When the world's at stake,
go beyond the headlines.

Editor’s Note: This is part of a running series of essays by Iskander Rehman, entitled “Applied History,” which seeks, through the study of the history of strategy and military operations, to better illuminate contemporary defense challenges.

We need not waste our time in disputes about who originated this idea of United Europe. There are many valid modern patents. There are many famous names associated with the revival and presentation of this idea, but we may all, I think, yield our pretensions to Henry Navarre, King of France, who, with his great Minister Sully, between the years 1600 and 1607, labored to set up a permanent committee representing the fifteen – now we are sixteen – leading Christian States of Europe. This body was to act as an arbitrator on all questions concerning religious conflict, national frontiers, internal disturbance, and common action against any danger from the East, which in those days meant the Turks. This he called “The Grand Design.” After this long passage of time, we are the servants of the Grand Design.

Sir Winston Churchill, Address given at the Congress of Europe in The Hague, May 7, 1948.

Under a crisp azure sky, the king’s carriage slowly wound its way through Paris’ bustling streets and cramped, refuse-packed alleyways. Drawn by six magnificent white steeds, the lumbering contraption’s heavy leather curtains had been drawn back to let in the spring breeze and golden afternoon light. Accompanied by only a few valets and a light escort of mounted retainers, Henri IV, clad in his customary attire of rumpled black satin, had forgotten his spectacles. Rocking back and forth on the carriage’s long bench-seat, his arm casually draped around one of his most trusted nobles, he listened intently as a dispatch was read to him out loud. The royal convoy began to fray its way through a particularly tight artery, its narrow pavements overflowing with ramshackle stalls and teeming with crowds of braying merchants. Clattering to a halt amidst the clotting traffic, the king and his entourage waited patiently as carriage footmen loped ahead to unsnarl a collision between a hay cart and a wine cart. Suddenly, in a flash of movement, a burly, green-brocaded man with flaming red hair darted out of the crowd, hoisted himself up onto a wheel spoke, and unleashed a frenzied flurry of blows. Teetering precariously over the side of the carriage, the aggressor hacked and slashed with brief but furious abandon — his blade first raking across Henri’s ribcage, before plunging deep into a lung, and puncturing his aorta. France’s first Bourbon monarch, as if in a daze, slumped back onto his seat, repeatedly muttering — almost as if to reassure his frozen, horror-blanched companions, “ce n’est rien, ce n’est rien” (it is nothing, it is nothing). Then blood began gushing in great torrents from his mouth, his eyes dimmed, and darkness claimed him. A ripple of shock and horror coursed through the crowd. Panicked orders were shouted out in wavering voices. A guard’s sword pommel crunched into the mysterious assailant’s throat, and he was hauled away, heaving and gasping for air, his gore-drenched blade ripped out of his clammy hands.

The sudden death of Henri IV, France’s grand unifier following the endless turmoil and vicious bloodletting of its wars of religion, was a seismic shock — not only for France, but also across Europe. Indeed, it had occurred just as the self-styled “Gallic Hercules” was on the cusp of launching a major military campaign: one which threatened to put an end to 12 years of tenuous peace with Habsburg Spain and engulf the entirety of a nerve-wracked continent in sword and flame. The king’s assassin, François Ravaillac, a hallucination-plagued Catholic fanatic, was subjected to excruciating torture before being torn to bloody shreds by a brace of horses in front of a baying crowd. During his extended interrogation sessions, Ravaillac, between garbled shrieks and millenarian ravings, had repeatedly professed to having acted alone. For many contemporary and subsequent observers, however, the timing — only a few days before Henri IV was slated to lead his armies into battle — appeared far too fortuitous. Too many adversaries, both foreign and domestic, had simply too much to gain from the felling of Europe’s great warrior king.

