War and Peace
10 things European leaders should announce at the emergency summit in Paris
By Dr. Garvan Walshe
They’ve been at war with us for almost a decade. It’s time we acted like it.
I saw this in the Remain campaign, in the EU’s treacle-like response to Viktor Orbán’s destruction of Hungarian democracy, and the West’s semi-response to Russian aggression in Ukraine.
Two questions keep coming into my mind: why have we taken so long to do anything? And why do we keep losing?
The reason is simple. They are at war while we are not. We have two types of enemies, right-wing nationalists and Russia. They’re separate but make common cause.
Whatever their disagreements, they share one belief: that they have to beat us, the liberals, the democrats, the men and women who believe in free societies and a free world. Theirs is a wartime mentality and we’re stuck with a peacetime one.
Neither Brexit nor Trump’s first victory, nor his attempted coup on January 6, nor the seizure of power in which he’s currently engaged in have shaken us out of our complacency.
Complacency manifests itself in two ways: first by wondering whether something we need to do to win is worth it. If we do X, there might be knock on consequences, in burnt political bridges, lower budgets for public services or higher taxes.
It might mean the Democratic Party had to have a primary and pick a candidate able to win. It might have meant capitalising on Michael Gove’s remark that Brexit Britain should model its relationship with the EU not on Norway or Canada, but on Albania. It might have meant reducing German dependence on Russian gas slowly, starting in 2014 instead of having to do so urgently in 2022. It might have meant starting to raise defence budgets in 2008, when Russia attacked Georgia, or in 2014, when it first attacked Ukraine instead of avoiding spending money that wouldn’t be needed if things returned to “normal”. It might have meant France not holding up artillery orders for Ukraine from outside the EU before the EU could build its own capacity. Or it could mean getting F16’s to Ukraine secretly and without delay, instead of the snail’s pace with which they were actually dispatched. I don’t mean to single any particular country out here: there’s plenty of blame here that a new “Cato” can parcel around.
All these are examples of a peacetime mentality. Avoiding pushing for victory now because it might lead to unpleasant consequences later. Thinking business as usual would continue when as usual has cease to exist. That was then. It’s not “then” any more. Hoping that Trump can somehow be dealt with as someone with a conception of US national interests — he doesn’t. Some Republicans around him and on Capitol Hill may have a transactional, America First view. It may eventually be possible do do business with them, but they’ve so far been marginalised in the administration.
Guess what, world history is full of self-interested individuals who get into power and impose disasters on the planet. Analysts need to read more history as well as economics, and economics-style political science. “Rational economic man” may be fine enough for the market place, but this is the battle, not trading.
The biggest mistake of all is refraining from winning because fighting might destroy the consensus we have. Too late. The consensus is gone. They’ve destroyed it. All we’ve left to do is to beat them and pick up the pieces afterwards.
The Summit
So as European leaders meet today here are ten things they need to do.
1. Make sure Zelensky is there. Show that Ukraine is one of the major nations of Europe and has a right to be at the top table.
2. Seize the over $150 billion of Russian assets in European banks. In international law this money belongs to Ukraine, and they can put it to good use in their defence industry.
3. All major countries should immediately increase defence spending to 3% if they haven’t already and make plans to raise it to 5% within the next three years. Don’t wait until after the German elections. Agree it with Merz and announce it now.
4. Increase nuclear weapons production. France and Britain have the weapons and technology, but can’t afford to increase it on their own so other large countries should chip in. Some of the effort should also go on sub-strategic weapons, which France has through air-launched cruise missiles.
Russia might still try and divide Western Europe from East here, so find a way to have give the Nordic-Baltic 8 and/or Poland the ability to take part in deterrence.
5. Sweden should send all its Gripens to Ukraine. It should divert the order Hungary has made to fill the gaps this creates, and in the meantime the UK, possibly with help from France, Spain and Italy, should cover Swedish airspace.
6. Norway should use the extra profits its oil fund has made from higher energy prices caused by the war to fund the war effort. Maximising current European 155mm artillery production would be a good use for some of this money. Spare capacity exists at a number of sites.
7. The UK should reopen an artillery shell production plant. That it hasn’t done so since 2022 is sheer carelessness.
8. Impose secondary sanctions on Russia. Do it as a coalition of the willing so the UK is included, and Hungary/Slovakia can’t block.
9. Establish a new EU/Occar procurement vehicle to centralise procurement of strategic enablers (air defence, lift, etc.).
10. Begin (if it hasn’t begun already) contingency planning for how European armies would fight Russia without the United States. This has implications for doctrine, use of air power versus land power, command and control and logistics, which will need to be worked out.
Dr. Walshe is founder of Article7 – intelligence for democrats, a research associate at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies and a research affiliate a the Central European University’s Democracy Institute. He co-founded Unhack Democracy and was a pre-Brexit foreign policy adviser for the British Conservative Party. He holds a PhD from the University of Manchester and was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.