Who will sign up to the Bundeswehr? (Credit: Adam Berry/Getty)
Imagine a world in which western Europe was actually able to stick it to Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump simultaneously. As if. Back in the real world, there’s a remote possibility the Europeans might get their act together sufficiently to stand up to one, or the other. But not both. They will, in classic fashion, be split. Some of the eastern European countries, the Baltic States, for example, will prioritise a push-back against Russia. Others, like France, are more concerned with driving their independence from the US. Then there is a third group that wants neither.
The extent of Europe’s current defence vulnerability is perfectly illustrated by the F-35 fighter jet. Sold to us by the American defence company Lockheed Martin, eight countries are involved in its manufacture and 14 Nato member states use it. They all co-operate on matters like training, and maintenance.
But according to the magazine Stern, the contract with the Germans stipulates that the Americans have the right to withdraw support for delivery of the aircraft, and maintenance at any time if the President decides to invoke national security interests. There is talk among European security officials that the Americans might even use something called the “kill switch” to immediately deactivate the planes, should their erratic President see fit to do so. While there is no credible evidence that such a thing even exists, the US certainly has many other ways to frustrate its use in the field — including refusing to service them or supply parts. Meanwhile, European defence ministries are committed to the jet as it allows them to remain under the US nuclear umbrella. France, the only nuclear power in the EU, doesn’t have sufficient capacity to provide the scale of defence services to other members of the EU that the US has been willing to do until now.
So, where does that leave Europe? What they are agreed on is the plan is to increase military spending. The EU will follow Germany’s example and partially exempt the defence budget from the fiscal rules. But the truth is, no amount of investment will wean the EU off its American dependency any time soon. It will take decades to close the immense defence technology gap.
To build entire industries from scratch takes time. You need defence companies, supply chains, and know-how. Europe is far from the cutting edge of 21st century defence technology and its expertise in that sector has been diminished since the end of the Cold War.
A graphic example of what happens when you lose industrial know-how can be seen in the civilian nuclear sector. Germany used to build the best nuclear power stations in the world but had changed by 2023 when it closed the last of its own plants. That same year, the country only had eight professors active in nuclear research — there were, by way of comparison, 173 professors in gender studies. This is what happens when you drive down industries. They can’t just be switched back on.
The same applies for defence. The US is miles ahead of us thanks to decades of investment into digital-era technologies. From the Manhattan Project onwards, American military investment and innovation has pioneered civilian spin-offs: the transistor in 1947, the integrated circuit a decade later, and the communication technologies in the Sixties that morphed into the technology behind the internet. When the US was investing in AI, the Europeans were fussing over the Green Deal. We spent our peace dividend on social transfers. As a result, the German military still uses the fax machine and we are similarly in the dark ages when it comes to building ballistic missiles, AI-powered satellites, and electronic warfare.
It is laughable, then, to think we could possibly match Russia’s defence capabilities in the next five years. Even with investment in place, given the weakness of our industry, we would have to spend it on defence imports from the US. At which point, action is thwarted by Europe’s age-old problem. Politics. There are no indications that political majorities in Berlin or Paris are willing to trade off welfare spending to pay for US arms imports. Italy and Spain are already recusing themselves from re-militarisation because they are far away from Russia, and because they have much less fiscal scope.
Even the more realistic goal of a gradual Europeanisation of defence spending over a period of 10-15 years would go beyond anything Europe has done in living memory. Key to their current position is the fact that the EU is not a military alliance. Defence is explicitly excluded from the single market. The UK is not in the EU, and yet it is indispensable in the construction of any functioning European security architecture. But Europe, obdurate as ever, launched a €150bn defence fund with the participation of Japan and South Korea, and without the UK. This tells us that they are still in business-as-usual mode.
Another obstacle to military greatness is Europe’s demographics, and its lack of young people willing to join the military. There is now growing support in several EU countries to reinstitute the draft. Interestingly much of this pressure comes from politicians of the Left, who themselves avoided the draft when it was in place, and who opted for social work instead. But even if the draft were brought back, that would not suddenly present Europe with the specialist troops they need to drive battle tanks and fly F35 fighter planes. I heard of a young man who wanted to join the Bundeswehr a decade ago but was rejected on the grounds that he was overqualified. He was told that preference was given to people from difficult social environments.
Our current predicament dates back to the woman once celebrated by pro-European liberals as the leader of the Western world, Angela Merkel. She left a long legacy of unsolved problems, including that of a depleted Bundeswehr.
But of all the terrible decisions Merkel took, by far the most consequential, the repercussions of which we are feeling now, was her refusal to accept a strengthening of the EU’s institutions during the eurozone financial crisis in 2012. For the briefest of moments that year, there was pressure on EU leaders to agree a timetable for a single European sovereign bond and a fiscal union. The sovereign debt crisis led to an increase in interest rates in several European countries that would have invariably led to an implosion of the eurozone if it had been allowed to continue. Merkel decided in the summer of that year that she did not want to pick a fight with the conservatives in her party. As a result, the EU was left trapped in a dependency on the US dollar, on US financial markets, and on US defence. If the EU had started the long process towards a fiscal union in 2012, it might have been better equipped to respond to the geopolitical shocks of this decade.
