With the Russia-Ukraine war entering its third year, the world is a lot more complex than it was in 2022. How can Europe tackle these fundamental challenges within a broader response matrix?
Can the European Union have a grand strategy?
For a continent whose post-war existence rested on the interweaving of three dependencies—cheap security from the United States, cheap energy from Russia, and intense trade with China—the return of conventional war caused disbelief, denial, anger, and shock.
Once the initial denial and disbelief subsided, optimism gripped European leadership and Brussels bureaucracy. This drew from the surprisingly good performance of Ukraine on the battlefield against a far superior adversary, which resulted in the successive liberation of Kharkiv and Kherson. Coupled with that was the EU’s spectacular diversification away from Russian energy, which had been entwined with the geopolitics of stability in the European theatre.
However, the optimism of early 2023 started to give in to pessimism as the Ukrainian counteroffensive didn’t fetch any more satisfactory results on the battlefield. Ukrainian forces ultimately withdrew from Avdiivka in February 2024, outgunned and outmanned.
The challenges faced by Europe since the Ukraine war started are unprecedented in scope and scale. In today’s geopolitical spacetime, Europe finds itself in a stark singularity of providing for its security amid a likely return of former US President Donald Trump and prevailing economic woes.
Also read: Securing Ukraine is very much part of Europe’s agenda. But when will Kyiv join NATO?
Grand strategy, not grandstanding
What Europe needs today is an authentic grand strategy, not merely grandstanding. While it is true that each of the 27 member states of the EU has a different perception of and relevance toward Russia depending on their physical proximity and historical experience, the necessity to take charge of politics, economics, and security is felt and agreed upon across the board.
Brainstorming on a grand strategy has already begun in Brussels. However, it operates as a specialised microcosm, making EU-wide policies that are sometimes not understood well enough among member states and their domestically competing political forces, let alone in other parts of the world. In the debate on what a grand strategy should look like, it is natural that there are more sceptics than takers.
Also read: Is Europe’s pursuit of security delusional? West must fix its internal maladies first
Three complementing verticals
Europe needs to put together a strategy with three distinct, perhaps competing, but certainly complementing verticals that are constantly evolving in a very fluid world.
First, transatlantic ties. How will a Trump-led US, eager to disengage from “geopolitical distractions” to focus on China, impact the discourse of transatlanticism within Europe?
Inherent in the US disengagement from NATO is a direct bearing on European security capabilities and security contributions. Furthermore, the burden of supporting Ukraine will also fall on Europe’s biggest economies where the buck will stop in Germany and France. In plain statistics, despite impressive commitments to Ukraine, the EU is not able to put the money where the mouth is.
Therefore, how to Trump-proof Europe? Can the Europeans do it in the long term? Yes. But can they do it in the short term while also supporting Ukraine militarily by revitalising their own defence industrial bases? The answer is very complicated.
The second vertical is to make Europe’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific, of which de-risking from China is a subset, more substantive. For all the de-risking aspirations of Brussels, while European investments in China are at an all-time low, Germany’s investments in China are at an unprecedented high. Despite numerous commitments to the Indo-Pacific, the EU seems to be focused on disconnected outputs and not coherent outcomes.
The EU’s engagement with the Indo-Pacific needs to focus on building an ecosystem for a viable ‘China plus one’ and pushing stuck Free Trade Agreement (FTA) negotiations with India, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia with strategic friendshoring, not merely the blinkered sustainability agenda. The other deliverable that the EU should be focusing on is putting together a tangible framework for tackling hybrid security challenges in the region, a natural culmination of the EU’s growing maritime engagement in the region through different tools such as the CRIMARIO, ESIWA, and CMP. Enhancing Security Cooperation In and With Asia (ESIWA) steered an EU-India track 1.5 session on disinformation at the sidelines of the recently concluded Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi.
The third vertical is what complements the above two by developing pathways for the real groundwork required for maximising defence capabilities.
