Pablo Hiriart
Madrid.- The diagnosis is clear to everyone: the European Union does not have the capacity to defend any of its member countries from a Russian attack without the active participation of the United States.
Europe does not have the means to protect “the world of principles, of human rights, of multilateralism and cooperation”, as King Felipe referred to yesterday before the guests of the newspaper El Español on its tenth anniversary.
It lacks the strength to avoid what the king asked of those of us gathered in a hall of the Casa de América: “Let us not allow the world of law, principles and values to be the world of yesterday”, quoting the Austrian historian and biographer Stefan Zweig.
The West, with a model of “society based on freedoms, the rule of law, respect for judicial resolutions and solidarity between territories and people”—according to the apt description of the journalist Pedro J. Ramírez at the event’s inauguration —no longer has the United States as its pillar and leader.
And Europe is not a frontline player in Donald Trump’s world, but a weak and undesirable freeloader, according to US Vice President JD Vance, who also came to insult Europeans in the main room of his home: Munich.
Faced with the abandonment and manifest contempt of the United States towards Europe, Emmanuel Macron has offered EU member countries shelter under “the nuclear umbrella of France”.
The gesture is welcome, but the reality is different: the French nuclear arsenal consists of 290 warheads. Russia has 5,580 nuclear warheads.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the other European nuclear power, Great Britain, has 225 nuclear warheads.
In other words, Russia outnumbers the only two nuclear powers in Europe, France and Great Britain, ten to one regarding warheads.
Even worse is the correlation of forces in conventional weaponry, according to the Global Firepower Index. France has 222 tanks, the UK 386, and Russia 14,777.
Applause is coming from almost every corner of Europe for Ursula von der Leyen’s presentation of the European Union’s rearmament plan a few days ago. The plan involves spending 800 billion euros over four years on building the old continent’s defensive autonomy.
But the applause fades when the question of where the money to cover this expenditure comes from is raised. Von der Leyen’s answer is from the coffers of each country.
Will the EU countries, the vast majority of which are in debt to over 100 percent of their GDP, be able to do so?
None of the 27 has said that spending must be cut because this is an existential and survival decision.
Except for one from outside the European Union: the Prime Minister of Great Britain, the Labour Party’s Keir Starmer, who announced the end of a series of social programs and budgetary sacrifices to finance the rearmament. The European Union’s rearmament plan seems to have been hastily thrown together, cobbled together as it were, like the laughable recommendation from the European Council to citizens to stock up on an emergency kit to last 72 hours: have a battery-powered torch to hand, store water, canned food, matches, first aid items and a Swiss army knife.
It was interesting to hear the European Union Commissioner for Defense and Space, Lithuanian Andrius Kubilius, speak at yesterday’s meeting about the urgency of complying with the 800 billion euro rearmament voted by 26 of the 27 in Brussels. King Felipe VI, however, spoke of the “urgent debate on the security and defense of Europe.”
The nuance is fundamental because as long as each country in the European Union is autonomous in its defense decisions, Von der Leyen’s plan may be worse than what it seeks to remedy.
In the words of the greatest living philosopher of our time, the German Jurgen Habermas, “European countries need to unite their military forces.” In other words, not a sum of the parts.
With courageous clarity, he points to the German rearmament plan (the only country whose economic situation allows it to carry it out – its debt does not exceed 60 percent of its GDP), which is for 500 billion euros over the next 10 years.
Question: “What would become of a Europe in which the most populous and economically powerful state at its center also became a military power far superior to all its neighbors, without being compulsorily integrated by constitutional law into a common foreign and defense policy, subject to majority decisions?” (SZ Munich, March 21).
In effect, Germany has become a military superpower again, this time without sharing its decisions with anyone else.
The Nazi concentration camps are barely 80 years away. And in reality, it was the Germans, Nazis or not.
True, they were other Germans. But today, April 2025, the second largest political party in Germany is AfD, pro-Nazi, anti-European Union, pro-Russian in the war against Ukraine.
The whole of what was East Germany (the communist part) voted overwhelmingly for AfD.
Arm themselves to the teeth, be the European military superpower and the leading economy?
The nuance made by the King of Spain yesterday morning in the hall of the Casa de América is essential: “The debate on European security and defense cannot be postponed.”
Urgent, yes, but don’t make serious decisions lightly, on your knees, lest the remedy may be worse than the disease.
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