Instead, it was left to Mario Draghi, then president of the European Central Bank, to roll out a backstop to prevent the eurozone from imploding. That accomplished the technical job of containing the rise in interest rates, but it was also the point at which the battle for a political union was lost. In the years since, the EU has only become more fragmented.
By 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine, the debate about further integration was fading. In 2023, the European Parliament did propose a reform of the European treaties, mostly about voting rights and changes to how the EU works internally. But even those pathetically insufficient ideas have since been dropped.
It was only this year, 11 years after Putin’s annexation of Crimea, and three after his invasion of Ukraine, that the EU started to panic. With the return of Trump, EU leaders finally realised that the combination of their under-investment in defence and their over-reliance on the US had left them dangerously exposed to global shocks.
There is a cliché about the EU that if only the crisis were big enough, Europeans might wake up and do the right thing. They had a financial crisis. They had a pandemic. They had Putin. They did not wake up. It reminds me of the Parable of the Drowning Man, about a devout Christian minister, trapped in a flood, refusing successive rescue attempts by boats and then a helicopter, all the while praying that that God would come and help him. The man drowned, and when in heaven, he asked God why he had refused to help. God responded: “What did you want from me? I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”
The EU has not drowned quite yet. It is at a point where it can choose between stepping into a US-made helicopter, or a European-made boat. My guess is that some Europeans will choose the boat. Others will choose the helicopter. And some will make no choice at all.
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SubscribeThis is what I call a killer fact:
“That same year, the country [Germany] only had eight professors active in nuclear research — there were, by way of comparison, 173 professors in gender studies.”
It just says it all.
Yes I made me LOL
Couldn’t agree more, absolute nectar!
I wonder how many ‘Professors of gender studies’ the UK has?
One is one too many.
The shocker is the tree of cascading effects. A professor will typically have multiple streams of research, have several PhD students each, and will lecture to many dozens of students each year. I bet you a student who did nuclear sciences would have no problem switching to gender studies, I am however, how can I put this, less confident that a gender studies student could move across to the nuclear sciences quite so easily – so students vacating the sciences in this way is a one-way trip. Assuming these are mostly not overseas students but home based, this means Germany is set to have a very large number of students qualified in gender studies the future, while nuclear sciences becomes niche or dies out completely. It goes without saying, we are in the same boat here in the UK.
And here in the US.
Not sure it’s true though. There are many areas of Nuclear research including fusion.
How many officials of any EU country have ever served in the military and, of those, how many ever under fire? In the US there are hundreds: in Congress, in the Cabinet, as the heads of Agencies, in the Intelligence community, in boardrooms of defense companies, and thousands more in positions of middle management. For better or worse, when it comes to defense, America has a deep bench comprised of people with real combat experience.
The educational resources of the American military is also vast in comparison to every other nation. Soldiers, sailors, and airmen (air persons?) are constantly being sent off to schools to learn and hone skills. That infrastructure cannot be conjured at will.
True enough, but before we get too carried away, how many of those Americans fought in a war that America actually won? It’s not a trivial question. Learning how to lose wars is not a massive advance on never having fought a war.
It’s an interesting question though. Which countries around the world, have fought a victorious, high-intensity war in the last half-century? I suspect the answer is very few.
Apart, that is, from Operation Desert Storm. This was when Saddam’s hapless army got unloaded onto it, all the NATO munitions that the West had carefully stored. These munitions had been preserved for the eventuality of a Soviet attack that never materialised.
In other words, this was NATO’s last, and unrepeatable, Cold War hurrah.
UnHerd contributor Edward Luttwak wrote a book called The Art of Military Innovation: Lessons from the Israel Defense Forces. In it he talks about the difference between microinnovations and macroinnovations. One comes from the ground up and the other from the top down.
I think the American military focuses too much on macroinnovations and needs to work on microinnovations. So instead of learning from Ukrainians what is working and adjusting our hardware, we give them our hardware and they struggle to use it effectively in an environment where it doesn’t do much to turn the tide.
The war in Ukraine is a slog, with air and sea power largely neutralized. The war has all the technological finesse of two heavyweights slugging it out toe-to-toe, pounding each other bloody. On the other hand, both countries are learning how to wage war and innovating as they go.
Bottom-up innovation only comes from agile development, not waterfall development. You need to test things out in the real world of combat. As discussed, the US hasn’t been in that kind of combat for a long time, maybe since the Korean war.
Too bad then that we have not taken the chance of working with Israel and Ukraine to learn from the battlefield. (At least to my knowledge. There is probably more going on than I know.) Things are changing, and we aren’t keeping up.
We just announced the F-47 fighter, a generation beyond the F-35. It’s not that these fighters are not well-designed, but they are obsolete as soon as they are built and they are specialized for a war that they will probably never see.
