PARIS — Europe's disunited governments are in denial about the extent to which violence is shaping global politics and must step up to assert their combined force as a hard power, the chief of defense staff of the French military has warned in a sweeping interview.
"A weakened Europe may find itself tomorrow as a hunted animal, after two centuries of the West setting the tone,” General Thierry Burkhard said in unusually outspoken remarks to POLITICO and French newspaper Libération. "It's not only about armed forces, but about the fact that hard power dynamics now prevail."
Burkhard warned that Europe's fragmented countries would have to bind together more tightly as a strategic force to counteract the "spheres of influence" being built by China, Russia and the U.S.
"On the one hand, European countries have never been so strong. On the other, there is a form of denial from governments and populations in the face of the level of violence in the world today," he added.
The French general's reality check echoes a growing number of warnings about Europe's weakness.
Former European Central Bank chief Mario Draghi also stressed last week the EU had to stop pretending it could exercise global influence just as an economic force and consumer market. He insisted the bloc had received a "very brutal wake-up call" from Donald Trump that it needed to think in far more strategic terms about security and defense spending.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Wednesday accused the European Union of sliding into irrelevance on the world stage. "We must be willing to pay the price of our freedom and our independence,” she said.
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