Wed, May 27, 2026 page7

• NATO must die for a European Defense Union to gain ground

  • By Yanis Varoufakis
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  The idea of a European Defense Union is gaining ground across Europe. However, so long as NATO continues to dominate Europe’s security, the prospect of building its own effective defense union would remain elusive. To become sovereign in defense matters (and more generally), Europe must terminate NATO — a prospect as unlikely as it is necessary.

  NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte recently let slip a truth that drew gasps from across Europe. He described the alliance not merely as Europe’s defensive shield but as “a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage,” and that “making use of key assets here in Europe” is “crucial also for the success of this American-Israeli campaign” in Iran.

  Rutte is right. NATO is a forward base for wars Europe did not choose, against adversaries Europe does not have, in the service of the global ambitions of a power increasingly at odds with Europe’s interests and values. European leaders always knew that the North Atlantic alliance was a marriage of nonequals, but they accepted this in return for the promise of security.

  Now that the US commitment to European security is in doubt, Rutte is cutting a lonely figure by continuing to celebrate an arrangement that keeps Europe tethered to the US imperium. Even among Europe’s Atlanticists, faith that NATO would automatically revert to its default settings once US President Donald Trump leaves office is waning (albeit in ultra-slow motion).

  Permanent acquiescence to US whims does not a European defense strategy make. At the same time, even the most conservative Europeans recognize that NATO without the US would be like a bicycle without a rider. That is why calls for a European Defense Union, most likely a coalition of the willing founded via EU’s enhanced cooperation procedure and extending to Norway and the UK, are multiplying.

  But therein lies the problem. So long as NATO continues, a viable European alternative is impossible.

  A properly functioning European Defense Union requires clear answers to four hard questions: Who places the orders for Europe’s weapons? Who issues the common debt necessary to pay for them? How is the resulting expenditure distributed among member states’ national champions in the defense industry? Last but certainly not least, who will order Europeans in uniform to kill and be killed?

  Sensible answers to these questions cannot be intergovernmental, nor can NATO provide them. The prerequisite for Europe to build its defense union is the political union that the architects of its monetary union eschewed.

  Some claim that the current existential threats Europe is facing, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, can create the momentum toward political union that the euro crisis and then the COVID-19 pandemic failed to generate. Right or wrong, one thing is clear: A functional defense union requires political union, and NATO’s continued existence is inimical to it.

  For the Cold War generation, subordinating Europe’s defense to US priorities made sense. American and Western European elites were aligned by a genuine, existential fear of the Soviet Union and by a financial mechanism that, in the 1950s and 1960s, turned Europe into the recycler of the US’ surpluses. Even after US surpluses gave way to massive deficits, Europe exported its surplus dollars back to the US: Americans bought German cars and French luxury bags ,while Europeans used those dollars to buy US debt, equities and real estate.

  Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall came down. The Soviet Union became a museum piece, and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia wanted nothing more than to join the West, including NATO. The US no longer feared Russia. What the US did fear was too close a relationship between Germany and Russia, lest its hegemony over Europe be challenged.

  German industry ran on Russian gas. However, German exports ran on US deficits, giving the US the leverage it needed to ensure Germany’s acquiescence to its two-pronged policy preventing Russia’s integration into Europe. It deliberately impoverished Russian society, and it expanded NATO eastward, thus forging the perfect conditions for a strongman like Vladimir Putin to rise.

  As NATO marched eastward, new ruling elites — in the Baltics, but also in Poland and now Finland — discovered that they could punch far above their weight within the EU by becoming the US’ most fervent agents of hyperexpansion. Suddenly, Europe added to its North-South faultline (separating surplus Germany and Holland from deficit Greece, Italy and Spain) a new divide between eastern hyperscalers and western moderates, each yanking the EU in different directions.

  Even if the US had no interest in dividing Europe in order to rule it, NATO amplified the centrifugal forces that rendered Europe’s political union — and by extension any effective defense union — impossible to forge. That is why Europe must exit NATO — not because Russia is friendly (it is not), and not because the US is evil (it is merely imperial). Rather, Europe must leave NATO because an alliance that serves as a platform for the US to project power on the world stage will forever benefit enough European players in its midst to frustrate Europe’s consolidation and sovereignty.

  I once heard the Irish novelist Edna O’Brien say that “the ruin of a heart is a slow and stealthy thing, parading as duty.” So, too, the ruin of a continent. Every time a European leader flies to Washington and genuflects before the Resolute Desk, the damage worsens — slowly, stealthily and parading as duty.

  Yanis Varoufakis, a former finance minister of Greece, is leader of the MeRA25 party and professor of economics at the University of Athens.

  Copyright: Project Syndicate
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