That the Houthis have been able to close the Red Sea to shipping shows again, I think, that we need to be more strategic in what we put our money into. Our military is like our healthcare. We spend more than any other country, but our results don’t reflect that.
The American military has learned lots on the ground in its various misadventures. So too are they testing equipment and learning lots in the Ukraine war….
..but it seems they are only learning how to fail! But sure they knew that already! LOL
So what you’re saying is the USA has discovered hundreds of ways its military and war machines don’t work.. like Edison’s light bulbs! ..while Russia’s old fashioned methods and Houthi determination hold sway.. This is encouraging for the USA’s victims, ie the rest of the world!
American policy in Ukraine has been exclusively a political project, not a product of Pentagon strategy. The American weapons systems deployed have been provided, not in the service of an overarching American military direction of the war, but to satisfy political expedience coming from outside the American military. If the results are poor, responsibility lies elsewhere.
Micro vs macro innovations is a dated concern to a larger extent than you imply. It was a subject alluded to in the book, Kill Chain, by Christian Brose, but has been eclipsed by the dramatic appearance of a robust non-traditional defense industry exemplified by companies such as Anduril, Planitir, and SpaceX.
A “ground up” advantage seldom discussed as it relates to the American military derives from its unique dependence on NCO’s to run the lion’s share of actual boots and bullets engagements. American soldiers at the level of Master Sergeant (for the Army) are the backbone of the military, a rarity in all other world armies that instead adhere to an ancient and rigid officer-class mentality that does not allow for enlisted men to adjust independently to battlefield situations or provide input for decisions. The Russian army is an example of zero autonomy for non-officer soldiers; even Russian officers must defer all decisions up the chain. In the U.S. Army it is widely accepted that 2nd Lieutenants receive a lot of their most pertinent “training” from the NCO just under them in rank.
There also exists in the US a unique subculture of multi-generational military families for whom service is a proud tradition of their clan. The level of commitment which derives from these service people exceeds that of the recruits who enter the military as conscripts or as an employer of last resort. The latter are what previously pacifist countries like Germany can expect, where “military families” do not exist at a comparable scale and cannot be quickly established.
One must not make the very foolish assumption that the US has performed poorly in many military conflicts because of an ineffective fighting force. American soldiers have been the victims of horrid political leadership that has committed them to impossible situations and constrained their ability to do their job. The performance of American soldiers, sailors, and aviators has been second to none. The Lyndon Johnsons, Bill Clintons, George W. Bushes, and Barack Obamas bear the blame for their misuse of military resources. European countries that have foresworn defense for decades will be hard pressed to conjure military effectiveness from thin air no matter how much money they commit.
Barnes Wallis said the genius of the English was their individuality. Wellington said our greatest asset was our honesty. Whenever people have to deal with the forces of nature and combat man and machines are tested by adversity.
Perhaps the most insightful assessment of damage done in war was by Speer; what he sad was the amount of irreparable damage done. The USA dropped vast number of relatively small bombs which caused damage and in the case of factories may have damaged roofs and even walls but left the lathes and other machinery working. B Wallis in 1939 realised that t make 1 T of steel Germany needed 120 T of water . Until 1943 Britain had no bombers which could carry large enough bombs to destroy dams. The construction of 6 Tt and 10T bombs meant the roofs of U Boat pens,, bridges and floors of factories were irreparable damaged..
Over the years there has been many examples where appropriate technology beats size; English war bow versus mounted French knight; 450 T Revenge armed with demi cannons versus 1300 T Spanish ship with high castles; German U boat compared to battleship, British pin point bombing with Lancasters and Mosquitos using large bombs versus USA blanket bombing dropping larger tonnage of smaller bombs. Will NLAWS and drone replace tanks and AI replace pilots. If Hitler had built 160, 1000T U-boats rather than Scharnhorst , Gneisenau , Bismarck and Tirpitz he would have won WW2.
Unless we identify the threat and have the people with the engineering genius of B Wallis , J R Mitchell, de Havilland, Whittle , S Hooker, Chadwick , Camm , etc spending more money on defence will not make us safer.
An chimerical victory . Unsustainable and hugely counterproductive.
Disagree, in so far as militaries usually learn a lot more from losing a war than winning it.
Really? If Iraq and Afghanistan are any guide, the Americans learned precious little from Vietnam, wouldn’t you say?
Apart from the absence of jungle in one, Afghanistan and Vietnam were very similar. Iraq was a more conventional war, where the opponent was an actual nation state.
It depends what you’re referring to – equipment? Tactics? Strategy? Supply lines? My father worked on reconnaissance photography during the Vietnam War and with the little he told his teenager daughter, no matter, it was still fascinating technological progress at the time.