Can Europe be more sovereign? Can it convert its geoeconomic heft into geopolitical traction? Europe’s sovereign stature today is incomplete without its role as a security actor, an unfinished project for many decades.
It is a complex process because it requires a reimagination of the European project; unlearning and relearning what Europe’s place in the region and world should be.
In a few days, the European Commission will produce two policy initiatives designed to stimulate the European Defence Technological and Industrial Base (EDTIB). First, a European Defence Industrial Strategy, and second, a long-awaited European Defence Investment Plan (EDIP), which is expected to mobilise €100 billion over seven years.
These two directives would provide a framework to connect the dots of defence industrial production within the member states and joint procurement of defence equipment from outside, along with contribution of military aid to Ukraine.
This reimagination of a securitised Europe seems organic and seamless in the central and eastern parts of Europe – the Czech Republic, Poland, and the Baltics. What is happening in Europe now is what these states had been warning for decades. Their stand is understood but not necessarily shared by other countries.
For instance, Germany’s deep historical wound of losing two wars to Russia and a deeper historical guilt of its Nazi past is what tugs at the root of the Bavarian risk aversion. That unease builds into the German political discourse of refusing the Taurus missiles, which are the very weapons Ukraine has been asking for to destroy the Crimean Bridge.
Germany is in a situation similar to last year when it kept delaying the deliveries of the Leopard tanks until the US sent them. The ghost of the past grips the German decision-making, with Berlin not wanting to be seen as confronting Russia directly, no matter what. It is no surprise that the decision on the €100 billion fund for EDIP is awaiting the German nod.
This indeed comes as a contradiction because Germany is now the biggest provider of military aid to Ukraine after the US, but it is still very risk-averse to enabling Ukraine to inflict unprecedented damage on Russia. European experiential distillates concerning Russia are not a monolith. To dismiss them as strategic cacophony is to fail to understand how Europe works.
Many missed a crucial set of points when French President Emmanuel Macron recently took the world by storm by stating that sending Western troops to Ukraine is not ruled out. Obviously, Macron was not referring to sending French troops today or in near future. His statements created a strategic ambivalence in his trademark style. The last time the world saw that was when he was on a plane from Beijing to Paris and talked to Politico on France’s independent stand on Taiwan. However, his statements at the Paris meeting were mindboggling at a different level. They imply that Paris has already started to reexamine the self-imposed red lines in the Russia-Ukraine war. Olaf Scholz, as expected, was quick to respond with a rebuttal.
The key takeaway from the meeting, though, was Macron’s proposal for a missile coalition and agreeing to the Czech plan for buying emergency purchases of ammunition for Ukraine from non-EU members. Macron understands that the real reason holding Germany back is the fear of going solo in the grand night of confronting Russia. He also knows that there might be a change of government in Germany soon.
The recently proposed bill on sending long-range missiles such as Taurus to Ukraine was tabled by the opposition at the Bundestag. In utter discomfort for an already unpopular Scholz, the FDP head of the Bundestag Defense Committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, voted for the opposition motion.
German foreign minister from the FDP has already been very vocal about sending Taurus to Ukraine. If SPD loses the next election and the CDU+ FDP coalition is in power, the German red lines to Ukraine might also change accordingly with far-reaching implications.
War fatigue vs war resilience
For the grand strategy to work, Europe needs to keep strategic solidarity ahead of strategic autonomy. War fatigue, although much touted, is not the real European problem. Several European countries are sending more weapons to Ukraine. The big powers are concluding bilateral security arrangements, NATO has just enlarged, and Europe is going to come out with its first defence military strategy with a nod from all member states. The far Right in Europe, at least in Italy and France, is pro-Ukraine as well.
The real problem before Europe is to show war resilience. It needs to rise above its security anxieties in a coherent framework that binds together the three most important verticals, all in good time.
The writer is an Associate Fellow, Europe and Eurasia Center, at the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses. She tweets @swasrao. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)