NATO on a path of no return

BarcelonaEurope in 2025, after The EU has put 800 billion euros on the table to articulate defense, seems to be rapidly moving away from the shadow of the Europe of 1939, which surrendered to Hitler at the hands of Chamberlain and Daladier. Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron represent a limit for both Trump and Putin, beyond their weaknesses and short-sightedness. And NATO? What will become of the increasingly distant Alliance between the US and Europe? I would say that NATO is gradually moving from an anxious impulse to an agonizing one, despite the insistence of its Secretary General, Mark Rutte, to convince Donald Trump of the EU's effort "to put 800 billion euros at the service of NATO." This while Rutte laughed at the US president's insinuations of annexing Greenland.But is Mark Rutte really convinced that the 800 billion euros will go to a NATO controlled both logistically and technically by Trump's US?

The expressive images of Ursula von der Leyen celebrating the huge windfall are very thought-provoking. These sequences are not accompanied by a detailed geostrategic exposition that helps to situate this huge investment in EU defense. Will all these millions go to NATO, or do they foreshadow its alternative? Von der Leyen doesn't clarify. She avoids talking about it. Is someone in Brussels thinking of resurrecting something similar to the Western European Union, born in 1954 and dissolved in 2011, without ever having been filled with defensive structures? And what about the European Defense Agency—which is not even mentioned—and which remains an empty body with 180 civil servants? Will NATO mutate into something different than what we have known, when it no longer has any ties to the US, as both Donald Trump and Elon Musk have suggested?

Whether NATO is at risk as a defensive platform that emerged from the Allied victory in World War II is a question that is beginning to be analyzed by the think tanks Europeans. The Spanish state-owned Elcano Royal Institute makes assessments that should not be overlooked: researcher Félix Arteaga says that at the next NATO summit, in June in The Hague, the US cannot turn a blind eye to Europe's extraordinary economic effort. And he warns that if Trump's men were to turn their backs on the Alliance, the EU would have already sent the message of its readiness to defend Europe. However, the question of how to rearm itself outside the US war industry weighs heavily on the EU.

The silences and calculated ambiguities have been shattered by the Financial Times spreading that for now several European countries – the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries – are reportedly studying a five to ten year plan for the US to leave NATO. Formally, it would be a future proposal from the Alliance to convince Washington how well it would be to focus on Asia and other geostrategic spaces.

The scoop from the Financial Times tune in with The Coalition of the Willing, formulated with four points by British Prime Minister Keir StarmerThe objective is the defense of Ukraine; it is necessary to intensify pressure on Russia and oversee a peace agreement that will prevent future invasions; and, finally, develop the "coalition of the willing" made up of all the countries that commit to it. A platform of eighteen countries—including Australia and New Zealand—which inevitably tempts us to draw analogies with the creation, in the midst of war, of what would later be known as "the allies," the core of a NATO that seems to have embarked on a path of no return.