May God forgive him.. the vast majority of those he targeted were innocent women and children, just like US satellites and UK Intel flights (out of Akrotiri) are doing to innocent Gazan women and children today. I wonder how such people sleep at night?
re: women and children – it would be hard to prove your accusation/estimation of ‘the vast majority were women and children’. It would be surprising if you had some inside scoop on this. If you’ve studied the Vietnam War, jungle warfare was very complex and there were rarely cut-and-dried ways to deal with things tactically; Civilians fought alongside soldiers and were integrated in military camps, often as ‘shields’. I recall, he did mention they used Vietnamese military handbooks to ascertain how many troops were in a given area, ie a certain number were assigned to each latrine. Photos revealed this. He also showed me pictures of other photographic devices that were planted in the ground which relayed data to satellites. Funny aside, one day I noticed a ‘pin-up’ in his briefcase, and I asked him what that was all about…supposedly, the first or one of the first digital photos transmitted from a satellite to a Hawaiian base was that pin-up photo. My father died years ago. I would say he was a pretty brilliant and clever engineer. I also know that he wasn’t exactly thrilled about doing ‘war work’. It weighed on him.
Quite well, thank you — Vietnam artilleryman.
That cannot be true, surely? ..if it was the USA would be unbeatable war geniuses by now!
The only one I can think of where there was anything near parity of arms and a clear cut victory was the Falklands War.
..a minor skirmish compared to a real war. The warcrime of sinking thr Belgrano was utterly shameful.. I don’t know how people can boast about such atrocities..
That’s strange. The Captain of the Belgrano told a BBC documentary that his vessel was a valid target but, Liam, you clearly know better.
I didn’t hear that.. if it was on the BBC it must be true, unbiased and not open to challenge, right? Yeah.. pull the other one!
It’s not who won as much as it is who has a ‘battle-hardened’ force….
Experience under fire is the point. Winning and losing is most often a political issue these days.
Still, I have my doubts about US capabilities. I can’t help but think of that floating dock fiasco of the coast of Gaza. Three weeks to do what a private contractor would have done in three days. And then it fell apart as soon as the weather acted up.
It was probably designed to fail.. a big gesture: like Trump’s fake ceasefire in Gaza!
You seem to have all the answers..hmmm
Could be.
But what fake ceasefire are you talking about? Didn’t the Israelis get more than a dozen hostages back?
It is often the case that soldiers obliged to serve in a war that is lost become exemplary leaders. I do not agree that “learning how to lose wars is not a massive advance on never having fought a war.” It is a massive advantage.
A prominent example is Colin Powell. He served in Vietnam before rising in a long career to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. From that post he oversaw the stunning military success of the first Gulf War in 1991. The subsequent debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan were after his retirement from military duty. The mistakes of Vietnam informed him in a way that no amount of theoretical abstract “War College” experience can do. That is part of Europe’s military problem: no soldiers who have learned from mistakes.
Not at all clear that doesn’t lead to more problems than it could ever resolve.
I’m not sure that’s right about educational resources. Maybe in theory but in practice some countries’ militaries seem to learn lessons better than the US (e.g. Turkey and Israel). How many wars has the US entered where they have shown some humility to learn and adapt and have actually won? Not many. The last few have been depressingly familiar tale of hubris and wishful thinking.
It’s amusing to me to remember that Ursula von der Leyen was able to step into her spot co-leading the EU from her spot as defense minister in Germany. Her lackluster performance in getting Germany’s military up to snuff was no obstacle to rising higher. As this article says, the EU is not a military union, but the European militaries seem to be united in mediocrity.
Some at least of those militaries will need to step up (and I doubt anyone thinks that it will be the Italians).
Ursula is the epitome of mediocrity
That’s still too much of a compliment.
Maybe the problem is Europe behaving as a collective rather than as a confederation of independent nations. There is also the larger question that ties to the headline – defend itself from what? Europe is in no danger of being attacked. Not from Putin, not from the Chinese, not from anyone. It is already being undermined from within between the unelected EU types and the importing of people hostile to native cultures.
Hopefully, the large increase in Europe’s Muslim population will make it more peaceful, especially if white supremacy and racial bigotry decline. Both Europe and the US urgently need to rid our lands of the bubonic plague of Zionism and rabid anti Islamic hatred.
Hah, two decent people on UnHerd! Who knew?
That’s very naive indeed Alex.
“growing support in several EU countries to reinstitute the draft” maybe in latvia or Estonia, in actual western european countries noone is willing to go and die for donbass, sorry
..die, less for Donbas and more for banksters, the MIC and Zionists more like! ..if you’re wondering what the link is between Zionists and Ukraine check out The Khazar Kaganate..
..oops,lots of AshkeNAZIs on UnHerd just now.. touched a nerve did I? Good!
I did, and I’m still wondering.
All practically moot given that Europe and the UK has already voluntarily surrendered to the massed Trojan Horses of radical Islam.
Happily, Islam has NOT surrendered to radical Islam.. maybe a little diplomacy, cooperation, understanding, education and assimilation might be advisable? ..and less racist bigotry, Islamophobia and white supremacy while yer at it!
Oh dear. Here’s another writer who thinks the answer to every conceivable political problem is “more Europe”. The poverty-stricken imaginations of the Brussels bureaucrats are stuck in power-grabbing mode. It’s all they care about.
