Europe keeps telling itself a comforting story. That the danger lies somewhere else, that time remains, and that the United States will steady the wheel as it always has. That story lasted a long time. It no longer survives contact with reality.
For three decades, European NATO treated defence as an administrative inconvenience rather than a material obligation. Ammunition stocks shrank until they were little more than accounting entries. Heavy industry was allowed to atrophy. Readiness became something you managed on spreadsheets rather than in warehouses. The quiet assumption was that America would always fill the gaps and, if it ever didn’t, there would be time to react.
That assumption has expired.
From a Realpolitik perspective, this is not a moral failure but a pricing error. Europe mispriced its own security by externalising the cost to Washington and assuming the supplier would always remain stable. That worked only while American power was both overwhelming and predictable. Once predictability erodes, dependency turns from efficiency into exposure.
The urgency now is not because war is inevitable tomorrow, but because deterrence only works if capability is visible before it is tested. You cannot improvise this. Ammunition does not appear because leaders agree it is needed. Air defence does not surge because a communiqué sounds firm. Trained formations do not exist because parliaments vote money. Rearmament is not intent. It is throughput.
Which is why the argument is no longer about how much Europe spends, but how it converts money into mass. In practice, that means concentration. One industrial spine, many feeders. Poland turns urgency and money into demand at speed. Germany turns that demand into production, repair and sustainment. The rest of Europe stops pretending it can all do everything and feeds that flow with ammunition, propellants, spares, refurbishment, logistics and crews. Fewer variants. Fewer calibres. Fewer national indulgences. Long contracts instead of annual theatre. Old kit returned to service faster than new designs can be perfected. It is dull, industrial and hostile to vanity. Which is exactly why it works.
This is where domestic politics collides with power reality. Large parts of the electorate will bang on about tax cuts as if security were a free add on, and no one does this louder than Reform UK. They demand a stronger Britain and a bigger military while insisting the state be starved of revenue and, with a straight face, claiming that we “don’t need Europe” anyway. In a continent sized security crisis. In an era of industrial warfare. From a Realpolitik standpoint, this is not patriotism but strategic self harm. It suits Vladimir Putin perfectly. Convincing your opponent to hollow out their own defences while cheering about tax cuts and splendid isolation is cheaper than any weapons programme. Whether they realise it or not, they are doing his work for him.
What has changed, though, is not only Europe’s position. It is the reliability of the American anchor it relied on. Under Donald Trump, American power has not vanished, but it has lost the qualities that made it stabilising. Predictability has been replaced by impulse. Institutions are treated as obstacles rather than force multipliers. Law is reframed as optional, contingent on loyalty and mood. That does not make America weak. It makes it erratic. And erratic power deters badly.
This is where the difference between spectacle and strategy matters. A Realpolitik practitioner like Henry Kissinger believed in coercion, pressure and even norm breaking when it served a clear design. What he despised was impulse dressed up as strength. Force was to be applied quietly, signalling carefully calibrated, allies reassured even as adversaries were pressured. Trump has inverted that logic. He unsettles allies first, performs dominance loudly, and treats precedent as collateral damage. From a realist perspective, that is not toughness. It is indiscipline.
More worrying still, the hollowing out is no longer confined to alliances and norms. It has begun to creep into the American military itself. When a retired Navy officer and sitting senator like Mark Kelly feels compelled to remind service personnel of their duty to refuse illegal orders, something basic has already fractured. That principle has been bedrock since Nuremberg. It should not need restating. The fact that it does, and that doing so is treated as subversive rather than axiomatic, signals the politicisation of obedience. Realists care deeply about this. Armies whose legality becomes factional do not fail slowly. They fail suddenly.
And while this circus plays out, the people who matter most are not confused by it. Xi Jinping is not distracted by the noise. He understands escalation, precedent and patience. He already violates norms when it suits him, but he does so incrementally, probing reactions and banking lessons. When the hegemon treats rules as disposable and its dependants argue about tax cuts, he does not panic. He recalculates.
So Europe finds itself squeezed from three sides. By its own long negligence, by an ally whose power has become a variable rather than a constant, and by domestic movements promising strength on the cheap while insisting we can stand alone. From a Realpolitik standpoint, the conclusion is brutally simple. States that cannot generate mass, sustain loss and replace capability quickly are not serious actors. They are buffers.
That is why rearmament is urgent in a practical sense, not a rhetorical one. Europe has time, but not slack. It must turn money into mass now, through concentration, standardisation and production, before uncertainty becomes invitation.
Deterrence is not built on hope, slogans or nostalgia. It is built on factories running, spares stacked, crews trained, and the ability to keep going when the noise fades. This time, Europe does not get to pretend it didn’t know what that required.
Codicil
Seen in that light, Peter Mandelson being withdrawn as ambassador to Washington looks less like misfortune and more like a narrow escape. An ambassador’s job is to reduce uncertainty between systems. Right now, uncertainty is being generated deliberately at the centre of American power. No amount of finesse can stabilise a relationship whose defining feature is volatility. Even Kissinger would have walked away from that brief.
No comments:
Post a Comment