Turning to our illustrious speaker, it gives me great pleasure today to introduce Dr. Hugo Meyer,
who is the CNRS research fellow at the Centre for International Studies at Cele's Bu in Paris.
He is also the founding director of the European Initiative for Security Studies, which those who haven't come across it.
It's a multidisciplinary network of scholars that share the goal of consolidating security studies in Europe.
It's a really great initiative and I encourage you to check it out. He's also the senior research fellow at the Centre for Security,
Diplomacy and Strategy in Brussels and an honorary researcher at the Centre for War and Diplomacy at Lancaster University.
His research interests lie at the intersection of foreign policy analysis and security studies.
He's currently working on several research projects on first,
the reconfiguration of American hegemony through the prism of US led regional alliance
systems in Europe and the Asia-Pacific since the end of the Second World War.
Second, national defence and security policies in Europe.
And third European and foreign and European foreign and security policies in the face of a rising China in the post-Cold War period.
He is the author of three Oxford University Press books. It's quite an achievement.
First in 2016, Trading with the enemy, the making of US export control policy towards the PRC.
Second, in 2018, the Handbook of European Defence Forces and Armed Forces,
which was co-edited with Moscow with the third, which is coming out this year.
I believe in the next couple of months we have awakening to China's rise.
European foreign and security policies towards the PRC.
He has also published in top journals such as International Security, the Journal of Strategic Studies,
Cooperation and Conflict Survival, the European Journal of International Security, and the Journal of Cold War Studies.
And [INAUDIBLE] be speaking Yesterday Today articles, which was co-authored with Stephen Brooks.
We're pleased to see us joined us on the line from Dartmouth in international security, which is illusions of autonomy,
why Europe cannot provide for its security if the United States pulls back over to you.
Thank you for joining us. OK, thanks, will, and thanks a lot for the invitation.
It's really a great pleasure to be here. I really want to thank the Centre for the invitation.
I'm very happy to have the opportunity to present this article in full, just in front of such a distinguished audience.
So let me share my PowerPoint. There you go.
OK. Can you see it? Yeah.
Awesome. OK.
So the article I'm presenting today is titled Illusions of Autonomy, Why Europe cannot provide for its security if the United States pulls back.
This article I co-authored with Steve Bruce, who is in the audience with us and I'm sure Steve might jump in during the Q&A.
We've worked on this article for more than two years or actually two years and a half, so it's been a lot of work.
But in the meantime, we also had fun. We had coffees and writing sessions in fancy Parisian cafes.
We went to Jen's concerts, so it was a lot of work, but it was also a lot of fun.
And actually, the article was published in 2021 in International Security as lead article of the Spring Issue.
And we had before that published an article in Survival, which focussed on the small, discreet aspect of the larger argument.
And that was in the forum in which we critically assess, together with other authors,
very bosun's view on European defence, and I'm sure we'll get back to that.
But so what is the premise of this article in international security?
The premise is that Europe's security landscape has changed dramatically in the past decade because of three main reasons.
First of all, you've seen growing concerns vis a vis Russian assertiveness today.
Russia is force strong militarily than it was 10 years ago, and we've seen in 2014,
with the crisis on Crimea and Ukraine and with the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, the territorial territorial revisionism is back on the continent.
Secondly, you're also seeing growing concerns amongst Europeans over the credibility of U.S. commitments to the continent's
subsequent U.S. administration have recurrently criticised Europeans for not doing enough on defence.
The issue of burden sharing and also the US pivot to Asia raised concerns amongst
Europeans over the long term credibility and robustness of the transatlantic alliance.
And of course, these concerns have been further fuelled under the Trump administration, and it is true that under the Biden administration,
there have been attempts at sort of restoring and reinvesting in U.S. alliance globally and in Europe.
But it's also true that the polarisation of U.S. domestic politics means that these shifts in priority run deeper than a single administration.
And the third trends which is linked to this previous two is that Europeans have called in recent years ever more to for greater strategic autonomy.
You've seen that in 2016 with the EU global strategy and then with subsequent initiatives like PESCO, the European Defence Fund.
This really shows that more than ever, Europeans want to pursue strategic autonomy.
And in light of these three trends, the central question that we raised in the article is could Europeans develop an
autonomous defence capacity if there were a complete US withdrawal from Europe?
This is really our overarching question, and I'll get back to why we focus specifically on the complete U.S. withdrawal in a minute.