Salvation will come from sovereign governments, stumping up the cash and the will to work together.
I disagree. The writer writes about Europe, but that doesn’t mean he thinks there should be “more Europe”, only that Europe has problems which it needs to resolve from within.
It’s a common mistake to make: discourse rather than advocacy.
I think the comments about closer EU financial integration do actually imply “more Europe”. Avoiding this was probably one of the very few good moves by Merkel. The German electorate would never have forgiven her.
I think the answer to this particular problem is “more troops and weaponry”, not “more Europe”.
How about more diplomacy and less Zio slavishness? Russia is a natural ally. It too btw is a European nation.. which will come as a great shock to most of you, no doubt!
..one wonders what exactly is so objectionable about my comment? 12 downticks but not a single rebuttal! Tells a story in itself methinks?
Your comment offends all the people who still don’t know anything about European geography and culture. That applies to majority of British people now.
The “culture” of the Russian people could be broadly summed up as “get drunk on vodka, invade somewhere, and commit war crimes”.
His comment is just deliberately offensive. Not called for.
I’ve done a rebuttal. I’ve given you an extra downtick too.
Russia is culturally not a European nation, even if a little bit of it is geographically in Europe. It is also not a “natural ally”, on account of being populated largely by barbarians, and led by a warmongering tyrant.
Russia is not and never has been a natural ally of anyone except Russia.
I don’t think that’s his general view at all. The tone of his excellent articles this year is far more sceptical. Though his suggestion that there should have been some sort of financial union – and likely debt consolidation and sharing – after the 2012 debt crisis is rather concerning.
But his key point is that the EU/Europe keeps deferring decisions – whether defence, welfare reform, actually dealing with the debt crisis or anything else. Actually taking and sticking to a firm policy – in either direction – would probably be better than continuing to sit on the fence and hoping the problems will all go away.
“The UK is not in the EU, and yet it is indispensable in the construction of any functioning European security architecture. But Europe, obdurate as ever …”
That might be because, despite what you say, GB is in fact IN EUROPE! ..it’s not in Asia, not in America either! Study a little geography!
History suggests otherwise though, doesn’t it? European nations work together? Yer ‘avin’ a larf, init?
Very good essay.
If NATO had been scrapped in 1990 – as it should have been – would Europe have developed stronger militaries?
Difficult to say, but why should NATO have been scrapped in 1990? After all, Russia is still there.
It wasn’t an enemy when Gorbatchov handed over the reigns. A huge chance for including Russia into the European project was missed. NATO could only find a raison d’être by creating a new enemy in the post Soviet Russia. They succeeded.
It was missed by the Russians. A drunk took over from Gorbachev, and a tyrant took over from the drunk. Russia would have needed to display a commitment to democracy, and it didn’t.
Probably EU nations would have aligned with their former ally Russia to form unbreakable bonds of mutually beneficial trade and cooperation. Aligning ourselves with the USA was stupid since the US had no interest in Europe (except to keep it down) as we all now know for sure..
FYI it is acknowledged by US statemen that indeed the objective was to kerp Europe weak and above all to drive a wedge between Western Europe and it’s Eastern European neighbour, Russia; which, thanks to EU stupidity (+ GB stupidity) it succeeded in doing 100%.. and OMG, look at us now! Pitiful!
Do you drink? If so, stop. If not, start.
I actually recommend ketamine.
It has taken me years, but I think I understand it better now. You are correct. We’ve spent our lives bitching about the costs – for good reason. But we didn’t really do Europe a favor in the medium-to-long term, did we?
If one looks at the those in the British elite units of WW2( Commandos ) they often came from rural areas where they had learnt to shoot birds, rabbits and game from an early age, boxed, played rugby, cricket or rowed, hunted and learnt how to navigate across the country quickly and quietly. Many had been in cadet forces and or scouts. The above was particularly true of New Zealanders and Rhodesians. In the 1930s it was common for school children to walk miles to school, across country and in winter.
In Britain, PT for school boys was rope climbing, gymnastics and boxing whether one at a local council, grammar or public school.
Before they joined the armed forces these men were tough, fit, could shoot and had fighting spirit.
Most boys left school at fourteen years of age . By the age of eighteen years they had four or more years of working on farms, construction, sites, shipyards, mines, steel furnaces where they would have boxed for site team team, played rugby in winter and cricket in summer. This work builds strength, quick reflexes, good eye to hand coordination, agility and stamina, they are not muscle bound nd can cope with the cold, wet and windy.
Since 1939 and especially since 2024 and Covid there has bee massive decline in fitness, toughness, country skills and figthing spirit.
I would suggest it would take a year of careful training for the vast majority of European eighteen year olds to reach that of those entering the British infantry in 1939 and another year for those entering the Commandos or Parachute Regiment.
If Europe actually wants an ability to win wars then it should develop the physical training of Britain and Empire pre – 1939 , boxing, rope climbing, gymnastics, swimming in cold water, rifle shooting, cricket and cross country runs.
