How Putin’s disastrous war exposed the folly of Macron’s EU army
When Russian aggression reared itsts ugly head, the Atlantic alliance – andnd not the European Union – came to o Ukraine’s aid, says Simon Heffer
TFrance wanted the US detached from the defence of Europe, thinking this would not affect its security
hat the conflict in Ukraine has become such a debacle for Vladimir Putin – whose sole responsibility it is – has surprised many in the West. For years we had instinctively believed much of the publicity from Russia about its power.
Putin in his arrogance was, like us it seems, woefully ignorant of the real capabilities of Russia’s military. He was also poorly advised and briefed, and leader of a crew of pathological liars.
His soldiers have been exposed as demoralised boy conscripts, with no idea they were expected to “liberate” Ukraine from “Nazidom”.
Their weaponry was ill-deployed and often ineffective, their logistics inadequate. They became sitting ducks for highly motivated, better armed and above all hugely brave Ukrainians. Russia has inflicted huge damage on Ukraine, and terrible cruelties on its people, and continues to do so.
However, a war that was supposed to lead to the capture of Kyiv within days has lasted nearly three months. There is no indication that Russia is winning, or can win – and this is thanks not just to Ukrainian heroics, but also to assistance given by Nato.
The resurgence of the Atlantic alliance has been another unpredictable consequence of this war, contrary to Putin’s supposed aims.
To many in the West, especially at the heart of the European Union, Nato was just a relic of the Cold War. Like a Trabant or a jukebox, it seemed to belong in a museum.
For most on this side of the Atlantic, international relations after 1991, when the Soviet Union went to its unlamented grave, meant the EU. It steadily grew to 28 countries, absorbing many states from the former Soviet bloc. With Russia diminished, humbled, introspective and sinking into corruption as it built a post-Soviet existence, the EU felt entitled to assume its self-appointed destiny of commanding the continent’s future.
Inevitably, in that heady moment of triumph – brought about more by the Soviet Union’s economic and moral weakness and America’s firepower than by anything the EU could offer – it, too, began to overreach itself.
As treaty after treaty – Maastricht, Amsterdam, Lisbon – was concluded, and the EU’s ambition and central control grew, talk became more frequent of a federation, and the trappings that go with it. One was a European army, something pointless if Nato was serving its purpose.
Nonetheless, France, Britain (under Tony Blair) and Germany agreed in principle on a European Defence Force at St Malo in 1998, albeit in a very different world.
The dream was helped by a strain of anti-Americanism in Europe that became especially apparent during the second Gulf War.
France notably, but also Germany, imagined they wanted America detached from the defence of Europe, and that doing so would not affect their security. Such attitudes helped turn Britain against the EU and led, six years ago, to its voting to leave the bloc altogether. They also fostered a hubristic cast of mind that, before 2014, had Brussels toying with Ukraine about the possibilities of its EU membership.
When Russia made its first move on eastern Ukraine in the winter of 2014 the EU headed for the hills, too terrified to provoke a fight with a powerful neighbour over something so trivial as a little guy who showed an interest in joining the club. Reality had intervened.
I f it has taken a greater attack on Ukraine to expose the true weakness of Russia and its deluded leader, it has also exposed the true weakness of the EU as an actor in international relations on its own continent – and the absolute indispensability of Nato if Europe is not to repeat the bloodsoaked mistakes of the 20th century in the 21st.
One of the reasons Putin offered for attacking Ukraine was that if it were to join Nato he would regard it as a Western threat to Russia, despite Nato being an avowed and unequivocal defensive, not offensive, alliance.
Putin’s excuse may well be a lie: virtually every public statement he makes is. One suspects the real reason for the attack was to accomplish a conquest that would make him look powerful and make his benighted people feel better about the Russia he has created, and to throw his weight around in the world, as bullies do, in the expectation of intimidating others.
The West was caught off guard: despite having its own nuclear deterrent, it for a while was the bloc being deterred by Putin’s deranged threats to deploy his. However, it is now clear that his attempt to stop Nato expansion is actually feeding it. Finland, whose 800-mile border adjoins Russia, for decades resisted the lure of Nato. Now its president, Sauli Niinisto, and prime minister, Sanna Marin, have issued a joint statement that “Nato membership would strengthen Finland’s security” and that “Finland must apply for Nato membership without delay”.
Around 75 per cent of Finns support this policy, with just 12 per cent against. Russia has threatened “retaliatory steps, both of a militarytechnical and other nature”, but nobody in Finland seems to care.
The Ukraine debacle has shown that Russia has moved from being a nation that inspired fear to one that provokes contempt and even derision. And Nato, set on this unexpectedly expansionist course by Russia’s mindless aggression, will be an even better insurance policy as the Putin regime continues through its death-throes, with its theatrical threats to lash out.
Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s secretary general, has promised the Finns that their accession will be “smooth and swift”. The alliance’s senior partner, America, has indicated its enthusiasm.
