France-Germany jet plans crash: Can Europe end reliance on US for security?
Despite the collapse of the bellwether fighter jet venture FCAS, there is optimism about the future of Europe’s strategic autonomy. France and Germany have announced
Despite the collapse of the bellwether fighter jet venture FCAS, there is optimism about the future of Europe’s strategic autonomy. France and Germany have announced this week that they are ditching a landmark project to jointly develop a sixth-generation fighter jet. French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed on Monday that the project is being terminated, in what is being seen as a major blow to efforts to boost defence cooperation between European Union states, a key issue amid uncertainty cast by United States President Donald Trump over the readiness of the US to help defend its NATO allies. Trump’s disdain for Europe’s reliance on the US has been building for years. Since 2019, the US president has been flirting with the idea of obtaining Greenland. His remarks about his desire for the island, a self-governing territory which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, built to a crescendo at the start of this year, with European leaders signalling their displeasure with the idea and Trump even threatening additional trade tariffs on those countries standing in his way. Both Denmark and Greenland have repeatedly stated that the island is not for sale. At one point, before Trump backed down after agreeing to a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland during a January meeting with NATO’s Mark Rutte in Davos, it seemed as if the US might even try to take the island by force – a notion that would have been inconceivable before the era of Donald Trump. The threat of military action set off alarm bells in European capitals. In addition to all this, Trump has withdrawn much of the US’s support for Ukraine and has consistently berated his European NATO partners for not spending enough on their own defence for years, outright urging them to reduce their reliance on the US for military protection. More recently, Europe’s refusal to join the US-Israeli war on Iran, which began with strikes on Tehran on February 28, has further irked the US president and deepened concerns that a widening transatlantic rift could weaken the continent’s security and embolden Russia. Until this week, a counterweight to these burgeoning concerns was in hand – the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project, a landmark pact to jointly develop a next-generation fighter jet involving France, Germany and Spain. But disagreements over whether France’s Dassault Aviation, or Airbus, which also represents Germany and Spain, should take the lead on the project have ultimately led to its collapse. Analysts, however, say all hope is not lost: despite the dissolution of the bellwether venture, Europeans can indeed become strategically autonomous, they say – but the road there runs through shared military integration, rather than shared political aspiration.
The BriefWire