An officer who recruited officers for the Parachute Regiment said a rule of thumb for fitness was that they should be county level rugby players.
All very interesting, but a lot of future soldiers will be flying drones.
A common mistake. What held the Russians were Ukrainians defending steel works and attacking armour with NLAWS and tanks. Yes drones will be needed but infantry are needed to take and hold ground supported by armour and artillery.
Drones are just another weapon to be used where needed.
Yes, but they are cheap and versatile. Imagine unleashing tens of thousands of autonomous AI guided drones onto a battlefield, each of which could perform its function independently of an operator.
The EU is weak, cowardly, and in rapid decline. And it is all the voter’s fault. They decided to “believe and trust” in glorified bureaucrats and this is what you end up with. The also don’t have the guts to replace them. The U.S was headed in that direction but with the recent election, it may be able to rid itself of these “experts” and right the ship. In the EU, the bureaucrats are doing quite well, thank you!
The problem for our dear leaders, is that after you have spent two decades portraying your socialist policies as bulwarks of last resort against existential threats (climate mainly, but also Covid and extreme progressive ideologies) it’s hard to commit fully to the reverse ferret without losing face and having to go mea culpa, which obviously their egos and hubris won’t allow them to do.
I think that they are now realising that Russia is the chief existential threat.
“War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.”
EU elites, not Russia, represent the only existential threat to Europe.
https://www.compactmag.com/article/europes-anti-democratic-militarization/?
Ursula A joke indeed
…”Germany used to build the best nuclear power stations in the world but had changed by 2023 when it closed the last of its own plants. That same year, the country only had eight professors active in nuclear research — there were, by way of comparison, 173 professors in gender studies.”
You get the enemies you deserve. The idea that Europe is surrounded by adversaries is a bit peculiar. It would be more true to say we’ve been strung up between two superpowers. All of Europe was getting on better and better with post Soviet Russia until a new crew in Washington decided to put an end to that. That’s where today’s problems with Russia came from, though few are yet willing to acknowledge it. The price you have to pay if you don’t is being trapped in a fantasy world forever, holding the consequences of Washington’s proxy wars on Russia after they’ve decided to turn the page back to the more normal relations of 2005-7 to get the benefits of Russian resources and markets and save money while they focus elsewhere.
So yes, it’s essential that European countries take responsibility for their own defence. And yes, that does entail considerable political and technical change. Impossible and undesirable change, if the object is to create a European Superpower. Fortunately, Europe’s actual defence needs are far more modest. It only remains to recognise that, and stop following the Neocon pied piper who’s no longer piping.
You are living in a fantasy world. The Chekists were not destroyed, they were humiliated by the collapse of the USSR and Putin wants to recreate the empire of Peter the Great. Oil hitting $150 barrel, Europe running down it’s defences and nuclear power and buying Russian gas played into Putins hands.
Your indoctrination is embarrassing.. I can hardly clench my buttocks tight enough!
..and realise Russia is actually a part of Europe!
No it isn’t. A bit of it is geographically, but none of it is culturally. Ukraine is though.
All of Europe was getting on better and better with post Soviet Russia.…until it launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
The situation in the UK is similar to, but not yet quite as bad as Germany’s. ED. Rank reports that 130 universities in the UK are recognised for their research performance in Gender Studies, whilst only 11 institutions in the UK engage in nuclear physics research.
The problem is much deeper than that, of course. Neither the UK nor the EU is prepared to defend its own borders even against unarmed illegal immigrants. Until that mindset changes, what chance is there that the EU or UK will be prepared to defend any European nation against Russian attack and nuclear blackmail without US support?
Which is more likely: a Russian attack or a Martian attack? Answer: no difference; the probability in each case is zero!
That would only be true if none of Russia’s nukes work anymore.
Has it escaped your notice that Ukraine is in Europe?
…the exclusion of the UK…and French determination to use this problem as a lever allowing them to plunder our fishing grounds…says all we need to know. Fortunately, we have a moat…and like minded friends elsewhere in the world, even without the current POTUS. But the best of luck to you chaps. You’ll need it…
..if you cannot defend the moat against rubber dinghies what good is that moat?
If the US ever deployed the F35 ‘kill switch’ or even withheld maintenance or parts that would instantly and gor all time, terminate the purchase of US planes by every EU nation.. indeed, probably every nation on Earth.. So can we forget that, please.
This comment has so many layers not even discussed in the mainstream media! What is the power of US truly?
A bit like the Wizard of Oz.. but with a lot more brutality.. still, nothing a pair of cahoneys or a backbone can’t defeat.. or maybe a little girl from Kansas with a small yappy dog?
Thank God we have TWO ‘spanking new’ Aircraft Carriers.
HMS Gordon & HMS Brown.
There will certainly be plenty of time for “spanking” amongst naval personnel whilst our two carriers spend their working lives under repair.
“Rum, sodomy, and the lash” as WSC put it, although I gather they are all teetotal now.
You need to increase the superglue budget and all will be well.. my Houthi friends say aircraft carriers are old hat now..