The central finding of the article is the following we conclude that any European
efforts to achieve strategic autonomy will be hampered by two major constraints.
The first one is what we call strategic cacophony,
namely profound continent wide divergences across all the domains of national defence policies, most notably threat perception.
And the second one is severe defence capacity shortfalls that will be hard to close because of forced into war themselves.
Of course, the might, which is open to question. Thank you.
Sorry, but I couldn't hear anything. Other words.
So these two constraints, strategic cacophony and severe defence capacity shortfalls mutually reinforce one another.
And together, they impose a rigid limits on the capacity of Europeans to achieve strategic autonomy anytime soon.
I can get back to the definition of strategic autonomy we used in the article.
If somebody is interested in the audience later and so to substantiate this argument, what I'm going to talk about today is, first of all,
the role of Europe in the grand strategy debate in the US and essentially the
debate over whether the US should remain engaged in Europe or should pull out.
Secondly, address these two fundamental constraints to European strategic autonomy again, strategic cacophony and defence capacity shortfalls.
Thirdly, will critically assess the counter argument,
which could be put forward that by restraints colours that actually has been put forward by some scholars and will critically evaluate this arguments.
And I will conclude by briefly discussing what can Europeans do about all that?
OK, so let's look at the evolving US presence in Europe and the role of Europe in the grand strategy debate.
As I'm sure you're all aware, ever since the founding of the US, up until World War Two,
detachments from European security affairs has been eight or was eight, if not the defining feature of U.S. security policies.
It's really was Woolworth two and the early Cold War that you see a major turning point.
The US decides to engage and be present on the European continent,
mostly in order to keep the Soviet Union out and to keep Germany down with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
The US chose to continue and sustain this relationship, instrumenting Nieto, however,
because of the collapse of the Soviet Union, it also cuts its presence in Europe drastically.
And here we go the data from the US Department of Defence and you can see that between 1990 and 2019,
the drastic reduction had been from 350000 troops to 65000 troops today.
So it's a massive decrease. However, U.S. scholars, those in the restraint camp essentially who argue that even this presence no longer
serves U.S. interests and the U.S. should completely withdraw from the continent.
And so one of the two main sides in the grand strategy debate in the US is the restraint camp.
And again, they argue for withdrawal pulled back of the U.S. from the European continent.
On the other side of the spectrum, you have the deep, those advocating us deep engagement,
and they argued that there are security and non-security benefits for us to continue its security presence in Europe.
And this argument has been most fully and in the most sophisticated manner put forward in the book America Abroad,
which was co-authored by Steve Books and together with William Wolfers.
Interestingly, however, the perspective of the restrained scholars is not uniform at all when it comes to different regions.
So, for instance, on the Middle East, some argue for a complete US withdrawal from the region.
Other think that it would be best to have a limited onshore military presence or to reduce U.S. presence, but maintain a limited onshore presence.
And if you look at the Asia-Pacific, the positions in the restrained camp diverge even more so for some,
the US should quickly withdraw and completely. For others, there should be a gradual withdrawal.
But the U.S. maintains some form of extended nuclear deterrence in the Asia-Pacific.
And yet others, like Mearsheimer and Walt, think that the U.S. should continue its ALANG commitments and its U.S. presence across the region,
and therefore here converge with the deep engagement folks.
And therefore you really see that it's Europe, which today is the fulcrum of the grand strategy debate.
All the proponents of deep engagement think that the US should state and all the advocates of restraint think that the US should leave.
But why exactly, you may ask, do the restraint scholars think that the U.S. should leave?
So some of the biggest name in the camp of history, which includes almost 50 or even more scholars in the US?
So Stephen Walt. John Mearsheimer and variables in here.
In the pictures, they argue that European states are big enough and rich enough to autonomously address the military threat from Russia,
which in their view, is the main security problem in Europe today.
And they base this arguments largely on the three main indicators which is combined GDP of these European states,
their population and their defence spending. And therefore, the Stephen Walt, for instance,
argues the notion that the European Union lacks the wherewithal to defend itself against Russia is risible and very.
Posen similarly argues that a coalition of any two of the principal western European powers Germany, France and Britain could easily balance Russia.
So this is really the central argument of the restrained camp.
And I might add, as I mentioned before, was will that we'll have a large conversation on these issues.
