March 22, 2025 - 4:00pm
The nascent European project of forming a “coalition of the willing” to support Ukraine could be a precursor to a larger joint undertaking. According to the Financial Times, Europe’s biggest military powers and the Nordic states are discussing a plan to “replace the US in Nato”, with a view to guaranteeing the continent’s security. At the heart of the proposal is massively increased defence spending and arms procurement over the coming five to 10 years.
This overcorrection to Vice President JD Vance’s recent critique of decades of European dependency on US military protection is intended to stop the Trump administration from crashing out of Nato. Instead, European countries are trying to persuade America to consider a gradual withdrawal. “Increased spending is the only play we have,” says one European official privy to the discussions.
Yet the possibility of “Amexit” from Nato is not the only challenge posed to the cohesion of the military alliance. As the emergence of the “coalition of the willing” clearly demonstrates, European countries are themselves split over commitments to Ukraine; Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte increasingly resembles a frustrated chief whip, unsuccessfully trying to control disruptive members. Poland and the Baltics also question, more or less openly, whether the mutual defence clause Article 5 can really be relied on in the context of the alliance as a whole.
None of this will be solved by a “European pillar of Nato” as imagined by Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron, which would essentially continue Nato’s current idealistic and rhetorically driven framing of policy — only without US guarantees for continental security. What’s more, such a scheme would have a shelf life only until a nationalist figure in the style of Germany’s Alice Weidel or Britain’s Nigel Farage is elected to high office in a major European country.
The only way, arguably, to keep the Americans in Europe and the Europeans together is to renegotiate the very mission and purpose of Nato. This is something which should have been done long ago, after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the inclusion in Nato of post-Soviet states with a strong desire to reclaim sovereignty and national identity.
There is a precedent that could be useful here: former French president Charles de Gaulle’s critique of supranational authority during the Sixties. Put another way: what if Nato were transformed into an alliance with a more “native” character, in which the highest degree of military solidarity would be expected only in the event of a threat against all members? In other Nato operations around the globe, member states would have the explicit freedom to participate in relation to what countries consider in line with their national beliefs and interests — meaning that if such a rule had been in place for the 2011 Libya campaign, Germany would not have been scolded for opting out.
In the longer term, a repurposed Nato could lead to member states developing different “profiles” based on their respective strengths. For example, countries such as Sweden, with limited military resources to defend their sovereignty but industrial prowess, could potentially focus on becoming the “workshop of Nato”. By this measure, they could offer high-tech weaponry and supporting systems instead of contributing troops to Nato missions. As a result, not all Nato members would have to chime in on a single, often Western-aligned analysis of world affairs — such as the wisdom of bombing Libya in 2011 — yet would still be deserving of the collective’s protection in a World War III scenario.
Similar to the original conception of the EU as a web of economic dependencies and hence political loyalties between historically warring powers, a “native Nato” could even dissipate doubts about the reliability of Article 5. With some form of work-sharing arrangement in the alliance, it would be in the interests of every member to support the “musketeer principle”. The coalition of the willing is a noble idea. To survive, however, Nato must accommodate its more unwilling member states too.
Johan Wennström is a Research Fellow at the Swedish Defence University, currently writing a book about Sweden’s stay-behind network during the Cold War.
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Subscribe“other NATO operations around the globe”?
NATO was formed as a defensive alliance for Western Europe against the USSR. That was it’s sole purpose. It should never be involved in “operations around the globe”. That it has been is entirely wrong and a result of its actual purpose vanishing with the end of the Cold War when its bureaucracy sought a different reason to survive.
Article 5 bears reading carefully. While NATO Secretaries-General like to trumpet the phrase “an attack on one is an attack on all”, they are much more reluctant to spell out the consequence: According to Article 5, each NATO member then autonomously decides the scope of its reaction. It may well deem a démarche (with exceptionally strong wording) to be appropriate.
Yes, Europe needs a new architecture for its defence – even if the label is “NATO”, it will have to be something completely re-thought from first principles. And the key principle will have to be defence, something current NATO has sloughed off.
The US’ current role in NATO is so crucial that there is no NATO without the US, which of course was always deliberate. The US brings not only the nuclear shield, but also intelligence, the command-and-control structures, and probably most importantly the undisputed leadership that precludes squabbles among the Europeans. Without the US, who will take that leadership role? France? Germany? The UK? A council? Even just asking the question shouts out the problem.
First and foremost, the defence architecture must not be linked to the EU, for the sake of everyone.