“my Houthi friends say aircraft carriers are old hat now”…lol..
Since the US and Russia may well end up closely aligned, pushing back on one amounts to the other.
Well spotted!
Weirdly so!
Europe will need to build up its nuclear weapons then.
That seems inevitable. The current US team doesn’t seem to understand Europe’s innate chaos.
Europe might one day need nukes to defend against the Americans.
Maybe get some genius Hungarians to work on European defence.
The fatal mistake made by Merkel was to retain the euro instead of abandoning that crazy experiment. The decision to create a single currency without all the EU’s member states (some had the sense to stay out of it) and without a fiscal union doomed not just the euro but the EU. Supporting Ukraine (in what is essentially a civil war – akin to a war between England and Scotland) was the second gigantic EU error. It could not survive either and certainly won’t survive both.
“Civil War”? Seriously? The Ukraine War results from the invasion of Ukraine by the world’s most barbaric nation!
Herr Munchau has provided many plausible reasons why Europeans now will never be able to become a coherent military power. In essence, his case is we are terminally decadent. Nevertheless, Europe is the homeland of the oldest continuous, most deeply-rooted and most savage military culture in the world: Personally, I would not bet against it.
EU is exactly what Duropean voters are moving away from
Europe doesn’t need the EU to form an effective defence industry and capability. What’s really stopping it is France’s obsession with ‘la Gloire’. As far as France is concerned, a European defence industry would have to be dominated and dictated by France, it’s armed forces led by France, and French would have to be the common language. Without its pernicious influence we could have a ‘Euro-NATO’, a European defence alliance capitalising on all the structures, procedures, operational concepts, communications protocols, etc, developed by NATO over the last 70 odd years.
Your mindset is exactly what keeps Europe from forming a serious united military front. As a pacifist, long may your views prevail.. down with France (cowards); down with Gernany (Nazis); down with Italy (fascists); Rule Britania – right on; I’m fully behind you!
Oh God.
“France, the only nuclear power in the EU, doesn’t have sufficient capacity to provide the scale of defence services to other members of the EU that the US has been willing to do until now.”
France is also clear that its nuclear deterrent is not available to NATO but only to France (unlike the UK, that has, from the beginning, made its nukes available to NATO).
The foreign policy objectives of EU member states range (and have always ranged) so widely that it is almost impossible to imagine any form of joint military action or military force. Pick any military action or event and there is always a wide-ranging response across members – exactly as per your last paragraph. It will never change.
Perhaps instead of costly defense spending, Germany could sneak a few dozen gender studies professors into Russia.
I think a lot of these articles are still written under the assumption that Europe wants war — that Europe is preparing for war. But that assumption might be what ultimately breaks the EU, because it’s not shared by all Europeans. And it’s a dangerous mindset to operate from.
If Europe doesn’t have weapons, wouldn’t that make diplomacy even more necessary? Why is it that the EU can’t negotiate honestly — not just with Russia, but with itself?
Forget the fact that Europe lacks weapons. Forget the fact that America has military influence in every corner of life. America is a unique country — for the past 250 years, it’s been militarizing all over the world. So of course the U.S. has military embedded in every facet of society.
And let’s be real: America and many of its allies — the UK, France, Israel — have been fighting adversaries who aren’t even in the same league. Many of these opponents didn’t have real air forces, airports, or tanks, or even standing armies and often use AK47 not even a proper technological advanced weapons. That’s not power — that’s bullying. That’s cowardice. The West hasn’t fought a war with an equal since Hitler!
At the end of the day, the EU needs to detach. Really detach — even if not in tangible ways, at least in mindset. It needs to have real conversations, understand its own value, and develop its own assumptions — ones not dictated by the U.S. or Russia. If it fails to do that, the EU will fracture.
Because many Eastern European countries — rightfully — may be saying: “We were never colonizers. We’re not afraid of the world.” They might just choose to make peace with China and gradually rebuild some level of industrial capacity — on their own terms. Thinking long-term, instead of being caught up in this impulse toward global domination magic making!
But the way the EU is acting now, it’s like: “We colonized the world, now the world hates us and will never trust us again (which isn’t even necessarily true), America is leaving us behind, and our only option is to build weapons against each other.”
It’s the stupidest idea ever!
Think long-term, not just about what’s in front of you right now — that mindset has gotten us nowhere near reality.
Thank you for your comment. I couldn’t agree more.
Europe is not “building weapons against each other”. It is building them against Russia.
Three of the four major world powers have a dictatorial approach to foreign policy and a stated objective of annexing other countries. Europe is different because it is politically diverse with no overall head of state and no desire for territorial expansion. It is good for peace, not so good for defence. The UK needed the manufacturing capacity of the US in two world wars becaue Europe was divided. The US wanted Europe to stop the spread of communism and NATO served a common purpose.
Trump has done Europe a service by spelling out the US is no longer concerned about the spread of communism and therefore NATO is not important to them.
