Defence is the new buzzword in European politics, since U.S. President Donald Trump made clear that America can no longer be expected to act as the West’s world policeman.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the unelected European Commission, is pushing an extraordinary €800 billion plan to “ReArm Europe”, starting with a €150 billion ‘emergency’ loan. She considers rearmament so urgent that the Commission will bypass the elected European Parliament to get the money.
Meanwhile President Emmanuel Macron of France and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer claim to have assembled a “coalition of the willing” of governments prepared to step up and defend Ukraine as the U.S. withdraws its support. (Although few seem willing to commit to doing much more than talk.)
Many questions remain about how these rearmament schemes might work in practice. But take a step back, and there are bigger political and moral questions that are not being asked loudly enough.
For a start: What exactly is it that European leaders want to defend today? What is the supposed coalition of the willing actually willing to fight for?
Let’s be clear. None of these bold, years-long rearmament plans can make much immediate difference to Ukraine’s war against the Russian invaders. Given the weakened state of most European armies, and their inability to act independently of US military strength, it is political posturing to talk of Europe ‘taking the lead’ in Ukraine.
Weekend headlines reported European military chiefs “wargaming” plans for intervening in Ukraine at a London summit. The “wargame” talk inadvertently exposed the fact that they are really playing with toy soldiers today.
Yet the ReArm Europe plans do point to dangerous times ahead—and raise important issues about the future of Europe and its defence.
Because the rearmament debate cannot just be about spending (and probably squandering) billions of euros. More importantly, it is about whether the current crop of leaders have the political will and moral belief to fight for Europe’s foundational values of democracy, free speech, and national sovereignty.
Let’s recall once more U.S. vice president JD Vance’s speech at last month’s Munich security conference. Vance shocked EU leaders by telling them that the threat to Europe he most worried about “is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” but rather “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
The U.S. had heard all the new talk about European defence against Russia, concluded Vance. “But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me—and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe—is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for?” In other words—what is it that Europe’s leaders are willing to ask their people to fight for?
After all, most of the EU and the UK are still led by a club of technocrats who believe in nothing more than their own empowerment and who display, to coin a famous Nigel Farage phrase about a previous EU President, “all the charisma of a damp rag.”
These poor excuses for leaders have spent years taking the knee to woke ideologies, and trashing the fundamental values and history of European society and Western civilisation. How do they now expect to be taken seriously as wartime leaders, with the ultimate technocrat von der Leyen cast in the role of warrior queen? Little wonder that polls show relatively few Europeans are keen to follow their lead and fight today.
They claim they’re going to defend national sovereignty in Ukraine. Yet they will not even defend their own borders against mass migration. The globalist EU elites have spent decades undermining national sovereignty and imposing centralised “supra-national” power from Brussels. They constantly seek to discredit those increasingly popular parties that want to defend the sovereignty of Europe’s nations as ‘far-right’ or even ‘fascist.’
These hardened globalists cannot convert overnight and become champions of national sovereignty. In fact it quickly became clear that, by treating defence as a COVID-style emergency, President von der Leyen’s ReArm Europe scheme means centralising even more planning and control in Brussels. Who would want to wage a ‘war for national sovereignty’ on the word of unelected Commission bureaucrats?
They claim they are going to fight for democracy? In true Orwellian style, they mean the opposite of what their words say. Europe’s political elites repeatedly demonstrate that they will fight to defend their kratos—power—at the expense of the demos—the people.
Look at the outrageous attack on democracy in Romania, where they cancelled the presidential election and then banned the right-wing nationalist who was likely to win, sparking riots in the capital. Former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton not only boasted that Brussels had “intervened” in Romania to make that happen, but also that they “would not hesitate to do the same in Germany” if the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland did too well in the general election.
In the event the AfD did well and came second—but incoming chancellor and Brussels darling Friedrich Merz has moved to subvert German democracy by forcing through his rearmament plans before the new parliament can meet.
Meanwhile in my native UK we will not forget how Labour PM Starmer, now promoting himself as Europe’s defender-of-democracy-in-chief, fought to ignore the result of the Brexit referendum and tried to overturn the will of the British people to leave the EU.
And are we seriously supposed to believe that these leaders will fight for our freedom of speech, the lifeblood of a democratic and civilised society? It is anathema to elites that want to control political debate. They are conducting a war against free speech, on the pretext of combatting “disinformation” and “hate speech” and Elon Musk online.
