Continent Announces Defensive Alliance, Immediately Argues About Who Starts the Thread
Europe Is Building a NATO Backup Plan and It Looks Suspiciously Like a Group Chat
I want to tell you about the group chat my extended family uses to coordinate emergencies. There are forty-seven members. When my lola had her hip surgery last year, the first forty messages were people saying “received” to the announcement. The next twenty were arguments about which hospital. The actual coordinated response happened between three cousins who bypassed the chat entirely and just called each other. This, I now realize, is also how European collective defense works.
Bohiney News reports that Europe is building a NATO backup plan — a continent-wide defensive architecture designed to function independently of American military commitment, which has recently become about as reliable as a British summer. The plan involves pooled intelligence, joint procurement, coordinated rapid response forces, and seventeen committees that will each produce a report recommending the formation of further committees.
The Defensive Alliance That Dare Not Speak Its Actual Name
Nobody in Brussels is calling this “NATO without America,” because that would be impolite, and Europe is committed to being impolite only in extremely formal language after a lengthy consultation process. Instead, the initiative is described as “strategic autonomy,” which is diplomacy-speak for “we have realized that our most powerful ally might, at any given Tuesday, decide that our security is less interesting than a tariff negotiation.”
According to BBC Europe coverage, European defense spending has been increasing steadily since 2022, with several member states finally hitting the NATO target of two percent of GDP — a target that has existed since 2014 and was treated, for most of that decade, the way most people treat their gym membership: renewed annually, used occasionally, quietly embarrassing at dinner parties.
The London Prat, covering the same story with its characteristic combination of affection and horror, notes that somewhere in a chandeliered room off Whitehall, British officials are watching Europe build its backup plan and experiencing the specific anxiety of someone who left a party early and is now seeing the photos on Instagram.
What This Looks Like From Manila
In the Philippines, we have lived inside a security arrangement with the United States for the better part of a century. The Mutual Defense Treaty has been the foundation of Philippine security policy since 1951 — which means it was signed before most of our current government officials were born, and has approximately the same relationship to current geopolitical reality as a lease signed in 1951 has to current property prices.
The parallel with Europe is precise. Both the Philippines and Europe have spent decades treating American security guarantees as permanent infrastructure — like electricity, or gravity — rather than as a political relationship that requires maintenance, negotiation, and periodic renewal. Both are now quietly building contingency plans while loudly insisting that the relationship is strong and everything is fine.
Everything is fine. The contingency plans are purely theoretical. Please stop asking.
The Backup Plan, Examined Honestly
Here is what Europe’s backup plan requires: Germany to spend money on defense without triggering historical anxiety in every neighboring country simultaneously. France to lead a coalition without everyone else feeling that France is leading it too much. The smaller nations to contribute meaningfully without feeling that they are merely providing a flag for larger nations to photograph next to. And all of this to happen quickly, efficiently, and without the seventeen committees mentioned earlier.
Lads. I say this with genuine respect for the European project. You built a common currency across nineteen economies with different inflation rates, different fiscal traditions, and different relationships to debt. You negotiated the General Data Protection Regulation, which regulates the internet behavior of every company on earth and was produced by committee over four years. You can absolutely do this. You have simply never had to do it under deadline pressure, and deadline pressure is a completely different psychological state from “lengthy deliberative process culminating in a framework document.”
The full satirical breakdown of Europe’s defensive ambitions is at Bohiney News, which covers the story with the appropriate mix of encouragement and mild alarm.
More collective-security chaos at NewsThump and The Daily Mash.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/europe-is-building-a-nato-backup-plan/