Par Michel Fortmann, David G. Haglund et Jeffrey Rice
The war in Ukraine has thrown into high relief a question that has hovered over transatlantic relations for many years: Is it possible for the European members of NATO to develop a more “autonomous” defence posture without at the same time jeopardizing their security bonds with the United States? The Ukraine war has exposed a gap in threat perceptions held by both Washington and (most of) the European allies, which has given the old debate about autonomy a piquancy that it never quite possessed before. The perception gap can be traced to several factors, but by far the most relevant is the growing pressure emanating from the US for greater “burden sharing” in the provision of European security. No matter their partisan affiliations, most Americans have difficulty understanding why the European allies, with a combined population of more than 500 million and a collective GDP only slightly less than that of the US itself, cannot do more to assure their own security against a Russia with barely 140 million people and an economy roughly the size of Canada’s. France is, correctly, known to be the one European ally to have been consistently promoting, if only rhetorically, the goal of an enhanced European security and defence autonomy over the past quarter-century. The authors argue that the Ukraine war has led to a shift in French thinking about the meaning of autonomy, and they conclude that should the goal ever be attained, it can only be within and not against the Atlantic alliance.