Together with very poor was in Steve Walt and John Russia and others at a
roundtable at the Conference of the International Studies Association in March.
But so this is also why, in the article, we focus on a specific scenario which is a complete US withdrawal from Europe.
And there are two main reason for focussing on this specific scenario.
The first one is that this is exactly the scenario favoured by the restraints scholars.
And so we start from their policy proposal and this allow us to probe their assumption,
namely that the Europe can quickly and easily create an effective deterrent to Russia if the
US pulls back and thereby the goal is also hopefully to advance a grand strategy debate.
And the second reason is that the complete U.S. withdrawal from Europe would be a shock and therefore
would be the strongest possible incentive that could drive Europeans to pursue strategic autonomy.
In other words, the best way to assess their capacity to develop an autonomous defence and in fact,
if even the major shock of the U.S. complete withdrawal is unlikely to move Europeans away from their strategic cacophony and capability shortfalls.
Well, partial U.S. withdrawal, which of course is more likely scenario, is even less likely to push them in that direction.
OK, so what does this look like in practise? Well, in practise, this means that the US withdraws all of its forces and military units from Europe.
It pulls out all its personnel, which is currently assigned to the NATO command structure.
It pulls out all the conventional forces across the continent, permanent and rotational.
And it also pulls out all its European based nuclear weapons.
So it's a complete withdrawal of the US from the continent. And you may say, well, this is pretty unlikely.
Yes. But so of course, such scenario is unlikely in the short term,
but it's hardly implausible in the longer term because of both domestic and international dynamics.
So if you look at the dynamics of the international structural level in the international system,
you see that the rise of China and the growing strategic centrality of the Asia-Pacific
region has led already the US to do that and the importance of Europe in its grand strategy.
And this is likely to continue.
All the more China becomes more powerful and that Asia becomes more central to international politics and at the domestic level,
there are a couple of points. Well, first of all, the U.S., as I mentioned, has pursued an isolationist grand strategy for most of its history.
And so leaving Europe would simply be a return to its traditional foreign policy baseline vis-a-vis the region and secondly, shrunk.
In fact, all it tapped in did not create the political momentum for curtailing U.S. presence in the region.
There are polls that's already in the early 2010s showed that there was a majority of Americans in favour of an American withdrawal from Europe.
And you also already had Republicans and Democrats in Congress pushing and advocating for such withdrawal.
And the last point here is keep in mind that you could have an active decision to fully withdraw from the continent.
But you also have the drifting away scenario, which is that the US and Europe would drift gradually further apart over years and years,
and the needle formally still exists, but in fact, this completely hollowed out of any substance.
So this also scenario. All right. So this is the initial scenario.
Our argument is that you have these two overarching constraints strategic cacophony and capability shortfalls.
Let's look at the first one. Strategic cacophony, again,
really refers to profound continent wide divergences in the threat assessments of European states and therefore in their strategic priorities.
But a key piece of background to keep in mind here, and that is really important is that the threat environments in Europe has significantly,
significantly diversified since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So look at the Cold War during the Cold War, you had one overarching common threat to all Europeans, and that was the Soviet Union.
The fear was a land invasion and the risk of escalation to nuclear war.
Of course, there were some differences between Europeans, but they were largely muted by the looming common.
Overarching Soviet threats was the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We enter in an area which basically lost to throw the 1990s up until the late 2000 2000s,
and that's an area of strategic exception in the sense that there's no major conventional security threats on the continent.
And that's pretty rare in European history. And in the meantime,
you have a diversification of the threat environment in the sense that the threat assessment of
governments naturally shift away from conventional states threats to non-conventional threats.
Precisely because in this era of strategic exception, you don't have a major conventional threat on the continent.
And so they focus even more on terrorism instability in the Mediterranean, in the Balkans,
migration, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, failed states.
And so as these threats assessments diverge, you have more and more discrepancy between the national threat assessments.
And in fact, Russia's resurgence in the 2010s further compounds this state of affairs after the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
So you have some states who become more and more concerned by Russia and this further, but others don't actually.
And so this further deepens the disagreements amongst Europeans about how to prioritise between Russia and other security challenges.
And this is exactly what we've tried to do in the article is really to provide the most
systematic coding of the national threat perception across 29 European countries to date.
To do so, we adopted the nested approach.
