And yet it moves
Europe's peace project goes to war
Revolutions have four symptomatic stages, wrote historian Crane Brinton – the Doctor House of social upheaval. Stage one is incubation, followed by moderation, crisis, and (a more or less healthy) recovery.
Until this week, it seemed obvious that the viral impact of Russian revanchism on Europe had been at the crisis stage for two years. Surely Europe’s two-step moderation phase – from the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and then from the annexation of Crimea and seizure of eastern Donbas in 2014 – had ended in the early hours of 24 February 2022. Not so, as it turns out. Instead, we have been living through an advanced moderation stage as Washington and its major western European allies supplied a Ukrainian campaign to muscle Russian president Vladimir Putin into a settlement well short of his war aims.
Although Putin’s full-scale invasion forced France and Germany – for six decades, the political engine of the EU – to end their resistance to the union’s eastern expansion, Europe still pulled its punches. Trad-NATO’s war aims were to localise the conflict then end it with a shrunken but western-oriented Ukraine rebuilt as a bulwark against a chastened Moscow. It may not have felt like it on Belbek airfield north of Sevastopol as French and British Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles rained down in January but, for Europe, this was still moderation. The crisis starts now.
A perfect cliché
French president Emmanuel Macron made headlines this week with his threat to deploy military personnel in Ukraine and his public criticism of Germany for refusing to supply Kyiv with Taurus cruise missiles. Berlin’s angry response was understandable; it is by far Europe’s biggest bilateral donor to Ukraine and dwarfs French commitments in all forms of aid, including military supplies. Plus, as always, Macron has some low political motives for his high-minded strategic repositioning. With farmers on the rampage and Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National (RN) commanding a ten-point lead heading into the June election to the European Parliament, Macron found himself a nice wedge issue. His political strategists hope to turn June into a “geopolitical election” against the RN, which has spent two years trying to shake off its Putinophile past. Gabriel Attal, the prime minister Macron chose in January to take the fight to the RN, kept it subtle as he addressed Le Pen directly in the national assembly this week, saying: “There is reason to wonder if Vladimir Putin's troops are not already in our country, I am talking about you and your troops Madame Le Pen”.
Nevertheless, seething German ministers would be wrong to mistake Macron’s turn for mere politics as usual. This was a pivotal geopolitical moment as it dawned on France’s head of state for the second time that the EU’s leadership had to adapt or die.
On the ground, after 18 months during which they repelled the Russian invaders, retook territory, and reclaimed Black Sea access, Ukraine’s armed forces are starting to look vulnerable. After humiliation and mutiny, the Russians seem to have got their act together – taking Avdiivka with an acceptably Soviet-era casualty rate and advancing along the frontline around the wasted city. As Russia’s war economy starts to deliver, Ukrainians are increasingly outmanned and outgunned. Short of ammunition, frontline units have been rationing bullets and shells for weeks. The Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles, which have been critical to Ukraine’s 2023-24 campaign – especially in taking the war to Crimea and forcing Russia’s naval retreat – are rapidly depleting. To prevent rationing and sustain a long-range strike campaign that keeps core Russian forces in sustained retreat, the Ukrainians need Taurus today.
Against this battlefield backdrop, anti-NATO Putin groupie Donald Trump leads the field eight months before the US presidential election, and his Congressional allies are blocking an essential support package for Kyiv. In Europe, despite intensive lobbying by the Americans, French, British and Poles, German chancellor Olaf Scholz refuses to supply his Taurus stocks to the Ukrainians - a veto that carries majority support1.
Watching NATO fracture, the Putin regime does what it always does: reaches for a crowbar. The president speaks directly to Trumpwelt through the conduit of Tucker Carlson while his operatives kill off his last credible opponent. Dmitry Medvedev, Putin’s mad cop, declares Odesa Russia’s next target and – within a week – Russia’s toy Transnistrian parliament in Tiraspol (100 kilometres northwest of Odesa) appeals to Moscow for annexation to “protect” them from those mighty Moldovans.
No time for EU time
None of this comes as a shock to the EU’s frontline governments, who have been in full crisis mode for two years. Poland, the Baltic and Nordic states have been mobilising at speed and creating their own pop-up NATOs in readiness for Russia’s next attack. The spokespeople for Europe’s new militant democracy aren’t from the EU’s founding states but from the north and east: Kaja Kallas (Estonia’s prime minister), Gabrielius Landsbergis (Lithuania’s foreign minister), and Alex Stubb (Finland’s new president) to name just three. For a showman like Macron, it must have burned to watch Poland’s foreign minister Radek Sikorski rather than a French silver fox go viral at the UN. Rhetoric aside, on a practical level, after months of European handwringing over their failure to meet a numerical commitment to supply Ukraine with ammunition, it took Czech President Petr Pavel – a former chairman of the NATO military committee – to find 800,000 shells and bullets available immediately and organise a whip round.
The Franco-German axis has as many lives as a cat but even cats aren’t immortal. Previous attempts to gatecrash the axis failed for a reason. In the case of the UK, London lacked a bipartisan agenda that coincided with Franco-German priorities and the patience to build alternative alliances. Estranged from the euro like the UK, Poland was a dependent whose politics soon veered off into anti-Germanism. Spanish governments have never wanted to lead in Europe and, with its 2%-of-GDP defence-spending target not due to be hit until 2029, they won’t be doing so now.
The EU’s northern and eastern members (minus Hungary and Slovakia) are in a position of strength and their essential needs coincide with the union’s. The Russian threat and the potential end of the US security guarantee will set the European agenda at least through the 2020s. As a marker, Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission president seeking reappointment until 2029, has already promised a “security commission” in her second term. But as ad hoc initiatives like Pavel’s ammunition search, the Ukraine Defence Contact Group, the F-16 training coalition, and the 250-fighter Nordic air alliance make plain, this agenda can’t be set according to “EU time” or within the union’s perimeters. Germany is a huge and essential weapons warehouse, but it is the Poles, Nordics (including Norway), the Balts - and, of course, the Ukrainians - that will be the frontline muscle. France and the UK will provide essential combat support and – in the absence of an America First Washington – the nuclear deterrent2. For Keir Starmer’s incoming Labour government, this is the perfect matching of European demand and British supply and the quickest way back into the European fold.
“I think that Europe has come out of its naivety and geopolitical torpor,” said Jean-Yves Le Drian – François Hollande’s defence minister during the post-Crimea moderation phase, then Macron’s foreign minister and geopolitical mentor until 2022. “Ukraine is Europe's first line of defence; it is there that we are competing for our freedom and our existence,” he told Le Figaro last week. “The price we would pay for Ukraine is nothing compared to the price we would have to pay if they were defeated”.
The RTL/ntv trendbarometer poll conducted on 23-26 February found Germans split 56/35% in support of Scholz's decision. Interestingly, this opposition is driven by AfD supporters, who oppose Taurus supply by 87/13% while Scholz's SPD voters oppose supply by just 46/41% and the CDU/CSU electorate by 48/45%, while FDP voters favour exporting the missiles by 48/46% and the once-pacifist Greens by 52/34%.
Alexander Sorg, a nuclear deterrence specialist at VU Amsterdam, discusses the option of a French nuclear umbrella in an editorial for Tagesspiegel.