In the febrile months leading up to Henri’s regicide, a Parisian notary, Pierre de l’Estoile, had dutifully tracked the steadily darkening clouds on the geopolitical horizon, jotting down in his diary that it seemed as if “all Paris talked of nothing but the upcoming war.” Yawning armories, bristling with cuirasses, pikes, and muskets had been emptied. Tens of thousands of French troops and foreign mercenaries had been levied, armed, and poised menacingly across France’s borders with Spain and Italy. Forward magazines of cannons, ammunition, and victuals had been established, and contracts had been drawn up to supply Henri’s hungry hosts with up to half a million freshly baked loaves of bread a day.

At the time of his assassination, Henri IV was on his way to visit the grand artisan of all these meticulous preparations, the great Huguenot lord and multi-tasking minister, Maximilien de Béthune, Duke of Sully. A youthhood companion of Henri IV, Sully had fought valiantly under his liege lord’s banner during the wars of religion. Over the course of those grim, blood-soaked years, Sully had miraculously survived being skewered in the thigh by a halberd, shot through the throat with a pistol, slashed across the face with a sword, and almost drowning in a waterlogged trench — all in addition to sustaining a myriad of other gruesome bodily injuries. On that fateful day in May 1610, the grizzled veteran was bedridden, struggling to recover from a reinfection of one of his many old war wounds. Henri IV, in one of his characteristic acts of royal largesse, had decided to spare his most trusted counselor the bone-jolting discomfort of a coach ride to the Louvre. Instead, he himself would venture over to Sully’s stronghold at the Grand Arsenal to pore over the final details of the upcoming campaign — a war whose ultimate goals have been heatedly debated by generation upon generation of historians.

The pretext for French military intervention had been provided by the Jülich-Cleves-Berg succession crisis of 1609. In March 1609, the Duke of Jülich-Cleves-Berg died childless, sparking a major international dispute over his minute inheritance. Two opposing coalitions of claimants staked their claims: the Catholic League led by the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, and supported by Habsburg Spain, on the one side, and the Evangelical Union of German Protestant princes supported by France, on the other. Rudolf II, citing imperial authority, dispatched Archduke Leopold of Austria with troops to seize Jülich. To Henri IV, this imperial fait accompli was intolerable: The diminutive but densely populated duchies lay along the lower Rhine, controlling access between the Spanish Netherlands and northwestern Germany. At this point, France and the Habsburg Dynasty (with its twin branches in Vienna and Madrid) had been waging war — both overt and covert — for close to a century, and thousands of battle-hardened Habsburg troops already loomed over virtually every French frontier.

Ostensibly, therefore, Henri IV’s expedition’s goal was simply to eject the encroaching imperial troops, demonstrate France’s revived military prowess, and shield the “ancient liberties” of a smaller European state from what French state propagandists portrayed as the Habsburgs’ hegemonic ambitions of “universal monarchy.” Famously, however, Sully provided his own highly detailed — and ad hoc — rationalization of Henri IV’s final months of frenetic diplomacy and intense military preparations. Writing close to 30 years later in his memoirs, the aging counselor argued that France’s first Bourbon monarch had been operating under the framework of a far more ambitious grand strategy. This “Grand Design” (grand dessein), Sully claimed, aimed not only to counter Habsburg hegemony, but also to fundamentally — and durably — reengineer the geopolitics of the continent for the public good. The passages in Sully’s winding, mammoth-sized (and notoriously indigestible) memoirs dealing with the Grand Design subsequently proved to be enormously influential in the history of European statecraft, inspiring thinkers and statesmen as varied as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, Kant, Tsar Alexander I, and Winston Churchill. Whether during the tortuous negotiations leading up to the Congress of Vienna, or in the grim aftermath of both world wars, it was viewed for centuries as a historical touchstone for advocates of European integration, and for students of balance-of-power politics.

Sully’s Grand Design: The Remarkable Success of a Political Fiction

Sully’s Grand Design called for nothing less than a complete transformation of European geopolitics. This sweeping vision, he argued, had been painstakingly — and furtively — crafted by Henri IV and himself in the years leading up to the king’s tragic demise. Only a few choice advisors and fellow rulers (such as Elizabeth I) had supposedly been let into the labyrinthine planning process.

