OPINION:
It’s official. Europe will soon have its own army and, presumably, its own regional defense. At least that is the stated goal of French President Emmanuel Macron. Mr. Macron is restating a position that German Chancellor Angela Merkel adopted some time ago that, “We Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands.”
Mr. Macron and Ms. Merkel have a point. The time to Europeanize NATO is long overdue. After all, the European Union’s economy is more than five times as large as Russia’s.
Privately, NATO’s European military elites are unenthusiastic. They refer to the dangers of “Macron’s disease.” In the minds of European military elites, Mr. Macron and Ms. Merkel are engaged in a dangerous game of self-deception because NATO’s command, control, communications, computers and overhead intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, (C4ISR), are entirely American.
Fortunately, there is a cure for Mr. Macron’s disease: President Trump should announce that, henceforth, the United States will no longer supply a U.S. Four Star to serve as Supreme Commander Europe (SACEUR). It is time to turn over responsibility for the command of European defense forces to a European Four Star selected by the NATO Council. Let NATO collectively acknowledge that the alliance is truly more European than American in the composition of its armed forces. In other words, unburden U.S. taxpayers from Europe’s defense, and let our prosperous European allies foot their own security bill.
This policy change will force Europeans to invest tens of billions of euros over the next decade to develop their own C4ISR and build a credible regional defense system. This approach will undoubtedly be supported by a U.S. military capability to surge as needed from a pool of forces (air, land and sea) that is predominantly in the Western Hemisphere, but Europeans must begin to defend themselves.
For 50 years, Washington has treated change beyond America’s borders — change in governments, borders, interests or trade relations that Washington did not initiate or propose — as something to be resisted. The outcome in the Washington Swamp is an unstated, but institutional national security strategy of being aggressive everywhere, all the time.
The result is the global distribution of U.S. military power from Norway to Japan buttressed by an endless list of highly improbable warfighting scenarios that are used to justify massive defense spending on an anachronistic military structure with its roots in WWII and the Cold War. This condition is undesirable, unaffordable and dangerous.
It is undesirable because the last 50 years of American military assistance have converted great nations that were once Washington’s most important military allies into military dependencies of the United States. NATO is decomposing, in part, because Berlin, Paris, Rome and London willingly consigned responsibility for their nations’ defense to Washington.
Most of Europe’s armed forces are boutique militaries designed for low intensity conflict or peace-keeping operations. The contemporary German army — America’s most potent and capable Cold War military partner on the European continent — is now effectively irrelevant.
This is not surprising. The original national interests and regional threats that gave NATO meaning and purpose are no longer shared across national lines. Germans do not share the East Europeans’ fear of Russia. Greeks fear Turkey — now a “paper ally only” inside NATO — as well as the soft invasion of Sunni Islamist Arabs, not Russia.
It is unaffordable because both political parties consistently refused to raise taxes to pay for America’s global defense mission. High on debt and seemingly intoxicated with military power, Washington’s interventionist, bipartisan foreign and defense policymakers (i.e. the Swamp) added debt-financed global military power to debt-financed consumption with the result that by 2023, the interest payment to service the national debt will likely exceed the size of the U.S. national defense budget.
Finally, 70 years after WWII, it is also self-evident that post-industrial warfare will not require the conversion of private sector manufacturing to federal control or the mobilization of millions of American citizens in uniform. The proliferation, range and lethality of precision-guided weapon systems linked to overhead ISR (ISR-STRIKE) demand a fundamental shift in U.S. national security strategy away from defending forward — garrisoning foreign territory — at enormous risk to U.S. Forces and unnecessary expense to the American people.
Mr. Trump accepts the burden of preserving the peace on the strategic level by maintaining the world’s most powerful military establishment, but Mr. Trump knows that Washington’s interest in good relations with European States must not relieve Europeans from the obligation to adequately defend their own countries. The president will not permit a weak ally to plunge the United States into a war that the American people need not fight.
In 1914, when the British intervened on the European Continent to support the French and the Russians against Germany and Austria-Hungary, the British were far too confident of their military superiority. They grossly underestimated their German opponent. By the war’s end in 1918, British national power was spent. Britain permanently lost its ability to shape the international system to its advantage. To paraphrase Arnold J. Toynbee, “The British Empire died from suicide, not from murder.”
President Trump’s demand that Europeans invest in their own defenses reflects his determination to avoid the mistake that London made; to make a repetition of 1914 impossible. Thus, if Mr. Trump declines to furnish another Four Star to command the NATO military alliance, President Macron and Chancellor Merkel should welcome the opportunity to end their dependence on Washington and shape their own destinies.
• Douglas Macgregor, a retired U.S. Army colonel, is a decorated combat veteran and the author of five books. His latest is “Margin of Victory” (Naval Institute Press, 2016).
Please read our comment policy before commenting.