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Europe may be willing to invest in its security, but is it able to do so?
- 2025/02/22
- 再生時間： 7 分
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あらすじ・解説
The last week has left European leaders in little doubt that they will be mostly on their own when it comes to providing security guarantees to Ukraine when Russia and the US have made a deal on the future of the country. This will most likely be a deal negotiated largely in the absence of both Europe and Ukraine. And it will be a deal that looks, at least in the short term, more like a Russian victory.These are worrying prospects to begin with. They are further exacerbated by the fact that Europe is ill-prepared for a future without a significant US security presence on the continent that has, since the end of the second world war, kept America’s NATO allies in Europe safe—first from Soviet and then from Russian aggression.For these past 80 years, since the ‘big three’ allies of the second world war divided Europe into a Soviet and an American sphere of influence in Yalta, the bill for European security has mostly been footed by Washington—much to the annoyance of US presidents past, and especially present.Even three years into the largest land war on the continent since 1945, European defence spending is dwarfed by America’s. There have been significant and real-term increases in military budgets in Europe since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. But even then, defence expenditure in Germany—now the largest spender on defence among European NATO members—stands at below 10% of that of the US. Where Washington committed over $900bn in 2024, Berlin spent less than $90bn.The story is similar when it comes to combat-ready forces. Poland has the largest standing army among EU member states with around 200,000 soldiers, half of whom are land forces that would be critical for both providing peacekeepers to Ukraine and deterring a future Russian aggression against another European country. Yet, Poland has already ruled out sending troops to Ukraine. Other EU countries, including Germany, Spain and Denmark, have been more circumspect about whether they would be willing to put boots on the ground in Ukraine.The clearest commitment so far to contribute ground forces to secure a ceasefire in Ukraine has come from the UK. However, the British prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, has not given any details on actual numbers yet. With the size of the British army now below 80,000 soldiers and reportedly fewer than 20,000 ready to deploy in combat, he will be hard pressed to commit British troops in significant numbers.Compare that to Russia’s armed forces with an overall personnel strength of 1.32 million soldiers, including land forces of 550,000—and the scale of the problem for Europe becomes clear. The necessity to step up and assume greater responsibility for its own security has been recognised by European leaders for some time now. Their increasing determination to do something about it was also evident at a meeting hastily arranged by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, on Monday, February 17, 2025, in Paris.Necessity and willingness to one side, Europe’s ability to act, however, remains in doubt. The meeting in Paris, much like a joint statement last week by the so-called Weimar+ group (Germany, France, Poland + Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, the EU’s diplomatic service and the European Commission) is indicative of how divided Europe is becoming over what course to chart between Russia and the US.There is an emerging “coalition of the willing” who are determined to invest in the continent’s defences in an effort to deter Russia from future aggression and provide Ukraine with badly needed security guarantees once a deal has been agreed between Trump and Putin. This coalition shapes up to be a mix of the Weimar+ group, those countries and institutions invited to the emergency meeting in Paris on Monday (Germany, Britain, Italy, Poland, Spain, the Netherlands and Denmark, as well as the NATO secretary-general and the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission,) and NATO’s other Baltic member states (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as recent joiners Sweden and Finland).Potentially, this is a formidable alliance. But as the debate over the commitment to ground forces already indicates, this coalition is far from a unitary force. And even if they were, their ability to act fast and decisively is hampered by the financial constraints they face. Several of them are highly indebted countries, including France, Italy and Spain who are among the EU members with a government-debt-to-GDP ratio above 100%.Germany, on the other hand, has a debt brake in place that prevents the federal government from exceeding an annual borrowing limit of 0.35% of GDP. While temporary emergency exemptions are possible (and were enacted in response to the COVID-19 pandemic), changing this permanently to enable sustained higher defence spending would require a constitutional amendment.With many European countries domestically constrained to increase their ...