Under the aegis of this “vast enterprise,” of which the planned 1610 intervention had been merely the first step, France would forcibly reengineer the geopolitics of the continent for the collective good. It would stitch new coalitions, arbitrate festering bilateral disputes, protect the age-old rights of the smaller, more vulnerable “stati liberi” (free states), and ensure that the “house of Austria” (i.e. Habsburg) was “divested of all the possessions in Germany, Italy and the low countries.” “In a word,” Sully bluntly asserted, the hegemonically minded Habsburgs would be reduced “to the sole kingdom of Spain, bounded by the ocean, the Mediterranean, and the Pyrenean mountains.” Habsburg Spain could be permitted to maintain — and even expand — its sprawling empire in the three other main parts of the world (Asia, Africa, and the Americas). This could help salve its wounded pride, suggested Sully somewhat condescendingly, providing a form of material and reputational recompense for the loss of its European primacy. Should the Habsburgs prove overly defiant, however, France would find itself compelled to intervene militarily at the head of a grand trans-confessional coalition. It would do so not to further its own primacy, but rather in pursuit of a lasting European peace, a noble goal which rendered “such severity as just as it is necessary.”

Once the Habsburgs had been suitably humbled and territorially neutered, the next phase of the Grand Design could come into being: the advent of a new “political system by which Europe might be regulated and governed as one great family.” In some of the most famous passages of his memoirs, Sully calls for the reorganization of Europe around 15 political entities — six hereditary kingdoms (France, England, Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Lombardy, to be formed by a fusion of Savoy and the Milanese), five elective states or monarchies (the Papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia), and four republics (Venice, Switzerland, Belgium, and a new Italian Republic). While this continental remodeling would require the implementation of vast schemes of territorial readjustment, France, Sully pointedly noted, “would receive nothing for itself, apart from the glory of distributing them with equity.” Such a demonstration of selflessness, he added, would not only bolster France’s reputation for magnanimity and equanimity, but it would also prevent it from engaging in ruinous overextension.

A general council with delegates from across Europe, one modeled “on that of the Ancient Amphictyons of Greece,” would be charged with mediating disputes between these newly balanced entities, and with levying shared funds and troops in order to pursue that age-old pan-European dream: the revival of a great crusade against the Turks. Prophetically, Sully even suggests that this council could be permanently located in a city in the “center of Europe such as Strasbourg” — the current location of the European Parliament. The Ottoman Empire, with its scheming Sultan and teeming hordes of infidels, would provide the great galvanizing foe, in whose direction a united Europe could redirect its martial energies. Indeed, like so many political theorists of antiquity and the Renaissance, Sully believed that a well-conducted foreign war, however tragic, had the perverse side-effect of fostering greater internal cohesion. Confiding to a fellow French minister, he said:

the true means of setting the [French] realm at rest is by keeping up a foreign war, toward which one can channel, like water in a drain, all the turbulent humors of the kingdom.

Applied universally to the entire European continent, this meant providing a suitable extra-regional outlet for Europe’s legions of glory-starved aristocratic grandees and avaricious mercenaries — whether Lutheran, Catholic, or Calvinist. Let them channel their bloodlust and desire for recognition away from Europe’s verdant plains and dense forests, argued Sully, and out toward the sparkling waters of the Eastern Mediterranean and the sunbaked coastlines of North Africa.

When it came to Russia — that vast, primeval, and largely uncharted land to Europe’s east — it was clear to Sully that its rustic inhabitants “belong to Asia at least as much as Europe.” With their strange attachment to “idolatrous” and “superstitious practices in their worship,” blind adherence to the most primitive forms of despotism, and their lackluster economy, Sully sneered that “we may indeed almost consider them as a barbarous country, and place them in the same class as Turkey, even though for these past five hundred years we have ranked them among the Christian powers.” The French minister’s dripping disdain was characteristic of his epoch, with one 16th-century Italian envoy to Russia carping that, “The entire marketplace in Moscow offered fewer goods for sale than a single shop in Venice.” Maybe at some later juncture, Sully ventured, Russia could wade into some form of a mutually beneficial association with a unified Europe. Should the czar refuse to prove cooperative, however, he “ought to be treated like the Sultan of Turkey, deprived of his possessions in Europe, and confined to Asia only.” Safely quarantined to the periphery of the civilized Western world, Russia’s atavistic autocrats could then continue “as long as they pleased, and without any interruption from us, the wars in which they are constantly engaged against the Turks and Persians.”

