U.S. Revives Concerns About European Defense Plans, Rattling NATO Allies
A top aide to Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Katie Wheelbarger, the principal deputy assistant secretary for international security affairs, said
that fitting Pesco and NATO together was a key part of Mr. Mattis’s conversations in Brussels with defense ministers last week.
Only last November, American and NATO officials embraced the bloc’s plans, under a program called the Permanent Structured Cooperation on Security and Defense, or Pesco, to spend more money on defense and to do it more efficiently, on national programs
that would enhance European combat capacity and reduce overlapping national equipment that does not always work together with those of other allies.
United States said that They have made it clear they don’t want a strong Europe, but see Europe as a competitor, which can only please Russia.
Last week, the American ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, warned
that Washington did not want Pesco or a new European Defense Fund "to be a protectionist vehicle for E.U." "We’re going to watch carefully, because if that becomes the case, then it could splinter the strong security alliance that we have," she added, referring to NATO.
R. Nicholas Burns, a former American ambassador to NATO now at Harvard, said, "It is a mistake for the U.S. to make this an issue." The real task is getting Europeans to spend more efficiently
and usefully on defense, he said, given the threats from Russia.
The German defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, said "We want to remain trans-Atlantic
but also more European," on defense, so that Europeans can shape the international order.
Daniel Flott, a defense expert with the European Union Institute for Security Studies, a research group, said
that he was "surprised to hear the return to the language of duplication, which we thought we had put behind us." Looking at the early projects for Pesco, he said he saw no duplication with NATO’s.
