If anyone had any doubt, America’s leaders made it abundantly clear in Davos this week: Wherever things go with Greenland, Europe can’t rely on US security guarantees to the extent that it long has. To defend their common interests, European nations urgently need to ramp up their military and financial cooperation. Europe’s leaders talk as if they recognize this new reality. Yet their actions fall far short of what’s needed.
The task at hand is daunting, requiring a level of solidarity that the European Union is ill-equipped to achieve. Its defining treaties leave defense and fiscal matters largely to individual member states, vastly complicating efforts to rearm rapidly. Major European nations each have their own military industries: France buys mostly French, Germany German. The result is a costly proliferation of ill-fitting weapons systems that aren’t produced at scale. Financing is similarly fragmented. Each EU country’s contribution to the common defense depends on its fiscal capacity and its individual threat assessment.
The region’s leaders must overcome such dysfunction and mount a more serious and coherent effort. More than seven decades ago, European nations came together in the hopes of ensuring peace and prosperity after the horrors of two world wars — a monumental experiment in the power of mutual benefit and shared values to triumph over narrow self-interest and ancient rivalry. It’s eminently worth defending.