There is not even a suggestion the EU elites might defend Europe’s founding Judea-Christian values. Look at the Christians and other minorities being persecuted in Syria by an Islamist regime backed by Brussels, or the Israelis who the EU has abandoned in their war on the frontline of Western civilisation.
Europe’s leaders are playing war games but they don’t truly believe that Europe’s values are worth fighting for. They are trying to solve their problems of domestic unpopularity by militaristic posturing on the global stage. That is a dangerous game to play, with real consequences for Europe’s future.
Fortunately, there are voices trying to awaken Europe to the reality of what’s happening. For example, the stirring intervention in last week’s European Parliament debate by Roberto Vannacci MEP of the national conservative Patriots for Europe group—a former general in the Italian army.
He exposed the reality gap behind President von der Leyen’s scheme, insisting that there is no justification for burdening Europe’s people with many billions more of debt by claiming these are ‘emergency’ measures when they will not bear fruit for several years. The “real emergency” facing Europe, declared Vannacci, is not some future Russian invasion but the problems that are already here—the cost-of-living and energy crisis made worse by Net Zero policies, uncontrolled mass migration, Islamist terrorism and violations of democracy such as in Romania. All of which European crises, of course, have been created and facilitated by the elites that now pretend to defend European values.
The advent of President Trump makes clear that we are living in a changed world where the rules of the old order no longer apply. As veteran US statesman Henry Kissinger told the Financial Times, “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.”
It is high time Europe stopped pretending the globalist order is still intact and faced up to the fact that, as I recently argued here, we are living in a new world of nation-states. We should oppose von der Leyen’s Brussels-based ReArm Europe scheme; the future of defence policies must be in the hands of national governments with democratic mandates for their policies.
One of the great statesmen of European history, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, famously described war as the continuation of politics by other means. War policies based on the continuation of the woke, anti-Western politics of arrogant globalist elites can only spell disaster for Europeans.
What Exactly Do Europe’s Leaders Want To Defend?
Photo: Dimitar DILKOFF / AFP
Defence is the new buzzword in European politics, since U.S. President Donald Trump made clear that America can no longer be expected to act as the West’s world policeman.
Ursula von der Leyen, president of the unelected European Commission, is pushing an extraordinary €800 billion plan to “ReArm Europe”, starting with a €150 billion ‘emergency’ loan. She considers rearmament so urgent that the Commission will bypass the elected European Parliament to get the money.
Meanwhile President Emmanuel Macron of France and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer claim to have assembled a “coalition of the willing” of governments prepared to step up and defend Ukraine as the U.S. withdraws its support. (Although few seem willing to commit to doing much more than talk.)
Many questions remain about how these rearmament schemes might work in practice. But take a step back, and there are bigger political and moral questions that are not being asked loudly enough.
For a start: What exactly is it that European leaders want to defend today? What is the supposed coalition of the willing actually willing to fight for?
Let’s be clear. None of these bold, years-long rearmament plans can make much immediate difference to Ukraine’s war against the Russian invaders. Given the weakened state of most European armies, and their inability to act independently of US military strength, it is political posturing to talk of Europe ‘taking the lead’ in Ukraine.
Weekend headlines reported European military chiefs “wargaming” plans for intervening in Ukraine at a London summit. The “wargame” talk inadvertently exposed the fact that they are really playing with toy soldiers today.
Yet the ReArm Europe plans do point to dangerous times ahead—and raise important issues about the future of Europe and its defence.
Because the rearmament debate cannot just be about spending (and probably squandering) billions of euros. More importantly, it is about whether the current crop of leaders have the political will and moral belief to fight for Europe’s foundational values of democracy, free speech, and national sovereignty.
Let’s recall once more U.S. vice president JD Vance’s speech at last month’s Munich security conference. Vance shocked EU leaders by telling them that the threat to Europe he most worried about “is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor,” but rather “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values, values shared with the United States of America.”
The U.S. had heard all the new talk about European defence against Russia, concluded Vance. “But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me—and certainly I think to many of the citizens of Europe—is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for?” In other words—what is it that Europe’s leaders are willing to ask their people to fight for?
