(Newswire.net — November 20, 2017) — While NATO grows its member list by spreading to eastern EU countries such as Montenegro, a word from Brussels is that the need for EU military is reaching the must have point.
Last week EU officials in Brussels convinced 23 members of the 28-strong entity to join the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) defense initiative.
“The European Security and Defense Union will help protect our Union, which is exactly what EU citizens expect,” argued European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who has been campaigning for PESCO for several years.
Mainstream media in the US suggests that sluggish policy by president Trump’s administration towards the EU propelled the idea of an independent EU military. However, the truth is that it is against EU’s strategic, geopolitical and economic interests to confront Russia simply by following the (NATO) leadership.
The president of the EU Commision Jean-Claude Juncker said Wednesday that EU should get “a functioning European Defence Union” by 2025. “We need it and NATO would like us to have it,” he added.
“The European Union should also have more influence on the world stage. But it needs to be able to take its foreign policy decisions more swiftly,” said Juncker.
We can sense the roots of disagreement with US-led NATO interventions back in 1999 after Clinton’s decision to launch airstrikes against Serbia, the constitutional nation in Yugoslavia, an US ally from World War I and II.
Ironically, Clinton’s administration helped Germany destroy Yugoslavia, the country that played a significant role in preventing Adolf Hitler’s aspiration towards Europe. These events were precedent in so many ways: It was the first time Germany took a military action against a sovereign country since WWII. Also, NATO used military force to occupy a territory of a sovereign country by allowing Kosovo (a province of Serbia) Albanians to unilaterally declare independence.
The effects of that move have carried over to the crisis in Ukraine, after Russia declared Crimea its territory, and in Spain where Catalonians voted for independence. However, this was not aligned with NATO’s interests in the EU, thus the project ‘independent Catalonia’ failed, at least for now.
Maybe the most important consequence of these historical events is bypassing the International law by acting without approval of the UN.
This led to a continuation of NATO acting outside UN approval, such as in Libya in 2011, to the point that the US ambassador to UN openly declared the US above International law by saying US and its NATO allies will intervene with or without consent of the United Nations Security Council, to fight for “justice.”
“With the unity of this council, or alone, unrestrained by Russia’s obstructionism, we will continue to fight for justice and accountability in Syria,” Haley said, referring to Russia’s vetoing of the draft resolution on the extension of the Syrian chemical weapons probe on Friday.
This, however, wasn’t received well by allies from the EU, which in turn suffers terrible consequences of US leadership in NATO. The debate surrounding NATO’s evolution from a collective defense alliance to an organization primarily concerned with managing crises centers around the world, including Europe, is questioned by the highest ranking officials in the EU parliament.
Presently, Brussels seems to have very little control over EU foreign policy objectives, except where and when they meet Washington’s national interests.
Trump’s “America First” political philosophy, often directly opposite from EU’s vision of a “free world” contributed only towards catalyzing the idea behind a EU military force which would secure EU interests, which are in fact more aligned with Moscow than Washington.