When reading Sully’s memoirs, it soon becomes apparent that he envisioned a unified Europe eventually taking on some greater global role. At one point the retired counselor seems to suggest that Europe should weave some form of a cordon sanitaire over certain “commodiously situated” regions, and “particularly the whole coast of Africa which is too near to our [Europe’s] territories for our complete security.” Establishing such a necklace of buffer states would require, he cautioned, the formation of new client kingdoms, ruled by a new generation of petty monarchs — so as to avoid simply reexporting old intra-European dynastic feuds onto neighboring shores. In short, this was a hugely ambitious geopolitical project.

Contemporary historians, however, have expressed a measure of skepticism about the veracity of Sully’s grandiose characterizations of French grand strategy. Indeed, since the late 19th century, a series of astute archivists and historians have highlighted numerous instances of exaggeration, distortion, and even outright fabrication in select portions of the Calvinist lord’s informative, but self-aggrandizing autobiography. There are no written records, for instance, of Henri IV ever discussing geopolitical ambitions quite as daedalean and far-reaching with his “good sister” Elizabeth I. Moreover, in the leadup to his death, only the slithery, perennially double-dealing Duke of Savoy had formally signed onto his proposed grand coalition. Other nominal allies, such as the German Protestant princes, wavered pusillanimously on the sidelines, or, like Venice, quietly fretted that another Franco-Habsburg conflict might jeopardize global trade and expose their territories to renewed bouts of Ottoman raiding. Many have judiciously observed that the memoirs were written when Sully, who had been forced into retirement following Henri IV’s murder, was hoping to simultaneously burnish his legacy and negotiate a reentry into the corridors of power. The formal elegance of the Grand Design (and his claims to having co-devised it) may have been designed to highlight his intellect and hawkish credentials at a time when Cardinal Richelieu — who appears to have evinced little fondness for his aging Huguenot predecessor — was implementing a policy of heightened confrontation with the Habsburgs. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding its clearly semi-fictional dimensions, Sully’s Grand Design (which was largely taken as historical gospel until the 19th century), is eminently worthy of rediscovery. Not only because of its abiding intellectual influence, but also, perhaps more importantly, because of the manner in which its manifold inner contradictions can help illuminate current challenges to pan-European unity.

Toward a New European Grand Design?

Primus Inter Pares? Adjusting to a More Evenly Militarized Europe

Throughout the passages of his memoirs dealing with the Grand Design, Sully labors to emphasize the benign — indeed, almost selfless — nature of the enterprise. The Kingdom of France, he repeatedly professes, was not interested in large-scale territorial expansion, or in simply replacing one form of hegemonic primacy (the Habsburgs) with another. The contemporary diplomatic correspondence of France’s jittery neighbors, however, reveals that they did not necessarily share this roseate reading of France’s future intentions. Many recalled how, only a few years prior, Henri IV had seized parts of Savoy — matter-of-factly informing their inhabitants that “it stood to reason that as your native language is French, you should be subjects of the King of France.” Had the hard-charging monarch perennially obsessed with restoring his nation’s lost grandeur really undergone such a radical internal transformation in the space of only a few years? Or were the lofty arguments in favor of European unity and the defense of smaller states’ sovereignty simply a product of France’s temporary weakness vis-a-vis the Habsburgs? As one well-known adage went at the time, impishly noted a Venetian diplomat, weaker countries typically welcomed the prospect of “France as an ally, but not as a neighbor.”

For the next half-century or so, France would thus labor, with varying degrees of success, to convince Europe of the validity and sincerity of its intentions. Somewhat inevitably, as this author has chronicled elsewhere, France’s new desire for equilibrium would come into tension with its more ancient quest for primacy, to eventually collapse, during the hyper-bellicose reign of Louis XIV, under the weight of its hegemonic temptations.