First of all, we coded the threat evaluations by 18 experts in a comprehensive examination of European defence policies,
namely the book, which I co-edited with Michael Weiss that was the Handbook of European Defence Policies on Forces.
That's a huge book of 950 pages, 60 chapters, more than 50 authors, and we're building upon that.
We coded threat evaluations of these 18 experts. And of course, we double checked.
It's not. The second step was to gather and analyse all the available national government reports across all of Europe on regional threats,
environments and prioritisation amongst threats. So national security strategies, intelligent threat assessments, et cetera.
For most countries in Europe, these two steps were sufficient to have a robust and reliable coding.
For some, it was slightly more ambiguous, and so we proceeded to a third step,
which was to interview senior foreign and defence policy officials in order to gain further clarity in their national threat assessment.
And here is the results, essentially, we we all the national threat perceptions across Europe along five categories,
and these five categories differ in terms of the threat level, which is given to Russia as compared to other threats.
So the first one is those countries for whom Russia is unimportant or not a threat,
and they focus on different security challenges like instability in the Mediterranean or terrorism.
The second category is Russia is perceived as a threat,
but still other threats are more significant in the Mediterranean again or terrorism, for instance.
For some countries Russian, all the threats had roughly equal significance.
The first category is Russia is the highest threat, but still one is concerned by other security challenges nevertheless.
And then you have the extreme of the spectrum, which is those countries for whom Russia is the dominant threat by far.
And other challenges have little, if any, importance.
So let's see a little bit more strategic cacophony for these countries that you see highlighted mostly in southern Europe and south eastern Europe,
but also elsewhere. Like in Ireland, Russia is unimportant and or it's not the threats for these countries.
The central concern is really regional instability in the Middle East,
in northern Africa and the larger Mediterranean region for some also migration and terrorism.
So these are the central security concerns.
Yet another group of states considers that Russia is a threat, but still other threats are more significant here.
The main country is France. But you also have Austria, Croatia and Switzerland in this category.
And so if you take France, but its members is increasingly concerned by Russian behaviour in the East.
But its sense and central region of strategic priority is the Mediterranean and northern Africa and specifically actually sub-Saharan Africa,
also because of post-colonial times, of course. For some countries, Russia, as I said,
IS has roughly equal significance as terrorism or as regional instability in the Middle East and northern Africa.
And here the main countries would be the Netherlands, outside Germany and the United Kingdom, but also includes Belgium, Denmark and the Netherlands.
And then if you take some of the countries in central eastern Europe and in northern Europe, for them, Russia is the highest threat.
So really their means for you, the concern is Russia.
But still, they have substantial focus and the key strategic priority for them is also all the concerns, like with the Mediterranean or terrorism.
And finally, you have a small group of countries, mostly small countries,
for whom Russia is the dominant threat by far, and this includes the Baltics, but also Finland and Poland.
And so here you go. This is Europe's strategic cacophony. And the key point to keep in mind here is that this is an enduring constraint.
This cacophony of threat perceptions is really shaped by the history of each country,
by the politics, by geography, and also by the local subregional strategic environment.
So this is not something that can change easily is really an enduring constraint.
And this is just to show you the table, actually, which is presented in the article, and I'll get back to this table later on.
The second major constraint to a European strategic autonomy is its profound defence capacity shortfalls and these capacity shortfalls,
in fact or exacerbated by the strategic cacophony.
And just essentially, the larger problem here is that since the end of the Cold War, there has been a sharp decline in European defence capabilities.
Just take one example. In 2000 11, you had the need to intervention in Libya and in that intervention.
Europeans displayed severe shortages of many systems like key neighbours, air to air refuelling, suppression of enemy air defences, intelligence,
target acquisition and reconnaissance capabilities, and all these capabilities, which they lacked had to be provided for by the US.
And so the central argument here on of the article is that Europeans faced four major challenges
that hindered their capacity to develop autonomous conventional defence capabilities.
The first challenge is the lack of weapons systems for conventional deterrence and defence.
The second challenge is the growing complexity of employing modern weapons systems.
Then you have the difficulty of institutionalised military cooperation amongst Europeans.
And finally, the fragmentation of Europe's defence industrial base. Let's look at each one of them briefly.
So if you take the lack of weapons systems for conventional interference in defence during the Cold War,
Europeans really invested heavily in these capabilities for conventional defence.
