's political elite is stubbornly committed to it. But it's a more general problem among the wealthier "core" countries of the EU:
CAP also uses this recent example, which provides a disturbing example of EU willingness to use military force, although CAP does add with disapproval that this example has the EU being "overly aggressive" ab out a situation of which I would definitely be more critical:
... stereotypes of EU pacifism are incongruent with the EU’s overly aggressive approach to countering migration. In the half-decade since the migration crisis, the EU has turned Frontex—a small, bureaucratic EU agency that coordinated EU border policy—into a 10,000-strong armed force. In early 2020, when Turkey initiated a migration crisis, Frontex was accused of ramming migrant vessels, potentially committing human rights abuses. Rather than condemning Frontex or the Greek coast guard for this horrific act, the heads of the EU flew to Greece to demonstrate EU solidarity with this hard-line approach. EU leaders, perceiving migration as a threat to the union, were seemingly willing to take inhumane, hard-line steps to protect its union. Contrary to EU skeptics’ characterizations of it as a postmodern state that has repudiated the use of force and is strictly committed to vague notions of international law over defending its borders, the EU actually went too far and potentially violated international humanitarian law. This is not the approach of a confident global power upholding global norms, but it is hardly the response of political actors from Venus [a favorite polemic neoconservative stereotype of NATO allie like Germany and France]. [my emphasis]It will be interesting to see the follow-up reactions to the CAP report from Democrats in Congress and the Biden Administration.
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