I don't get how this isn't obvious. If you can't defend your territory without relying on another country, you are not truly sovereign. The larger union might be sovereign, but you aren't, and your protection is only as strong as the larger union.
I don’t think you have to go quite that far. NATO was intended to provide cover against the other superpower bloc in Europe. That superpower isn’t really a superpower anymore, but the remnant that legally succeeded it still has a lot of nukes.
Arguably in a world of superpowers, only superpowers have total sovereignty under your definition, hence why I said it was a sliding scale. 95% of any individual nation or most configurations of alliances you could technically (though maybe not plausibly) come up with would still get crushed by the French military in a mano a mano military conflict. They can defend themselves, but what if they have to defend themselves alone vs the United States, Russia, the PRC, or a medley of European great powers? NATO keeps them from having to go it alone, and NATO plus the EU takes a couple of those possibilities off the table, at least for a while, but in Charles de Gaulle’s time, France still had a colonial empire they were trying to keep together (and they still have a fair number of overseas territories outside of metropolitan France) and the plausibility of NATO keeping it together was all up in the air.
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, I don’t think you can make a winning argument that on balance the US was ever a bad ally, but as an old European leader, he was definitely right to be skeptical about the tradeoffs, and right to think that if France has more power, then it wouldn’t need to cede sovereignty or at least much sovereignty to all these newfangled international institutions popping up across Europe.
I don't think the issue is whether or not it's obvious. It boils down to weighing the risks. It seems to me that the weight has favored dependence on another superpower for the past several decades. I'm sure everyone involved understood that the consequence of that decision was quasi-sovereignty. I'm not in Europe, so I'm not sure what the UK government has been saying this whole time, but it probably sounds really bad to admit that publicly. So, I'm sure they perform lingual acrobatics to try to reassure the public that they are truly independent when it comes to military security.
Perhaps it's a naive take, but I'm just armchairing this from the perspective of playing a 4x grand strategy game and the sort of decisions you have to make in these contexts.
Anything can be called 4D chess if we add enough layers to the logic. I agree that what you're describing makes sense; but I think it's probably more in line with the bureaucratic mindset to observe this is the result of decades of kicking cans down the road.
SllX|11 months ago
Arguably in a world of superpowers, only superpowers have total sovereignty under your definition, hence why I said it was a sliding scale. 95% of any individual nation or most configurations of alliances you could technically (though maybe not plausibly) come up with would still get crushed by the French military in a mano a mano military conflict. They can defend themselves, but what if they have to defend themselves alone vs the United States, Russia, the PRC, or a medley of European great powers? NATO keeps them from having to go it alone, and NATO plus the EU takes a couple of those possibilities off the table, at least for a while, but in Charles de Gaulle’s time, France still had a colonial empire they were trying to keep together (and they still have a fair number of overseas territories outside of metropolitan France) and the plausibility of NATO keeping it together was all up in the air.
Throughout the duration of the Cold War, I don’t think you can make a winning argument that on balance the US was ever a bad ally, but as an old European leader, he was definitely right to be skeptical about the tradeoffs, and right to think that if France has more power, then it wouldn’t need to cede sovereignty or at least much sovereignty to all these newfangled international institutions popping up across Europe.
sepositus|11 months ago
Perhaps it's a naive take, but I'm just armchairing this from the perspective of playing a 4x grand strategy game and the sort of decisions you have to make in these contexts.
generalizations|11 months ago