Why? Because as I said, the Soviet Union was the overarching common threat to all Europeans,
and the fear was an invasion by the Soviet Union, leading potentially to nuclear war.
But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, defence spending plummeted.
In Europe, countries shifted away from territorial defence,
which had been the key focus of attention during the Cold War and the move toward expeditionary warfare out of area operations.
And this problem was magnified by a strategic cacophony because basically some
of the largest countries in Europe are based in western and southern Europe,
and they have all the emphasised territorial defence and they focussed on expeditionary warfare.
By contrast, you have some countries in Europe that have reinvested in territorial defence capabilities,
but these are mostly small countries in northern and eastern Europe.
So strategic often is in full display here, too.
And the result is that today, Europeans like even the most basic conventional deterrence and defence capabilities,
you have some studies already shown this likes studies by the blade of.
But there was no long term analysis of the year to year shifts across the whole of Europe,
of the core capabilities needed for conventional deterrence and defence.
And this is exactly what we tried to do in the article.
So we systematically gathered data from the bolide bless military balance for the whole period 1990 to 2020,
we focussed on three specific systems for conventional warfare, namely main battle things, armoured personnel carriers and artillery.
And you may ask, why did you focus only on conventional land capabilities?
What about air and naval capabilities? That's a fair point, because conventional warfare, of course, more than simply land capabilities, to be sure.
However, the key point here is that Russia's strategy is specifically aimed at compelling naval forces
in case of conflict to operate in an environment of land warfare with contested air supports.
And so here is why land resistance and therefore land capabilities become key.
And that's why we focus on this specific weapon system. And if you look at the detail.
I'll be brief here, but we can discuss the details if you want in the Q&A.
Look at you think main battle tanks and we divided large, medium and small powers for analytical clarity.
We take all these countries. You see you see a decline by 85 percent from 1990 to 2020.
That's huge. You take artillery.
They decline over the same time frame by 56 percent, and armoured personnel carriers similarly declined by 54 percent.
So this is really staggering figures and it's a massive and severe decline in European capabilities.
But in fact, the situation is even worse because Europeans have significant readiness deficiencies.
Just to give you an example, German parliamentary commissioner for the Armed Forces concluded in 2018 that
the readiness of the Bundeswehr military weapon system is dramatically low.
Two small examples almost 40 percent of Germany's battle thanks Lilburn tool available for
use and less than 50 percent of his Eurofighter centre need a combat aircraft were available.
So this is the readiness problem. And of course, Europe, you have actually an additional problem, which is the obsolescence of main battle things,
which is projected to become ever more challenging in the decades ahead.
So this is if we look at conventional capabilities, but in fact,
today there is a growing complexity in weapons systems and the employment of modern weapon systems,
effective employment of modern weapon systems is far more challenging today than it was in past errors.
This is at least in part because of the immense premium put on what is called C4 Isaura capabilities.
This essentially refers to the information,
architecture or nervous systems of modern militaries where you have interlinked in a whole system satellites, computer system, armed forces.
It's really a system of systems, essentially, and these capabilities are crucial for gathering information about combatants and for
effectively processing and disseminating that information amongst the armed forces.
And Europeans have profound shortfalls in this domain.
Again, the 2011 intervention in Libya on how reliant Europeans are on the U.S. for a historic capacity and then was in an intervention in Libya.
So if Europeans, whether it's balance Russia autonomy without the U.S., they would require the development of such a separate assault capabilities,
which not only would take a very long time, but would be a very challenging task because Russia is not Libya.
Now what would they have to do?
They would have to develop large amounts of these separate sort of systems, like reconnaissance and communications satellites,
early warning, control, aircraft intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance drones, military satellites.
So the range of systems is very large. Military satellites are pretty crucial because they allow for communication,
navigation, early warning, attack assessment, surveillance, reconnaissance.
So these are very complex and crucial capabilities. And if you look at the data, this is the result.
You see that Russia enjoys a massive preponderance quantitative preponderance in terms of military satellites compared to any other European country.
But in fact, Brexit with two out of the EU a lot of these capabilities.
But this is only if you look at hardware.
Something which is less this cost is that it's not only a matter of hardware is that you need the specialised personnel to operate.
These separates our capabilities. And that's a huge problem for several reasons.
First of all, you had massive decline in the number of military personnel in the past three decades.
Just the total active active militaries declined by almost 60 percent.
So you would have all the costs involved in buying this additional needed personnel.