This evolution serves as a useful reminder of how states long accustomed to a certain measure of influence and power may ultimately prove reluctant to bequeath it, notwithstanding the nobility of their original intentions. In today’s Europe, every European capital (rightly) welcomes the fact that Germany or Poland have chosen to massively reinvest in their defense capabilities and are now on track to emerge as Europe’s two most formidable land powers within the next decade. Until now, within Europe, only France and Great Britain could be truly characterized as full-spectrum, expeditionary military powers — and this notwithstanding their troubling shortfalls in munitions, enablers, and (in the case of Britain) manpower. This and the fact that European expertise in leading large formations geared toward high-intensity warfare has thus far been “overwhelmingly concentrated in British and French officers” means that Paris and London have traditionally wielded an oversized influence over the shape and trajectory of European defense.

However, as countries such as Germany, Poland, or even Sweden, sizably expand their defense capabilities and involvement within NATO, it is only natural that they will also begin to demand that their growing role goes hand in hand with greater influence, including in decisions which have “traditionally been shaped by Franco-English leadership.” This may eventually come to generate subtle tensions, as the two countries long accustomed to shaping the discussion over European defense adjust to the reality of a more evenly militarized continent, with a larger number of relatively powerful — and therefore vocal — European powers at the strategic planning table. Conversely, those wealthy European nations that continue to demonstrate a reluctance to sizably boost their defense spending, or, like Spain, haggle to negotiate separate carve outs, are likely to lose influence in a Europe where hard power — and the willingness to militarily burden share — is a far more prized diplomatic commodity than in earlier decades. In short, defense ministries and chancelleries across Europe should begin preparing for a new, more militarily multipolar continent — something which will indubitably yield overarching benefits for European security, but will also inevitably generate fresh challenges in terms of strategic convergence and coordination. To give but one example, if in the future NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe were to be European rather than American, as Henry Kissinger proposed way back in 1984, how exactly would European countries go about choosing said officer’s nationality?

From Ottoman Turkey to Putin’s Russia: A New Unifying Foe?

For Sully, the principal way in which to overcome these internal challenges was to jointly face off against an external, existential foe. In the late 16th to early 17th centuries that extra-regional menace was the Ottoman Empire. The goal, he baldly stated, was to “convert the continual wars among Europe’s several princes into a perpetual war against the infidels.” However, national cynicism and intra-European animosities had long militated against the realization of such a goal — as Sully was well positioned to know. Indeed, whether under the previous Valois dynasty or under his own ministerial tenure, French kings had not hesitated, in their attempts to cripple or distract their Habsburg foes, to covertly support or openly ally with the Ottoman Empire. Thus in 1530, France’s decision to allow the Ottoman fleet to winter in the French port of Toulon had generated continent-wide revulsion. France’s king at the time, Francis I, had gingerly framed this distasteful partnership as a necessary, albeit temporary, evil. One of his most renowned generals was more unapologetic, snarling to an appalled Italian envoy that against an enemy as reviled as the Habsburgs, he would gladly make an alliance with the devil himself. During Sully’s own career as minister, he had personally encouraged Henri IV to quietly perpetuate this deeply controversial but longstanding policy.

In addition to these naked expressions of realpolitik, early modern European statesmen, notwithstanding their occasional embrace of Erasmian irenicism or sweeping, federalist projects, were in reality often hopelessly chauvinistic. Lazy stereotypes and deep-rooted national animosities abounded. Thus, the Germans were widely held to be boring, “diligent plodders,” the French overly temperamental and unreliable, the Spanish cruel and covetous, the Italians fickle and sybaritic, and so on. For all his later expressions of fraternal bonhomie toward his fellow Europeans, Sully regularly indulged in such sentiments, once griping after a particularly trying diplomatic mission to London that “The English hate us, and with a hatred so widespread that one is tempted to number it among the national dispositions of this people.” For some of the more blasé 17th-century policymakers painstakingly leafing through Sully’s memoirs by candlelight after a long day at the office, the prospect of an early European Union reaching to project power across the Bosphorus must have appeared hopelessly pollyannish. The horror and devastation of the Thirty Years War — which was still ripping the continent asunder when the versions of Sully’s memoirs containing the Grand Design were published — likely only reinforced their professional skepticism.

