Rutte is wrong, MEPs say – and they've set up a defence group to challenge him

"Member states keep talking for years about greater European defence capability, yet in Brussels they block even the first practical steps," says the EU Parliament's defence committee chair.

In January of this year NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte appeared before the European Parliament’s recently-established defence committee and delivered what many in the room perceived as a vile insult to Europe. “If anyone here thinks that the European Union, or Europe as a whole, can defend itself without the US, keep on dreaming,” he scoffed. “You can’t. We can’t.”

Yesterday, a cross-party group of MEPs launched the European Defence Union group in order to push back - and to put pressure on national governments in the EU that are blocking European sovereign defence out of fear of undermining NATO. At the launch, Reinier van Lanschot, a Dutch MEP from the pan-European Volt party who has organised the group, had a sharp message for Rutte: “It’s not a dream, it’s a necessity. That’s why we decided to prove him wrong.”

This is the first defence alliance in the parliament and it so far has 30 members from all the pro-European centrist groups, from the liberal Renew, the left S&D and Greens and even from Ursula von der Leyen’s centre-right EPP. MEPs from Giorgia Meloni’s hard-right ECR group have declined to join. Van Lanschot said that as he approached MEPs and asked them if they wanted to be part of a group calling for EU defence, the response from centrists was overwhelmingly positive. “When I entered the European Parliament [in 2024], I felt like people were asleep,” he said. “We didn’t even have a full defence committee. The recent turmoil has gotten people out of that sleep, but not enough.”

Nine MEPs from all four of the groups spoke at the launch, and the consensus was clear: the Parliament wants EU defence, the Commission wants EU defence, the citizens want EU defence. The only ones standing in the way are the national governments in the Council, who are both fearful of undermining what’s left of NATO and hesitant to surrender any defence sovereignty to confederal European level. Surveys show that two-thirds of EU citizens want a sovereign independent EU military capacity without the United States. According to a Bertelsmann survey published this week, 58% of EU citizens now believe the US is not a trustworthy partner and should not be relied upon for Europe’s defence. 73% believe Europe should distance itself from the United States and “go its own way”. Yet Rutte and the national leaders in the Council like Germany’s Friedrich Merz and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni are insisting that the US protectorate system (NATO) can be the only game in town and the EU must be kept out of defence matters.

“There is no alternative to NATO,” Mark Rutte tells us. And EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas tells us “there is no NATO without the US”. So the attitude from our leaders is that Europeans just have to sit by helplessly and hope that the US becomes reliable again. Even if Donald Trump declares that NATO is a “paper tiger” (and if he says it is, then it is), our leaders say we have to keep pretending that the security guarantee still exists because if we say out loud that it is gone then Russia will invade us. We have no choice, we are helpless children hoping that daddy changes his mind.

Well these MEPs say our national leaders are wrong. “This is not some theoretical project, this is a matter of survival and political credibility,” said Liberal German MEP Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, chair of the parliament’s defence committee which became a full committee for the first time only in 2024. “The Commission is ready, the Parliament is ready, now it’s up to Council to deliver…Member states keep talking for years about greater European defence capability, yet in Brussels they block even the first practical steps.”

“It’s time for member states to finally act in the interest of their citizens, who across countries and politics say of course European security needs to be addressed at European level,” said Dutch centre-left MEP Thijs Reuten at the launch. He bemoaned that the national leaders had only a cursory “table exercise” discussion about the EU’s mutual defence clause article 42.7 at their summit last month in Cyprus - even though the parliament had passed a resolution calling for a full accounting of when and how it can be used.

Reuten noted that Andrius Kubilius, the EU Defence Commissioner (a new position only created two years ago), has been a breath of fresh air in the von der Leyen commission for being honest about what Europe needs to do and who is standing in the way of it. “I said to Commissioner Kubilius, ‘you are definitely not the problem, we are not the problem, it’s the member states that are the problem’,” he said, adding that the national governments currently have a myopic focus on just increasing spending (on US military equipment) while still keeping Europe reliant on American command and control for military protection. “You cannot spend your way out of a defence gap. You need a mentality change.”

