Sometimes I hate being right. A year ago, my article in West Country Voices described some of my concerns about the possible election of Donald Trump as US president. With the new President in office, with Elon Musk in power and with the Handmaid’s Tale as the working agenda, I confess that my worst fears are being exceeded. I worry for my American friends and relations, but this piece is about some of the things that we should worry about on our own account.
The Munich Security Conference is one of those annual talking shops that seldom disturbs the headline writers. This year, it was noteworthy for the US Vice President telling the assembly that the main threat to Europe was “the threat from within,” – its own democratic values, which many of us had assumed that the US shared. King Trump’s subsequent assertion to Ukraine on the war with Russia that “You should have never started it”, came as a surprise to those of us who remember Russian forces rolling towards Kyiv in 2022. Elon Musk, as the power behind the throne has commented “The Cold War is over. NATO’s anachronistic.” It has been one of those weeks in which a whole decade’s worth of history happened, uprooting the security structures that most of us have known throughout our lives and that have guaranteed the peace that we have enjoyed.
Talk has inevitably turned to what happens if the US were to withdraw from NATO. Possibly more worrying is how we manage if the US remains within NATO. On present evidence, there is no certainty that it would honour Article 5, of which the key paragraph is reproduced below.
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence recognized by Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”
This is the basis on which US troops have been based in a number of European countries for decades, including not only Germany, but Turkey and Cyprus, more recently Poland and the Baltics and, by no means least, the UK (RAF Mildenhall, which is occupied and operated by the USAF despite the title).
Trojan Horse
Forward basing troops, equipment and facilities in Europe has been the basis not only for surveillance of, and response to any Russian activity, but also as a staging post to Africa and the Middle East. EUCOM (European Command of the US Army) and AFRICOM (Africa Command) both in Stuttgart, USAFE and AFAFRICA of the US Air Force (at Ramstein) and United States Naval Forces Europe and Africa in Naples provide purely national command facilities, as well as being NATO Commands. All these currently operate under the NATO Status of Forces Act, which defines the legal basis on which they and their hundreds of thousand of personnel operate and the legal immunities that they enjoy.
Quite simply, do we risk all these US assets becoming Trojan horses? If the shooting were to start, would they be with us, would they stand aside or would they follow a president, who seems to be Benedict Arnold to Russia’s Putin.
The US has a base under NATO auspices at Thule in Greenland for a Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS). How should Denmark and Greenland respond, if the whole island is being regarded as a potential property opportunity by their guests? In 1988, Spain simply negotiated the termination of the lease on Torrejòn air base when the political circumstances required it. Could that happen now?
Leaving aside the Trojan Horse argument, how does the intelligence community deal with a US president with a supreme disregard for protecting secrets? How do you protect your sources, be they American, allied or other, if classified material may end up in an unlocked bathroom at the Mar-a-Lago palace? And when will the apparatchiks of the DOGE start mining and scraping the data bases of US intelligence agencies?
NATO without the US
The prospect of a NATO without the US is little more appealing. Brexit was described as like trying to get the eggs back out of a cake and taking the US out of NATO would be equally challenging. Organisationally, the various headquarters that are provided by US structures could be replaced. Co-operative ventures like the international pilot training programme that runs at Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas could be set up elsewhere. Operational exercises like Red Flag could be set up in Europe or Canada, and so on. NATO has been likened to a computer with an Anglo-Saxon operating system and that would most likely simply keep on running since everyone is used to it.
As always, the real question is political.
If you were to reinvent an organisation with many of the characteristics of NATO, who would join and who would you want to be a member? With Hungary and Slovakia wavering towards Putin, would they join? How about Turkey? Would Canada wish to become an honorary European? Presumably Serbia would stand aside and what about Switzerland? How would we feel about offering Moldova or any of the republics in the Caucuses a guarantee if they were invaded?
Given the strategic nature of such an endeavour, how would you create an industrial strategy that delivered freedom of action? A real consequence to the US will be a weakening of its role as the arsenal of democracy, as nations feel the need to wean themselves off dependency on American military equipment.
Given the immediate issue of establishing a demarcation line along a 1,000 km frontier between Ukrainian and Russian troops, which nations could participate? Germany, Poland and Romania have their own historical baggage in Ukraine and so should probably be kept out of the front line: their role may be to provide support infrastructure, which will be extensive. Finding the manpower to police a cease fire line, with hundreds of thousands under arms on both sides and a no-man’s land littered with unexploded ordnance, will be a major challenge.
I can only say that, if I look back at this article in 12 months’ time, I sincerely hope that I will have been wrong.
“Whose side are the US troops stationed in Europe on?”, asks Eric Gates
