2025/07/31 by Jolyon Howorth
Social Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #European Union Policy and Governance #Defense, Military, and Policy Studies #International Law and Aviation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/jcms.70010
The project to endow the European Union (EU) with its own defence capacity and policy is now (at least) some 30 years old. Although it was adumbrated in the late 1980s via the reactivation of the Western European Union (Rees, 1998), it began life in the early years of the Clinton presidency as the European Security and Defence Identity (ESDI), which sought to empower European forces as a distinct military capacity with its own chain of command from inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) (Howorth, 2000, pp. 22–30). In 1998, the Franco-British summit in Saint-Malo launched the project that was to become the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The summit Declaration blurred the link with NATO by stating that ‘the Union must have the capacity for autonomous action, backed up by credible military forces, the means to decide to use them, and a readiness to do so, in order to respond to international crises’ (Joint Declaration on European Defence, 1998). The word ‘autonomous’ was launched. For over 25 years, the EU has striven to transform the Saint-Malo Declaration into reality (Howorth, 2014). That quest has taken on a bewildering variety of forms, but underlying all of them has been the challenge of clearly defining the relationship between CSDP and NATO. The CSDP project has faced three major obstacles, which have persisted over time. First is the very fact that NATO existed: what precise role was there for CSDP? Second is the reality that every US president since George H. W. Bush has actively opposed greater European autonomy. And third is the fact that the EU's member states could not agree either on the nature of the defence project or on how to play the transatlantic card. During the 2000s, the EU's more Atlanticist states, led by the United Kingdom, insisted that CSDP was little more than a regional crisis management capacity. NATO itself would – and should – continue to take responsibility for collective defence. Other member states, most notably France, did not exclude the prospect of CSDP eventually becoming a much more robust European capacity, capable of aspiring to genuine autonomy of action. To some, this implied competition with NATO. Yet France, which had left NATO's integrated military command in 1966, rejoined it in 2009. The objective, according to Hubert Védrine's official report on reintegration, was to be the ‘Europeanisation of NATO’ (Védrine, 2012). What did that imply? In a private conversation, Védrine told me that the expression was merely an aspiration. It had no substantive meaning. Throughout a succession of crises beginning in the 1990s (from the Bosnian and Kosovo wars to the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and finally the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022), the EU constantly struggled with the key conundrum of its relationship with NATO. The quasi-automatic – and quasi-universal – assumption was that, if an existential threat ever emerged, the United States would step in to protect Europe. But would it? In June 2016, the EU published a long-gestated strategic plan entitled Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy [European External Action Service (EEAS), 2016]. The key ambition in that document, invoked on no fewer than eight occasions, was ‘strategic autonomy’. The concept eluded precise definition. Was this, as a range of US politicians and strategic experts alleged, a declaration of competition with and independence from NATO and, by implication, from the United States? Or was it, as European officials and spokespersons insisted, an expression of strategic maturity and military determination? The answer was far from clear, and each member state had its own distinctive viewpoint (Bartels et al., 2017). In a series of publications from 2012 onwards, I argued that the solution to the conundrum lay not in the parallel coexistence of NATO and CSDP but in their merger (Howorth, 2012, 2014a, 2017). The argument went as follows. The United States had been ringing the burden-sharing alarm bell for decades and seemed determined to force Europe to take more responsibility for its neighbourhood. This was also what Europe claimed to want. It was therefore equally in the interests of both parties jointly to engineer a strategic shift whereby the balance of responsibilities and leadership within the Alliance should change. Instead of attempting to empower CSDP in contradistinction to NATO, in the teeth of US suspicion and resistance, and instead of duplicating institutions and capacity, the Europeans should engage in an effective takeover of the Alliance but in total co-operation with the United States (Howorth, 2019). Autonomy could only come about via NATO. Over the years, this argument appeared to morph into what many now call ‘the European pillar of NATO’ (Daalder et al., 2025; Ringsmose and Webber, 2020; Tardy, 2025). It also confers meaning on the ‘Europeanisation of NATO’. Such notions began to pick up steam even during the Obama administration in the wake of the NATO intervention in Libya, which was characterised for the first time by US ‘leadership from behind’. The NATO mission was led by the Franco-British couple (Howorth, 2014b; Johnson and Mueen, 2012). Under the first administration of President Donald Trump, more and more voices were raised in support of ever more intensive EU–NATO co-operation with a view to accelerating the Union's moves towards greater autonomy, not just in terms of crisis management but increasingly in terms of collective defence. The EU's CSDP has not been abandoned. In summer 2025, it was still engaged in no fewer than 14 civilian missions and operations, 4 military training missions and 4 strictly military operations (EEAS, 2025). It would be both churlish and inappropriate to dismiss these missions as a sideshow. But in comparison with the challenge of preparing Europe for a potentially existential high-intensity military conflict with a resurgent Russia, they are certainly of a secondary order. By the mid-2000s, as Russia began to flex its military muscles in Eastern Europe, the direct EU–NATO relationship became the most urgent focus of attention. The key problem was that the EU lacked any grand strategy, any clear vision of what it hoped to achieve in the Eastern neighbourhood. Its much-vaunted Eastern Partnership policy proved to be a dismal failure (Nielsen and Vilson, 2014), leading, in 2014, to the United States resuming leadership of Alliance policy in the borderland between Europe and Russia. That leadership was already rocked by the experience of the first Trump administration. US allies around the world were forced to reconsider the wisdom