A few days ago, US President Donald Trump announced he would be withdrawing 5 000 soldiers from Germany and suspending the 2024 agreement, struck between then-Chancellor Olaf Scholz and then-President Joe Biden, to station American intermediate-range missiles in Germany. It’s not yet certain whether the troops will return to the US or be redeployed elsewhere in Europe, or whether the planned stationing of those weapons, in particular the Tomahawk cruise missiles, will genuinely be abandoned. As so often with Trump’s erratic decision-making, key questions around what this will mean in practice and how it will be implemented remain unanswered.
What’s beyond doubt is that Trump’s announcements have once again given rise to uncertainty within the transatlantic alliance. For Europe, it’s another wakeup call, a reminder that it needs to have more control over its own fate and greater economic and military independence. We already have the necessary capabilities to make this happen, and the political will is now growing. If Europe can thus succeed in combining sovereignty, responsibility and collaboration, it could play an important part in shaping a dependable international order.
Risking a new nuclear arms race
The short-term consequences of Trump’s announcement for European security are likely to be fairly modest, given that NATO will still have superior air power to Russia. The latter may have one of Europe’s largest air forces, but European NATO allies alone have almost twice as many military jets at their disposal. In addition, Russian forces are significantly constrained by the war in Ukraine and thus not geared up for all-out war with Europe.
It is, in any case, questionable whether these intermediate-range missiles would actually make Europe safer. The dangers associated with hosting them cannot be entirely ignored. Capable of being deployed at very short notice, they would undermine the primacy of national political leaders, i.e. of democratically legitimised civilian decision-makers, and deliver new technological capabilities. They would significantly increase the risk of an unintentional military escalation, not least because they would be under the sole control of decision-makers in the US.
It was also a mistake not to ensure from the outset that the stationing of intermediate-range missiles would form part of an overarching NATO strategy, one agreed at a political level, and that the financial burden would be shared. Instead, the plan was devised solely via bilateral discussions between Germany and the US. Incorporating the stationing of such missiles into existing alliance structures would have made it much harder for Trump to scrap the agreement at short notice in a fit of pique. In addition, no serious attempt was made to link the move to arms control initiatives in the way the NATO Double-Track Decision did. It would, for instance, have been possible to offer Russia a deal in which the US would ditch its plan to station intermediate-range missiles in Germany if Russia agreed to withdraw its Iskander-M missile systems from Belarus and Kaliningrad.
With attention focusing more and more on rearmament alone, our strategic room for manoeuvre has become increasingly limited.
That doesn’t, of course, mean we don’t need to take the Russian threat seriously. However, I remain convinced that an intelligent foreign and security policy strategy requires multiple facets: a credible defence capability, a defence-focused military procurement strategy and a diplomatic strategy that involves active disarmament and arms control initiatives. It’s important for Europe to ensure it is not left out in the cold, especially against a backdrop of direct discussions between Trump and Putin on superpower relations and the stability of their strategic nuclear weapons stocks.
Nuclear weapons within Europe have a direct impact on our security, which is why we should and must address these issues ourselves. As the debate in Germany and Europe has narrowed, with attention focusing more and more on rearmament alone, our strategic room for manoeuvre has become increasingly limited — be it in terms of arms control or negotiations on an end to the war in Ukraine. We got a particularly striking illustration of where this approach leads last August, when European leaders were seen seated like a bunch of schoolchildren in front of the US president’s Oval Office desk.
When it comes to security policy challenges, Europe shouldn’t let itself be pushed into a position in which it’s only ever reacting. We can’t assume that the US will take Europe’s security interests into account. In today’s multipolar world, it’s imperative that the EU articulates and defends its own interests much more clearly and confidently than it has to date and that it makes conscious efforts to forge new partnerships. First and foremost, that means closer cooperation with liberal democracies such as Canada, Japan and Australia. At the same time, Europe should also devote more attention to Global South countries, many of whom have similarly little interest in a world defined by spheres of influence and military superpower politics. That’s why relations with the Global South offer particular opportunities for new forms of cooperation — for instance, in the field of multilateral arms control and non-proliferation agreements.
An important occasion in the latter context is the ongoing review conference for the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which runs until 22 May. At the two previous conferences, which took place in 2015 and 2022, respectively, no substantive final documents could be agreed upon. At a time of rising global tensions, a joint final document would certainly be an important political signal. On the other hand, we have to be realistic in our expectations; the last conference to succeed in agreeing on a final document was 2010, and that came shortly after Obama’s Prague speech on a nuclear-free world.
Today’s world looks very different. With the New START treaty expiring in February of this year, there are, for the first time since 1972, now no legally binding and verifiable constraints on US and Russian nuclear arsenals. At the same time, we are increasingly having to deal with new nuclear actors and a real danger of proliferation, with new technological advances and the combining of conventional and nuclear deterrent systems making the situation even more difficult. Illusory notions of nuclear war as a viable and winnable option are increasingly back in vogue, especially among the global superpowers. The debate in Germany and elsewhere about opting in to and having a say in the UK’s or France’s nuclear deterrent has not exactly increased our credibility on the international stage.
The danger of nuclear war is now greater than ever.
China, too, is massively expanding its nuclear arsenal. The US is therefore pushing for the Chinese to be included in any future multilateral arms control treaties. Beijing, though, maintains that its nuclear arsenal remains significantly smaller than those of the US and Russia. The US recently accused China of having carried out secret nuclear weapons tests in 2020 and, last October, announced that it intended to restart its nuclear weapons testing programme, which has been paused since 1992. Russia responded in kind, declaring that it would begin preparations for tests of its own.
All this shows that the danger of nuclear war is now greater than ever. Intensifying superpower rivalry, the development of new types of weapons systems and the ongoing modernisation and diversification of nuclear arsenals are combining to create a new arms race that will cost participating states billions. That’s money that will come at the expense of investment in other areas — such as fighting climate change, boosting the economy or improving social justice.
As Europeans, we might well view all this as highly regrettable. What matters more, though, is that we take an active stand against this highly dangerous shift towards confrontation — and do everything we can to prevent those who think in terms of nuclear capabilities and spheres of influence from setting the agenda once again. Europe must act decisively to combat the risk of a new nuclear arms race, and nuclear weapons tests must be clearly and unequivocally condemned — no matter who conducts them. At various times in the past, Europeans have, by intelligently combining defensive capabilities and diplomacy, helped to drive moves towards détente, multilateral arms control and non-proliferation. Such a strategy is now urgently needed once more — and perhaps more so than ever before.