Is there maybe a stronger case to be made, today, though, of the unifying value of a shared threat — only this time in the form of a Putinist Russia? The early European Union, after all, was forged in the wake of another system-shattering intra-European war, and under the growing shadow of the Soviet Union, a hostile extra-regional power which — as Winston Churchill famously suggested — had come to replace Ottoman Turkey as the major threat to Europe’s civilization and way of life. For many years following the Cold War, testy Eastern and Central Europeans could rightly grouch about their Western European partners’ naivete regarding Russian intentions, or their more mercenary willingness to welcome a steady, brackish flow of Russian cheap energy and dirty money. Until the E.U. arms embargo following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, many European countries had little compunction about selling Russia high-end military platforms ranging from Italian armored vehicles to French Mistral-class landing helicopter docks. More broadly, as some Polish foreign policy analysts acidly note, while frontline states such as Poland “had always been wary of a potential Russian threat,” Western European states with no direct experience of Soviet occupation, such as Italy, France or Germany, continued to regard Russia for decades “as an attractive partner that needed to be supported on its path to eventual liberalization.” Barriers to the formation of any kind of durable strategic convergence on the nature of the Russian threat were reinforced by the kaleidoscopic nature of the continent’s disparate national strategic cultures. Southward-facing countries such as Spain, Italy, or France, with their history of deep involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Sahel, had a wholly different set of defense priorities and threat perceptions from their Eastern European allies. Greece and Cyprus were far more alarmed by Turkish truculence in the Eastern Mediterranean than by Russian actions in the Donbas. Meanwhile, the United Kingdom, while staunchly committed to trans-Atlantic and regional security, worked actively from its perch inside the European Union to prevent the emergence of any shared, E.U.-wide defense initiatives, for fear that it might either duplicate or dilute NATO.

It is safe to say that this situation has now drastically changed, and that Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 constitutes a pivotal moment in the formation of a shared European strategic culture — albeit one that, in the eyes of many, took far too long to materialize. Opinion polls conducted across the continent thus show a sea change in European public opinion vis-a-vis Russia, and a much greater alignment between Western and Eastern European citizenries in terms of the hierarchy of their threat perceptions. France, which recently ended its multidecadal military presence in the Sahel by handing over its last remaining base in Chad, has sizably reduced its strategic involvement across the African continent, while bolstering its presence along Europe’s eastern periphery. Relations between Ankara and Athens have recently improved. The United Kingdom, which has left the European Union, can no longer act as an in-house spoiler when it comes to European defense integration. Nor would it necessarily want to. Indeed, since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, Britain has, in addition to tightening its defense and security cooperation with the European Union, also begun to more openly welcome its emergence as a more independent strategic actor. With regard to trade and sanctions, the European Union has also demonstrated a newfound resolve, taking the lead on blacklisting hundreds of ships in Russia’s “shadow fleet” and recently announcing an ambitious plan to finally phase out all fossil fuel imports from Russia by Jan. 2028.

Although there is a broad continent-wide consensus on the nature of the Russian threat, this does not mean, however, that there are not certain lingering, and often significant variations, in approaches to contending with said threat — or over its durability. Thus France and Great Britain have been far more willing than other European states to adopt forward-leaning strategies with regard to the provision of certain standoff weapon systems to Ukraine, or when it comes to their stated willingness to put boots on the ground following the establishment of a properly negotiated ceasefire. Orban’s Hungary, and to a lesser degree Fico’s Slovakia, continuously act as nettlesome nuisances, with both countries recently threatening to veto the European Union’s next package of sanctions. This recurrent issue could be resolved, however, if the European Council did away with unanimity voting and extended qualified majority voting to common security and foreign policy, as recommended in the 2024 Draghi report. There is also currently a vivid debate within Europe — and within European national parliaments themselves — over the desirability and legality of seizing frozen Russian assets in order to finance Ukrainian reconstruction or European rearmament. Last but not least, opinion polling reveals important differences among Western and Eastern European publics regarding their willingness to reengage with Russia diplomatically and economically in the aftermath of an internationally recognized – and Ukraine-approved — peace agreement. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding these continued intra-European divergences, it seems that many of the broader trendlines are pointing toward the realization of Sully’s dream, and in the direction of a historically unprecedented degree of European strategic convergence.

