Europe is an American power — it just doesn’t know it

American and European interests in one another are a constant across the past five centuries. From Spanish possessions’ participation in the global Habsburg and later Bourbon empires starting in the 16th century, to the roles played by French and English possessions in every major war (and revolution) of their mother countries starting in the 17th century, to the myriad minor possessions’ parts in the affairs of the Netherlands, Sweden and so on, the sweep of half a millennium reveals the Americas not as an arena apart from Europe, but as an extension of Europe itself.

This extension is not merely cultural, nor is it bound by proximate politics: the geography and economy of the Atlantic world compels its eastern and western halves to each engage in the affairs of the other. When men of the Plymouth colony sailed east to lend their arms to Cromwell; when a general European war began as a British colonial officer named George Washington blundered into a massacre in the Pennsylvania wilderness; when the young United States managed to fight both sides in the Napoleonic wars between 1798 and 1815; and when British and French arms came within a hairsbreadth of intervention in the American Civil War, an enduring phenomenon of interest and entanglement was illuminated. Contrary to popular historical narrative on both sides of the ocean, it was not the world wars of the 20th century that bound America and Europe. The connection was forged centuries before.

On the part of the United States, this enduring interest has been formalised into both institution and policy across the past century. The US is bound to Europe – and perhaps more significantly, has bound Europe to itself – through trade, through military hegemony, through the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and beyond. This may seem a curious moment to affirm it, even as the US-Europe relationship descends to a nadir driven by the Iranian war, the Greenland crisis, the Ukrainian war, tariffs, and more. Yet these affairs, significant as they are, take place in a context in which the Americans are for the first time demanding that Europe be affirmatively European. To miss this is to misunderstand the entire American project in Europe now, branded as ‘civilisational’, which is, from the American standpoint, an effort to ensure that Europe is worth defending – and also not, in the long run, a threat to the US itself. The American calculus, buried beneath current events, is that Europe in its social and civic transformations – weakened defences married to societal shifts uprooting its nations from their civic inheritances – risks becoming an exporter of disorder and instability on par with the Middle East and Latin America. Rather than passively observe that outcome, they will actively oppose it.

Yet to focus exclusively upon this is to miss the other half of the phenomenon, which is that the European interest in America and the Americas is equally strong, and arguably more so. Four European nations have either territorial possessions or associated nations in the Americas. The Kingdom of the Netherlands has three constituent countries and other territories in the Caribbean. France has three overseas départements and other collectivités. Greenland is a realm of the Danish kingdom. The United Kingdom’s interests are the most expansive, with various overseas territories in the Caribbean and South Atlantic, and an array of Commonwealth nations throughout the hemisphere, of which Canada is the most significant by nearly every metric. A fifth nation, Spain, has no remaining territory in the hemisphere but retains expansive cultural and economic ties to its own erstwhile American possessions. These footholds alone commend to the European nations, both individually and collectively, an active interest in the Americas.

That obvious commendation is, however, inadequate to compel action. The general European failure to grasp its own interests has led them, for the most part, to regard their American territories as mostly remnants of empire, to be managed or devolved. The major exception is France, which actively leverages French Guiana in South America as a hub of its own space industry, and also as an arena for military training. In this author’s experience, only French diplomatic personnel have ever spoken, in person, on the proactive defence of French territory in the Americas. For the Dutch and the British, the topic never arises. Nor did it with the Danes until the Greenland crisis, versus the Americans, of the past several months – and then it was mostly French military power upon which they called. France has a modern history of action in the Americas – it was the 1941 Free French takeover of Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, just off the Newfoundland coast, that in part catalysed Charles de Gaulle’s ascent to national leadership – and the question is less why France acts than why France’s European peers largely do not.

It is not as if the American possessions of Britain, Denmark and the Netherlands carry with them neither strategic issues nor strategic risk. It is quite the opposite: as the recent Greenland affair shows, Europe’s American territories can command the interest of powers both within the Americas and well outside of them. The lesson for Copenhagen is clear. For London, the South Atlantic islands, chief among them the Falklands archipelago, constitute a standing risk of war with a close-by irredentist power that could plausibly assert localised military superiority in the mid-term future. The Commonwealth nations, to the extent that Britain retains an interest in them, expand the strategic burden: Canadian defence, although long since indigenised, is abruptly a compelling topic; Guyana is under renewed threat from Venezuelan claims to the Essequibo; and British commitment has been essential to guaranteeing the independence of Belize versus Guatemalan claims for nearly half a century. It is furthermore worth noting that of the two nations in the Western Hemisphere that the United States has invaded and occupied in that period, one of them was a Commonwealth realm. Finally, the Dutch retain constituent nations in Curaçao and Aruba directly off the Venezuelan coast – within a locus of hemispheric disorder.

These Caribbean possessions, whether Dutch, British or French, are squarely in the region most affected by the recent American military focus upon the Caribbean basin, in Operations Southern Spear and Absolute Resolve. The latter, in capturing the now-former Venezuelan dictator, disrupted a regime that enabled the importation of even more drugs to Europe than it did to the United States. Yet it was the US, not any European state, that acted. The governments of those three aforementioned European nations responded negatively to Washington’s actions. France positively condemned the Caracas raid (an irony given France’s long record of comparable actions in its African spheres of influence), and the Netherlands suspended local intelligence-sharing in its aftermath. The United Kingdom maintained a studious silence on the raid, even as various British political figures on the left and right condemned it. Britain had already suspended its own regional intelligence cooperation with the Americans before Absolute Resolve, considering Southern Spear beyond the pale of acceptability.

