The European Union’s strategic autonomy: trapped in the United States-NATO duo

Abstract

The article aims to demonstrate that the European Union’s “strategic autonomy” in the military sphere is a project that has accompanied the history of the regional integration process from the beginning, hampered (trapped) by the hegemony over Europe that the United States has exercised in this area through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a project that has been revitalized since the Russo-Ukrainian war. In the first section (conceptual clarifications) the conceptual orthodoxy of the word “strategy” in the military sphere is maintained in four compound terms: strategic actor, strategic alliance, strategic autonomy and nuclear deterrence strategy. The second section focuses on the historical debate between two opposing political tendencies: “Atlanticist Europe”, anchored in the United States-NATO binomial, and “Europeanist Europe”, which excludes the United States and Canada. The third section deals with seven challenges facing the Common Security and Defense Policy (CSDP) in its progress towards strategic autonomy: coherence, consensus, political will, new treaties, a European army, nuclear deterrence and NATO. The conclusions detail the lack of coherence and consensus in the CSDP.