The French air force spent this week flying President Emmanuel Macron to Moscow and Kyiv. Macron’s pursuit of peace deserves praise but warrants Ukraine’s caution.
The German air force spent this week flying Chancellor Olaf Scholz to Washington. Scholz’s visit was designed to deflect criticism that Germany is an unreliable ally. For some reason, however, Scholz thought a good way to show his reliability would be to fail to support publicly a key test of said reliability. Standing alongside President Joe Biden at the White House, Scholz refused to support directly Biden’s pledge to shut down Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the event that Putin invades Ukraine.
Beyond these flights, however, the French and German air forces haven’t been doing much — certainly not when contrasted with the U.S. Air Force’s activity in Europe.
In a sad testament to the continuing overreliance of the European Union on U.S. military capabilities, it is the U.S. Air Force, with some support from its British counterpart, that is providing the intelligence and surveillance aircraft in support of Ukraine’s democracy. The United States now has near-persistent aerial coverage of ground radar, imagery, and signal intercept capabilities focused on Belarus, Russia, the Black Sea, and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. This involves daily flights to Ukraine of aircraft from Britain and other U.S. bases in Europe. It is a time-consuming and expensive effort. It is also exhausting work for the U.S. aircrews and their ground support elements.
What about surveillance aircraft on the part of French and German air forces? Flight tracking websites suggest they’re nowhere near Ukraine. Indeed, they’re probably on the ground at their air bases.
This deficiency proves the present fiction that is Macron’s call for EU “strategic autonomy.” Top line: Unless you’re willing to deploy military capabilities actively in defense of European democratic sovereignty, strategic autonomy isn’t a thing. Unlike Germany, Macron does at least invest in defense. Unfortunately, it’s not much good if he won’t deploy at moments like these.
There’s more.
It is the British and U.S. that now appear to be leading the search for a Russian submarine in the North Sea. But the U.S. is also providing the vast proportion of additional defensive support to NATO’s eastern flank allies such as Poland and the Baltic states. While more U.S. ground forces should have been sent to the Baltics versus Poland, Biden deserves credit for extending the deployment of an F-15 fighter squadron from Britain to Estonia. Again, however, contrast this with France and Germany.
Macron says he will deploy forces to Romania if needed but appears yet to have done so. Yet considering that additional U.S. forces are now in Romania, we should assume that Romania requested NATO support. (As of publishing, Romania and France had not responded to requests for comment on whether any French forces had yet arrived in Romania.)
Similarly, while Germany is sending an additional 350 troops to Lithuania, its existing deployment in that Russia-bordering NATO state appears to center on just one combat company — not, in short, a force designed to withstand Russian combined arms forces.
Where does this leave us?
Well, facing Russia’s threat to annihilate a supposedly sacred principle of the European political project, democratic sovereignty, America is once again holding down the EU fort. It’s no wonder some European powers value the U.S. more than they do their fellow EU members.