As with the Iranian case, so, too, with the case of the Americas: the United States acts and, incidentally, does so against antagonists of the Europeans, and the Europeans dissociate from the United States.

Events surrounding these European Caribbean possessions reveal the strategic drift at hand in Europe’s American engagement. Despite the existence across centuries of enduring interest in the Americas, today’s European leadership cannot seem to formulate a coherent policy capable of advancing those interests. We are long past the days in which the British implicitly afforded Western-Hemispheric primacy to the Americans, trusting that the Americans would defend British interests there. The benefits of that primacy are assumed and enjoyed – or else the small garrisons in all the European American possessions outside of the French regiments in French Guiana, which are the honourable exception, would be more sizeable – but there is no effort to sustain or support it. The United States, in its Caribbean-basin operations, finds regional support in countries like Panama, the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago, and not in Caribbean possessions of its NATO allies France, Britain and the Netherlands.

All this constitutes a series of strategic contradictions that will in the fullness of time collapse upon themselves. Under the status quo, the best-case scenario for Europe in the Americas is perennial management of its imperial leftovers, coasting on the hemispheric security provided by the United States while maintaining a performative separation from the very source of that protection. To the extent that European powers with American possessions have a conscious strategy in the Americas, this is it. This scenario will not come to pass, both because the imposed risk in places like the Falklands, Greenland and elsewhere will eventually culminate, and because the Americans themselves – in both senses of the demonym – will not allow it. Europeans who expect American contribution to provision of European security will eventually find Americans expecting European contribution to provision of US security.

This American expectation is correct, and it will also not be met. By way of illustration, this author has had conversations in which Spanish officeholders have asked whether the US will support Spain in the defence of their plazas de soberanía on the North African coast, much coveted by Morocco. The response, that Spain ought to build confidence by sending a naval vessel to support American operations in the Caribbean under US Fourth Fleet auspices, is met with rejection at worst, and incomprehension at best. There is little sense on the European side that there is a common cause beyond the contractual, to say nothing of a common interest.

European strategic vision is, as is too often the case, constricted. It would benefit from alertness to possibilities. As Europe seeks to retain the American guarantee that has seen to the general peace on the Continent since May 1945, European leadership ought to consider that it is not merely a consumer of American security. This is not to imply that Europe, and especially the four European powers in the Americas, has no record of reciprocity and support for American security needs: the British, French, Dutch and Danish sacrifices in American efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere testify to a readiness to do exactly this. Americans would do well to remember them more often.

The Americas ought to be a much easier case for European involvement in US-led security efforts because, unlike in the War on Terror conflicts, European territory and citizens are directly involved and at risk. European absence from those efforts, although in the charitable interpretation simply an outcome of policy inattention, also plausibly seems to American eyes to be free-riding, or worse, a deliberate standing apart. NATO is by design – one entered into at American insistence – a geographically limited alliance, and so does not apply in the Caribbean basin. Yet there is something injurious to NATO when the allies within it refuse one another intelligence and aid in an arena of prime importance to one. It is true when the Americans covet Greenland; and it is true when Europeans condemn the American fight against groups now designated as ‘narco-terrorists’.

The European powers ought to consider what, exactly, their possessions in the Americas are for. They are remnants, but with a modicum of strategic vision they could be launchpads. The United States is nearshoring: why would Europe’s American territories not compete and win for that? The United States is pursuing security: why would Europe’s American territories not contribute to that? The United States is seeking minerals and commodities: why would Europe’s American territories not lead the way in the exploitation of their resources? The United States has a tax and regulatory structure that, although superior to much of the world’s, is by no means perfect: why would Europe’s American territories not present themselves as possessing a comparative advantage for investment and more? The United States is developing a space industry: why would Europe’s American territories not leverage their comparative equatorial location, and existing launch facilities in French Guiana, to accelerate that process? Caribbean and Latin American governance is a mixed bag, but one constant is that nearly all of it is conscious of adjacency to the world’s leading economy, and seeks to derive advantage from it. Four European nations have land and people equally adjacent – and yet, outside of a handful of tax havens, they fail to do the same. 

The American and European interests in one another are a constant across the past five centuries. In those centuries, the Europeans took every advantage of American richness and dynamism, and America did the same in Europe. The unity of the Atlantic world was real, and productive, and created arguably the greatest material flourishing of any civilisation in history. That unity is sundered but not gone. Americans, with their ‘civilisational’ mission, are attempting to revive it, even as they turn away from some of its venerable pillars. Time will tell if the mission succeeds. 

The Europeans could do the same. The Americans are within Europe, yet the Europeans are within America. They are, in the literal sense, American powers. But a French garrison on South America’s north coast, and a British garrison off that continent’s south coast, otherwise inert and unengaged, are insufficient to the task. What they need is more ships and more men, yes – but above all, greater vision.