Greenland, NATO and the ghost of Henry Kissinger

The possibility of American use of force to acquire Greenland has been openly contemplated by President Donald Trump and is being taken seriously in Europe. “If the sovereignty of a European ally were affected, the cascading consequences would be unprecedented,” says French President Emanuel Macron. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen says it would mean the end of NATO alliance. Former Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell says it would "incinerate" NATO.

In his latest column, Financial Times Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator Gideon Rachman considers the full political and economic implications. He notes that NATO's demise would generate an urgent need for European NATO members to build a successor body:

The risks for European countries of a divorce from the US would clearly be very high. They would need to move fast to establish a new security pact to replace Nato. The countries that signed a joint letter supporting Denmark — Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Spain — could form the basis of that alliance, along with the Nordics. The EU and the UK combined have the wealth and population numbers to deter Russia. But it would cost a lot of money and might require painful steps — like the establishment of compulsory military service.

Rachman is absolutely right about Europe's collective capacity: compared to Russia, the EU has four times as many citizens and roughly ten times the GDP. It also has a substantial military-industrial base that produces world-leading weaponry. Arguably, Europe would not even have to increase its defence spending in a post-American world. As Adam Tooze has argued, the problem is not the amount of money European nations spend on defence but the disastrously inefficient ways they spend it.

But bringing together Europe's demographic, economic and industrial strengths in this way is largely an exercise in arithmetic. In the political sense, these countries are not sufficiently united to be counted together. And this is why an American break with NATO would be so significant - not because it would stretch Europe's economic and military capacities but because it would raise political dilemmas that Europe has been able to avoid as a consequence of American leadership.

The famous question attributed to Henry Kissinger - "If I want to talk to Europe, who do I call?" - has never had to be addressed because deep down, everyone knows the answer is “Washington, DC”. But if that is no longer to be the answer to Kissinger's question, then what is? Is it Berlin? Paris? London? Warsaw?

It can't be any of those places because choosing one would risk reviving the exact inter-European rivalry that the post-war project of strategic and economic integration was designed to subsume. “The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany”, said the 1950 Schuman Declaration, which led to the creation of what today we call the European Union. So why would either Berlin or Paris now agree to the other becoming Europe's leader? And why would any European nation submit to French or German leadership of the continent, especially when both countries face the imminent prospect of populist right-wing governments? Another massively complicating factor is that German leadership of Europe would require a German nuclear weapon.

So, if Europe is indeed entering a post-American era, the only plausible answer to Kissinger's question is “Brussels”. Europe will have to pool its strategic sovereignty in the same way it has pooled its economic sovereignty, creating a single European foreign policy underpinned by a unified military with a European nuclear deterrent. Europe would need to become a single great power.

Yet “Brussels”, as a symbol of European unity, now appears too tarnished to carry such a weight. The post-World War II European integration project has been an overwhelming success, but for complex reasons it is now discredited such that it offers no viable pathway towards pooled strategic sovereignty. European integration, always an elite-driven project, now has such fragile democratic foundations that it can't hope to support an initiative that would surpass the creation of the eurozone in ambition.

The irony is that perhaps only one force could confer popular legitimacy upon such a project: an armed attack by Russia, the very thing that the elevation of Europe to unified great-power status would be designed to prevent.