By Thanos Kalamidas
The idea of a pan-European army has always hovered over the continent like a half-remembered dream, something glimpsed between wars and summits and then politely forgotten. It was there in the early blueprints of European integration when the project was still called the European Economic Community and optimism was fresh enough to be naïve. Europe, bruised by history, considered the radical thought that peace might be defended not by foreign guardians but by a shared shield of its own making. And then slowly, that thought was folded away like an embarrassing sketch from youth.
The official story is familiar, NATO worked, the Cold War demanded unity, duplication was wasteful, sovereignty was delicate. The unofficial story is blunter. Washington did not want a European army, the US weapon and airplane industry did not want a European army and Europe learned to live without wanting one either.
From Clinton’s polished reassurances to Bush’s blunt certainties to Obama’s velvet-gloved diplomacy the message barely changed, relax, America has this. Your skies are our skies. Your borders are our business. Build bridges, not battalions. Europeans were told that strategic dependence was not dependence at all but partnership, like sharing an umbrella where only one person owns the handle.
This was comforting, especially in countries where the memory of tanks in city streets still smelled of smoke. Why spend political capital arguing for a European army when the United States promised repeatedly and theatrically to be Europe’s bodyguard? Why provoke voters with talk of militarization when American aircraft carriers floated offshore like benevolent steel islands?
Yet comfort has a way of aging badly. What Europe quietly surrendered was not merely the ambition to command its own defence but the habit of thinking about it seriously. Strategy became something outsourced. Military industry became something to apologize for. The continent that once exported the very idea of modern warfare gradually trained itself to speak of weapons only in embarrassed footnotes.
Meanwhile American pressure, sometimes diplomatic, sometimes economic, sometimes merely implied, nudged European states toward American hardware, American standards, American dependency chains. Fighter jets were bought like loyalty tokens. Tanks were purchased like political insurance policies. European defence companies learned that excellence was not enough; acceptance mattered more.
And yet, excellence stubbornly persisted. The Swedish Gripen, designed to operate from short, frozen highways and be serviced by conscripts with gloves on remains a marvel of pragmatic engineering. It is cheaper, more flexible and arguably better suited to Europe’s geography than the glamorous American F-series jets that dominate airshows and defence brochures like celebrity actors playing soldiers. German armour shaped by a national obsession with mechanical precision and lessons written in steel has repeatedly outperformed expectations, including the venerable Abrams, whose reputation benefits from Hollywood as much as from metallurgy.
Europe did not lack competence. It lacked permission, psychological, political and strategic, to trust itself.
For decades European leaders learned to confuse gratitude with adulthood. They thanked America for protection and then quietly adjusted their budgets to prove they were not taking advantage quietly adjusted again to buy American equipment to prove they were loyal. It was a choreography of dependency dressed up as alliance.
The tragedy is not that Europe relied on the United States. Alliances are sensible; isolation is romantic nonsense. The tragedy is that reliance became identity. Europe stopped imagining itself as a strategic actor and settled into the role of a well-behaved neighborhood under someone else’s watchful porch light.
Now the lights flicker. Suddenly American elections feel like foreign weather systems capable of flooding European cities. A vote in Florida can rearrange defence doctrines in Warsaw. A campaign rally in Arizona can echo through ministries in Paris. Europe, wealthy, educated, technologically advanced finds itself anxiously interpreting the moods of another democracy to determine whether its own borders are still fashionable or financially worth to defend.
This is not partnership. This is adolescence with wrinkles. A true European army would not be a gesture of defiance toward the United States nor a theatrical break-up letter to NATO. It would be something far less dramatic and far more threatening to the status quo, a declaration of adulthood. It would say that Europe intends to remain allied but not infantilized; cooperative but not structurally helpless.
Critics will insist it is impossible, too many languages, too many flags, too many historical grudges. But Europe already coordinates currencies, laws, borders and air traffic across dozens of cultures. Apparently complexity is manageable when the subject is money or cheese standards. It becomes “impossible” only when the topic is power.
Perhaps the real fear is not inefficiency but responsibility. An independent European defence would force Europe to confront decisions that cannot be outsourced like, when to intervene, when to hesitate, when to fight, when to refuse. It would end the comfortable habit of moral commentary delivered from behind American armour.
And perhaps that is why the idea was discouraged so vigorously, so consistently, and for so long. Empires prefer allies who are grateful, not equal. Markets prefer customers to competitors. And superpowers, like gods, enjoy being indispensable. But indispensability is a fragile foundation for safety.
It is time for Europe to stop relying on the USA and remember how to stand on its own two feet. After all, Donald Trump has repeatedly shown Europe that America wants our money, our resources and compliance, not our partnership.
About the author:
Thanos Kalamidas, is a retired journalist and columnist for various print and digital news-agencies and magazines.
