Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has never been known as a retiring soul. His famous eccentricity notwithstanding (he would mess up his hair before a public appearance to appear "normal"), Johnson was a very good politician and a persuasive speaker.
Since retiring, he has written a strong defense of his career in his autobiography, Unleashed, and has gone on a global speaking tour warning that the world cannot afford the West's decline. He remains a vocal advocate for Western support of Ukraine and recently visited President Lai Ching-te Taiwan, where he emphasized the need for Western nations to stand with the island against pressure from China.
Johnson took his European friends to task in the Wall Street Journal, where he criticized them for failing to support Ukraine while paying lip service to European "independence" from the U.S.
"We can’t stand Donald Trump, European politicians say. We can’t trust Washington anymore. We can no longer rely on American military leadership, and so—this is the hour of Europe! It’s time for European strategic autonomy!," he wrote, summarizing the attitude of European leaders.
Johnson notes the tearful ovations that greeted Mark Carney’s speech at Davos, "Principled and Pragmatic: Canada's Path," where Canada was apparently going to lead the free world. Carney’s speech received a standing ovation largely because it allowed Europeans to pretend that someone besides the U.S. could lead the free world, and because Europeans desperately want someone—anyone else—to lead the free world, but not them.
So they have been chiming in: Friedrich Merz, Emmanuel Macron, even the U.K.’s beleaguered Keir Starmer. It’s time for some kind of stand-alone European military effort, they say, or at least more collaboration.
My friends, I agree—but on what are you proposing to collaborate? We hear something about a European nuclear umbrella, apparently to be offered by France to Germany. We hear about joint defense procurement, but then we have been hearing this kind of thing for 50 years, and nothing has come of it.
These debates are trivial, and irrelevant, because right now Europe has a golden opportunity to assert its strategic independence. If Europeans want the chance to seize leadership from the U.S. and do things differently, then this is it.
"There is a real war on our Continent—as opposed to a nonexistent U.S. 'threat to Greenland,'” Johnson wrote. "It is a cruel and hideous war in which Vladimir Putin is increasingly torturing the Ukrainian population, bombing their electricity supply, so that women and children are freezing to death in temperatures of 15 below," he added.
Does Europe actually want this war to end? Then what are we doing about it? If we care about the suffering of these Ukrainians, as we say we do, then for God’s sake let’s give them the means to take out the factories that make Russia’s drones. Why are the Germans still sitting on their arsenal of Taurus cruise missiles? Fears of “escalation”?
The history of the war so far is that the only person who fears escalation is Mr. Putin himself. If we wanted to show real strategic European autonomy, we would launch a concerted operation to impound the shadow fleet—the sanctions-busting oil tankers that are helping Mr. Putin to fund his war machine. Will this crop of European leaders have the guts?
Johnson is urging that a European military force be sent to Ukraine —"to one or more of the parts of Ukraine that are completely safe" — to demonstrate that only Ukraine can invite foreign troops to operate on its soil.
This is a typical aggressive idea by Johnson. Is it sound policy?
I think Putin would call the Europeran's bluff within 24 hours of any force being deployed. Johnson knows that, too.
"The whole thing is beyond pathetic," he writes. "European statesmen say they want strategic autonomy. Liberal Europeans clap their perfumed hankies to their noses and proclaim their revulsion at the boorishness of the Trump administration," he says. But when the time comes to make "independence" a reality, they scurry back to America.
Unless these European leaders are prepared to do something brave and perhaps very expensive to make good their rhetoric, the best hope for this economically stagnant, welfare-addicted Continent is to maintain the strategy that has worked for the past 100 years and more. That is to do everything we can to persuade Americans of the truth that their security is bound up with ours, and that in return for that commitment we are willing to spend more on defense, and glad to accept the continued reality of American military hegemony in Europe.
That's all that the Europeans have. Continued reliance on the U.S. for their security because they don't really believe that America would abandon them.
Even if a Democratic president is elected in the next 2, 4, or 6 years, the U.S.-Europe relationship is permanently altered. We are no longer going to pay 75% of Europe's security bill. NATO is a dead letter. Our security may be bound to Europe on one level, but the idea that we're joined cheek to jowl is no longer true.
The Europeans had better start listening to Johnson if they want to survive to the mid-21st century.
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