Sovereignty is better shared than borrowed

Only by pooling its defence efforts can Europe exercise power independently of America.

Europeans have long accepted that certain elements of sovereignty can profitably be pooled between like-minded nations. From competition policy to currency, European countries have given up national powers in exchange for collective clout on the world stage through the EU.

The rationale is that a small country acting alone can’t make an impression on a multipolar world. You have collective power, or no power at all. As the world continues to fragment, that logic should be applied to areas where it is still taboo – most notably defence.

Decades of peace under the NATO umbrella, alongside our history as great military powers, have given Europeans a warped view of our capabilities. In the lifetime since European armies last fought at scale, peer warfare has become more complex and expensive even as budgets and manpower have withered.

The result is that European countries are unable to deploy combat-effective forces without American leadership. Peacekeeping missions aside, only Britain and France have operated outside US-led coalitions in the post-war period, and never against a peer adversary (the closest was the Falklands War of 1982, and there is some debate over whether Britain could win such a fight today).

Now threats are re-emerging. Vladimir Putin is trying to rebuild the Russian empire, a project that will sooner or later threaten EU territory if not checked. Donald Trump, a coin-toss away from a second term in the White House, has threatened to disengage from NATO. Even if he doesn’t, or if he loses the election, American interests are shifting to the Pacific; it’s not clear whether the US would, or could, fully commit to simultaneous conflicts with both China and Russia.

Industry at scale

Becoming combat-effective will require more than simply scaling up budgets. Many European NATO members now meet the alliance’s spending target of 2% of GDP, but most still can’t field a single combat division, the smallest formation able to act independently in a modern conventional conflict. And several crucial NATO capabilities, such as integrated air and missile defence, can’t be performed at all without American forces.

The weakness extends all the way up the supply chain. European militaries procure equipment independently of each other, meaning there is no strong demand signal to the European defence industry, which therefore remains fragmented and lacks economies of scale.

As Mario Draghi noted in his report on competitiveness this month, European armies operate twelve types of battle tank, compared to just one in the US. European countries are developing two separate next-generation fighter aircraft – neither of which is likely to match America’s offering, if history is a guide.

Unsurprisingly, many European militaries turn to superior American equipment: Nine EU countries, plus Norway, Switzerland and the UK, operate the F-35 fighter jet. This means a large chunk of European defence spending is funnelled into the US economy rather than creating jobs and innovation in Europe – a missed opportunity even in peacetime.

More importantly, European militaries never truly ‘own’ their most advanced equipment, since the US imposes restrictions on its use after sale. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US blocked the Netherlands and Denmark from donating their F-16s for several crucial months. More recently, America has even been able to restrict the use of British and French missiles because they contain some American components.

In these cases, America’s strategic interest – avoiding escalation with Russia – conflicts with that of European countries, which want to increase support to Ukraine. The Europeans are unable to conduct an independent foreign policy because their military power is rented from America, with conditions attached.

Unity of command

European NATO members combined spend almost half as much on defence as the US does, without achieving anything like half the combat effectiveness. A unified European defence industry producing standardised kit would be the first step towards a more integrated command structure, allowing units from different countries to operate alongside each other with shared maintenance and logistics companies.

But fragmentation goes beyond the lack of equipment standardisation. Culturally, European forces are stuck on the idea that every nation needs to field a complete combined-arms force, no matter how small and ineffective, rather than contributing a specialised capability to a larger force.

For most of Europe’s history, its armies were large enough to operate independently and might be called upon at any time to fight their neighbours. But in the modern world, no European army will fight a significant adversary outside a larger coalition – and most couldn’t even if they wanted to.

Imagine if each US state had its own army, each with a handful of tanks and jets and artillery pieces of various kinds; each with its own officer academies and gunnery schools and support companies. Even if you could find a way to merge them into effective formations when conducting operations, it would be an astonishingly inefficient way to allocate funds.

This is, in effect, the situation in Europe. Each national military, no matter how small, operates dozens of different vehicles and weapons systems, none of them at the scale necessary to be useful in a modern conflict. Of course each country needs its own core military force, but specialised functions could safety and profitably be allocated and shared among allies.

By offloading non-core capabilities, each force could invest more in what it does best. Perhaps Sweden could lead work on the next generation of short-takeoff jets, or Slovenia could create a larger formation of elite mountaineers. Both of these capabilities, and many others, would be useful for NATO not only in defending Europe but also in a wide range of other potential conflicts.

In other words, unifying Europe’s defence capability would not mean a break with NATO or the US, but rather strengthen them. European forces could take the lead in their own defence and even, if needed, contribute useful formations to operations overseas.

In a world of big powers, no European country can muster a significant armed force but the continent as a whole can, if it works together. European leaders must therefore make a decision: would they rather share sovereignty with each other, or continue to borrow it from America?