Europe needs to be better prepared to defend itself, the former Swedish premier warned
Europe should prepare to shoulder a significant financial burden for the war in Ukraine and ready itself for tension with the US over relations with China if Donald Trump wins the race for the White House in November, Carl Bildt has told Euronews.
A former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister who currently co-chairs think tank the European Council of Foreign Relations, Bildt spoke to Euronews on the fringes of Forum Alpbach, the Tyrol-based political congress.
Trump “is unpredictable in the extreme, but clearly there will be considerable strains across the Atlantic” should he win the Presidential election, Bildt said.
“We [in Europe] have our views on territorial integrity that are important from our point of view, and he doesn’t really care, so strain there will be.”
“We Europeans will have to step up our financial support for Ukraine,” said Bildt. He estimated that the cost would amount to between 0.2% and 0.3% of EU GDP, but said “We can do it if the political will is there.”
Bildt also flagged the EU-China relationship as a potential cause of transatlantic tension if Trump wins.
“He will increase tariffs of all sorts [on China] and that’s going to have a very negative effect on global trade,” Bildt said.
“Will Europe follow America in having massive tariff increases on China? I don’t think we will, and I don’t think we should, because that would have a negative effect on our economy as well, and that might well increase tensions across the Atlantic further.”
Bildt said the EU needs to develop greater independent defence capability. “We are more dependent on the Americans now than we have been for a very long time,” he said, flagging nuclear deterrence in particular.
“Putin is counting on his nuclear capabilities for political pressure and other reasons, making exercises and talking about it,” he said, cautioning that Europe can currently only counterbalance that threat with US capability.
Increased intelligence, command and control capabilities and greater ground forces are needed too, he said, “because at the end of the day war is decided by what happens on the ground — we see this happening in Poland and Germany, but clearly much more needs to be done.”
Ursula von der Leyen, the European Commission President recently elected to serve a second term, has promised to bolster defence policy under her second mandate – but that won’t be easy, Bildt warns.
“It will be quite a tough task to define the mandate and the scope of the defence commissioner, in competition with the work that is done within NATO and the priorities given to the decisions of the national governments.”
The role of the United Kingdom is also problematic, he added, as it is “one of if not the most important [military] intervention powers that we have in Europe, and they are outside of the EU”.
Since a lot of European defence industry is highly integrated with the UK’s, “when it comes to forging an EU and European identity in defence policy, we need to sort out the relationship with the UK”, Bildt said.
