Nato chief: EU must spend more on military

Nato chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen has urged EU countries to spend more on defence despite the economic crisis or risk losing US solidarity. He said in a foreword to the alliance's report on 2012, out on Thursday (31 January), that: "If current defence spending trends were to continue, that would limit the practical ability of Nato's European nations to work together with their North American allies. But it would also risk weakening the political support for our alliance in the United States." He added Nato is still "the most important military power in the world." But he warned: "The security challenges of the 21st century - terrorism, proliferation, piracy, cyber warfare, unstable states - will not go away as we focus on fixing our economies."

He also said "the rise of emerging powers could create a growing gap between their capacity to act and exert influence on the international stage and our ability to do so." 

The Nato report says the US accounted for 72 percent of Nato countries' defence spending in 2012 compared to 68 percent in 2007. France, Germany, Italy and the UK made up the bulk of the rest, but the French contribution fell steeply. "This has the potential to undermine alliance solidarity and puts at risk the ability of the European allies to act without the involvement of the United States," the report notes. 

It adds that Nato spending as a proportion of world military expenditure fell to 60 percent in 2011 from 69 percent in 2003 and is to hit 56 percent in 2014.

The angst over EU defence capabilities is not new. Former US defence chief Robert Gates in a speech in Brussels in 2011 also voiced alarm. "The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the US Congress - and in the American body politic writ large - to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defence," he said at the time.

Gates and Fogh Rasmussen's anxiety is not confined to Nato. Speaking in Brussels also on Thursday on the margins of an EU foreign ministers' meeting, Poland's Radek Sikorski said the Union needs a real defence force of its own. "I think the Mali crisis shows this is necessary because the next crisis could unfold even more quickly and we need to be able to react instantly," he told press. "Let's recall that events in Mali unfolded very fast. The terrorists crossed the line of contact and France reacted from one day to the next. But we know that in the EU, as in the Vatican, the wheels of state turn very slowly," he added.

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Mali shows holes in EU defence

Speaking to press on Saturday (2 February) at an annual conference on trans-Atlantic security in Munich, Germany, he noted that, as in the Libya conflict in 2011, France could not have carried out its bombing raids without US help."European allies still need strong support from the United States in their endeavours to carry out such an operation ... The Mali operation once again points to the need for increased European efforts to fill the gaps when it comes to essential military capabilities such as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance," he said.

"We saw that in Libya and in Mali the US has had to come and provide Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance assets, they have had to provide air-to-air refuelling tankers for jets," he noted. "These are just two capabilities where we have huge European shortfalls. The Europeans must invest to fill the gaps," he added.(...)"Security challenges won't wait while we fix our finances. And more cuts now will lead to greater insecurity in the future, at a cost we simply can't afford," he said.

For his part, US vice president Joe Biden told Munich that the US' new emphasis on Asia does not mean it will forget its World-War-II-and-Cold-War-era ally. "Europe is the cornerstone of our engagement with the world ... This engagement [with Asian countries] does not come at Europe's expense," he said. He noted that the fight against jihadists in north Africa "is fundamentally in America's interest." (...)
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