Brussels, Belgium. In details emerging from the fallout of US President Trump’s visit to NATO, a very worried cluster of NATO leaders is trying to put together some kind of alliance that can go forward in the wake of “hurricane Donald’s” visit.
New ideas of how to run NATO will be put forward by European defense union, and analysts pray that it won’t affect funding for NATO and wouldn’t complicate President Donald Trump’s demand for increased contributions from European nations.
With the Brexit decision, the European Union has intensified talks on how to move forward and tackle the growing anti-EU feeling. In a white paper last March, the EU outlined several options for its future, four out of five included stronger defense integration. But the bottom line is Europe is ” in deep trouble, with a shaky, uncertain future.”
The europeans have made progress on this front in recent months and have focused on establishing an EU defense fund, aiming to centralize procurement strategy. The possible future defense union would go further, it could necessitate a joint, centralized defense industrial strategy, sharing of member state ‘strategic’ defense assets, and perhaps even a level of autonomy from NATO. According to their views.
NATO member states have been criticized by Trump for not respecting financial targets to NATO’s budget. Over the last eight years, the United States spent more on defense than all NATO countries combined. If all NATO members had spent just 2 percent of GDP on defense last year, we would have had another $119 billion for our collective defense,” Trump stated in utter disgust in Brussels.
NATOs defense union proposal could include a common European Counter-terrorism Agency, for example, to improve cooperation between police and judicial authorities on terrorism-related issues. It could also include a common fund to spend on defense. But, it is not yet known how much funding the troubled euro economies would have to spare to support a European defense union.
Europes main priority right now is simply not to fragment further. Massive waves of migration, combined with an open door Merkel policy to immigration has flooded europe with welfare state populations draining resources NATO needs to stay effective. Experts say with over 1 million more immigrants on the way to europe currently, prospects for further NATO funding are anything but certain.