Tag Archives: Security in Europe

Britain, Europe, Greenland, NATO, Society, United States

Society as we know it must change if NATO is to survive

SOCIETY

Intro: Western societies have grown comfortable assuming that security, prosperity, and peace are the norm. They are not

The stand-off over Greenland has, for now, been defused. Donald Trump has withdrawn his threats of military action and tariffs. There is now an agreed framework for talks. Europeans, including Britons, should be relieved but not reassured. The deal is not done. More turbulence seems certain to lie ahead. The biggest winners in this disruption are not in Washington, let alone Europe, but in Moscow and Beijing.

For weeks, the world has been transfixed as America threatened a NATO ally over an Arctic territory that many struggle to locate on a map. That might have been “Art of the Deal” pressure and not a determination to be the president who acquired a 51st state, but it will have confirmed for Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping that Westen unity is brittle, that transactional pressure works, and even old alliances can be destabilised.

The strategic logic for Trump’s agenda is real. The Arctic is no longer a frozen periphery. Climate change is opening new shipping routes and exposing vast mineral deposits. Russia has militarised its northern coastline with submarine bases, icebreakers, and hypersonic missiles. China, despite having no Arctic territory, has declared itself a near-Arctic state and invested heavily in infrastructure and resources. Greenland sits at the intersection of these ambitions and astride the Golden Dome missile defence coverage.

The Arctic has always mattered to Britian. Our defence posture is northern-oriented, shaped by the Cold War imperative of protecting the Atlantic sea lanes to North America. That has not diminished but intensified as undersea energy and data cables have become critical to the modern economy. Our submarine patrols, maritime patrol aircraft, and our commitment to NATO’s northern flank all reflect this reality. The UK Commando Force will be in Norway shortly for their winter deployment – a tangible reminder that, for Britain, the High North is not a distant theatre but increasingly our strategic front line.

Greenland and Canada now sit on that front line too. Mark Carney’s call at the World Economic Forum in Davos for “middle powers” to collaborate more closely was not abstract multiculturalism but a recognition that the post-Cold War security architecture is fracturing. Countries like Britain, Canada, the Nordic nations, and others must build new coalitions. These will require substance – they need capability, capacity, and credibility.

For decades, we have relied on America’s military dominance to underwrite our security. Notwithstanding our sacrifices for American security in Iraq and Afghanistan, that guarantee can longer be assumed. The United States might be unwilling (isolationist sentiment is rising) or even unable to provide it (for example, were a crisis in the Euro-Atlantic to coincide with one in the Pacific). Shorn of its rhetoric, the Trump administration’s recently published national security strategy reflects priorities that any US administration would recognise: homeland security, the western hemisphere, China and the Middle East before the Euro-Atlantic.

Europe has committed to increasing defence expenditure over the next decade. Away from the eastern front line, those commitments are not yet backed by credible capability plans. Fragmentation is an issue. Europe operates 17 types of main battle tank; America has one. We have 20 different fighter jets; they have six. We have 29 classes of destroyers and frigates; they have four. Every variant means separate supply chains, training regimes, and maintenance.

Integration is not just about efficiency but credibility. An alliance that cannot operate as a coherent force will not deter a determined adversary. Putin has watched European defence debates for years and calculated – correctly so far – that we lack the collective will to match our rhetoric. European NATO must therefore accelerate defence investment, military interoperability, and defence industrial integration. Not as an alternative to NATO, but to reinforce NATO.

Political leaders must educate voters about the world we now inhabit. Western cohesion is brittle. The post-Cold War peace dividend has been spent. The threats are real and growing and the choices are hard: Europe spends 10-times more on welfare than on defence. No modern politician has dared echo John Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country”. Someone will have to try.

These choices are not just about bigger budgets, they demand a broader reshaping of national resilience: how we protect critical infrastructure, secure supply chains, educate engineers and strategists, and prepare communities for disruption. During the Cold War, civil defence was a shared civic responsibility. We need a modern equivalent – not bunkers and drills but resilient energy systems, domestic manufacturing capacity, cyber literacy, and a citizenry that understands the strategic environment and can respond to crises from floods to hybrid warfare.

This isn’t about sacrifice. It’s about engagement. Higher educational establishments must train the technical talent and conduct the research that underpins resilience. Businesses must rebuild strategic capabilities. Local authorities must prepare for infrastructure disruption. And citizens must understand that security is not something government provides while we go about our lives – it is something we build together.

Darwin saw that it is not the strongest or smartest who survive but the most adaptable. The West has grown comfortable assuming that security, prosperity, and peace are the norm. They are not. They require constant effort. The Greenland episode has been a crisis. It must now become a catalyst. Europe has had its wake-up call.

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Economic, Europe, Government, History, Military, Politics, Society, United States

If we are unable to defend Greenland, then Europe is finished

UNITED STATES – EUROPE

Intro: Once you are reliant on foreign forces for safety you must abide by their decisions, like it or not. What is so difficult to understand about that?

