Behind the crowing, this is not a proud day for Europe
NATO's Rutte today called Trump a "daddy" who had rightly scolded this naughty continent into spending more money on US military equipment. The European Trump response reaches new pathetic depths.
Europe’s political and media elite have been in overdrive today lauding the commitment signed at the NATO summit in the Hague for members to spend 5% of their GDP on defence, up from the existing target of 2%. It’s an arbitrary number demanded by Donald Trump, even though the US itself doesn’t spend 5% of GDP on its military (they spend 3.4%). But behind all the crowing and self-congratulating, there is a more embarrassing reality of what happened in the Dutch capital today.
For one thing, the numbers have been fudged here in order to placate Trump into thinking this unrealistic number has been agreed. This is actually a target of 3.5% military spending plus 1.5% ‘military-adjacent’ spending that could include anything from building roads to managing migration to investing in education. But more importantly, European leaders have committed to a box-ticking exercise that doesn’t actually make Europe more militarily independent but does oblige them to purchase more weapons from America. Even worse, today’s agreement has further allowed Europeans to deceive themselves into thinking the United States is committed to NATO mutual defence. This has allowed them to fool themselves into thinking they don’t need to do what really needs to be done: developing a unified European command-and-control structure that is not dependent on America.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, until recently the long-serving Dutch prime minister, encapsulated the grovelling that today’s commitment represents in private messages he sent to Trump today that the US president published without his permission. “Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win.” The NATO chief also told Trump, “Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary and something no one else dared to do.”
By now people have grown used to Rutte behaving like Trump’s errand boy in Brussels. He spends half his press conferences these days praising the US president and defending America. But this level of cringe-inducing sycophantly still managed to shock people. And it didn’t escape people’s notice that, just moments after Trump posted Rutte’s grovelling messages while on Air Force One flying to the Hague, he came and spoke to the press pool on the plane and cast doubt on whether he would honour NATO’s Article 5 mutual defence obligation. Asked if he would, he said, “Depends on your definition. There are numerous definitions of Article 5. You know that, right? But I’m committed to being their friends.” All of that grovelling, sacrificing so much of Europe’s dignity and self-respect, and they couldn’t even extract an Article 5 commitment from Trump - supposedly the whole point of the over-the-top flattery.
Today at the summit, sitting alongside Trump, Rutte likened the US president to a "daddy" intervening in a schoolyard brawl regarding the Israel-Iran conflict, which Trump today called the “Twelve Days War”. “Daddy has to sometimes use strong language,” Rutte cooed. Multiple European leaders, from Britain’s Starmer to Germany’s Merz, were bending over backwards this week to praise Trump’s illegal war on Iran. The fawning response from Europe, which for many brought back memories of the Iraq War 20 years ago, was likely due to the timing of the war coming just a week before the NATO summit. Europe’s leaders were terrified of angering Trump because they have been desperate for him to get in and get out of this summit without incident (or, more specifically, without pulling the US out of NATO). And so if international law (or Iran, a country they don’t like very much anyway) had to be thrown under the bus to ensure a smooth summit, so be it. I have seen so many supposed ‘pro-Europeans’ on social media this week defending the obsequious response of Europe’s leaders to Trump’s illegal war, as well as Rutte’s sycophantry, because it’s all for the greater good of keeping the US in NATO to stave off a Russian invasion. And when Trump gave vague niceties about Article 5 today in the Hague, it seems that’s all it took to convince them that Trump is committed to their defence. Nevermind the fact that he just said the opposite six hours earlier. Nevermind that any reasonable person can see that the commitment to Article 5 is not there and NATO is therefor a paper tiger. Never underestimate the ability for Europeans to delude themselves rather than deal with uncomfortable realities.
Across the pond, Americans are less than impressed with European leaders’ praise for the Iran war. The guys at Pod Save America said European leaders’ reaction to Trump’s bombing and lauding of the 5% target was pathetic and embarrassing. Ben Rhodes, the former deputy national security advisor in the Obama administration, asked:
“Is there anything Trump can do that they’re not going to kiss his ass over? Because at some point he’s going to do something that they really don’t like. The 5% thing is bonkers. We don’t spend 5% on defence. Trump’s just inventing numbers and throwing it at them. At some point, have a spine guys. Yes they have to increase defence spending because they have to backfill the US, but this is getting ridiculous. I saw this as an American – it’s in our interest that the Europeans stand up to our president sometimes, or else you’re going to encourage him to do crazy shit.”