But you have another problem, which is that it's increasingly hard to attract personnel for skilled position in the military.
There are very solid studies that showed that advanced weapons systems today require skilled
and highly trained military personnel precisely because these are very advanced capabilities.
These information architecture is pretty complex,
and therefore it's very difficult to recruit and retain this skilled and highly trained military personnel in the military.
And of course, you have the challenge in the time required to train these people very poisoned himself at all.
Wrote about the US of the development of new weapon system and tactics depends
on decades of expensively accumulated technological and tactical experience.
So and this for the US, which is one single country that would take even longer for you for Europeans,
because it's a patchwork of countries with different operational cultures, levels of ambitions, different languages, et cetera.
So it's a pretty daunting task. The third challenge is the difficulty of institutionalised military cooperation, strategic cacophony.
So these divergence diverging interests amongst Europeans have prevented them from developing.
And this is a historical fact from developing an autonomous military planning command and control structure.
Today, there is not autonomous operational headquarter in Europe,
autonomous from the U.S. because of strategic divergences between France, the UK and Germany.
But this is history.
You may say well, but if the US withdrew, could Europeans rely on NATO's command and control integrated structure without the U.S.?
There are two problems here. First of all, is that historically the US has been the hegemonic power was in NATO, and as such,
it has helped overcoming coordination problems and collective action problems between Europeans and because of European strategic cacophony.
The U.S. disengagement from NATO would amplify collective action problems and coordination problems within NATO.
Assuming the need to actually survives,
and the second issue is that one thing is to be in an integrated military structure under the command of the hegemon,
the US, and another thing is to be under the command of another European power.
It's actually extremely unlikely that any European country would be willing to be
under the permanent command of another European country for deterrence and defence.
Do you see France being accepting being under the permanent command of Germany,
for instance, is Britain likely and this is true for all European countries?
All right. The final challenge is the fragmentation of Europe's defence industrial base,
which hinders the capacity of Europeans to produce the defence systems that it needs to balance Russia essentially without the US.
You have fragmentation and both the demand side and the supply side on the demand side.
The data showed that in the past three decades,
Europeans have consistently privilege domestically procured defence equipment of European arms co-operation,
and we're talking 80 percent versus 20 percent.
And the reason is mostly national protectionist practises, which remain the dominant driving force in EU defence procurement,
and this was very well shown by many utterly at King's College London in an excellent study.
You see, we have fragmentation on the supply side, so you have very fragmented,
non-competitive European defence and technological industrial base, which partly results actually from strategic cacophony.
Just to give you an example, you have 16 16 major military shipyards in the EU versus two in the US.
And that's because you have a lot of duplication, inefficiencies and endemic overcapacity in Europe.
So the bottom line of all this is that strategic cacophony and defence capacity shortfalls feed and reinforce one another,
and together they impose rigid limits on the capacity of Europeans to achieve strategic autonomy anytime soon.
Restraints scholars may advance that again have advanced some of them.
It comes to arguments, which is basically to say that, of course, yes, fine.
Europe is currently split today by strategic division and severe capacity shortfalls.
OK. But the study, they argue, or they might argue, that a US withdrawal by delivering such a major shock would do two things.
First of all, it would drive European threat perception to heighten.
So you would have an intensification of this threat perception vis-a-vis Russia and all would converge on Russia, essentially.
And therefore,
the second step because of this heightened threat perception that Europeans would increase their defence investment in order to balance Russia,
either in coalition or through the EU. So that would be the counter argument of the restraint.
Yeah, let's evaluate each one of these logical steps in the council arguments.
So let's look at the first logical step in this country argument,
namely that if the US withdraws this because this European threat perception to heighten and converge around Russia and let's go back to the table,
I was showing you on the threat assessments in Europe.
This is the three major powers and then we'll see for the minor, admit the lesser and medium powers France, Germany and the UK.
As we saw, France sees Russia as a threat, but other threats are more important.
And for Germany, the U.K., Russia and other threats have equal significance if the US pulled out.
This is what would likely happen. Germany and the UK would indeed shift one column to the right, meaning that, in their view, was under us.
Nieto would lose complete credibility in terms of conventional deterrence and defence,
and therefore their threat perception heightened and it would become more concerned by Russia.
Nevertheless, it should be stressed that it's not like the other threats will disappear,
so they would still have to grapple with terrorism, with regional instability in the Middle East, with the larger Mediterranean area.
