Will the EU succeed in eliminating NATO?

МОСКВА, 14 июня 2021, Институт РУССТРАТ.

The Foundation for Investigative Journalism of the British edition of The Guardian published an alarming article of rather unexpected content. The authors were very concerned about the European military programs, which, for some reason suddenly, according to British journalists, do not strengthen international stability, but, on the contrary, undermine it.

In particular, it is a question about the European Defence Fund (EDF), established by the European Parliament already on April 18, 2019. By the way, it remains unclear why the British investigators started talking about this only now, after more than two years later. Its decisions were never secret, on the contrary, they were widely covered in the European media.

The EDF was created as a tool to support and consolidate funds to finance research programs in the military field of the EU countries. All the leading EU countries conduct military research. But they do it independently, which results in multiple duplication and increased inefficiency of spending.

For example, the annual budget of the American Office of Advanced Research Projects (DARPA) is only $3.2 billion, but thanks to the centralisation of research, American progress in the military-technical sphere is radically superior to the European one.

So, Brussels also decided to “adopt the partner experience” by establishing EDF. For the budget period 2021-2027, €13 billion (about $14.5 billion) were requested for the defence fund, but the parliamentarians approved only €8 billion.

British journalists also described the recently invented European Peace Mechanism (EPF) with a budget of €5 billion – designed to simplify European arms exports, to provide them to countries outside the EU and to train their armed forces – no less scarily. Formally – only in the European zone of influence in Africa. In order to do this directly, and not as before – only through the African Union. But in fact, the European Peace Mechanism extends to the whole world.

British investigators saw this as an attempt to destabilise international security and increase the risk of EU involvement in foreign military conflicts. Like saying, how does this fit in with Brussels’ statements of commitment to the mission to promote peace? But on closer inspection, it is clear that The Guardian journalists are frankly  deceitful. They are afraid of something completely different.

The goal of the European integration process is not to draw a circle of golden stars on a blue flag, but to transform the community of individual independent European states into a new supranational centralised state entity, with unified management and financing mechanisms. What automatically implies the emergence of a pan-European army, as well as other mechanisms of “defence” purposes. From research ones to production and export ones.

There is nothing special in this. If, of course, not to look at what is happening from the position of unconditional preservation of the inviolability of American geopolitical and military hegemony. After all, if the European Union will create its own fully-fledged army, it will be quietly able to use it to ensure its own security. So why would it need then to preserve NATO?

And if to “move” the Alliance, then the American “leading and guiding” role of the United States in Europe will be automatically lost, without which it becomes unclear why the EU should continue to “pay” the United States in the matter of “for protection”. Putting aside the subtleties, we can say that two mutually excluding each other processes are currently going on in parallel in Europe.

On the one hand, the European integration process, launched back in the 1970s, continues to work, moving towards the creation of something like the “United States of Europe” with all the relevant attributes of geopolitical subjectivity.

At its end, Europe should turn into an entity comparable to the United States in terms of economic power, technological development and international political weight.

On the other hand, the United States itself, for the sake of its own long-term survival, began to try to re-colonise Europe in the political and economic sense. And in this case, European military and geopolitical subjectivity is like a stick in the wheel.

And since Britain now continues to serve, first of all, American interests, then its leading media give appropriate assessments of what is happening. Except if earlier British concern about threats to international peace extended exclusively to “totalitarian” states like China, Iran, Russia or North Korea, now the British are trying to bring the European Union into the same mixing pot too.

Институт международных политических и экономических стратегий Русстрат

(@russtrat)