Europe can: ( Archived) (11)

France is realizing that political will is hollow if it isn’t underpinned by a strong economy. The government’s new Defense White Book, published this week, confirms this.

While hoping for an economic turnaround within the next five years, France is curtailing its military ambitions. It will still be able to act on its own, as it did in the recent military operation in Mali. But interventions will be on a much smaller scale.

What is more, France’s scaling down of its military reach has immense strategic implications for Europe, both in the continent’s immediate neighborhood and further afield.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, a former diplomat who presided over the commission that drew up the French white paper, summed up his country’s ambitions and limitations.

“France’s allies did not expect it to be able to do everything everywhere,” he said. “The defense world only gradually became aware of the magnitude of choices made necessary by financial constraints.”

Along with Britain, France is one of only two powers in Europe that can act strategically. Both have the military capacity to do so. And, in the past, both have been able to match their political will with economic clout.

Now, with Europe’s two major military powers in serious economic difficulties, Camille Grand, a leading French security expert, said the White Book showed that France was struggling to preserve “a reasonable level of ambition.”

Yet France is not ready to give up its status as a major military player. (It is, after all, a nuclear power.) Indeed, the white paper sets limitations on the projection of French power, rather than proposing a whole-scale retreat.

France’s defense spending for 2014 will be kept at €31.4 billion. That is equivalent to 1.5 percent of GDP, which is below the 2 percent demanded by NATO and well below the 2.5 percent spent during the ebbing years of the Cold War. The overall defense budget for period between 2014 and 2019 is set at €179.2 billion.

Expenditure will be diverted to intelligence, midair refueling, and heavy airlift equipment—the three capabilities that were lacking during the Mali mission. The defense ministry has already ordered twelve drones.

To cut costs, the 218,000-strong armed forces will be reduced by 24,000. The civilian sector will be reduced by 10,000 from its current 66,700.

More revealing, the number of soldiers that can be rapidly deployed will be halved to 15,000. That will sorely affect France’s military reach and geopolitical priorities.

There are few European countries that can step in.

Germany is the only one that has enough economic might. But Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government is not prepared to translate that economic power into a military leadership that could shape Europe’s defense and security ambitions.

It’s not just because Germany is unwilling to define Europe’s strategic interests. It is also because Germany—like many other European countries—does not feel existentially threatened. Berlin shared Paris’s concerns over the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Mali, but did not feel any need for military action. It was France that sent in the troops in January.

Now, the Europeans should be deeply worried by France’s recent defense reductions.

Indeed, the French (and British) cuts should be the catalyst for fundamental change in Europe’s attitudes toward defense. This is surely the time for Europeans to ask how they are going to protect their interests if they do not have adequate military and security resources to do so.

But Europe as a whole is not thinking along those lines. The record so far on pooling and sharing scarce military resources is miserable. Somehow, there is a misguided belief that the Americans will always be there to pick up the pieces.

Most European governments have not internalized the fact that the United States is disengaging from Europe.

Who is Europe going to defend it self from?

Russians are now the good guys, Chinese are now just businessmen, Koreans just make loud noises and the muslims are already inside europe taking over soon

Good points.

Meanwhile, although France and the UK, the EU's most significant military powers, made the most noise about a military intervention in Libya in 2011, they were unable to take action without the US' help.

More broadly, Washington has said it will intensify its role in the Asia-Pacific region, leaving the EU to do more in its own neighbourhood.

Paris and Berlin say their paper should form the basis of discussions at an informal foreign ministers' meeting in September. EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton is also due to produce an interim paper on defence before the September meeting, to be followed later in autumn by a fuller report.

The EU commission has also chipped with ideas on making defence spending more efficient and the importance of implementing defence-related legislation.

We are sending all our Muslims to Iceland, to drive your buses

During World War II, Iceland joined Denmark in asserting neutrality. After the German occupation of Denmark on 9 April 1940, the Althing replaced the King with a regent and declared that the Icelandic government should assume the control of foreign affairs and other matters previously handled by Denmark. A month later, British armed forces invaded and occupied the country, violating Icelandic neutrality. In 1941, the occupation was taken over by the United States, so that Britain could use its troops elsewhere, an arrangement reluctantly agreed to by the Icelandic authorities.

All the Danes did was sell us wormy meal.

When the Brits came it was a boom for the economy, all of the sudden there was plenty of jobs and flow of money.
Then they went broke.
The Americans had tons of money but the poor sods were fenced in, not allowed outside the base.

Peace in East Asia????