Why NATO now marks the limit of European sovereignty

European sovereignty as a legal fiction: why NATO is the West’s mechanism of strategic subordination

By Antonio Tejeda Encinas | Doctor of Law (SJD / Dr. iuris) | Techno-Geopolitical Analyst | President of the Euro-American Committee of Digital Law - CEA Digital Law

I. The structural diagnosis: NATO as a device for codifying hierarchy

Since 1949, Europe has lived under a comforting illusion: that its collective security rests on an alliance of equals. The North Atlantic Treaty formally established a framework of mutual defence which, in principle, placed all the parties on an equal footing in the face of a threat. Seventy-six years later, that premise has turned out to be a rhetorical construct with no real strategic foundation.

NATO is not a symmetrical alliance. It is a hierarchical system for codifying power, in which Washington sits at the apex of decision-making with no European counterpart. That apex is not merely military, although it is primarily so; it extends to technology, energy, industry and, ultimately, politics. The United States does not negotiate with Europe within NATO; it communicates strategic decisions which the Europeans subsequently ratify, often under the illusion that they took them jointly.

The mechanism works through structural subordination wrapped in the language of cooperation. When Washington decides on extraterritorial sanctions against adversarial geopolitical actors, NATO and the transatlantic framework become the de facto enforcers of that policy, without any prior strategic debate in which European interests carry equal weight. When the United States redefines its industrial policy, moving from ‘offshoring’ to ‘nearshoring’ and ‘friend-shoring’, Europe adapts. When it decides that 5G technology requires certain suppliers to be excluded, Atlantic national security serves as cover for decisions that Europe has not formulated for itself.

In none of these cases is there a genuine multilateral decision-making framework. What exists instead is a de facto hierarchy in which the hegemonic power sets the parameters and its European allies, formally ‘consulted’, fall into line for a simple reason: they have no alternative means of defence. That lack is not accidental; it is the result of structural political decisions taken over decades.

II. The irresolvable legal contradictions of the Euro-Atlantic order

The European Union and NATO operate in a space of supposed complementarity that is in fact an unresolved contradiction. Article 42(7) of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) establishes an obligation of mutual aid and assistance if a Member State is the victim of armed aggression ‘on its territory’. At the same time, Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty sets out an obligation of collective defence within a political and military framework led by the United States.

When both obligations point in the same direction – towards a clear external adversary, typically Russia – the tension remains latent. But what happens when the vectors cross or potentially collide? Imagine a scenario in which Denmark, a member of both the EU and NATO, becomes embroiled in a territorial sovereignty dispute with an Atlantic power over a strategically sensitive territory. The legal question is simple but devastating: where does the centre of gravity of the response lie – in Article 42(7) TEU or in NATO’s Article 5?

Any honest lawyer knows that Article 42(7) is not a ‘European Article 5’ with its own chain of command, logistical structure and strategic planning. It is an essentially intergovernmental assistance clause, organised case by case between Member States and heavily conditioned by national choices. Reading it as a miniature NATO is a formalism useful for seminars but irrelevant to the reality of power. That is precisely the dysfunction: Europe has given itself a legal obligation of mutual defence without equipping it with the institutional, logistical and technological muscle that would turn it into an effective guarantee against any threat, including one from a hegemonic ally.

The current debate over whether Article 42(7) applies to Greenland illustrates this with uncomfortable precision. Some scholars argue that any aggression against a territory under Danish sovereignty could trigger the aid and assistance clause; others stress that only territories fully within the scope of the EU Treaties would be covered. The mere fact that European lawyers are debating whether an armed attack on a territory associated with a Member State would fall within the perimeter of mutual defence shows just how unfinished a category ‘European strategic sovereignty’ still is.

The Treaty of Lisbon tried to remedy this deficit through the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). Both have failed structurally: the unanimity requirement in defence matters makes every step forward hostage to 27 potential vetoes, while NATO, under US leadership, operates on a logic of concentrated political command. In practice, Europe negotiates with itself while Washington acts.