America’s Role: Source of European Unity or Disunity?

One of the key differences between Sully’s era and our own, however, is the role an external great power — the United States — has come to play in shaping European security. Going forward, Washington’s actions could either stimulate or complicate Europe’s strategic unity.

For instance, whereas for many decades, successive U.S. administrations were largely in favor of greater European integration, that tradition of bipartisan support is now in serious doubt, partially — but not solely — due to seething trade tensions between Washington and Brussels. The issue of U.S.-European economic competition over issues such as trade, standards, and regulation will likely only grow more salient in the upcoming decades. So may strains over America’s occasional willingness to wade into European internal politics, or to express sympathy for populist political candidates that many deem fundamentally hostile to the European project.

On the other hand, with regard to U.S.-European security cooperation, we may have entered a new era, whereby many of the longstanding ambiguities in Washington’s attitude toward European strategic autonomy are cast aside in favor of a restructured — and more healthily balanced — trans-Atlantic defense compact. Indeed, for all its decades-long frustration with post-Cold War Europe’s relatively anemic levels of defense spending, Washington’s attitude toward Europe’s emergence as a more powerful — and thus potentially more independently minded — strategic force has long been somewhat schizoid in nature. Famously, during the Clinton administration, Washington cautiously welcomed the European Union’s nascent European security and defense policy as long as it respected what U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright coined the “3Ds”: no decoupling from U.S.-NATO security structures, no duplication of NATO command assets, and no discrimination against non-E.U. NATO allies. And in essence, until relatively recently, America’s attitude, regardless of administration, was to encourage European contributions within a NATO-first framework, while discouraging moves toward an autonomous E.U. defense policy that could eventually come to bypass or supersede NATO.

America’s role as Europe’s prime security guarantor has also long been a double-edged sword: It has allowed Washington to play a disciplining role among a diverse array of states, all while fostering unhealthy long-term pathologies and dependencies. Some of these dependencies have been hugely frustrating and problematic for the United States — encouraging allied free-riding and what some have termed the “normative disarmament” of many of Europe’s strategic elites, whose thinking on issues such as defense preparedness and high-intensity warfighting severely atrophied following the end of the Cold War. Others, however, have proven more financially rewarding — and enormously profitable for U.S. defense manufacturers, with Europe now accounting for the largest share (35 percent) of all U.S. arms exports. Furthermore, the United States has reaped a number of sizable benefits from its overwhelming dominance of the European security architecture, from its continuous access to some of the world’s finest and most strategically positioned basing infrastructure, to its ability to play a largely unchallenged lead role in shaping the decisions and priorities of the trans-Atlantic alliance. If the current model of U.S. dominance does yield to a more equal partnership, certain costs will inevitably be attached, and those costs will not solely be borne by the Europeans. As one Brookings report rightly notes, the old model, whereby “Europe wanted autonomy without paying for its defense, while the [United States] wanted Europe to pay more without truly letting it lead,” is no longer fit for purpose.

And indeed, the dual stressor of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine has served a useful clarifying function — casting a harsh light on many of Europe’s initial weaknesses (the brittleness of certain aspects of its defense industrial base, the alarming atrophy of its munition stocks, its lack of coordinated contingency planning for protracted, high-intensity warfare), yet also illuminating some of its emergent strengths. For example, despite the sorry state of its pre-2022 industrial capacity, Europe now outproduces the United States in artillery munition production. In addition to hosting millions of Ukrainian refugees, E.U. countries have trained tens of thousands of Ukrainian troops (albeit sometimes with unequal results) and have collectively provided more economic aid and military assistance to Ukraine than the United States. The European Union has also often been more forward-leaning than the United States with regard to sanctions policy and — given the fact that its pre-war trade with Russia was almost 10 times the size of that between Russia and the United States — is able to bring far more economic pressure to bear. Meanwhile, nearly all European countries have heightened their defense expenditures — and sometimes by considerable amounts — while some have signed ambitious new intra-European security pacts. Many are considering either reinstating conscription or sizably revamping the size and training of their reserves, and previously taboo questions, for example over the nature and quality of a putative independent European nuclear deterrent, are now being openly discussed in interesting, and sometimes even provocative ways.

