Can Europe and Turkey Work Together?
Turkey has expressed interest in becoming a part of a new European security architecture.
Against a backdrop of the mayhem caused by the first 100 days of the Trump administration, Europe is faced with a number of awkward choices. First and foremost, it needs to create a European security architecture in the event that America withdraws from or substantially diminishes its presence in NATO.
American Vice President JD Vance made it plain in his address to the Munich Security Conference in February when he told participants that in the coming years, Europe must step up in a big way to provide for its own defense. But this is nothing new. This has been in the offing for years since Donald Trump’s first period of office.
In 2014, at the NATO summit in Wales in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the member states agreed to commit 2 percent of their GDP to defense spending. Nevertheless, in 2017, during his first term in office, President Trump made it plain that all members of the alliance must pay their fair share of defense spending.
Three years later, Trump blasted Berlin for low defense spending, and the Pentagon planned to withdraw almost 12,000 troops from Germany. In January of this year, Trump planned to cut the U.S. troop presence in Europe by about 20 percent, or 20,000 troops, as part of a review of Washington’s commitment to protecting Europe. This number was later reported to be 10,000 in April. However, it was Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 that really galvanized Europe into action.
For example, in July last year, the Atlantic Council noted a surge in defense spending, with Poland in the lead but with southern European countries (Portugal, Spain, and Italy) still remiss.
In Denmark, which plays a strategic role as a doorkeeper to the Baltic, foreign minister Jeppe Kofod, in 2020, blithely stated, “The USA is the guarantor of our security—also in the future. The idea that there is an alternative to our security without the USA is naive.”
In 2024, Denmark was expected to live up to NATO’s goal of 2 percent on defense. Still, in February, there was a sudden surge in spending (the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen called on the defense chief to “buy, buy, buy”), which is expected to bring this up to more than 3 percent. However, in January, Trump upped the ante to 5 percent, a point echoed by NATO’s secretary-general Mark Rutte.
The former German chancellor Olaf Scholz was spot on when he described Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a “zeitenwende,” a historic turning point. In 1905, the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” and it is with a horrid sense of déjà vu that events unfold.
In 1936, Nazi Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in defiance of the Versailles and Locarno Treaties. In 1938, it annexed Austria. Later that year, in Munich, Britain and France ceded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to Germany, and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain proclaimed “Peace in our time.” One year later, Germany invaded Poland, and World War Two began.
A similar pattern has repeated itself in Europe. Smarting from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia took control of Transnistria in Moldova, then Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and finally, in 2014, annexed Crimea. Then, Russia’s attention turned to the Donbas region of Ukraine, where Donetsk and Luhansk were recognized as independent states.
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, Putin cooked up a 7,000-word justification for Russia’s claim to Ukraine, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” published in July 2021. Anne Applebaum in Autocracy, Inc. found a different rationale; shortly after the invasion, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov stated: “This is not about Ukraine at all, but the world order. The current crisis is a fateful, epoch-making moment in modern history. It reflects the battle over what the world order will look like.”
Robert Ellis
Robert Ellis is a Turkey analyst and commentator. He is also an international advisor at RIEAS (Research Institute for European and American Studies) in Athens.
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