Description
European strategic autonomy and the drafting of both NATO’s new Strategic Concept and the EU Strategic Compass fall into a time of growing great power rivalry, a changing threat landscape, and growing complexity and unpredictability that all require more coordinated responses. The 2016 and 2018 Declarations have been milestones for EU-NATO relations, cooperation is yet not sound. The emergence of European strategic autonomy within the EU has initially been perceived with a distaste from both the United States and the NATO alliance. Yet, strategic autonomy in the European context is needed more profoundly with the lack of reliability and trust across the Atlantic (Binnendijk and Vershbow 2021). Understood as the capacity to act based on its own interests and values, and with an appropriate level of ambition and the required capabilities (Ewers-Peters 2021), this article elaborates on the possible implications of European strategic autonomy for the EU-NATO relationship. It thus argues that European strategic autonomy can serve as an enabler for enhanced EU-NATO cooperation, allows for a more equal partnership with an increase of the EU’s level of ambition, and it will result in a more coordinated division of labour emphasising their comparative advantages and allowing for joint defence planning.
