European strategic autonomy has been discussed prominently in the context of defence issues and the EU’s relationship with NATO and the US. Despite being a contemporary phenomenon in the EU’s foreign policy debate, it has only recently become of central importance in academic analysis. The broader concept of strategic autonomy has evolved from a foreign-policy principle in the EU’s 2016 Global Strategy, to the economic realm with the bloc’s new commitment to ‘open strategic autonomy’ in 2020. This article will examine the newly created imbalances in US-EU relations and how they are impacting the vision of strategic autonomy in Europe. Under the growing weight of the US in the relationship, Europeans feel increasingly incapable of acting, while the US feels increasingly less interested in what Europeans think about security issues. Under Joe Biden’s administration, there was a willingness and forbearance to keep the transatlantic partnership with Europe intact. This has now fundamentally changed, for example with President Donald Trump’s unilateral approaches to the Gaza and Iran conflicts and the resolution of the Ukraine conflict. John J. Mearsheimer’s offensive realism positions the international system as irredeemably anarchic, compelling states to pursue power maximisation to ensure survival. Offensive realism also offers insight into the structural constraints on the EU’s geopolitical ambitions as anarchy rewards power accumulation and penalises dependency. The article will also analyse the most divisive issues confronting the EU and the Franco-German alliance, which have roots in the worldview of the two countries. German post-war identity rests partly on a military alliance with the US and partly on a strong aversion to public debt; President Emmanuel Macron’s vision of a sovereign Europe is a logical extension of long-standing French trade protectionism and ambivalence towards a permanent role in Europe for the US. Resolving these different outlooks is now key to the EU’s future and to European strategic autonomy.
John Ryan (Wed,) studied this question.