And so they would have trade-offs in the allocation of their resources between southern and eastern Europe,
between territorial defence and border projection. And this is also why they are not in the loss column of this chance.
France, by contrast, is very unlikely to shift column for France really again because of history,
because of the history of France and how it sought to position itself during the Cold War and after the Cold War,
and also because of its post-colonial ties. The centre of gravity for France is really south of Europe.
Its regional stability in Africa and specifically in sub-Saharan Africa.
So it's very unlikely that France would move ramp up.
Russia is the threat assessments, and because of these different threat perceptions,
the big three would be very likely to reach agreement on a common position vis-a-vis Russia.
If the US withdrew, so be sure Germany and the UK might lean toward balancing,
but it would still have to grapple with other threats and face trade-offs in their resources.
France is very unlikely to provide any substantial contribution to a balancing coalition, and in fact, France may even bandwagon with Russia.
And this was highlighted in interviews by with senior French defence official who said
that actually threats to Europe's southern periphery in Africa and the Middle East.
If the US withdrew, they would still be considered much higher priority than Russia.
Our vital interests are not threatened by Russia. This is in the words of a senior official, and the situation is even more sonic.
If you look at the other states, the medium and small state,
they would have profoundly different reactions as a function of geographic location, history, etc.
The one exception would be these countries in the loss column Baltics, Finland, Poland, for whom Russia is already dominant threat.
But if you think most of the countries in column one and two, they're very unlikely to revise the threat assessment of Russia.
For them, Russia is not a threat or a secondary threat, and they could actually even become neutral or bandwagon with Moscow.
And indeed, even if all countries, all the countries in the stable moved Russia up in their threats assessments,
the cacophony of threat perception would remain. So let's see what would happen.
This is what happens if you have all the countries shifting one column to the right.
Well, the cacophony of threat perceptions remains. So the bottom line here is that it's extremely implausible.
Unlike what restrained scholars argue that all European states move Russia up in the ranking of threats.
Even if they did, the cacophony of threat perception would remain.
And a US withdrawal would therefore not mitigate Europe's strategic cacophony, and it could actually exacerbated.
But let's see the second part of this counter arguments. The research scholars could say, Well, yes, OK.
But even if threat perceptions do not converge across Europe,
it's not a big deal because balancing Russia would not require much effort because Russia is so weak.
And again, they always come back to when the three indicators of GDP, population and defence spending.
But in fact, what we tried to show in the article is that Russia is a much tougher adversary to match than what restraints colours seem to believe,
and that's true both in the conventional and the nuclear domain. Let's look at the conventional domain.
There are three key points to bear in mind. First of all, Russia's defence budget is in fact much higher than what is usually assumed.
So Russia pays its soldiers and its weapons systems in rubles and not in dollars,
and therefore estimates of its military spending that are based on market exchange rates are inaccurate.
If you think military spending and use purchasing power parity exchange rate, Russia's effectively their expenditure is much higher.
So that's an important point. The second point is that precisely given this military spending in the past decade,
Russia, it's substantially increased its defence capabilities, including civil.
Right, it's our capabilities in the past decade.
So if you take from 2015 to 19, the size of the Russian Army, just this increased by almost 25 percent.
And so if you go back to the capabilities that we discussed before, this is the result.
This is the preponderance of Russian capabilities vis a vis any type of coalition of potential balancers vis-a-vis Russia.
And these coalition are based on the table of threat perception that we discussed before.
So this is the preponderance of capabilities of a Russian main battle things vis a vis any coalition of European bouncers.
This is for, excuse me, in armoured personnel carriers.
And you also have preponderance if you look at artillery. Likewise, if you look at total active troops, you have this huge preponderance here too.
And this is again for the fundamental capabilities for the conventional deterrence.
But if you go and look at the more complex systems which are key for C4 air strike capabilities like military satellites,
I just wanted to remind you the huge imbalance in capabilities here, too.
And the last point to bear in mind is that Russia and this is often forgotten.
It's a simple but key point. Russia gains efficiency in service of the Europeans because it's a single actor
that would face a collective patchwork of countries with diverging interests.
And so the bottom line here is that if the US pulled back, a single,
centralised Russian actor would confront a group of potential European bouncers who would have diverging threat perceptions.
And because of that, they would have coordination, challenges, collective action problems.
