*This video was recorded last week, prior to Peter departing on his backpacking trip (and prior to Biden leaving the race).
Today, we’ll be looking at the recent European Commission presidential election and its broader implications for the Europeans.
Former German Defense Minister, Ursula von der Leyen, will remain as president for the next term. She has been in office through the Ukraine War and has kept a tight grip on many policies coming out of the Commission.
The President serves as a crisis mediator among European countries and handles issues requiring unanimity and majority voting. Ursula von der Leyen has prioritized the Green New Deal, cyber defense, and a common EU air defense system (which is top of mind for everyone).
There’s lots of moving parts throughout Europe right now, so von der Leyen will have her hands full. Specifically, we should expect to see significant changes to the EU-NATO relationship and European security dynamics.
Here at Zeihan On Geopolitics we select a single charity to sponsor. We have two criteria:
First, we look across the world and use our skill sets to identify where the needs are most acute. Second, we look for an institution with preexisting networks for both materials gathering and aid distribution. That way we know every cent of our donation is not simply going directly to where help is needed most, but our donations serve as a force multiplier for a system already in existence. Then we give what we can.
Today, our chosen charity is a group called Medshare, which provides emergency medical services to communities in need, with a very heavy emphasis on locations facing acute crises. Medshare operates right in the thick of it. Until future notice, every cent we earn from every book we sell in every format through every retailer is going to Medshare’s Ukraine fund.
And then there’s you.
Our newsletters and videologues are not only free, they will always be free. We also will never share your contact information with anyone. All we ask is that if you find one of our releases in any way useful, that you make a donation to Medshare. Over one third of Ukraine’s pre-war population has either been forced from their homes, kidnapped and shipped to Russia, or is trying to survive in occupied lands. This is our way to help who we can. Please, join us.
Hey, everybody. Peter Zeihan here, coming to you from Colorado. Today, we’re doing a video that’s a reminder that it’s not just elections in the United States that matter this year. We just had elections for the European Commission president. And I know, I know, I know, you’re like, really, the election of the chief bureaucrat in Europe? That’s what we’re going to talk about today.
But, hey, it matters. So, Ursula von der Leyen, a former defense minister of Germany, was elected to be the president of the Commission a few years ago. She’s now been reelected with a fairly strong majority. I would argue she’s done a decent job overall, considering that she’s been presiding over the European Union during the entirety of the Ukraine war and has emerged as a bit of a hawk on most policies.
The leader of the European Commission is basically responsible for two things. Number one is managing the bureaucracy that is in the European Union, which is very small by European standards, but technically it has legal authority over most of what happens in Europe. Second, to basically serve as a crisis mediator among the various European countries. There are a lot of issues in Europe that require unanimity.
And when you’ve got countries as small as Malta and as large as Germany all having functionally one vote, it requires a lot of proactive work on the part of the executive. Other issues in Europe are decided by something called qualified majority voting, in which it’s kind of a hybrid voting structure where states, based on their population size and their economic strength, have more of a say than others.
It still favors the small states a little bit like America’s electoral college, but it’s a lot more nuanced. And, of course, it’s done European style, so it’s more complicated than it needs to be, and someone has to ride herd over all of that. And that is von der Leyen’s job, and now will be for another few years. The reason I wanted to shortlist this topic specifically, though, is in her final pitch before the vote happened, she indicated what her priorities were going to be.
And, you know, a lot of it is the normal stuff: Green New Deal, cyber defense, all that good stuff. But one that really stuck out, both to me and to the members of Parliament, was her assertion that the EU now needed to create a common air defense space. Now, there are two institutions that have dominated Europe for the last 75 years.
The first is the European Union itself in its various forms, starting with the coal and steel community, turning into the European Community, and now the European Union. Its job has pretty much always been economic integration: the creation of a common trading bloc, the creation of a common market, eventually getting into banking and financial regulation, all that good stuff.
And in that, the European Union, in my opinion, has actually done a lot better than I thought it was going to do 25 years ago. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems. Oh, my God, there are so many problems. There’s so much drama. But it’s still there, and it’s still kicking, and they’ve been making more than incremental progress.
Especially since the financial crisis of the mid-2000s. So, you know, give credit where it’s due. The second big institution is NATO, which has always been American dominated. Or if you want to be really kind, American-British dominated, and it’s responsible for defense issues primarily, but not exclusively, versus the Soviet Union and now the Russians. Now, NATO was kind of on its back foot in the 2000s and 2010s, when most Europeans didn’t see any security problems anywhere. Even with the Russian invasion of Ukraine dating back to 2014, a lot of Europeans, the Germans most notably, just tried to pretend that didn’t happen.