IT WAS some two decades ago when Robert Cooper, Tony Blair’s foreign policy adviser, wrote: “The rest of the world… reacts to America, fears America, lives under American protection, envies, resents, plots against, depends on America. Every other country defines its strategy in relation to the United States”. And, in turn, the United States defines its foreign policy aims as effective “invulnerability”.

Fast forward to today, and Donald Trump is ruthlessly pursuing this same policy. Bombing Iran, deposing Nicolas Maduro, threatening war with Colombia, and now musing on the annexation of Greenland. “We need it for defence”.

Presidents change and domestic policy changes with the incumbent; as with the British Empire before it, however, the interests of the American state are eternal and perpetual. It is the duty of the White House to follow them, and the role of others to respond with envy constrained by their dependence or fear. In this case, the reaction in Europe to an explicit proposal for the annexation of European territory has been muted by both.

Denmark has complained that Trump has failed to show sufficient “respect for international law”, and Keir Starmer has politely asked Trump to stop musing on the prospects of conquering part of an allied nation. Beyond this squawking, however, there has been no response because Europe has no response to offer beyond hoping that Trump forgets about this issue and moves on. We are not going to see US forces conducting midnight raids to capture Danish politicians, or shots fired in anger over the fate of Greenland. Europe is not going to fight America because it can’t, and America is not going to fight Europe because it has no need to: if Trump really wants the territory and isn’t just enjoying the sight of European politicians scrambling to cover their shame, then he could apply deeply painful leverage until he gets his way.

Despite all the rhetoric about the US military and how it intends to be used in the future, the continent’s security is still guaranteed by American boots on European ground, and the outcome of the conflict on its eastern flank by the flow of American weapons and intelligence to Ukraine.

If push comes to shove, no one should be betting against Trump using this leverage to get what he wants in Greenland through some means short of outright annexation: declaring that in the absence of new US installations and treaties that deployments to Europe will need to wind down to preserve forces for the protection of the US homeland.

The diplomatic side will be smoothed over, but the faultlines will still exist. Read the responses from European leaders, and there will always be a hint of rulers who have relied on outsiders to maintain their forces, and have belatedly understood that the interests of those outsiders do not always align with their own. In this, at least, they are in company: the last Western Roman emperor was deposed by foreign allies garrisoned within his territory when their demands for land were denied. The Normans entered southern Italy as mercenaries and ended up ruling over swathes of territory. The Mamluks began as foreign slave-soldiers, and became sultans. The European nations of the present day have spent decades freeloading on US defence spending, paying lip service to the American political obsessions of the day on diversity, migration, democracy, and other cultural issues in exchange for this defence. Geir Lundestad coined the term “empire by invitation” to describe this process: embracing dependence and ever greater American intervention in the life of the Continent.

When American and European interests were aligned, this dependence and intervention was tolerable. The constraints rarely chafed. As American relative power has waned, though, the tasks necessary to secure the homeland and to secure Europe have begun to diverge. As one expert previously said some three years ago, the United States did not “have the military capacity to remain so heavily engaged in Europe while ensuring effective defence in Asia”.

Today, that military expert is at the heart of the administration’s defence policy and is putting this policy into action. Subsequently, Europe is now finding that by having a dependence on a nation with interests different to your own is a deeply uncomfortable position to be in. It is also a deeply difficult one to get out of. For all Europe’s talk of strategic autonomy, at every turn it has baulked at paying the costs that this would entail. It left security to the Americans, comforting itself that they would always be there to pick up the bill.

This dependence reaches beyond the military sphere. America and the EU might enjoy the world’s largest bilateral trading relationship, but it is not an even one. The economic might Brussels hoped to rely on is a partial illusion: US companies provide the payments systems that many European nations rely on, the cloud storage their citizens store their secrets in, the search engines, AI models, and social media platforms which determine the information landscape for the electorate. If a dispute really escalated, the kill switch is in Washington. The EU scramble for alternatives is a result of this realisation.

Yet, the mistake politicians made was a simple one. Ariel Rubinstein’s book Economic Fables makes the point that there is more than one set of rules that the world can operate on. What we think of as immutable features of society are nothing of the sort. Rubenstein was elaborating in the context of how we teach economics to students, but there is no doubt this point can usefully be taken much further.

Underneath the logic of economics and international law the base level of reality still exists. The law of the jungle does not operate in gold and contracts, and it is not tamed by them. It only sleeps, and the market is only in charge until it wakes. Wealth is only power until the men with guns decide that it should be redistributed in their favour, and their agreement to forego this only holds if you can create more wealth than they could otherwise take. Europe’s leaders are now relearning at their cost these lessons their predecessors could have taught them for free. Once you are reliant on a foreign force for safety and a foreign power for prosperity, you are no longer completely sovereign. All the cultural soft power and economic heft in the world won’t do you any good if your outsourced military decides it can insist on more favourable terms than you are willing to provide.

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