After years of prodding by President Trump and as China extends its global reach, the Europe Union will increase its military spending, according to a senior EU official.
“We are aware that our partners around the world expect us to play a bigger role as a provider of global security, and we are ready to do so,” EU High Representative Josep Borrell said in a Thursday address to the EU’s Washington Defense Forum. “The era of a somewhat naive Europe has come to an end.”
That declaration amounted to an acknowledgment of American calls for increased defense spending, which have intensified with the deterioration of the United States’s relationship with China.
The U.S. allots a far greater percentage of its GDP to defense spending than Europe does.
A European member of NATO’s civilian leadership team hailed the “intense” statement as a sign of unity.
“Global competition is raging, and the rise of China is also a fact,” NATO Deputy Secretary-General Mircea Geoana told Brookings Institution President John Allen, a retired Marine Corps general, during a conversation following Borrell’s remarks. “I think we have a sense of a common understanding of the threats. And the strategic culture across the Atlantic is also becoming far more modern and also far more global.”
Borrell implicitly acknowledged the threats posed by China’s use of economic power to gain national security advantages.
“We know that in today’s world, soft power alone is not enough,” he said. “It is even difficult to know when a power is soft or hard because the difference between the two of them are vanishing. In any case, we need to complement our soft power with a hard power dimension. This is a key contribution to a more geopolitical union, one that should do more for its own security and defense.”
The disputes over how to manage that shift has caused some American analysts to resent European allies as free-riders, while French President Emmanuel Macron has contemplated increasing defense spending in order to establish autonomy from American foreign policy priorities. Geoana, after reminding EU officials that the vast majority of NATO’s military capabilities are provided by nations that are not members of the economic bloc, emphasized that EU nations should improve their defense capabilities in a way that doesn’t weaken transatlantic unity.
“American leadership is needed, and American leadership is something that is, you know, our strong interest,” he said. “And North America-European cooperation is paramount for the interest of all of us.”
