Any British official who has worked on European policy at any point over the last 50 years knows that the idea of American neutrality on the EU is a myth. The US security “blob”, that group of national security specialists, think tankers, diplomats, academics, and so on who have set US policy over this period, have consistently pressed for a more united Europe, more cohesive, easier to deal with, but also easier to lead. From Kissinger’s famous question, “Who do I call when I want to call Europe?” to Obama’s threat to Britain that we would be at the “back of the queue” for trade deals if we left the EU, the direction has always been clear.
Of course, there have been times of tension, notably during the Iraq war, but the policy has not changed. Even Trump 45 didn’t break with it. But in pushing this policy, the Americans were prey to two misunderstandings. The first was about the very nature of the EU. In my experience, even quite expert US interlocutors often fail to understand what the EU is really like. They don’t think through what it means to have a court overruling national laws or a political executive, in the form of the Commission, elected by no-one. They often don’t really “get” the constant series of negotiations between member states, trading unrelated dossiers against each other, to keep the show on the road, one of the most powerful weapons of the EU integrationists. As a result they end up urging Europeans to sign up to institutional developments that the US would never for one second contemplate accepting for itself.
The second was to see where this direction of policy would take them. The Americans wanted a European satellite, subordinate to and broadly supportive of US global security and defence policy, but taking more of the European strain. During the Cold War they got that and for Europeans it was clearly the right thing to do. But when the Cold War was over the dynamics changed. The EU and most of its members aspired to be a global power in its own right. For some that could happen in collaboration with the Americans, while for others, certainly a majority among pro-EU ideologues, the idea was to create a power that was distinct from the US, gentler and less capitalist in its economic policy, and less cowboy-ish in its foreign policy. The Americans thought they were building the former; in fact they got the latter.
Indeed this latter approach was always the one most likely to prevail, and so it has. After all, what is the point of being a global power if you don’t use that power to act independently?
The problem with this approach is that a less capitalist power economically, and a softer one externally, in the end becomes relatively poorer, with less hard power, and less capable of being taken seriously by others. It weakens rather than boosts actual power. As Europeans perhaps started to realise this, so they started to talk up various kinds of European fantasy politics, such as the EU’s supposed “regulatory power”, European assertiveness in the form of paperwork rather than tanks.
To be clear – we Europeans did this to ourselves. It’s not the American’s fault we have ended up like this. But the Americans did encourage us. Now they, or at least Trump and the MAGA movement, rightly enough, don’t like what has emerged. That has come out very clearly in the US National Security Strategy published earlier this month.
The Strategy itself is a remarkable document, the kind of thing that emerges very rarely from governments. For one thing, it is short. For another, it is upfront about the importance of making choices about priorities, the impossibility of doing everything, and the need to be realistic about what is most important to the United States. It doesn’t seem to have been subject to bureaucratic capture. If the US actually acts in accordance with it – always the challenge when “events” get in the way – the world will become more predictable and therefore safer.
The Strategy is also ruthlessly clear about the kind of Europe it now sees emerging. “Strategically and culturally vital to the United States”, Europe is nevertheless experiencing “economic decline” and “civilisational erasure”, because of mass migration, greater not lesser “external dependencies”, and a “lack of self-confidence”. There is veiled criticism of blundering European diplomacy and as a result a “risk of conflict between Russia and European states” despite Europe’s significant hard power advantage.
We can all agree on that. But now the Americans risk another misunderstanding: The belief that American pressure in a different direction – supportive of “patriotic European parties” and, it seems from a leaked or classified version, encouragement of certain countries to leave the EU – is going to produce a different direction of travel.
For the EU genie is out of the bottle now. First, for many Europeans the EU is what there is. Many voters may be ambivalent about its regulatory and anti-democratic instincts, but it is any port in a storm, and a storm is clearly brewing. They can see that most European countries are likely to have very little real influence over the US on top-level strategic questions in future. And in any case the Americans are not offering a special deep institutional partnership to any EU member that decides to leave: They aren’t really offering anything. So for many European voters, it is better the devil you know.
Second, the Americans underestimate the attachment of European elites to the EU project. They will do almost anything to stop it becoming more fragile, still less breaking up. The desperate salvage operation on the Euro after the financial crisis told us that. Every difficult challenge is met with some version of “more Europe”: More borrowing, more debt, more institutional debate, anything rather than confront the actual underlying problems. Indeed policies that antagonise the US, perverse though they may be in their own terms, can actually help politically by highlighting differences and providing something for European leaders to rally around – for, as the reception of the Strategy in Europe has shown, EU leaders hate having to hear uncomfortable truths.
So the US must accept they are dealing with a European entity that will for the foreseeable future be deeply unsatisfactory. It isn’t going to break up. Either it will be less than the sum of its parts, because it can’t master internal dissent and differing views about the direction of travel. Or, in the unlikely event it gets a grip, it will use the fruits of recovery in the economy and in hard power to become even less of a partner to the US than it is now. That’s just the way it is. Weakness or antagonism are the two possible outcomes here, whether the Europeans spend more on defence or not.
This poses uncomfortable choices for Brits. British policy has always been to encourage, gently, Europeans standing on their own two feet defensively, but within a clear NATO and transatlantic framework. The weakness of that broader framework has been apparent for the last couple of decades and it is now verging on collapse because of choices made by the US and by the Europeans. Yet the other options are also problematic.
For one thing, Britain’s own military power is at a low ebb and the army is smaller than it was at the time of the Napoleonic wars, when Britain’s population was a sixth of what it is now. There isn’t an option of a special bilateral partnership with the US, a genuine reinvigoration of the “special relationship” and “five eyes” partnerships, unless that changes.
Yet the choice to join in with the EU’s defence arrangements is politically and institutionally problematic too. Institutionally for the reasons set out above, and because the EU is likely to be a poor substitute for US power for some time to come as a guarantee of real security and territorial integrity. And politically, even if you are the ineffectual Keir Starmer, who wants to subcontract national security to Ursula von der Leyen and Kaja Kallas? I don’t because I deeply distrust the kind of people the EU tends to choose as its leaders.
Hard choices, but they need to be made. In truth Britain badly needs to redefine its national strategy after Brexit smashed the old one. So far, there is no real sign its politicians are up to the task. But world politics won’t wait.
The Rt Hon Lord Frost of Allenton CMG was Britain’s chief negotiator for exiting the European Union
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