From Defense News, May 9:
French vision for an autonomous Europe proves elusive
After Russia unleashed the largest land war in Europe since the end of World War II, exposing European defense capabilities as lacking, now may not be the best time to fantasize about the continent standing alone militarily.
But French President Emmanuel Macron is doing just that, sparking a fresh debate in Europe about where the continent is headed in the grand squeeze among the United States, China and Russia.
Strategic autonomy — the ability to provide for one’s own security, he told journalists aboard the plane flying him home from a visit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in April — must become Europe’s organizing principle. Without it, Macron said, Europe risks becoming a “vassal” to other powers, including the United States, which could be on a collision course with China over Taiwan’s independence.
The problem, according to analysts, is strategic autonomy means different things to different governments in Europe, and there’s no defined end state of when it might be realized. While there is a shared understanding that a new beefiness in defense matters is vital, the degree of continued reliance on the United States — with its atomic weapons and troop deployments across Europe — as the ultimate security guarantor is where opinions collide.
There is a widening gap now between Eastern and Western European countries along those lines. In Romania, for example, any military measures to protect the eastern front are perceived as having limited value unless they involve American boots on the ground, ideally stationed there forever.
In Western European governments, some still expect the bloc’s economic prowess and mere proclamations about Europe’s own defense ambitions to insulate them from Russian aggression.
Christian Mölling, who leads the Center for Security and Defense at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations, said Macron’s insistence on the term strategic autonomy is something of an anomaly among European leaders because it conveys a desire to be autonomous from others, namely Washington.
Macron, Mölling explained, “was mainly speaking for himself,” projecting France’s national vision onto the rest of Europe.
Germany prefers softer terms, like European sovereignty, that simply express an ambition to act independently during crises, according to Sophia Besch, a Europe analyst at the Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace....
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