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Europe is mulling a fallback plan to ensure that North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) survives in an event of the US pulling back as Germany had been a long-time proponent of go-it-alone approach, a report by the Wall Street Journal says.
European officials- Wall Street Journal has learned- are referring to the plan as "European NATO." They seek to get more Europeans in the higher ranks of command-and-control roles and supplement US military assets with their own. The plan still floats informally through dinner meetings, and is not intended to rival the current alliance. European officials are aiming to deterrence against Russia. An anxious Europe scrambles for solutions after US President Donald Trump has threatened to annex Greenland from Denmark, and called NATO a 'paper tiger'. This particular plan was conceived last year, as reported by Wall Street Journal. Political reversal in Berlin also fed this plan with Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Previous leadership in Germany had preferred to keep the US as the security guarantor, ignoring France's calls for greater European autonomy in the defence sector. Although the challenge seems colossal, Europe is considering an uptick in in taking the responsibilities. The US is mingled in almost every aspect of the NATO. Secretary-General Mark Rutte said recently that the alliance will be "more European-led," as quoted by the Wall Street Journal. "A burden shifting from the U.S. toward Europe is ongoing and it will continue...as part of U.S. defense and national security strategy," Finland's President, Alexander Stubb, one of the leaders involved in the plans, said, as quoted by The Wall Street Journal. "The most important thing is to understand that it's taking place and also to do it in a very managed and controllable way, instead of [the US] just quickly pulling out." Berlin hosts US nuclear weapons, and hence had stopped before questioning the US as a guarantor of European defence. But Merz, last year, deduced that Trump was prepared to abandon Ukraine, and was confused between the victim and aggressor in the war. Wall Street Journal further said that as per Merz, there were no longer clear values guiding US policy within NATO. This shift opened the Pandora's box within Europe, with the UK, France, Poland, the Nordic countries and even Canada supporting the contingency plan as a coalition-of-the-willing within NATO, as per Wall Street Journal. The plan is now tackling practical military questions, such as who would run NATO's air-and-missile defences, reinforcement corridors into Poland and the Baltic states, logistics networks and major regional exercises if US officers stepped aside, as reported by Wall Street Journal. (ANI)
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