Commissioner Kubilius has become an object of derision in the Council, with people from national government representations here in Brussels laughing off his ideas as pie-in-the-sky. Nevertheless, he persists despite the national capital mockery.

There are many ideas floating around out there about how to build European defence, and Kubilius has said he’s open to all of them but they need to be seriously discussed - which for the moment the Council is refusing to do. In March I attended his speech about the idea for a European Security Council, at the launch of a paper outlining how it would work. “Why has nothing happened? Because the European Council, a Council of 27, is not a good place to have an intellectual discussion with solutions going forward,” he said. The paper’s idea is to establish an intergovernmental treaty with a coalition of the willing to build European defence - essentially bypassing the European Council because it is so dysfunctional. The big question is how this Council would make decisions of war and peace. Could it make these decisions on its own, or would it give a mandate that then needs to be ratified by national parliaments? “We’re not talking about another meeting format, we’re talking about a democratic innovation,” said German MEP Sergey Lagodinsky about the ESC. “The EU’s existing structures are not working. The ESC would be designed to break the paralysis. It would be an intergovernmental body operating under a treaty - not against the EU but with the EU. Not the entire EU, and not only the EU.”

Such calls for creating new institutions, rather than using the existing EU institutions that already exist, are controversial. “I can’t say my preference, but this issue should be debated and a decision should be made,” Commissioner Kubilius said. “We need to change mindset. We spend all this energy convincing the Americans to stay, but we should instead use that for our own preparation and building a European pillar of NATO.”

Like others, Kubilius has been keen to stress that European Defence Union would not work against NATO but with it - creating a European pillar that can be equal to America and turn NATO into a real alliance rather than a protectorate. MEP Rasa Juknevičienė, who like Kubilius is a conservative EPP member from Lithuania, noted at the launch of the European Parliament group that she and the commissioner have worked together since the birth of Lithuania’s independence from the Soviet Union. “The US attitude toward its responsibility for security of Europe is changing - not because we want it to, but because their attitude is changing,” she said, noting that this shift is not temporary but permanent. But as an EPP member she had to add: “The issue of non-duplication with NATO must be resolved. European defence must be based on the transatlantic bond as much as possible. But for me, Ukraine’s participation is just as important as the US. It must also include the UK, Norway and maybe other stakeholders. A new agreement will be needed for this.”

Van Lanschot also stressed this point, saying a European Defence union would be “not separate from NATO, but separable.” In other words - that Europe would hope to preserve the transatlantic alliance but would be capable of acting without it. Because a real alliance would allow equal members to act independently. As Rutte has plainly said, that is not what NATO is today. It is not an alliance, but rather a protectorate.

Tomorrow, on the occasion of Europe Day, the MEPs are publishing an op-ed in major newspapers across Europe outlining their aims. “Instead of waiting for war to unite us, we must unite to prevent war,” they argue. “The words of national governments [on Europe’s defence capabilities] are not being backed up by actions. In recent years, EU-US ‘diplomacy’ meant buying time through appeasement. But after a year of US pressure on Ukraine, unilateral tariffs, interference in our elections, and threats to annex Greenland, it is clear that this strategy failed.”

They call for the '“defence omnibus’’ currently working its way through the Parliament and Council to be urgently adopted. It would cut time and paperwork for defence production, integrate the European defence market and enable joint procurement. But short-sighted self-interest from national capitals is blocking its adoption, they note. The MEPs also call for the creation of a true single market for defence, a principle of European preference instead of buying all American weapons, increasing interoperability and achieving economies of scale. They also say that the European Defence Union should have the longer-term possibility of integrating Europe’s armed forces, although that would not be done just yet (a compromise since many EPP MEPs are still very wary of the ‘EU army’ idea). One of the group’s first activities will be a visit to Ramstein air base on 18 May.

29-year-old German MEP Lukas Sieper, who served in the German military, stressed at the launch that it is the young people of Europe who must be listened to - even as the older generation blocks progress. “We need to accelerate efforts to make the EU capable of defending itself - but too many national leaders are sitting in their nationalist trenches,” he said. “We must go beyond national interests and work along international lines,” he added, noting that he was speaking “as a young European man, one of those who would sit in the trenches if Europe fails to defend itself.”

“Europe will only survive if Europe stands together,” he insisted.