Certainly, part of Obama's logic is correct. In the case of Nato, the core European allies need to take their own defence much more seriously. Collectively they spend only 1.4 per cent of GDP on defence. The only region of the world to spend less is Latin America. Europe has been overly focused on the politically unpopular, elite-driven task of political and economic union. While it is true that America has always borne the brunt of Nato responsibility, financially and in terms of boots on the ground, only three European countries (the UK, Estonia and Greece) currently meet Nato's target of spending at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence. Even with Obama's new commitment, America will have no serious military presence in Europe. Nato requires a significant strategic reappraisal in order to manage a completely reordered European security situation. Even while Europe waits for the US Congress to approve Obama's ERI, Nato showed that despite the gravity of recent events it is still not prepared to step up its defence commitments. It announced a "readiness action plan" to address the most serious military deficiency exposed by Russia's Crimean adventure. While Russia was quickly able to mobilise tens of thousands of troops on the border with Ukraine and clearly had special forces operating within Crimea and the East, Nato would have taken months to get a "rapid" reaction force in place were a military response required.
The political elites in Washington and across Europe face an uncomfortable summer recess, disturbed by the unwelcome reappearance of geopolitics, challenging the core strategic assumptions of the past 25 years. The consequences have been consistently downplayed in the left-leaning media, which insist that Obama has outmanoeuvred Putin. After the European elections, the notion that it is business as usual for Europe and America is less laughable but just as hollow. Brussels has already discarded the drastic message spelt out at the polls and moved onto fresh internal politicking surrounding the appointment of the new President of the European Commission. However, the European elections have served to underscore the degree of disunity among the continental partners, most importantly between the key countries, Germany and France. The historic rationale for the European project and Nato was famously summed up by Nato's first Secretary General, Lord Ismay: "To keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." Nato was the military component of this strategy towards European political and economic integration. By Ismay's measure, transatlantic security is in crisis and there is no small degree of irony in the observation by the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, "Pro-European Germany is getting more and more powerful — and is distancing itself further and further from the rest of the Union."
The core Nato allies are struggling politically and their ability to increase their Nato commitments has once again taken a back seat to the EU. The Franco-German compact that has been at the heart of the European project for decades is under threat and not just because of the two countries' differing economic approaches: German fiscal discipline and French public investment.
One of the few uniting factors in the mishmash of extremist parties who stormed the European polls was a rejection of the onward march of European integration, threatening the political stability which Nato was designed to defend externally. The most worrying victory at the European elections was that of France's Front National, whose leader has loudly courted Putin's Russia. Marine Le Pen's success is the most likely to be repeated in domestic elections and if that is the case the European project will probably be significantly compromised, perhaps fatally so. The political forecast is rendered more ominous as the European Central Bank introduces negative interest rates and considers an asset purchase programme to avert continental deflation. The situation represents an existential crisis for Germany in particular. The Germans are perhaps even more worried than their allies about the prospect of a concentration of power in Berlin. At precisely the moment when it must consider the historically explosive topic of increasing military commitments to Nato, Germany's European partners look weakest both politically and economically. As a result, the greater the threat to the postwar European order that sustained Germany's economic revival, the less Germany feels able to attend to Nato.
The folly is that Obama's approach to Europe does not take into account the magnitude of strategic and political change that has taken place in Europe this year. His strategic intransigence has been based on the security situation of his predecessors. Relative peace in Europe meant that Nato's old strategic paradigm was gradually replaced by "out of area" operations. Indeed, the only time Article Five of the Nato treaty has been invoked involved the alliance sending its forces to Afghanistan. America's gradualist approach to Nato was that the European partners should shoulder their share of the burden and expense of the alliance. The problem is that Obama stubbornly refuses to accept the gravity of the changed security situation in Europe after Russia's Ukrainian incursion. Additionally, the historical reality that America has always shouldered the majority of the Nato burden, because transatlantic stability was in US strategic interests, challenges Obama's worldview. The result is that as Obama pivots to Asia, Europe appears to be pivoting back towards the twin curses of nationalism and economic stagnation.
For some Ukrainians the values of the European Union are clearly worth dying for, but EU diktats and its unaccountable bureaucracy are simultaneously resented in many member nations. The dream of the EU's founders was that "ever closer political union" was needed to prevent another global war, fuelled by European nationalism. The notion of war between any EU member countries today seems implausible, but war and military conquest is a real threat in the states of the former Soviet Union, as events in Ukraine show.
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