And so NATO was fading because the Americans were getting frustrated. The Europeans weren’t taking European security seriously. And the Europeans didn’t think security was an issue at all. In fact, we got to a point just before the Ukraine war where the Germans were actually openly, publicly talking about dismantling their military completely, which would have been, you know, monumentally stupid, but anyway.
Von der Leyen’s discussion of an air defense space is really interesting. It’s not that it’s not necessary. It’s not that it’s not needed. The Europeans are looking at the Ukraine war and are getting a little pale. They realize that their system is much more integrated. It’s much more dependent upon energy and electricity than anything going on in Ukraine.
I mean, Ukraine, I don’t want to call it a failed state or anything like that, but on the technological scale, the industrial development scale, it is significantly below anyone in Europe. And so the Europeans know that if the sort of attacks that the Russians are doing daily against Ukrainian infrastructure would have happened somewhere else in Europe, the impact would be an order of magnitude bigger.
There’s just so many more important things in Europe that run on electricity than what you have in Ukraine. That the damage would be immense. And an air defense system, a missile defense system, is really the only way to make that happen. And if you have a Polish, a Slovak, a Latvian, and a Romanian system, that’s great.
But what you really need is integration, especially with things like radars. And since missiles, you know, from the point that they’re launched to the point that they hit, if it’s a few hundred kilometers away, you’re talking about, you know, single digits of minutes. Reaction time is really important. And that has to be all set up ahead of time.
What really stuck out in my mind, though, is that she wants this to be an EU prerogative.
And until now, we’ve only had a few little… well, let’s just call them temper tantrums. That’s what they were when a few countries decided they didn’t like what the United States was doing with its military, so they wanted to form a European answer to NATO.
The problem is that the resources were never there. And anything that you dedicate to a NATO project is automatically not available to be dedicated to an EU project. Well, with the Russians basically launching a genocidal war next door that is a combination of forward scorched earth and kidnapping and sexual assault, the Europeans have found themselves motivated to massively expand their defense spending.
So not only is this likely to help NATO quite a bit, but there actually could be the resources necessary for the European Union to do something in defense on its own. Whether it’s enough is an open question, which means that this is going to go one of two directions. Either number one, the Europeans are going to massively expand the defense spending.
And the worse Ukraine does in the war, the greater the push for that is going to be in order to build a kind of parallel capacity. Or number two, the European Union is going to sign a series of agreements with NATO that basically merge the two from a certain point of view. Now, most of the countries that are in the European Union are also in NATO and vice versa.
And the holdouts are countries like the United Kingdom, which isn’t going to leave NATO, but has a pretty strong position on European defense. The sticklers are going to be the four countries that are members of the EU, but are not members of the military alliance. One of these, Malta, doesn’t have a security concern aside from illegal migration from Africa.
So we can put that one to the side. Another one is Ireland, which kind of has a Canadian approach to defense or like, by the time anything gets to us, the world’s already ended. So we’re just going to free ride on this. The Irish hate me. I’m sure I’ll get that here in no time. But the other two matter a little bit more.
One is Austria, which has been a neutral country because everyone wants it to be neutral. The last time the Austrians started to get into security policy, we got Hitler. So, you know, it’s like the more they simmer down, the better. They’ve got a good relationship with NATO that will probably mean that they can just abstain on everything and let it sail through.
And then the last country that matters is Cyprus, which, you know, has very little to do with the Ukraine war. But if you’re going to have a European defense network, the idea is it’s going to protect against countries that are not in the European Union.
And while everyone’s eyes right now are on Russia, and that’s the whole thing that von der Leyen’s trying to get people agitated about, Cyprus’s primary security concern is Turkey. And so you have this one country that has under a million people who has deep, abiding cultural and military conflicts with a major trading partner of the EU, Turkey, but probably is going to have veto power over all of this.
So even if von der Leyen is able to get the Europeans to come up with the money, even if they can figure out a format in Europe that allows NATO and the European Union to do this side by side, we have one hell of a fly in the ointment here as regards the Cypriots. How will that be sorted out?
God knows. Keep in mind that the last time Cyprus really made the news from a global point of view, it was in the financial crisis of the late 2000s. And in that time, we had huge bailouts for Italy, for Spain, for Hungary, for Greece. There was one for Cyprus too. It was the smallest of all of them.
But because Cyprus is a money laundering center, it became very quickly the most controversial, the most complicated of all of them. And we’re going to see something like that in defense as well. So stay tuned.
