NATO Shifts to EU Mode: Rasmussen Says

Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has presented a security plan that proposes a stronger role for EU in Ukraine as well as in NATO.

Former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen has presented a security plan that proposes a stronger role for EU both in Ukraine and in NATO. Since his term ended, he has worked in the consultancy Rasmussen Global that he founded in 2014.

Anders Fogh Rasmussen following the meeting of the NATO-Ukraine Commission in 2014. Photo: NATO

The Rasmussen plan, published earlier this December and presented for Zelensky and other actors, starts by recognizing the facts on the ground and works out what needs to be done.

Currently, Europe provides more than half of all military and non-military aid to Ukraine. However, the president elect has been clear that the current formulation is and will remain unacceptable. Europe must now come forward with a new funding proposal if it is to convince the Trump administration to stay engaged in the long-term—both in Ukraine and across Europe. This should involve a gradual transition to a 70-30 burden-sharing formula.

European allies should commit to spending 3 per cent of GDP on defense. Of that, Ukraine should receive 100 billion euros per year. Current US military aid is average 40-50 billion per year.

Rasmussen does not comment on the Ukrainian analysis and reporting that only 10% of the announced US military donations have arrived so far this year. For EU, the delays in delivering are also significant, for instance the Estonian initiative to have EU deliver one million heavy artillery shells within 12 months, took 20 months to reach that goal. See this post:

According to the plan, it will cost the Europeans around 100 billion dollars a year to raise defense spending to 3% of GDP, of which 0.5% (one sixth of the spend) will be used directly on support for Ukraine. Some or large parts of it will come from Europe finally seizing the frozen Russian assets estimated at 300 billion euros, which mostly reside in the EU, and utilize them for direct funding of Ukraine’s defense.

A coalition of European states, led by France and the United Kingdom, should deploy military trainers and advisers to western Ukraine. This multinational coalition would support Ukrainian forces now and demonstrate to Washington that Europe will shoulder the burden for future peace enforcement deployments. This train-and-advise mission should be augmented by border NATO allies extending their air defence capabilities to cover western Ukraine and free up Ukrainian air defence assets for use where they are needed most.

Ukraine in NATO

The best way to give Ukraine security guarantees is to grant NATO membership for the country as a whole, within the internationally recognized borders. Rasmussen has proposed before, that the effective membership is within the area actually controlled by Kyiv, but his security plan says the aim is to recover the currently occupied territory by negotiations or show of force.

The most effective way is to grant membership because if Putin is faced by a de facto status, he will lose his incentive to continue the war. When Putin understands that Ukrainian NATO membership cannot be avoided, it will be futile to burn his already scarce resources in Ukraine.

Zelensky himself said in a recent interview with Sky News:

If we want to stop the hot phase of the war, we need to have the part of Ukraine that we control under the umbrella of NATO. We need to do it quickly. And as for the occupied parts of Ukraine, we can get them back diplomatically.

Russia will clearly see this as a concession and act accordingly by affirming their claims of territory as well as abstaining from Ukrainian NATO membership. It is a clear weakness of the Rasmussen plan that NATO membership requires a unanimous decision by all member countries. We saw how much trouble and delay Turkey and Hungary were able to cause in the process of admitting Finland and Sweden earlier this year. But it is bound to happen, provided that USA and the other major powers in NATO agree that it must happen.

Mutual support EU-USA

Rasmussen explained in a newspaper interview that USA still needs strong and mutually beneficial European relationships in the future, especially regarding China, which can only be achieved by standing up to Russia. He says that European leaders must explain to Trump "that Ukraine should not be his Afghanistan. He should not be beaten by Putin. He should ensure peace through strength and seek a permanent peace solution. And that can only happen by getting Ukraine into NATO."

The EU has adopted 14 Russia sanctions packages since 2022. However, enforcement has been a challenge, including when closing loopholes to re-exports from third countries. When it comes to China, European policy has been confusingly fragmented as member states and institutions seek to thread the needle between Washington and Beijing. Europe must more clearly align with United States and the new administration’s broader foreign policy aims in the Pacific in order to secure the continued support of the United States in Europe.

Europe should simultaneously join the United States in sanctioning Chinese companies that support Russia’s war effort, as well as impose secondary sanctions along the lines of those already imposed by the US. The European Union should also appoint a tariff tsar to work closely with their US counterpart and coordinate responses to aggressive Chinese trade policy and product dumping. Taken together, these measures should be part of a renewed effort by European leaders to make clear to Beijing that any attempt to change the status quo in the Taiwan Strait by force would be met with a strong, united, and coordinated response from Europe.

What EU needs right now is leadership to carry out this kind of suggested agenda. The Rasmussen report can be a start. However, the first thing is to make EU leaders realize the new realities of rising importance of China and persistent aggressiveness of Russia. The collapse of the much touted EU green deal ought to be the final eye-opener. Taking up the competition from China, regarding key electrical technology and monopolistic raw materials, requires a strong position along with USA. And vice versa, USA needs European allies to stand up to China in the trade and industry war.