Daily Times

Poor old Theresa May just can’t seem to get a break these days. Each news cycle offers a brand new stumbling block to thrashing out a Brexit deal that will be palatable to the backbenchers; for this has long ago ceased to be about the people. And now, after 70 years, it is here: the EU has its own defence pact. Meaning that the beleaguered British PM will have to face additional thorns in already prickly negotiations with the Centre. For London will want to be part of the Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) – even if it is no longer part of history in the making. All of which means going back to Brussels with cap firmly in hand.

In laymen terms, PESCO means one national army for 25 member nations. Denmark has an opt-out clause, similar to its decision regarding the Social Chapter under the Maastricht Treaty; whereas Malta has said it would like to possibly adopt a ‘wait and see approach’. And the UK will be out of the (now) 27-strong bloc by 2019.

To be sure, there is much to celebrate across European capitals. Not least because we are now living in a fast-paced world whereby global threats to peace are forever accumulating. Today, cyber security is a recognised risk to all nations everywhere. And then of course there is the matter of transnational terrorist groups, such as ISIS, which has stolen the crown of the world’s previously most favoured bogeyman: Al Qaeda. The serious issue at hand is how such outfits have sprung up in the chaos of the aftermath of western military intervention.

Which inevitably brings us to the question as to whether PESCO will make the rest of the world – that is, in the MENA region and the entire global south – any safer. Or better put: will it render our security even more fragile? For we have already seen the devastation wreaked by the US-led NATO war machine; especially in terms of the mass influxes of refugees along the borders of Fortress Europe. Just as we have seen how the latter has responded, at times violently, to those whom it chooses to recast as economic migrants. In other words, the question that must be asked is this: who will be safer at the hands of, in theory at least, a single trans-European army?

The only answer can be the EU itself. Or at least, that is the plan in terms of decreasing dependency on the omnipresent NATO when it comes to waging military interventions. After all, much has been made of the embarrassing failure of Britain and France to entirely ‘own’ the European-driven war on Libya. Yet, just as with the Islamic Military Alliance, we would like to know how the decision to go to war will be made. Will it be one country, one vote? What about the power of the veto? And what does any of this mean for an already increasingly irrelevant United Nations?

We can’t help but feel that the real winners here will be defence manufacturers. For one thing is certain, for all the talk of cooperating – not competing – with NATO, the latter isn’t going to take such ‘insubordination’ lying down. It may not be entirely outside the realm of imagination to see, in the near future, the next wars being fought among different security blocs. Though who will be left to profit once the whole world has been killed?   *

Published in Daily Times, December 16^th 2017.