Finland is acting in close concert with its neighbour Sweden, whose attitude towards Nato has been similar – a long-term relationship of sympathy and respect without desiring the full consequences of membership, notably that an attack on one member is treated as an attack on all and requires a united response. Sweden had historically taken a principled view of its neutrality, seeing itself almost in similar terms to Switzerland as able to act as an honest broker in international conflicts.
Until recently it was deeply divided about Nato, not least because of a strong strain of anti-Americanism among the Swedish Left. However, support for membership has now reached more than 60 per cent, with most Swedes realising on what side their bread is buttered.
Last week both countries signed a defence pact with the UK, as a prelude to their approach to Nato. Notwithstanding last-minute grandstanding by Turkey, both countries are likely to join in coming months.
Two points have clearly emerged from this change in policy: that civilised Western countries such as Finland and Sweden have had to accept that with a neighbour as brutal, reckless and criminal as Russia, neutrality is no longer an option; and that the EU, of which both are members, is simply not an adequate shield or protection for their national interests or – more to the point – their peaceful and democratic way of life. The formal decisions for both nations to join are likely to be made this week, and will constitute a further humiliation for Putin.
That Finland and Sweden should embrace Nato now, rather than looking to the EU for security, shows also what a failure the Ukraine war is proving for the bloc.
It has confirmed what many around the continent have recognised for years, but what Brussels and the more fanatical of the pro-Europeans in some member states have chosen to pretend is not the case: that, like Russia, the EU is experiencing its own decline, and like the old Soviet Union when it started to crack in 1989, it is suffering from growing disunity.
The aspirations of the EU to act in the military defence of its member states are largely meaningless, and the Finns and Swedes know it.
The bloc’s decline really began with the economic crisis of 2008, which forced it to act expensively to shore up its single currency, notably by keeping the Greek economy afloat and by making subventions to other underperforming states around its periphery, including Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy.
Away from the enclaves of the rich on the Côte d’Azur and Amalfi coast, most of southern Europe is in decay, and the decay is spreading.
Brexit struck a grievous blow to the EU, partly by undermining its belief in its permanence, and partly because it became clear that its anti-democratic arrogance and unwillingness to acknowledge strong national differences and vested interests played a big part in the leave vote.
One or two leaders – notably Emmanuel Macron, now posturing as the leader of the EU – took the blow so personally that they have sought to belittle the UK in world affairs ever since.
This now proves at odds with President Zelensky’s admiration for this country in the unflinching assistance it has given Ukraine since Feb 24, while too many EU countries have procrastinated about what, and how much, to do.
Both Poland and Hungary are in a growing culture war with Brussels,
Nato is the only option for a more secure future: but it means paying for the possibility of warfare
which appears to have learnt nothing from its experiences with Brexit. The pandemic was little short of a disaster for the EU. A policy of “every man for himself ” became widespread as panic took over, with supposedly eternally open borders hurriedly closing and nations attending to their own needs rather than obeying Brussels.
President Macron even held up France’s vaccine programme because it might have meant following the example of Britain and using vaccines the UK had approved but Brussels had not; the way the EU, and especially Mr Macron, now conduct themselves betrays a distressing blend of infantilism and headless chickenism. This hardly inspires confidence while a heavily armed and deeply unstable near neighbour is invading an innocent party.
France, of course, has never much liked Nato, not least because it meant playing second fiddle to the Anglo-American relationship at the alliance’s heart. It was a founder member of the organisation in 1949 but was pulled out of its integrated military command in 1966 by Charles de Gaulle; France did not return until 2009.
De Gaulle’s action showed how the French are happy to be in any alliance so long as they call the shots. Chirac hoped that would be the case militarily after St Malo, and Mr Macron is trying to do something similar with the EU now, after the departure of Angela Merkel, its uncrowned empress, and given the power vacuum that is her successor, Olaf Scholz.
Indeed, Mr Macron seems to have learnt much from de Gaulle – who never forgave the Americans, the British and the anglophone Canadians for liberating his conquered country in 1944, and ludicrously pretended the French had done it themselves.
In a statement that shows why he struggles to win friends around the world, as in his own country, the president said in an interview in 2019 that Nato was “brain dead”, an assertion for which he was rapidly rebuked by Dr Merkel. He questioned whether Nato was still committed to collective defence. His remarks were, inevitably, welcomed by the Russians, who called them “truthful words”.
Mr Macron’s ill-judged comments help show why EU members worried about their own security will look to Nato rather than to someone posing as the leader of their own bloc – particularly if, like Mr Macron, that person curries favour with the Kremlin by berating the Western defensive alliance that is perhaps their only hope of true security.
The French president’s words were seen at the time as an attack on America’s defence policy under Donald Trump – something other Nato members were also uneasy about. However, they realised it was best to deal with such unease in private diplomatic discussions rather than in a magazine interview.
