This declaration of European autonomy from its traditional transatlantic ally echoed a theme that has been running through French President Emmanuel Macron’s pronouncements since his discovery, during Donald Trump’s first term as President, that Nato (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) had become brain-dead, and Europe needed to build the capability to defend itself with its own men and materiel.
With the two largest economies and military powers of Europe now converging on the need for European means of self-defence and European geopolitical salience, there is little doubt that Europe would move out from under the geopolitical shadow of the US and constitute a centre of global power in its own right, sooner, rather than later.
Need of the hour
The emergence of a multipolar world is good news for India. Imagine a world under the twin hegemony of the US and China. In this world, to resist China’s aggressive moves against India, particularly on the disputed border between the two countries, India would need to take help from the US.
Knowing that India has no alternative to submitting to its demands, the US would be able to extract concessions from India that compromise India’s cherished strategic autonomy, built up painstakingly over the decades with India’s investment in key nuclear and space technologies (space rockets are, after all, close cousins to military missiles), and diplomatic positioning, such as non-alignment.
This is why India has refused to join up with the West in condemning Russia for its aggression against Ukraine. India well appreciates that Russia cannot remain a global power without its naval power, for which Russia’s only warm-water naval base located at Sevastopol in Crimea is vital.
It is very much in India’s interest for Russia to remain a global power. Ukraine’s Nato membership would have meant not just further success of the onward expansion of the anti-Russia military alliance, Nato, to the east but also that Russia’s key naval base and access to that base over land would come under Nato control.
Time to fend for itself
Merz’s statement comes in the wake of the current US President Donald Trump’s thinly concealed disdain for Europe’s dependence on US military might for the Old Continent’s security and his oft-repeated position that he would welcome Russia doing whatever it wants to European states that do not meet the Nato members’ target of spending 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) on defence.
Trump has made it clear that the days of European freeloading on American generosity are over.
The statement also comes in the wake of US vice president J.D. Vance condemning, at the Munich Security Conference that concluded on 16 February, European practice of democracy, including openness to refugees from other parts of the world, including African countries that Trump has described as “shitty”, and clamping down on hate speech and on objectors seeking to impede legally authorized practices such as abortion.
In the same speech, Vance said, “…(A)s President Trump has made abundantly clear, he believes that our European friends must play a bigger role in the future of this continent. We don’t think—you hear this term, “burden sharing”, but we think it’s an important part of being in a shared alliance together that the Europeans step up while America focuses on areas of the world that are in great danger.”
Vance proceeded to leave the conference venue to meet up with Alice Weidel, leader of Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), a party that has come in second in the German elections on the strength of its anti-immigrant platform, and which most Germans consider to be a modern-day iteration of the Nazis.
Merz’s statement also comes in the wake of Trump seeking to settle the Ukraine war directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, over the heads of both Kyiv and Europe. Clearly, it is time for Europe to reassess the true import of America’s “Pivot to the East” that began under Barack Obama, who also began to reduce the number of US troops stationed in Europe.
Europe had been left to pick up the pieces as Trump, in his first term, tore up the Iran nuclear deal that Europe had negotiated, along with the US and Russia. Now, the US has walked out of the Paris Accord on fighting climate change for the second time, condemning the Green Transition, dear to most Europeans, as a hoax.
Europe, it would appear, is done with letting the US trample over the principles and priorities it holds dear, and now wants to establish that European leaders firmly belong to the group that animal taxonomists recognize as Phylum Chordata, Sub-Phylum Vertebrata.
And European re-discovery of its spine is good news for India.
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