Varoufakis: NATO Should Be Dissolved for a European Defence Union

Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister who is now NATO’s secretary general, recently spelled out a truth that has caused outrage across Europe. He characterized the alliance not just as Europe’s defensive shield, but as “…a platform for the United States to project power on the world stage.” And that “utilizing key resources here in Europe” is “crucial also to the success of this U.S.-Israeli campaign” in Iran.

Rutte is right. NATO is the forward base for wars Europe did not choose, against adversaries Europe does not have, in the service of the global ambitions of a power increasingly at odds with European interests and values. European leaders have always known that the North Atlantic Alliance is a marriage of unequals, but they have accepted it in exchange for the promise of security.

Now that the U.S. commitment to European security is in question, Rutte looks like a lone figure, continuing to glorify an agreement that keeps Europe tied to the U.S. empire. Even among European Atlanticists, the belief that NATO will automatically return to its original settings once Donald Trump leaves office is melting away (albeit at a super-slow pace).

NATO without the US is like a bicycle without a cyclist

Constantly acquiescing to the whims of the United States is not a European defense strategy. At the same time, even the most conservative Europeans recognize that NATO without the U.S. would be like a bicycle without a bicyclist. That is why calls are multiplying for a European Defense Union, most likely a coalition of the willing, based on the European Union’s deep cooperation procedure and extending to Norway and the United Kingdom.

But therein lies the problem. As long as NATO exists, a viable European alternative is impossible.

A well-functioning European defense union requires clear answers to four difficult questions:

– Who places orders for European weapons?

– who issues the total debt needed to pay for them?

– how are the resulting costs allocated among the national defense industry leaders of the member states?

– who will order Europeans in uniform to kill and die?

Reasonable answers to these questions cannot be intergovernmental, and NATO cannot provide them. A prerequisite for Europe to build its defense union is political union, which the architects of its monetary union have abandoned.

Some have argued that the current existential threats facing Europe, especially in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, can create the impetus for political union that neither the euro crisis nor the pandemic failed to generate.

A defense alliance is impossible without a political one

Right or wrong, one thing is clear: a political alliance is necessary for a defense union to function, and NATO’s continued existence contradicts this.

For the Cold War generation, subordinating European defense to U.S. priorities made sense. American and Western European elites were united by a genuine, existential fear of the Soviet Union and the financial mechanism that had turned Europe into a recycler of American surpluses in the 1950s and 1960s.

Even after U.S. surpluses were replaced by huge deficits, Europe exported its surplus dollars back to the United States: Americans bought German cars and French luxury handbags, and Europeans used those dollars to buy U.S. bonds, stocks, and real estate.

Meanwhile, the Berlin Wall fell. The Soviet Union became a museum piece, and Boris Yeltsin’s Russia wanted nothing more than to join the West, including NATO. The U.S. was no longer afraid of Russia. What the U.S. did fear was too close a relationship between Germany and Russia not to jeopardize its hegemony over Europe.

German industry worked on Russian gas. But German exports worked on the American deficit, giving the US the leverage it needed to ensure that Germany agreed with their bilateral policy of preventing Russia’s integration into Europe. They deliberately impoverished Russian society and expanded NATO eastward, thus creating the perfect conditions for a strong leader like Vladimir Putin to come to power.

A new rift in Europe

As NATO has moved eastward, new ruling elites – in the Baltic states, but also in Poland and now Finland – have found that they can play a role in the EU disproportionate to their weight, becoming the most ardent promoters of U.S. hyper-expansion.

Suddenly, Europe’s existing North-South divide (separating the surplus countries of Germany and the Netherlands from the deficit countries of Greece, Italy and Spain) has been joined by a new rift between Eastern hyperexpansionists and Western moderates, each pulling the EU in different directions.

Even if the U.S. had no interest in dividing Europe for the purpose of governing it, NATO has intensified centrifugal forces that have made European political union – and, by extension, any effective defense alliance – impossible.

This is why Europe should withdraw from NATO – not because Russia is friendly (it is not), nor because America is evil (it is simply imperial).

Rather, Europe should withdraw from NATO because an alliance that serves as a platform for projecting U.S. power on the world stage will always benefit the European players within it sufficiently to frustrate European consolidation and sovereignty.

I once heard the Irish writer Edna O’Brien say that “the destruction of the heart is a slow and imperceptible process masquerading as debt.”

It is the same with the destruction of a continent. Every time a European leader flies to Washington and kneels before the Resolute table, the damage is compounded – slowly, imperceptibly and masquerading as debt.