Patrick Costello and Glyn Ford argue for a European defence strategy for serious times
Mary Kaldor makes many valid points in the last issue (“Beyond Knee-jerk Defence Spending” Chartist May/June 2025). Europe needs to have the capability and capacity to defend itself against today’s very real security threats, most immediately by ensuring that the necessary level of support for Ukraine is maintained as Washington walks away. Yet, if done properly, this should not require any significant increase to current NATO European defence spending: Trump’s demands for bigger commitments are really about strong-arming new contracts for the US military-industrial complex.
More money is unnecessary if the EU and the UK make the right decisions. The EU’s collective defence budgets are two and a half times higher than that of Russia. Add in the UK and it’s three times higher. The issue here is not quantity, but quality. Currently, each Member State has its own defence spending regime and national defence industry. The result is massive fragmentation, the failure of interoperability and the financial drain of over-expensive kit supplied by the US. In the absence of an EU single market for defence procurement, Europe’s arms are produced in small batches, paying massive premiums. A single market would see the creation of European champions that could mass produce European weapons with a sharp collapse in unit cost.
In January, Kaja Kallas, the new EU foreign policy supremo, argued for the creation of this single market: “We need to consolidate our defence industry and develop common weapons systems”. Commission President Von Der Leyen has crucially now made achieving this single market a key objective of her second mandate, even if the headlines from the Commission White Paper in March were more focused on the €150 billion in soft loans made available for purchases of advanced weapons and ammunition. Both are important, but the former is more far-reaching.
Kaldor is also right to point to the wastefulness of spending on expensive aircraft, tanks and ships when the Ukraine war has demonstrated both their vulnerability, and that the key needs are the much cheaper missiles and drones. The recently published Defence Review moves some way to acknowledging this. But it doesn’t follow through on its logic: Trident is perhaps the best example of enormously expensive military kit that is a complete white elephant. Worse still, many of these over-expensive parts of European armouries are based on advanced military technologies bought from Washington who then have a built in US veto on their deployment, maintenance and use. It’s a lie that the UK has an independent nuclear deterrent absent sovereign capacity.[JW1] As the fraught debate over the use of F35 fighter jets in the Gaza genocide has also shown, increasing the involvement in production in and purchase of American military technology is to collude in, rather than free Europe from its subservience to Washington.
A coherent European defence would recognise that foreign aid, diplomacy, trade and democracy support for our neighbours and beyond are vital and cheaper tools that can play crucial roles in guaranteeing Europe’s security. Rather than mimicking the madness of the US cuts, Europe should be using the US withdrawal to develop Europe’s influence further in its neighbourhood and beyond. Without this, the only global beneficiary of Washington’s withdrawal will be Beijing.
Where Europe is in a quandary is over how much of Europe’s future defence should be NATO-based and how much should be EU-based. Given the unreliability of the US security guarantee for the foreseeable future, dependence on NATO leaves Europe fundamentally dependent on often wrong-headed and sometimes malign US decision-making. However, today, EU defence structures are not adequate to replace it: compare, for example, the 6,800 personnel in NATO’s military command structures with the handful in the EU’s equivalent. In addition, an effective European defence would need to involve a number of the non-EU NATO members, notably the UK and Turkey, because of the important defence capabilities they would bring to the table. What is needed is the design of a European defence pillar using elements of both the EU and NATO. Its design will require new structures to ensure that all the countries concerned can work together in designing and building it. Some analysts are already talking about a rebooted Western European Union.
The idea of a European nuclear-free zone is a non-starter while Putin remains in the Kremlin – and probably long after. Instead, the ongoing discussions on how the French nuclear deterrent could be repurposed as a European one need to be accelerated. Better still would be if the UK could become part of that process, though the absence of autonomous control of Trident makes that much more difficult. Nonetheless, if the Defence Review’s proposals for nuclear bombers can go ahead with non-US aircraft, that might well change.
Many of these debates are underway in Brussels and in national capitals. There is light at the end of the tunnel, but there won’t even be a tunnel until Europe’s leaders get serious about security and abandon the madness of national sacred cows for collective defence. If that were to happen, we could have the defence we need, neither playing Trump’s numbers game, nor at the expense of the welfare state.