Europe does have a GDP that can rise to the challenge of defending itself. It actually has an advantage in that Ukraine and Gaza have shown defence needs a clean sheet of paper and creative minds on how to protect yourself from aerial and cyber attacks. Airbus is more than the equal of Boeing. The nations in Europe do not want the EU to be a supranational power and they do not need that to work together on defence. The more erratic the US is the greater the effort Europe will put into its defense. The risk to the US is that Europe will see the benefits and risks of China very differently from them.
Europe is different because it is politically diverse with no overall head of state and no desire for territorial expansion.
Europe is so diverse that it cancels election outcomes it dislikes. Also, Europe is a collection of multiple independent nations; it’s not the US with states and a federal govt.
Is there anything more depraved (outside of Israelis) than to read decrepid old men in their warrior armchairs yearning for death.. not their own death (chance’d be a fine thing).. no, for the deaths of their grandsons and the youth of their own country? ..in the name of some delusional past glory that never existed.. You guys make me sick!
..only 5 downticks.. where are the rest of you craven cowards? ..maybe you are capable of shame after all?
..OK, we got to 10.. but dome of you are holding out! Come on, thud is not how you built the Empire!
Go on! I like your comments. You speak for me too.
I have to say I agree. I’ve told myself to try to give this journalist a fair crack, maybe somewhere in there there’s some sense. But i’m struggling. His X bio states ‘speaks with a German accent, writes with a UK accent’, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Maybe he aspires to be a Daily Telegraph columnist and has pictures of Boris Johnson on his office walls….
Ok, it will take Europe time to “come up to speed” militarily, but there is no time like now to start. If Europe has an advantage, it is that the Ukraine War has taught everyone that warfare has changed, and Europe is well placed to factor that change into its rearmament in time for the next war with Russia.
And yet, the main Europeans nations are not fully engaging with the impact of AI driven drone technologies, they are still obsessed with big-ticket defence items like fighter jets etc, which are of course needed but now only part of the mix. My evidence is that it is still countries like Turkey building and supplying drones, the other European nations aren’t really researching or building them as part of what they sell militarily.
Well, they need to start.
Who is going to invade the EU? Hardly China or America and not Russia. Despite putting its economy on a war-time footing and spending 9% of GDP on defence, Russia’s ignomonious military failure in Ukraine (it was supposed to overrun the country in weeks) and its disastrous demography indicate it is no threat, despite all the hyperbole.
I have been subscribing to UnHerd for two years and I have yet to read a single article in favour of the EU which, despite its faults, is arguably the world’s most successful Continent-wide polity (450 million) when measured against every important quality-of-life indice. It spends marginally less on defence than America (2% as opposed to 3% of GDP). The latter benefits from economies of scale which the EU is now seeking to replicate.
You publish every week Wolfgang Münchau’s diatribes against the EU where he specialises in creating straw dogs to shoot down. Yet he has no answer to what the EU has achieved from its modest beginnings in 1957 to a continental Union today, with its single currency, single market and democratic legitimacy. No-one is following the folly of the UK in leaving. Perhaps UnHerd should occasionally commission an article with something positive to say.
Amen to that. And for the commentaries, the Europe bashing by an eloquent herd promoting a kind of I’m the only gay in the village British exceptionalism is both tedious and silly.
Are you replying to yourself? Or is this a default username?
Russia didn’t muster enough troops to “overrun the country in weeks”. The attack towards Kiev was probably a speculative “if it works fine, if it doesn’t it’s a good diversion” event.
The real focus has always been Donetsk etc which has been achieved in the main. And Russia ain’t giving them up.
As for the EU, it has lost one of it’s major contributors…hardly a mark of success. Note that I make no comment as to whether Brexit was good for Britain.
Did you happen to visit the EU during the great Covid plague?
I frequently did and was simply appalled by the draconian behaviour of everyone, French, Spanish, Italians, Germans, even the ‘ever so smug’ Swiss*. It was if their long suppressed base instinct to behave like authoritarian thugs was give full reign. Basically “Come back Hitler all is forgiven “.
In one heated exchange with a Swiss/German policemen about the wearing of the ridiculous masks, he found it simply incomprehensible that in England it was a matter of personal choice. He kept muttering “but you must have written authority”!
Fortunately I happened to have a sixty year old NATO Gas mask, in pristine condition, about my person, which caused utter consternation when I put in on. Thus I concluded that the veneer of European civilisation is much thinner than I had supposed. My dogs had come to the same conclusion sometime time ago now.
*Technically not actually in the EU for any US readers.
Russia has no interest in invading the EU or even Western Ukraine, its all hyperbole from our clown show leadership
7 downtickers are checking under their bedsgir Reds, as we speak! God, it’s embarrassing isn’t it? Grown men, eh?
“Grown men, eh”? Must be. I mean, there couldn’t possibly be any women on this site, right?
Please detail how you know this. Have you been on the phone to Putin?
Bwahaah. You had me at “democratic legitimacy”.
Europe: home of the referendum re-runs and canceling elections and the opposition “to save our democracy”.