Mr Trump had pulled US forces out of Syria without consultation: but he had also, legitimately, complained about the high proportion of Nato’s financial burden America had to bear, while European nations – including, shamefully, the UK – paid so little. (This complaint was not a typical piece of Trumpian bloody-mindedness: Barack Obama, more isolationist by instinct, said the same.)
Mr Macron’s assertion that Nato’s members could no longer rely on the US to defend the alliance was nonsense when he said it, and it has been proved to be utter nonsense now. Whatever manifest faults President Biden may have, soft-pedalling on Nato and on
Ukraine are not among them: when the test came Nato was there, and led by America.
How unlike some of the EU’s leading countries. Germany is still struggling to decide whether to end its reliance on Russian energy, or to continue to line the Kremlin’s war chest. During his recent victorious presidential election campaign, Mr Macron found himself under fire from the Polish prime minister for having gone to talk to Putin. Mr Macron’s vanity and self-regard are epic; he may well genuinely have believed that he alone had the diplomatic skill and brilliance to make Putin see sense.
Offering leadership is commendable, but it must be rooted in reality and based on credibility. Mr Macron’s failures of judgment, his easy recourse to pettiness and the shortness of his temper suggest reality and credibility are distant from him.
Nato has seized the initiative in recent weeks, while Mr Macron and the diminishing number who, like him, think the EU is a global force, have been desperately trying to catch up. Most of his fellow leaders have wisely kept their mouths shut. He, though, sought to give new meaning to this failing institution by offering a new vision for Europe in Strasbourg last week: a vision of concentric circles, an outer ring enabling the EU to have a relationship with Ukraine. That ring could also, he suggested, include recusant nations such as the UK which, if stupid enough to leave the bloc, could still participate at the margins and co-operate on certain policies (including defence – because, as we know, Mr Macron persists in his eccentric belief that Nato is brain-dead), provided Brussels is recognised as the centre of the universe.
In setting out this vision, he once more evoked the spectacle of a European army – doubtless, in his imagination, commanded by the French. Mr Macron immediately tried to press his plan for a “wider EU” on Mr Scholz, who refused to commit himself: the reaction from around the EU, as well as from the UK, was overwhelmingly negative.
Brexit has left France as the only serious military force in the EU, and that is not enough; and there is no will among the other members to duplicate Nato by having a European army, even if it means annoying Mr Macron by making him endure American leadership in European defence. Also, there is plenty of evidence that European forces do not always operate in a satisfactory fashion. Like most of her predecessors, Ursula von der Leyen, the present head of the European Commission, was promoted to that job after a disastrous domestic political career – in her case, as Germany’s defence minister.
Under her, the Bundeswehr was tainted by scandals including sexual harassment, a soldier who plotted terror attacks on asylum seekers and an epidemic of bullying. German military intelligence admitted identifying 275 Right-wing extremists in the army in the six years until 2017. She was also investigated about the allegedly corrupt award of pointless multimillion-euro defence consultancies to cronies. Three years ago, a Belgian intelligence officer was found to have passed Nato secrets to the Russians. When the EU had a defence review, 18 months ago, it found that only 60 per cent of its troops and weapons in Nato countries were ready or fit to be deployed.
Mr Macron inhabits a parallel universe where the EU is concerned, a mindset increasingly apparent to his partners in the bloc but also to his own fellow citizens. Over 40 per cent of French voters have just backed his Eurosceptic rival. Many who voted for him did so under sufferance, and not because they endorse his imperial European views. He fails to understand that the other EU nations no longer defer to the views of France, and are even increasingly sceptical of Germany, as its financial clout in the block weakens and the embarrassment of its dependence on Russia becomes ever more apparent. It is no wonder resurgent nations such as Poland are more Atlanticist, and find it easier implicitly to trust Britain and America, than to follow blindly the diktats and power fantasies of the EU.
Nato had a shaky start to the Ukraine conflict, and is still struggling to make Germany, in particular, shake off its self-righteous pacifism. But the alliance’s members, led by Britain and America, are now pouring arms and other assistance into Ukraine.
Nobody can now accuse the US of a lack of commitment, and it is important it stays that way: which means Britain and other Nato members doing exactly what Presidents Obama and Trump asked, and paying their fair share for the vital protection the alliance offers.
The assistance the alliance is giving Ukraine and the quality of the training it has offered Ukrainian fighters have given this beleaguered country the edge over its bigger, but less capable, neighbour.
Nato is the only option for a more secure future for the West: but it also means countries such as Britain cutting back on welfare and paying for the possibility – distant, one hopes – of warfare.
What the past three months should have taught us is that no nation or alliance can conduct diplomacy successfully without armed force to back it up as a last resort. We may not have understood how underpowered and overblown Russia’s military force was, but Russia knew how run down the West’s armies, navies and air forces were, and believed we were decadent and reluctant to risk what we had.
If we are to avoid a repeat of this crisis, we must trust Nato – and we must pay our way and build up our Armed Forces. It is a question of priorities: and Britain, freed from the EU and its military dreams, can set the example.