Musing About Europe Without NATO

moon  of  alabama

Tonight Trump will address Congress. There are unconfirmed rumors that he will announce a U.S. exit from NATO.

Now that would be a bummer for the Europeans.

During the last 80 years European leaders never had to think strategically about their own nations' security. The U.S. and USSR did that for them.

How would or should Europe look without NATO?

Over the last eight decades NATO and the U.S. (and until 1990 the Warsaw Pact and Russia) have largely prevented wars between European countries. The continent - where nations have been at war with each other for centuries - could easily fall back into that bad habit.

Just look up what Polish revisionists think of Germany and how that country is re-building its army ...

As a German I understand that my country is, financially and size wise, the biggest dog in the European pack (ex Russia). It would be wise for it to declare absolute neutrality and to refrain, like Austria, from joining any alliance. Its army, based on a short conscription of every men, should be stationed and act only within its own borders.

That done it would be time to launch a new Concert of Europe (incl. Russia):

... a general agreement among the great powers of 19th-century Europe to maintain the European balance of power, political boundaries, and spheres of influence. Never a perfect unity and subject to disputes and jockeying for position and influence, the Concert was an extended period of relative peace and stability in Europe following the Wars of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars which had consumed the continent since the 1790s.

The last concert did not keep the continent at total peace but it prevented crises from escalating beyond narrowly defined borders. In that respect it lasted from 1820 up to the start of the first World War.

To conduct such a concert would probably require another Prince Metternich or Otto von Bismark. There is however no such person in sight. (Lavrov would be good at that job but he is Russian, too old and otherwise committed.)

The EU bureaucracy in Brussels has neither legitimacy nor competence in inner-European or international security issues.

Don't count on it when NATO is out.

What are other alternatives?

Posted by b on March 4, 2025 at 20:08 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2025/03/musing-about-europe-without-nato.html