After all, most of the EU and the UK are still led by a club of technocrats who believe in nothing more than their own empowerment and who display, to coin a famous Nigel Farage phrase about a previous EU President, “all the charisma of a damp rag.”
These poor excuses for leaders have spent years taking the knee to woke ideologies, and trashing the fundamental values and history of European society and Western civilisation. How do they now expect to be taken seriously as wartime leaders, with the ultimate technocrat von der Leyen cast in the role of warrior queen? Little wonder that polls show relatively few Europeans are keen to follow their lead and fight today.
They claim they’re going to defend national sovereignty in Ukraine. Yet they will not even defend their own borders against mass migration. The globalist EU elites have spent decades undermining national sovereignty and imposing centralised “supra-national” power from Brussels. They constantly seek to discredit those increasingly popular parties that want to defend the sovereignty of Europe’s nations as ‘far-right’ or even ‘fascist.’
These hardened globalists cannot convert overnight and become champions of national sovereignty. In fact it quickly became clear that, by treating defence as a COVID-style emergency, President von der Leyen’s ReArm Europe scheme means centralising even more planning and control in Brussels. Who would want to wage a ‘war for national sovereignty’ on the word of unelected Commission bureaucrats?
They claim they are going to fight for democracy? In true Orwellian style, they mean the opposite of what their words say. Europe’s political elites repeatedly demonstrate that they will fight to defend their kratos—power—at the expense of the demos—the people.
Look at the outrageous attack on democracy in Romania, where they cancelled the presidential election and then banned the right-wing nationalist who was likely to win, sparking riots in the capital. Former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton not only boasted that Brussels had “intervened” in Romania to make that happen, but also that they “would not hesitate to do the same in Germany” if the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland did too well in the general election.
In the event the AfD did well and came second—but incoming chancellor and Brussels darling Friedrich Merz has moved to subvert German democracy by forcing through his rearmament plans before the new parliament can meet.
Meanwhile in my native UK we will not forget how Labour PM Starmer, now promoting himself as Europe’s defender-of-democracy-in-chief, fought to ignore the result of the Brexit referendum and tried to overturn the will of the British people to leave the EU.
And are we seriously supposed to believe that these leaders will fight for our freedom of speech, the lifeblood of a democratic and civilised society? It is anathema to elites that want to control political debate. They are conducting a war against free speech, on the pretext of combatting “disinformation” and “hate speech” and Elon Musk online.
There is not even a suggestion the EU elites might defend Europe’s founding Judea-Christian values. Look at the Christians and other minorities being persecuted in Syria by an Islamist regime backed by Brussels, or the Israelis who the EU has abandoned in their war on the frontline of Western civilisation.
Europe’s leaders are playing war games but they don’t truly believe that Europe’s values are worth fighting for. They are trying to solve their problems of domestic unpopularity by militaristic posturing on the global stage. That is a dangerous game to play, with real consequences for Europe’s future.
Fortunately, there are voices trying to awaken Europe to the reality of what’s happening. For example, the stirring intervention in last week’s European Parliament debate by Roberto Vannacci MEP of the national conservative Patriots for Europe group—a former general in the Italian army.
He exposed the reality gap behind President von der Leyen’s scheme, insisting that there is no justification for burdening Europe’s people with many billions more of debt by claiming these are ‘emergency’ measures when they will not bear fruit for several years. The “real emergency” facing Europe, declared Vannacci, is not some future Russian invasion but the problems that are already here—the cost-of-living and energy crisis made worse by Net Zero policies, uncontrolled mass migration, Islamist terrorism and violations of democracy such as in Romania. All of which European crises, of course, have been created and facilitated by the elites that now pretend to defend European values.
The advent of President Trump makes clear that we are living in a changed world where the rules of the old order no longer apply. As veteran US statesman Henry Kissinger told the Financial Times, “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences.”
It is high time Europe stopped pretending the globalist order is still intact and faced up to the fact that, as I recently argued here, we are living in a new world of nation-states. We should oppose von der Leyen’s Brussels-based ReArm Europe scheme; the future of defence policies must be in the hands of national governments with democratic mandates for their policies.
One of the great statesmen of European history, the Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, famously described war as the continuation of politics by other means. War policies based on the continuation of the woke, anti-Western politics of arrogant globalist elites can only spell disaster for Europeans.
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