Europe does need to spend more on defence, but it needs to do so on its own terms in a structure it controls. What Europeans have done today is commit to a box-ticking exercise simply because it was demanded of them, not because it is the smartest way to improve defence. This money will continue to be spent within an American command-and-control structure via NATO, which is not truly an alliance but rather an American protectorate. There are many ways that today’s agreement may actually be bad for Europe, several of which were summed up in a good post by EU Matters Media today.
“We could deter Russia for far less than 5%, but we have to base the figures on the fact that we don’t cooperate as much at the European level among the defence forces as would be desirable,” Jacob Kaarsbo, formerly a chief analyst in Denmark’s military intelligence agency, told EU Matters. “Billions in defence spending are pouring out of the coffers of the 27 EU Member States, simply because there is a clear lack of harmonised standards and European defence planning.”
If these box-ticking exercises to reach arbitrary targets don’t actually yield any meaningful results, “then you might also lose public support, and the result is that in five years or so, this target will, in reality, have lapsed,” Mikkel Vedby Rasmussen, a Danish professor at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science, told them.
In their race to appease Trump and ensure that the US is committed to protect them from Russia in the next few years, European leaders may have locked their countries into an arrangement which ensures that no alternative to American dependence is developed. Efforts to develop a ‘European Defence Union’, which received much media coverage in 2022, have stalled. There are no serious efforts underway right now to build a European command and control structure for the same reason that such efforts have been blocked for 60 years: fear that it will undermine NATO.
Andrius Kubilius, the first-ever EU Commissioner for Defence (appointed by von der Leyen at the start of her second term in December) has said that the death of the nascent European Defence Community in 1954 was one of the greatest mistakes ever made by the European Union, and that efforts to build common European defence must be revived. But he has been continually undermined by national leaders and by his boss President Ursula von der Leyen, a staunch Atlanticist who still clings to the NATO protectorate as the only option for European defence. The same European leaders who were patting themselves on the back today for agreeing to a nonsensical spending target they know most countries will never reach are also blocking actions that would create an actual sovereign European military defence capable of taking on Russia without the Americans. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was the only one there today pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, that this target is nonsense, for which he was vilified by other European leaders.
As Luke Johnson pointed out in his Public Sphere Substack today, “flattering Trump might have bought time for Europe, but it won't solve an underlying vulnerability in procurement.”
“European defense spending has been extraordinarily inefficient, and spending more can only help so much without reforms. In the EU, defense spending is overwhelmingly at the national level, funded by national governments. With 27 EU members, this creates huge inefficiencies: national governments make different weapons systems that cannot always work together. One study by the European Parliament's research arm noted that there are 17 different kinds of tanks in operation in the EU, compared with just one for the U.S. Another study by the Parliament said that the lack of an integrated approach at the EU level cost national governments 44 cents out of every one Euro invested in defense.”
Inertia is Europe’s biggest enemy right now. Yes, the Trump era has made most Europeans aware of the dangers of relying on the United States. But this continent’s military, economic and cultural dependence on America is so deep that people here are frozen in inaction, daunted by the enormity of the challenge. It’s sad to say, but most people I know here have simply given up. They have thrown their hands up in the air and assumed there is just nothing they can do to free themselves from America so they might as well just brace for whatever’s coming. This isn’t just anecdotal, it’s also reflected in opinion polling.
According to a survey published Monday by the European Council on Foreign Relations, about half of EU citizens think it is impossible for the European Union to decouple from the US on defence and security in the next five years. That figure is most pronounced in countries with far-right governments (54% in Hungary and 51% in the EU), while 39% in France, 45% in Germany and 47% in Spain think it’s impossible. In 11 of the 12 countries polled (with the exception of Denmark) only a minority of respondents said the think the EU can put aside its internal differences and become a global power capable of competing economically with the US and China. Trump has made anti-American sentiment on this continent rise, but Europeans still feel helpless to do anything about it. “To be pro-American today mostly means to be sceptical of the EU, to be pro-European means being critical of Trump’s America,” noted study co-author Ivan Krastev.
Europeans have never been taught to believe in themselves, but they have always been taught to believe in America. And this is why so many of them can convince themselves today, despite all the evidence, that this humiliating gesture of agreeing to Trump’s arbitrary target has gotten them a commitment for continued American defence. This continent has not yet woken up. And like Rutte, there are many here who will swallow being made to call Trump “daddy”.