And this would hamper their capacity to do many things to devise a common strategy to share the burdens of defence investment,
to rationalise the highly fragmented industrial base, to build integrated command and control structure,
and also to sustain, develop and deploy supervisory capacity.
And you also need to keep in mind the timescales involved.
Such a build up of capabilities would take a very long time, and this is very clear stated by senior officials in Europe.
Just take the German foreign foreign policy official,
who stresses that the whole defence and capability requirements would be so extreme that the upgrade that would
be needed to fill the gap if the U.S. completely withdrew is totally off limits for the foreseeable future.
It is pretty clear, and I won't go into the detail of nuclear real, but I can get back to it in the Q&A.
But essentially, you face the same constraint. You have a major, a massive Russian numerical preponderance in terms of nuclear capabilities.
Russia is a single actor facing a patchwork of European actors,
and the strategic divergence and capability constraints would hamper the emergence of a European nuclear deterrence.
I'm happy to say more about it in the Q&A. And so what are the implications of all this?
Ultimately, the notion forwarded by restraints callers that European countries can easily and quickly balance Russia.
It's ungrounded, grounded, in fact, is based on unfounded optimism and the striking restraints.
Collars are a self-described realist, but they need to be more realistic.
Europe today is characterised by profound strategic cacophony and fundamental defence capacity shortfalls.
Therefore, it is today not in a position to autonomously mount a credible deterrent and defence against Russia.
This situation is likely to continue for a very long time, even if there were a complete U.S. withdrawal from the continent,
and it would all the more so be the case in the event of a partial U.S. withdrawal, which again is more likely scenario.
And so the US pulled back from the continent would leave Europeans increasingly vulnerable to Russian aggression and meddling.
It would make institutionalised intra European defence cooperation much harder,
and it would therefore have grave consequences for peace and stability on the continent.
And so you may ask, OK, but this is a pretty depressing overview that you are giving us.
So but what can Europeans do about it? And based on facts, we are working together.
Steve Brooks we're working on a follow up article which tries to address exactly this question.
We had a very preliminary stage, so we would really welcome any kind of feedback, comments, suggestion that you may have the.
And here I'll be very brief.
But essentially two things important things that the Europeans should do, first and foremost, is move beyond wishful thinking.
Essentially, wishful thinking has sometimes prevented a sober and empirically grounded analysis of European interests and capabilities.
And it is my belief that European integration benefits from realistic, hard nosed assessment more than it benefits from impractical wishful thinking.
And the second thing that can be done is to halt the proliferation and prioritise initiatives.
You have so many initiatives in the EU with so many acronyms that it's very hard to just keep track of them.
And in fact, this proliferation of initiatives can end up reinforcing rather than deeming strategic.
Cacophony, and it can also have little impact on existing capacity shortfalls.
So what can be done about it?
Well, our suggestion is that Europeans should focus on very few initiative with targeted initiative that's adhered to essentially three criteria.
The first one is that there should be capabilities that can be developed in the short term, say, five years.
These capabilities should address existing gaps, of course, and they should be vulnerable to the US today.
But these capabilities should also be useful in case the US pulls back.
And so based upon these three criteria, we've tried to identify some potential initiatives.
We ask for feedback to 35 European and American scholars and policymakers.
And let me know that some of these initiatives already exist but are scattered through the EU or NATO and other initiatives don't exist yet.
And so just to give you a few examples,
capability development initiatives would include focussing on military mobility, which is a big problem in Europe,
developing a network of special operation forces across Europe,
which is useful across the spectrum of conflict and bolstering cyber and electronic warfare capabilities.
We could also think potentially of some institutional reforms, like creating a new creating a European Security Council,
which is something she has been put forward in the literature and revising the Stability and growth pact,
meaning seeking out defence investments from the rigid fiscal constraints of the civilian world.
These are just initial preliminary ideas, so we really would welcome your feedback.
And before I conclude, I will just make some shameless self-promotion,
which is that I'm I'm the director of this European initiative for security studies,
which is this network of scholars across Europe who want to bolster and consolidate security studies in Europe.
We have a call for panels and four papers.
The deadline is January 30, and so if there's any Ph.D. or postdoc or scholar here that would like to apply,
we really welcome your pencil or paper proposal.
And with that, I'll conclude, and I very much look forward to your questions and comments.
Thank you.