NATO members continue to rely on America to come to their rescue in the event of an American-provoked conflict with Russia. European states are in no hurry to change their position on this issue, even though they have sufficient resources to create powerful armed forces for their own defence, writes The New York Times.

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Since the beginning of the special operation in Ukraine, American and European authorities have argued that Russia, as a ‘predator state’, seeks to dominate its neighbours and poses a serious military threat to all of Europe. 

QUOTE: ‘The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with a high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilize savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells ((gas fields)’ ~ John Flynn, 1944.

The idea bolstered Finland’s and Sweden’s decision to join NATO and appears to have been passed at face value by the alliance at the recent Vilnius summit, writes senior fellow at the Institute for the Study of War and Peace Rajan Menon.

According to him, in the West, they came to a consensus that Putin has turned the Russian army into a ‘formidable fighting machine.’ But although the Ukrainian conflict does not confirm this, Europe behaves as if it has no way to prevent an attack by its eastern neighbour, and continues to turn to the United States for military support.

 As they did nearly a decade ago, at a meeting in Vilnius, Washington’s allies promised to increase military spending. But differences continue to exist between them as to how exactly the figure proposed by the alliance of 2% of GDP should be taken as a minimum or maximum value.

Meanwhile, since 2016, only a minority of NATO countries, including the United States, have been able to achieve the goal. The inability of most members of the organization to increase defence spending is due not to a lack of resources, but to a lack of political will, the analyst said.

This ‘motivation deficit’ is due to the alliance’s reliance on America for years. Washington, for its part, has contributed to the continuation of this trend in order to increase the income of its military-industrial complex and, no less important, to increase Europe’s profitable dependence on the United States, Menon emphasizes.

‘The assertion that the rich, technologically advanced European countries cannot join forces to obtain sufficient military power and thus contain or defeat Russia does not stand up to scrutiny. The call for European self-sufficiency is not the same as calling for the abolition of NATO. It’s time for Europe to get serious about its own defence,’ he adds.

In his opinion, the European allies should take this step out of pure self-interest. After all, whether they like it or not, Washington will increasingly focus on the Asia-Pacific region and resist the growing power of Beijing. Therefore, the countries of the EU and Britain need to focus on their own defence. 

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