Far too many times in recent history, the European Union has pledged to get serious, only to defer the process to some future date. When announcements come out, as with the Juncker investment fund a decade ago or the EU’s post-Covid recovery plan, there tends to be a flashy headline figure. But a closer look usually reveals that the numbers are underwhelming.

So it will likely prove for the defence package announced by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen this week. There are two key elements to the plan. One involves using Commission powers to issue €150 billion in new loans for defence spending via joint procurement, using the “exceptional circumstances justification” to bypass both the European Parliament and unanimous approval from the EU Council.

The other would modify the EU’s stability pact rules to allow for more defence spending. This would free up another €650 billion over the course of four years, assuming that EU countries use the fiscal headroom to increase their defence spending by 1.5 percentage points of GDP on average. In her speech this week, von der Leyen did not specify the time window that the loans would cover.

There are several dubious things about this plan. For one, the extra money which would actually be raised by loans — €150 billion spread over several years — is not that much. The bulk of extra defence spending will, absent new resources that require unanimity, have to come from national budgets.

One argument in favour of using loans like this is that they would act as an incentive to spend money together on defence procurement, rather than engage in wasteful duplication. The problem with this idea is that to make joint procurement work, all of the big spenders need to be involved. If you use a transfer mechanism, which is what the loans effectively are in the current budgetary set-up, then only those in the weakest fiscal position have an incentive to play along.

It’s also doubtful that the stability pact is really what’s limiting extra defence spending in Europe, when a lack of fiscal headroom plagues several of the continent’s large economies. How, for example, would France or Italy spend an extra 1.5 percentage points of GDP on defence without having to make structural savings somewhere else? Regardless of what the Commission says, would bond markets really look favourably on this?

But there is another, more fundamental problem. The long and arduous process of reorienting European defence probably shouldn’t start with arguments about money. Instead, if the US does withdraw, then the North Star of European security does too. The US doesn’t just provide troops, equipment, and other capabilities: it provides leadership, and a point of reference for everyone else.

Defence planning and command structures within Nato are currently oriented around continued US involvement. An accurate prediction for the consequences of American withdrawal would have to carefully consider where decision-making responsibilities for international security really lie. Ultimately, this is about more than who spends what and where.

Since the European defence community’s failure in the Fifties, there have been continual efforts to put off all of these questions. Instead, continental leaders have become more dependent on the US, and allowed themselves the illusion that they can be self-sufficient. They continually go on about the national prerogative of defence and security, but the reality is that playing this game can only happen because they all rely on the Americans. It is the illusion of sovereignty, not the same in practice.

This is an edited version of an article which originally appeared in the Eurointelligence newsletter.