Summary
UK Labour leader Keir Starmer reaffirmed to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to NATO membership.
This stance contrasts with recent U.S. signals, where Donald Trump suggested potential concessions to Russia, including accepting Ukraine’s non-NATO status.
European leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, have criticized such concessions, insisting on Ukraine’s right to negotiate its future.
The UK also imposed new sanctions on Russian officials and entities.
Couldn’t EU and other countries form their own defense pact with whoever they want? What makes them specifically need to be in nato?
NATO has a lot of infrastructure already including designated response forces, a command structure etc. In addition to that, a European alliance exists(CSDP), though unsurprisingly, it’s not the same as Europe’s NATO efforts, as it would have been basically duplicated effort since most EU members are also part of NATO.
An example of coordinated European defence is the fact that the Netherland’s armed forces are now under command of the German military. So efforts are underway.
CSDP is specifically a EU thing and result of the French drive for a EU army… which it arguably is: Political and strategic command, check, even if it has to outsource much military matters to the national armies. It’s been boosted quite a bit since the first Trump term and by now even the most atlanticist Atlanticist isn’t working against it any more. Also, the US isn’t working against it any more, they were worried about a EU army sidelining the likes of Turkey. This gets often overlooked, especially by Trumpists, how much the US invested into not having to compete in security matters with a big European blob.
That’s different from a potential European defence treaty, though: Not all of Europe is in the EU and there’s definitely a couple of NATO allies we’d like to keep, and others to add.
That’s actually a separate thing, that’s bilateral cooperation, not EU level. Long story short the Dutch land forces were so tiny it just didn’t make sense to have an independent strategic command. Also Dutch is a dialect anyway so it doesn’t make sense for them to have an army. They’ll probably definitely want to keep their fleet, even when there’s a EU army.
I didn’t want to imply the NL forces things happened under CSDP; it was just an example of military cooperation between member states.
I just wanted to give some examples of European military cooperation that’s not NATO as the other comments implied nothing exists / it would fail due to national interests or whatever.
I hope we’ll see more cooperation in the future
Wow, how did the Dutch hurt you so bad? Weinreich would be proud
Their football team exists. Worse, it still did not surrender. Nothing but total annihilation or Anschluss to the DFB is acceptable.
Probably, but it would be a lot of bickering first.