In an interview with ERR, former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves said European leaders have yet to grasp the fundamental shift in relations with the United States and the emergence of a confrontation. According to Ilves, the European Union needs a restructuring in order to finally build an independent defense capability that does not rely on the U.S.
We’ve seen what has unfolded around Greenland in recent weeks. Can we still realistically rely on the Americans who have been the main guarantors of NATO’s deterrence? What happens next?
I believe it should be clear to all of us just how much has been left undone on this side of the Atlantic. Europe’s problem for the past 35 years has been that we haven’t focused on our own defense.
If we look at Western European defense spending during the Cold War, it was roughly where we in Estonia are now — around 4 percent. We’ve been living under the illusion of a “peace dividend” — a term, by the way, coined by George H. W. Bush. (In the former U.S. president’s view, defense resources freed up by the end of the Cold War could be used in other areas, while the U.S. would continue to act as the guarantor of global security – ed.)
Now we find ourselves in a situation where our defense is underdeveloped and we’re heavily dependent on the U.S. And we can’t say that the U.S. did not try and prevent us from developing autonomous defense over the years. In fact, this was one of the major foreign policy battles between the U.S. and Europe back in 1998 when the European Union adopted what’s known as the Saint-Malo Declaration (The joint statement, adopted in Saint-Malo on December 4, 1998, laid the foundation for the EU’s Common Security and Defense Policy. It established that the EU must have the capability to use military force when NATO as a whole is unwilling or unable to intervene – ed.) for addressing security matters itself. That caused a great deal of friction. The Americans asked: how dare you?
Read more: ERR.EE