What I find amazing is that they’re unironically calling themselves “the coalition of the willing”, either thinking most people are too stupid to remember what a disaster the last “coalition of the willing” led to, or being too stupid themselves to think of something original (and not associated with a fairly recent western foreign policy debacle).
“According to the Financial Times, Europe’s biggest military powers and the Nordic states are discussing a plan to “replace the US in Nato”, with a view to guaranteeing the continent’s security”
….but they can’t even secure their borders.
Personally I’m finding it quite tedious having military defence and border control/immigration conflated all the time. The two things are not at all related.
Really? The inability to control borders most certainly calls into question the competence of those who are now proposing to involve their countries in expanding their militaries and getting involved in a “peacekeeper” role in Ukraine.
Peacekeeping can quickly become “hot” and I for one have no faith in any of the leaders to handle the situation.
You could say their inability to run the economy calls into question their competence, or the rise in shoplifting, or how well they can cook.
Migration is too high. This does not say anything about replacing the US in NATO.
The keyword is “border”. They are proposing to police someone else’s but cannot do so for ours.
Replacing the US in NATO, as the OP was talking about, involves buying weapons, boosting the size of the military etc.
Reducing immigration requires processes to prevent/deport illegal migrants, enacting policies to reduce legal migration etc
They are not the same, and people putting them together are just parroting something they’ve heard elsewhere.
What’s the point of national defence if your borders are open?
There will soon be no nation to defend.
Not “can’t”
Won’t.
I’m still unclear, as an American, as to what NATO is supposed to do any more? Russia is not the Soviet Union in scale or capability. Europe has 3 times larger economy and population than Russia. The EU together spends as much or more on defence than Russia with capacity to spend more on defence. France and the UK have nukes so what is NATO’s purpose at this stage?
The Russians are still “the Enemy”. That isn’t going to change any time soon.
Pure fantasy. There are only three countries in the world that can actually affect change. They are the U.S. China, and to a lesser extent Russia. Germany, up to 2010, could make that list but they are a broken country. France has always wanted to have that capability but has never had the capacity. England is also out for the same reason.
The EU is nothing but a bureaucrat’s wet dream. It has no purpose except to further their careers. They are amoral, occasionally immoral, and wouldn’t risk a broken fingernail to actually do the right thing. There will be a lot of eloquent soliloquies but no real action. As always. But they will still be building their careers and wealth.
Europe has no guts. It won’t do a damn thing for the Ukrainians.
If that it true, then it will need to accept continual Russian invasions of its borders.
Europe will never be capable of its own defence until it grows some b*lls.
….and realises who its enemy is (Spoiler Alert: Russia).
After reading this article, I’m at a loss what the author is proposing. What is a more native NATO? How would this be practically implemented? It all seems so abstract when the real world is anything but abstract and needs to be dealt with in a concrete way.
‘Swedish Defence University?’ Now there’s the perfect definition of oxymoron. Mind you, Sweden did very well out of its close economic ties with Germany during WW2 so it does have form for looking after itself.
Hasn’t been doing too well looking after itself against crime just recently. Probably that’s where effort should be expended, not on a dying NATO.
A millennium of violent European history prior to Pax Americana casts a long shadow of doubt on the success of a NATO sans the U.S. All of the many divisive elements–economic, cultural, and political–that continue to plague Europe will soon escalate to more profound significance absent the heavy hand of American hegemony.
Consider the historic European experience of conflict deriving from simply the division of Christianity into Catholic and Protestant and then add to that the two additional modern polarities of Secularism and Islam. The adversarial nature of the current milieu will lose its latency when all the separate European nations and factions within them are left to their own devices.
One thinks of Turkey, not mentioned here.
“The only way, arguably, to keep the Americans in Europe”
Why would we want this?
Watching NATO die is not, I suppose, a very edifying business but what we are currently witnessing (I’ve seen it described as a “coalition of the killing”) is rather pathetic.
Russia IS a threat to all members. The sooner they all realise it, the better.
What is happening is the return to the default condition of Europe in which nations decide what is best for them. The EU like the earlier UN and League of Nation talking shops is doomed to splinter apart. People reject supranational organizations in principle on the reasonable grounds they are unnatural. Tribalism is deep in our DNA.
The Cold War is over. It’s become obvious that Russia (or China) has no wish or capability of invading the West. The West should turn its efforts to friendly trade with the East, and minimize effort wasted on weapons.
Ukraine is “the West”. Russia has invaded it.