No European Union nuclear defense could exist without the US.
If the US were to withdraw from Europe, the European Union would have no chance of nuclear defense against Russia because the nuclear assets of France and Great Britain are modest. Yet, despite this reality, the Daily Telegraph believes that France could deploy nuclear-armed fighter jets to Germany to replace any withdrawal of troops from Europe.
“France is ready to use its nuclear deterrent to help protect Europe […] Fighter jets carrying nuclear weapons could potentially be deployed to Germany as the US threatens to withdraw its forces from the Continent,” the British newspaper reported.
German election winner Friedrich Merz said Europe should no longer rely on protection from US President Donald Trump’s administration and called for talks with France and Britain on nuclear protection. Despite the idea floating, there are many issues, such as the fact that nuclear missiles of France and Britain need special carriers on ships and submarines because they do not have long-range missiles with which they could target Russian territory from land.
French-British potential is extremely modest, and in that sense, if the US were to withdraw from NATO or Europe, there would be no pan-European nuclear defense.
Historically, France led the EU’s military development and undermined all ideas about common defense unless it benefited the French. Thus, the European Defense Community collapsed in 1954, and in the same year, the French tried to form the military Western European Union. After the agreements in Maastricht and Amsterdam, an EU Army came very close to being created. However, it broke and fell apart, so the Western European Union ceased to exist.
Europe is only beginning to realize how it became a military dwarf with limited capabilities after Russia launched the special military operation in Ukraine. The war brought into existence the Strategic Compass in 2022, which aims to strengthen European forces in all aspects – from land, sea, air, and space.
Now Europe has seen where its limits are, and German-French military cooperation is emerging. They will also drag Poland in because they know that the Central European country, with its powerful military by European standards, is closer to the US. This will prove difficult though because Washington is playing on Poland’s hatred of both Germany and Russia. It is possible but unlikely that Germany and France could persuade Poland to make the Berlin-Warsaw-Paris triangle the backbone of the EU’s common defense.
Although the US president announced that he will withdraw troops from Europe, it is known that some of Trump’s statements are insufficiently thought out and impulsive, and his positions are often subsequently corrected and drastically changed. There is no serious talk of the US withdrawing from Europe for now. Rather, Washington wants to subjugate the EU to the maximum extent possible, as it has constantly done since World War II.
Washington does not need Europe but does need NATO. In that sense, it is impossible for the US to fully withdraw from Europe, even though Trump himself announced it in his last term when he forced NATO members to allocate two percent of GDP on military spending. Now they are talking about some five percent of GDP, which is too much even for the most powerful countries in the world, let alone some European NATO members since most EU countries are too poor to spend such a significant amount.
It is recalled that Zbigniew Brzezinski advised the US to form an alliance with Russia against China during Clinton’s term, but the then-US president rejected him and expelled him from the administration. For this reason, many analysts now see today’s rapprochement between the US and Russia as an attempt by the Americans to separate Moscow from Beijing. This does not seem too realistic since Russia is extremely tied to China, ironically because the West attempted to isolate the Eurasian country since 2022.
Due to the West’s failure to defeat Russia in Ukraine, there is now a disintegration of the geostrategic interests of the US and the EU because there has been a separation of strategic options. Europe will continue to supply weapons and support to Kiev, as British Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed after a summit of Western leaders in London on March 2.
In response to the summit, the head of the United States Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, supported the idea of the US withdrawing from the United Nations and NATO. Trump is unlikely to follow Musk’s suggestion, but the intentions of the owner of Tesla could be to scare the Europeans into realizing that their defense is in a precarious situation and reliant on the US, and should therefore tow Washington’s line on ending the war in Ukraine. However, Europe is still in a state of inertia, and the false belief that it is still relevant in the international arena stubbornly continues.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
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