T WENTY YEARS ago George Robertson, then the head of NATO , mocked the European Union. Noting the EU ’s lack of guns and fondness for complex organisational charts, he quipped: “You cannot send a wiring diagram to a crisis.” In an interview with The Economist published on November 7th, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, flipped the charge. NATO was experiencing “brain-death”, he said, and America might not show up to defend it in a crisis. But Europe “has the capacity to defend itself”, he insisted. Since then, the debate about what Europe ought to do for itself, and how that might affect NATO , has raged in public and private.

Mr Macron has some support for his crusade to beef up Europe’s powers. “Both the willingness and ability to do more than its fair share are dwindling in the United States,” warned Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, Germany’s defence minister and Angela Merkel’s successor as leader of the governing CDU party, in a speech that day. Europe could be strong “if we want it to be, and if we remove the obstacles in our way”. There has been no shortage of wiring diagrams, and even some action. Ursula von der Leyen, president-elect of the European Commission and previously German defence minister, wants “bold steps in the next five years towards a genuine European Defence Union”. To that end, Thierry Breton, France’s new commissioner for the single market, will be double-hatted as director-general for the defence industry and space. He will preside over a European Defence Fund which will devote €13bn ($14.4bn) over seven years to boosting research and stitching together the continent’s fragmented defence industry.

That follows an alphabet soup of initiatives, cooked up over the past few years. A scheme known as Permanent Structured Co-operation ( PESCO ) was initiated in 2017 and now includes almost four-dozen projects that span the prosaic (a Eurodrone), the cosmic (a space-surveillance network) and the cloak-and-dagger (a school for spooks, run by Greece and Cyprus). In 2018 Mr Macron spearheaded the creation of a European Intervention Initiative ( E 2 I ), a more exclusive club of 14 countries—including some from outside NATO and the EU —that will jointly plan for future crises, with the aim of producing a “common strategic culture”.

Europeans are even pooling sovereignty in areas once guarded jealously by states. On November 8th the EU decided to put the European Border and Coast Guard (also known as Frontex) on steroids. It will grow from 1,300 secondees to a standing corps of 10,000, with a 26% jump in funding next year, to €421m. For the first time, the EU will be able to dispatch gun-toting men and women clad in EU uniforms to patrol its fringes, without asking member-states to cough up guards.

Yet for all this activity, there is a provisional quality to the rising edifice of European defence. Europeans see the storms coming and know they must build. But what the final structure should look like, and what its purpose ought to be, is left to another day. Mr Macron’s intervention was intended to inject a sense of urgency into these questions, but its effect has been to widen the cracks.

In her speech on November 7th, Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer repeated the customary pieties of Franco-German comity. But on November 17th she spoke with more candour. Whereas her own aim was to strengthen Europe’s “ability to act” in support of NATO , “the French are seeking strong European co-operation to replace NATO, ” she said. Whether that is true or not, it reflects mistrust of French intentions. Germany wants a stronger Europe to work through EU institutions. Mr Macron finds these plodding and ineffective; hence his resort to extra- NATO coalitions like E 2 I , a project to which Germany signed up with gritted teeth.

A more serious disagreement concerns the severity of Europe’s predicament. Mr Macron cast doubt on whether President Donald Trump would honour Article 5, the promise that an attack on one NATO member will be treated as an attack on all. That fear is commonplace in think-tanks and chancelleries across Europe. But in most countries doubt has not yet slipped into fatalism. In a poll in 2018 majorities in all nine European countries surveyed said that America would come to the aid of Europeans if they were attacked—including 60% in France. Mr Macron believes there is little to lose; Germans, and those in uneasy proximity to Russia, like Poland, realise how much further damage Mr Trump could do to NATO if Europeans provoke him.

Steady on

To talk down NATO without a safety-net in place is negligent. Yet for all the talk of a European army, the continent’s current schemes and spending will not—and are not intended to—plug an America-sized hole. Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer’s speech was full of exhortation for Germany to do more. But her answer to when Germany would meet NATO ’s target of spending 2% of GDP on defence was dismaying: in 12 years’ time, and that is not settled policy. The CDU ’s Social Democrat partners object to a budget boost that would turn Germany into the third-biggest military spender in the world.