This week saw the European Council’s first ever informal gathering on security and defence – a meeting that brought together the UK prime minister and his EU counterparts for the first time since Brexit.
The agenda was centered around how Europe can more effectively pool its resources on defence in the face of an uncertain US commitment to the NATO alliance and an emboldened Russia at its doorstep.
But their ambitions were also tempered by an apparent need to appease President Donald Trump, who still expects the country’s allies to buy US weapons.
French President Emmanuel Macron is insisting on a 'buy European' approach, which would include joint borrowing on defence. It’s a tactic that other powers, including Germany, have rejected. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz left Monday’s meeting insisting there would be no “prospect of taking on joint debt.”
Meanwhile, NATO’s Nordic and Eastern European members called for the military alliance’s larger states – the UK, France and Germany – to do more to protect allies in the face of a potential US pullback from the continent.
In a Q&A with The Parliament, Camille Grand, a researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations, formerly in charge of procurement at NATO, discussed the implications for European defence.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What would you say is the most pressing threat on the table for the UK and its EU allies in NATO?
When you look at the European security strategy of 2003, it starts with Europe being surrounded by partners. It has never been as peaceful as that. Today we're in a very different world. We see turmoil on our southern flank with a protracted conflict in the Middle East. We see the Sahel that has been falling apart, a number of failed states in our neighbourhood. And we do see a Russia that has started the largest conventional conflict in Europe since 1945 and is waging this war under a form of a nuclear umbrella. So the security environment is drastically different to what it used to be.
There is an ongoing great power competition that involves not only Russia, but also China, the US, alongside a number of regional powers. And Europe has been, by design, focused on how to foster peace and sow itself as a peace project. All of this has shaken the environment. Add to this the re-election of Donald Trump, which adds a dose of uncertainty on the transatlantic alliance, and we are in very much uncharted territory.
What is the best way to defend against all of those geopolitical threats?
The basic challenge has to do with Russia because it hosts thousands of nuclear weapons and has started this major conventional conflict. It is not necessarily on the verge of invading Western Europe or even the Eastern flank nations. But [it] could be tempted – depending on the outcome of the war in Ukraine – to continue to push and test the solidarity of NATO and EU member states and exercise the form of pressure that would go beyond the existing hybrid attacks on European infrastructure and political processes.
In this context, I think there are a few requirements. One of them is unity – and that's not a given. Even though the Europeans did perform well in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there are obvious tensions within the European system between those partial to accepting a compromise with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, and those who prefer to focus on transatlantic relations, sometimes at the expense of European solidarity.
There are also tensions on fiscal grounds and domestic politics. Every European country faces a form of a populist wave, which is questioning the way our democracies function and doesn't make life easier for governments that appear weaker and weaker.
Having said this, I think there is a geopolitical wakeup moment where we see Europeans spending significantly more on defence than they used to – there is about a 50% increase compared to the situation of about ten years ago. The EU has become a player in this domain in its full right, which had never been the case before. It has been training Ukrainian soldiers and providing military assistance to Ukraine. All these steps would have been unthinkable even five years ago.
France is at odds with other NATO members, including Germany, on issues such as joint borrowing for defence spending, for which France is in favour. Does Macron still have influence?
Macron continues to hold the keys to French foreign and security policy. So he is not as constrained on the global stage as he is on the domestic stage. Secondly, the situation in Europe is changing quite rapidly, meaning that it's not so much the leadership that has moved from Paris and Berlin to other capitals, but the fact that it is much more diffused. Macron can no longer lead alone or come up with a proposal on his own. But neither can Scholz or others. The reality is that it doesn't mean that suddenly [Italian Prime Minister Giorgia] Meloni or [Polish Prime Minister Donald] Tusk can do the same thing by themselves. So we have a situation which is more open, more conducive to alliances and building bridges, which creates opportunity for some countries like Poland or Sweden.
But France and Germany are still very much a part of the conversation and, therefore, can shape the outcome of European debates, both in the EU and NATO to a large extent. France [is] a serious military power and nuclear weapons state, a status it shares with Britain. It’s a role that is quite unique in the NATO environment, which explains why many allies turn to Paris and London to make sure that they are on board for some of the discussions.
What lessons do you think NATO is learning from the decades long experience in the US of waste and fraud in the defence procurement system? The Pentagon has failed seven audits in a row.
I would say that when it comes to NATO allies, individual nations have to reflect on what sort of problems they face in procurement. Why is it so slow? What lessons can we learn from Ukrainians and their ability to deploy their systems at pace? I think the Europeans don't have the same problem as the Pentagon, which maybe has too much money and a very complex programme to manage, with a Congress that has very demanding views on how to run such programmes. We usually tend to deliver better value for money in Europe, and on the whole, we are doing reasonably well.
With tensions in the transatlantic alliance already high, does the EU risk Trump’s retaliation if it pursues a ‘buy European’ approach to weapons?
I think we are obviously in a very complicated moment with the Trump administration, where it increasingly appears that this term is different and more difficult than the last, especially when it comes to allies. The messaging on tariffs is interesting because you get a lot of announcements and then the rollback of these announcements. So it's going to be interesting to see how far [Trump] goes on this. I think the EU is reasonably well-prepared for that conversation on tariffs.
On transatlantic relations and NATO – this all impacts NATO, because part of the subtext of the Trump administration is to form a disbelief in alliances and a form of bullying allies that is very, very unusual, and to a degree extremely problematic. The US has been the custodian of the global norms of international security and international trade. So seeing the US moving away from that rule is very disconcerting for European allies who have always believed in this.
There is a scenario where we go through some tensions and Europeans have to do much more for their own security, but ultimately, as during the first term, we land somewhere where NATO is preserved and the transatlantic bond endures. There’s another scenario in which things go more sour and the tensions continue to increase. In this case, I think the most important thing for Europeans is to be able to display both unity and clarity – unity in the face of the US administration and Ukraine, and clarity in being crystal clear on what it stands for, what it wants to do, and how it intends to do it.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer met with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on Monday for the first time. Can the UK bring anything new to the table for NATO and support for Ukraine?
We’re in a very important moment with regard to where the UK is on the European security landscape. There is a clear decision by the prime minister to re-engage with the EU, via the new [defence] agreement with Germany and the refresh of the Lancaster House Treaty with France. But on top of that, there is this idea of an EU-UK security pact. That is quite interesting in the sense that it could iron out some of the absurd outcomes of Brexit, in that the UK and its industry is very much part of the European ecosystem on defence and it is absurd to treat them as a third party. I think it was a good move by the EU leaders to invite Starmer to their own conversation.
Can the EU as a bloc play a stronger role in all of this?
I think it's interesting to see that the new leadership, both at EU and NATO, is creating new opportunities. We have a commissioner for defence, Andrius Kubilius, for the first time ever. We have a president of the Council, Antonio Costa, who has made the decision to host this informal Council, for the first time ever. We have the high representative for foreign affairs [former Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas] whose credentials on NATO cannot be questioned, but [who] is also speaking forcefully about the need for Europe to be able to defend itself. We have the secretary general of NATO, Mark Rutte, who's a former Dutch prime minister, and who was a strong voice in the European Council until not so long ago.
So if you look at the sequence of events since December, with the appointment of the new leadership, their first months in office, it makes me a little more optimistic on the ability of the Europeans to do things together.