It is the case that the 27 EU member states remain heavily reliant on three NATO members, Canada, UK, and USA, none of which are themselves EU members, for their collective defence, writes Gary Cartwright.
It should not be lost on them Europe is still so dependent on the three western powers that liberated Europe in 1945, whilst simultaneously being threatened by Moscow, which so cruelly divided the continent with an “Iron Curtain” from 1945-1991.
Whilst only three NATO members have exceeded the agreed threshold of 2% of GDP to be spent on defence – Greece, UK, and USA – Europe’s largest economy, Germany, repeatedly fails in this respect: the country’s defence spending amounted to just 1.53% of GDP in 2021, according to NATO estimates.
This situation previously prompted Donald Trump to accuse his NATO ally of profiting off of US troops, before announcing plans to reduce the presence of US service members stationed in Germany by withdrawing approximately 11,800 of the nearly 35,000 US troops there.
“Germany is a wealthy country, and they have to pay,” Trump said. “They owed us billions of dollars… billions of dollars to NATO. They should be paying their bills. Why should we defend countries and not be reimbursed?”
The black hole in the region’s security is Germany. Its size and location would add crucial heft, but the other countries around the Baltic Sea are privately mistrustful of decision-makers in Berlin. Germany has backed the two Nord Stream natural gas pipelines along the Baltic seabed. Other countries in the region see them as a grave threat, entrenching the Kremlin’s dominance of the region’s energy supply… Latvian Defence Minister Artis Pabriks described Germany’s approach as ‘immoral and hypocritical.’
This under-spend, which is consistent, may reflect the low serviceability of Germany’s military equipment, much of which is in storage, and would not be able to return to serviceability if needed quickly as in, for the sake of argument, an invasion of Ukraine or indeed the Baltic States, by Russia.
In 2018, state-owned Deutsche Welle reported that “due to a technical problem with the defence system of the combat aircraft only 10 of the Luftwaffe’s 128 Eurofighters are mission ready.”
In the same year none of the German Navy’s six submarines were available for operations.
This situation, which is ongoing, is to a significant part attributed to Ursula von der Leyen, who served as the country’s defence minister from 2013-2019, a portfolio bestowed upon her then chancellor Angela Merkel.
Former defence minister Rupert Scholz, who served under Helmut Kohl, said in 2019 “The Bundeswehr’s condition is catastrophic. The entire defence capability of the Federal Republic is suffering, which is totally irresponsible.”
Former president of the European Parliament Martin Schulz Tweeted about von der Leyen, on the news that she was to become president of the European Commission, that she was Germany’s “weakest minister.”
Ursula von der Leyen owes her rise to prominence to Angela Merkel, although her failures at the defence ministry put an end to any chances of her becoming chancellor, once considered a possibility.
Following her appointment as head of the Commission, the UK-based openDemocracy Foundation for the Advancement of Global Education, opined “The acrimony and opportunistic horse-trading in von der Leyen’s appointment were a microcosm of a deepening European malaise: the inability to act with a common voice in the common interest.”
Vladimir Putin will love her!
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