N ORWAY’S COUNTRYSIDE teemed with European soldiers in the past two weeks. A Montenegrin platoon drilled within a Slovenian company, which was wrapped in a Spanish battalion, which in turn was inside an Italian brigade. All were part of NATO’ s biggest exercise since the cold war (see article). Yet this is not quite what President Emmanuel Macron had in mind when he called for a “true European army” on November 6th. Striking a Gaullist pose, Mr Macron urged Europe to free itself from military dependence on America.

Mr Macron did not say precisely what he meant. Even so, his loose talk of a Euro-army is confused, quixotic—and reckless at a time of growing transatlantic uncertainty.

European federalists have long dreamed of defence integration, but they have had little to show for it beyond some joint equipment projects and anti-piracy operations. The most ambitious plan for a common army collapsed in the 1950s because of French opposition. Since then, however, France has pushed lesser schemes to develop autonomous European forces. These were mostly blocked by Britain, which feared splitting NATO (whose integrated military command France left in 1966 and then rejoined in 2009).

European defence has returned to the fore for three reasons: Brexit will remove its most dogged opponent within the European Union; Donald Trump has shaken European faith in the NATO alliance; and France and Germany have been desperate to find common cause. But European leaders cannot agree on its aims: should it be a symbol of ever-closer union, a roving gendarmerie to police the continent’s periphery or, as Mr Macron implied this week, a force that could beat off the very biggest powers, such as Russia and China?

Germany is keen on using EU defence schemes, like Permanent Structured Co-operation, a cluster of EU projects launched with fanfare last year, to bind big and small European countries closer together. Mr Macron, irked that this gives priority to politics over firepower, proposed a European Intervention Initiative: a smaller club of more ambitious powers, open to non- EU members, who would jointly plan future expeditionary campaigns. Germany saw this as an attempt to drag others into France’s African wars, but grudgingly signed up anyway.

For all these plans, Europeans would struggle to wage even medium-sized wars without extensive help from America, as they discovered during their air campaign in Libya in 2011. Though their defence spending is growing, there are still large gaps in their arsenals. In Norway, Europeans flaunted their armoured vehicles, air-refuelling tankers and transport aircraft. But data collected by the German Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank, shows that their stock of equipment in all these areas has been shrinking. The EU will be weaker still when Britain leaves.

So what if some fantasise about Euro-forces? If that pushes them to equip their armies properly, and stop duplicating capabilities, so much the better. The merging of Dutch, Romanian and Czech units into the German army is promising. The danger is that little new fighting strength will be created, giving America yet more reasons to feel exasperated with its allies. European leaders rebuked America for pulling out of the INF treaty, a cold-war nuclear pact, but until recently kept silent about Russia’s brazen violation of the accord. Mr Macron was crass in talking of the need to “protect ourselves” from America, in effect comparing Europe’s awkward but indispensable ally to Russia and China.