The raid on Caracas that landed Nicolas Maduro and his wife in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Centre has surely focused minds in the Kremlin. For twenty-five years, Vladimir Putin lavished funds on his armed forces and elite airborne units. Yet when called to decapitate the Ukrainian leadership and neutralise Kyiv’s military, they failed miserably. The cream of Russia’s professional army were slaughtered on the approaches to Bucha and across the runways of Hostomel. A planned three day blitzkrieg devolved into grinding four year bloodbath.
The Russian military simply does not have the capacity and skills to launch an operation like Absolute Resolve. The US shut down the entire military communication and air defence systems of a country twice the size of Germany, penetrated a heavily guarded compound and spirited the Venezuelan leader away without the loss of a single American life. Equipment expensively sourced from Moscow didn’t save Maduro, nor did his cadre of Cuban guards trained to Russian Spetsnaz standards. Putin stakes his credibility on his capacity to protect his allies, yet has been unable to do so in Damascus, Teheran and now Caracas. He will no doubt require his military commanders study the US operation and develop similar capabilities, assuming enough of his army survives the Ukrainian cauldron.
Less has been made of how far Europe is from developing these capacities. Polish PM Donald Tusk announced that Europe is “finished” if it doesn’t unite, yet unity requires far more than coordinating the foreign policies of 27 states. Eliminating national vetoes in the Council won’t magic up a unified European military force. If the EU is ever to exercise strategic autonomy, it will have to integrate the military capacities scattered across its member states. This is much easier said than done, despite bureaucratic oddities like the Eurocorps, which remains outside the formal governance structures of the EU thirty years after its creation. Long before Delta Force rappelled onto the roof of the Miraflores presidential palace, the US military devoted itself to mastering complex joint operations involving the Army, Air Force, Navy and the intelligence community. The Goldwater-Nichols reforms in 1986 constrained the individual service fiefdoms that hindered operations from Vietnam to Grenada. A generation of US military leaders learned “jointness” and the effectiveness of cooperation across the full range of American military capacities. The seamless coordination of the vast array of military assets deployed in Absolute Resolve is a hard-won tribute to decades of ambitious reform.
In addition to entrenched inter-service rivalries in its major military powers, the EU faces the additional obstacle of 27 national executives determined to retain final authority over their military forces. Joint operations prepared in secret and conducted at lightning speed cannot wait for 27 bickering leaders to endorse common action. The epic political fisticuffs over new funding for Ukraine show how far the EU is from unity of outlook, much less joint military action. Dissenting leaders may well undermine or leak sensitive plans to thwart collective action. By contrast, NATO’s unified military command remains the default provider of security: It has harnessed European capabilities to the common defence through the agency of US hegemony. Without the dominating offshore power able to provide the command, control, communications and intelligence capacities (“C3I”) that bind raw military power together cohesively, the EU will struggle to animate declared autonomy with actual capability.
The grudging endorsement of the Caracas raid by most European leaders, including Commission President von der Leyen reveals a recognition of how far Europe is from realising actual strategic autonomy independent of US support. Rebuking Trump’s triumph would only endanger America’s remaining commitment to European security. The vast expenditures needed to replace American C3I as well as the long term commitment to cross-service and transnational integration will not be realised quickly, and likely not before Vladimir Putin goes to his reward in whatever heaven awaits a committed Chekist. NATO chief Mark Rutte is fully aware of Europe’s continued dependence on American power and is doing the hard graft of keeping the White House onside. While the EU’’s assumption of Ukraine’s financial needs has helped assuage US anger over asymmetrical burden sharing, Washington is still eager to reduce its commitments to Europe as it looks to secure the Pacific from Chinese aggression.
Declarations of strategic ambition and new budgetary commitments are an important first step if the EU is to assume future responsibility for the capabilities traditionally provided by the US. But as the EU is unlikely ever to wrest control of military forces from its sovereign member states, it will at best become the financing arm for an alliance still backed by US infrastructure and nuclear guarantees, if not American armoured brigades. Rather than wrangling over big ticket weapons programmes like the Future Combat Air System, Europe should concentrate on the less glamorous reforms needed to ensure interoperability and the rapid deployment of multinational units into Eastern Europe. Upgraded bridges and prepositioned equipment will do more to protect the Baltics than a handful of new fighter jets set to fly in 2040. Full replacement of what the American military provides is simply not within the budgetary or political capacity of Europe anytime soon.
The lessons from Caracas may help deter Putin with a painful example of his military inferiority to the West, but they also provide Europe with a sobering measure of how far short of true autonomy its current military capabilities leave it. Talk of strategic autonomy is cheap; actually achieving it is beyond the capacity of the EU.
‘Shut up’, they explained