On December 9, 1950, General Dwight Eisenhower became NATO’s first Supreme Allied Commander for Europe (SACEUR). Since that day, nearly 75 years ago, it has been the U.S. responsibility to have an American four-star general oversee all Atlantic Alliance military operations in Europe. But this could change in the more or less near future.
The latest sign of the US desire to put an end to this tradition inaugurated by the last general to reach the White House came through the American ambassador to NATO. “I look forward to the day when Germany comes to the US and says it is ready to assume the role of Supreme Allied Commander,” Matthew Whitaker said at the Berlin Security Conference. Quoted by The Telegraph and via Euronews, the diplomat may have admitted that “we are still far from that”, but he did not fail to guarantee that he hopes these talks will actually take place.
The idea of the US giving up on SACEUR is not quite new. In March, two months after Donald Trump took office for a second term, NBC News cited two defense officials who said that abandoning NATO command in Europe would be part of the Administration’s plans to cut Pentagon costs. But in July, General Alexus G. Grynkewich actually succeeded Chistopher G. Cavoli in a role that includes overseeing support for Ukraine in the war against Russia.
For the US to abdicate SACEUR would, at the very least, be a turning point in the balance of powers within the military alliance created in 1949, at the beginning of the Cold War, as a response to the Soviet threat. And while the idea is not surprising coming from a president who threatened that “if the NATO countries don’t pay, I won’t defend them”, it leaves many skeptical. This is the case of James Stavridis, who served as SACEUR and head of the European Command from 2009 to 2013, for whom “for the US, abdicating the role of supreme allied commander of NATO would be seen in Europe as a significant sign of distancing itself from the Alliance”. NBC News assured: “it would be a political mistake of epic proportions” because “we would lose enormous influence within NATO and this would be seen, correctly, as probably the first step towards abandoning the Alliance completely.”
Whether or not they come to fruition, Whitaker’s words will at least help us understand that the US protection that we, Europeans, took for granted for decades is no longer true. And the time has really come for us to be able to take charge of our own defense.
Executive editor of Diário de Notícias