of their own dependency on the American protector. From Tokyo to Berlin and from Canberra to Paris, from Seoul to Brussels and from Ottawa to London, long-standing certainties about the nature of security relations with Washington were shaken (Haas, 2020). Everywhere, stirrings of autonomy captured the headlines. This global trend took on a particularly acute form in Europe as Trump called into question not just the funding basis of NATO but even its core purpose (collective defence based on Article 5 of the Washington Treaty). As Biden succeeded Trump, the question became not so much that of knowing to what extent the new administration might turn back the autonomist tide, as that of deciding to what extent a new balance could or should be established between independence and partnership. Then, on 24 February 2022, just 2 years into Biden's term, Russia invaded Ukraine. The Russia–Ukraine war led to a radically different context in which the EU–NATO relationship was to unfold (Casier, 2023). During the final 2 years of Biden's term, the United States and the EU underwent a type of military and strategic chassé-croisé. The United States, which had been utterly dominant at the diplomatic level in overseeing the lead-up to the war and which took an early, albeit relatively restrained, lead in supplying weapons to Kyiv, progressively became bolder in the type of military equipment it was prepared to transfer. At the same time, Biden utterly ruled out any thought of putting US troops on the ground or of admitting Ukraine to NATO. Indeed, Biden sought actively to minimise NATO's profile in the crisis. Despite this new East–West confrontation seemingly highlighting the role of NATO – which was enhanced by the precipitate accession of Sweden and Finland (Alberque and Schreer, 2022) – in reality, the Alliance per se acted more as a liaison mechanism than as an executive body. The EU, on the other hand, which had been totally absent from discussions over the lead-up to war, whilst slow to organise the transfer of weaponry to Ukraine, progressively overtook the United States in terms of financial commitment [Kiel Institute for the World Economy (KIWE), 2025]. It also pressed both for Ukrainian membership of NATO and for the deployment of European troops into Ukraine. However, European support for Ukraine came overwhelmingly from the member states rather than from the EU per se (Johansson-Nogues and Leso, 2025). Moreover, it was predicated on a lasting US commitment to the cause, a key factor that progressively became a victim of US domestic politics. The Biden administration spoke of doing ‘whatever it takes’ to support Ukraine but had no vision of an eventual outcome or settlement. It aimed to help Ukraine to fight but not to win (Mackinnon, 2024). The Europeans seemed prepared to go much further in their support for Kyiv and generously offered the embattled Zelenskyy a pathway to EU membership. But, alone, European military assistance was limited in impact, and its diplomatic clout is negligible. Ultimately, neither the United States nor the EU proved to be instrumental in shifting the dial on the battlefield. Ukraine was not winning. Russia was not losing. In the United States, anticipating the advent of a second Trump administration and a massive shift in military resources away from Europe and towards the Asia-Pacific region, security policy experts debated the pros and cons of a ‘dormant NATO’ and a ‘post-American NATO’. In the former (Maitra, 2024), the United States would transfer to the Europeans total responsibility for ground forces, whilst retaining a nuclear ‘backstop’ and some offshore balancing capacity. In the latter (O'Brien and Stringer, 2024), the Europeans would be progressively forced to assume the totality of their own collective defences. The choice seemed to be between ‘less America’ and ‘no America’. In October 2024, only days after Mark Rutte succeeded Jens Stoltenberg as NATO Secretary General and weeks before Trump was re-elected, significant new objectives were set for the Alliance's deterrence posture against Russia. Instead of the 82 brigades considered necessary prior to the Ukraine war, NATO now set a target of 131 brigades – an increase of 150,000 combat troops, the lion's share of which would have to come from Europe (Hoorman and Vincent, 2024). Europe was served notice to put its own defence house in order. The only way to do this would be through NATO. By 2025, there was a virtual consensus across the EU member states on the need for a massive increase in defence spending. Multiple high-level discussions were launched with the aim of generating funds allowing European states to borrow vast sums of money for defence purchases. One expert sees three separate strands in these discussions: those relating to direct EU funding of military–industrial co-operation, those relating to EU incentives for member states to raise defence spending, and those that encourage public and private financial institutions to support the defence industry (Santopinto, 2025). Other voices proposed the creation of a European Rearmament Bank (Carter et al., 2025). In April 2025, the Bruegel economics think-tank, in a major study, advocated the creation of a European Defence Mechanism (EDM) to build a common defence market outside of the Commission. This would require a new intergovernmental treaty (Wolff et al., 2025). For its part, on 4 March 2025, the European Commission, in a much-heralded document, Re-arm Europe: A Plan for a Safer and More Resilient Europe (Pugnet, 2025; Von der Leyen, 2025), proposed that member states defence budgets be exempt from deficit limits for a period of 4 years, the of an per In the sought to a for defence by on the et al., 2025; 2025). This of about generating of new defence the very European states that the US no be One is that many of these were by the European Commission, over the had to out a for itself in a that the of the member states and a over this policy the is still a way from becoming a defence or in its own (Santopinto, 2024). The role is to encourage the member states to step At the same time, as a expert the EU still from three the that the European defence industry its own the that to be a of strategic autonomy and the that the EU a grand Moreover, to a in the European to the transatlantic all the States agree that European defence should be they are all not to do much to the very they to American in NATO and from European how far Trump was prepared to go to NATO, the Europeans faced an The global think-tank, in a major report in 2025, put the of the US to the in to defence at et al., 2025). This challenge was by the equally of the between the outcome of the Russia–Ukraine war and the of an autonomous European defence. President Trump for on the that would put an to the Ukraine war 24 was based on a plan up by General a former security and 2024). 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