Calls for the strengthening of the EU and NATO
May 18th, 2015A left-wing commentator fears that Europe’s security cannot be maintained without stronger transatlantic cooperation. A liberal columnist urges the setting up of a separate EU military force rather than relying on NATO.
Eastern Europe cannot trust NATO’s promises to defend the region in the event of of a military crisis, Tamás Mészáros writes in Diplomaci blog. Commenting on US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Russia and the meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers in Turkey, the left-wing analyst notes that NATO lacks unity in its stance towards Russia. “Neither the EU nor NATO were prepared to react to Russia’s intervention in Crimea,” Mészáros remarks and likens the current situation to the 1938 annexation of Sudetenland by Nazi Germany. He goes on to mention that NATO foreign ministers all emphasize the need for closer cooperation and make fools of themselves by singing hand in hand the song ‘We are the World’, while the transatlantic alliance could do nothing if there were to be a Russian backed armed uprising in the Baltics.
We are lame ducks without a strong military force, Árpád W. Tóta asserts in Heti Világgazdaság. The liberal columnist thinks that European nation states cannot defend their territorial sovereignty from external threats. European countries for long have assumed that Russian would not dare to risk military intervention, but Tóta thinks that in light of recent events in Ukraine, this assumption should not be taken for granted any longer. In order to defend Europe, he suggests, the EU needs to set up its own military force rather than rely on US-dominated NATO. “In the last world war, external help came several years late, and only when a crazy empire had already struck down nation states one by one – and in the end, half of the continent became subject to Russian domination,” Tóta remarks. In peaceful times, a common European military could be used for civilian purposes in the case of floods and other natural disasters, he adds.