That being said, enormous challenges lie ahead. One recent International Institute for Strategic Studies report thus assesses the financial costs and defense-industrial requirements for Europe to defend itself without the United States at close to one trillion dollars. As of now, Europe would struggle to generate an independent division-size force for Ukraine, and according to another analysis, would need to form approximately 50 new brigades — many of them heavily armored — to make up for the absence of in-theater American troops (and their reinforcements) in the event of a direct confrontation with Russia. Long-called-for investments in Europe’s infrastructure are now required more than ever in order to enhance trans-continental military mobility. And while Europe’s defense industries have demonstrated an encouraging ability to ramp up capacity, its militaries are still overly dependent on U.S. equipment in certain critical areas, from advanced air defense systems to long-range precision strike, fifth-generation aircraft, and exquisite intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities. These capability gaps remain a huge challenge that European states will need to work diligently to overcome through intensified indigenous research, development, and co-production efforts.

Fulfilling Sully’s Vision of Strategic Unity

In the Grand Design, Sully alluded to some of the same challenges that bedevil European rearmament today — most notably the fact that duplication across disparate national defense industries means that much of Europe’s spending is wasted. Commenting on the need for greater economies of scale, the 17th-century military planner commented on how, provided it was better pooled and organized, Europe’s defense would appear “inconsiderable and little burdensome” in comparison to the unnecessary expenses individual European states “kept on foot to awe their neighbors.” In today’s largely pacified Europe, the issue is thankfully not so much one of intra-European balancing as one of industrial fragmentation.

Unfortunately, European leaders also have to balance certain competing political imperatives — and most notably the fact that their citizenries are unlikely to acquiesce to massive hikes in defense expenditure — with all its associated tradeoffs with regard to social security and public benefits — absent a confirmation that much of said expenditure will be funneled back into their local economies. This is an uncomfortable reality that disgruntled U.S. policymakers will eventually have to wrap their heads around. Notwithstanding the recent Hague Summit declaration’s call for greater trans-Atlantic defense industrial cooperation, large-scale European rearmament efforts such as the 170 billion dollar ReArm Europe Plan are going to focus as much as possible on supporting local industries, technologies, and jobs, rather than those of a more distant and disinvested partner across the Atlantic. Similarly, NATO’s recent 5 percent defense spending pledge includes 1.5 percent on somewhat nebulously defined — and purely domestic — security-related expenses, ranging from civil preparedness to physical infrastructure or cybersecurity. This was probably the only way to render the 5 percent pledge politically palatable to European allies.

Once again, the voluntary ceding by the United States of a certain measure of primacy — be it for sound strategic reasons — can never be entirely cost-free. Nor will this transition unfold overnight, notwithstanding the seeming recent acceleration in geopolitical shock events. It is therefore in America’s interests to maintain a steady level of military support long enough for Europe to remedy its key deficiencies in a coordinated and systematic fashion, rather than in dread-filled agitation over the possibility of a precipitate U.S. withdrawal. Only then, perhaps, can the old world finally fulfil that fugacious fantasy of strategic unity — a dream once conjured up by a weary, battle-scarred aristocrat in the cavernous stone halls and flickering chambers of his Loire Valley castle.

Iskander Rehman is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, where he focuses on applied history, grand strategy, and defense issues. In his spare time, he is writing a book on the evolution of French statecraft under Sully, Richelieu, and Mazarin.

Image: Peter Paul Rubens via Wikimedia Commons