III. Geopolitical redesign and a crisis of strategic availability

What has lain dormant for decades is now coming sharply into focus: the post-Second World War order is breaking down. The symptoms are many – the war in Ukraine, tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the debate over Greenland’s strategic status – but they all point to a common reality: the major powers are unashamedly redrawing their perimeters of interest, resources and military reach.

Europe, having entrusted its security to an alliance in which it is the subordinate party, suddenly finds itself without an autonomous defence. Not because the United States has abandoned it; on the contrary, the US maintains a significant military presence on the continent. But that presence no longer reflects a commitment to the ‘defence of Europe’ in the strict sense; it reflects the positioning of the United States in the Eurasian competition with Russia and China. Europe is the board on which Washington plays its main games; whether Europe wins or loses is part of the calculation, but it does not decide it.

This shift is strategically coherent from the US point of view. The United States has global interests; Europe has European interests. When those interests coincide, NATO works as a mechanism for legitimising decisions taken in Washington. When they diverge, NATO becomes a forum in which US priorities prevail and European ones are sidelined. There can be no symmetry when one party can unilaterally decide the scope of the threat and the other depends on it for its own defence.

Moreover, the geopolitical redesign has a technological dimension that can no longer be relegated to a footnote. Control of the technological perimeter – critical infrastructure, data, semiconductors, cyber defence – is now as important as control of physical territory. Through its corporations and its regulatory mechanisms (extraterritorial sanctions, export controls, investment screening), the United States determines which European technologies can be developed, with whom they can cooperate and under what restrictions. Atlantic security is used as the vehicle for legitimising those decisions.

Europe, in other words, uses NATO to subordinate itself: it calls ‘cooperation’ an arrangement in which it has outsourced to a third party the definition of its risks, its technology partners and its industrial limits.

IV. The paradox of mutual defence in a hierarchical order

There is one question that no European institution has answered honestly: what does ‘mutual defence’ mean when one member of the alliance is a global hegemonic power and the others are regional powers of limited capability?

The theory of collective defence rests on a premise of relative symmetry: proportional contribution, shared benefit and a common external threat. In Atlantic practice, however, the threat is defined in Washington. When Russia is the priority, European funds are directed towards the eastern flank. When China rises up the US agenda, NATO begins to pivot rhetorically towards the Indo-Pacific, even though most European states have no real capacity to project power in that theatre.

What makes genuine ‘mutual defence’ structurally impossible is that, in the event of a direct conflict between the United States and another NATO member, there is no institutional mechanism enabling Europe to act as arbiter or counterweight. The design codifies subordination: Washington decides; the others comply or abstain.

V. The awkward question: can NATO protect Europe from the United States?

This is the question that official discourse avoids, but which any serious geopolitical analyst must ask: is there any mechanism within the Atlantic architecture that would allow Europe to defend itself against aggression, pressure or strategic imposition from the United States?

The answer is an unequivocal no. The North Atlantic Treaty does not even contemplate the possibility that the hegemonic power might act as an aggressor against the vital interests of an ally. This is not a gap in the Treaty; it is by design. NATO was built to allow Washington to act with the legitimacy of a collective alliance, not to give Europeans the tools to restrain it.

Let us take the logic to its extreme to show how fragile the system is. If a US president were to decide that Greenland’s strategic resources, or the geographical position of Ceuta, Melilla or the Canary Islands, were essential to US national security – to the point of justifying extreme pressure or even the use of force – what could Europe do? Invoke NATO’s Article 5 against Washington? Inconceivable. Activate Article 42(7) TEU as the basis for a European defence against the ally? Theoretically imaginable; politically suicidal.

The reason this scenario has not materialised is not the robustness of the legal framework but a temporary convergence of interests. That convergence is not structure; it is circumstance. And circumstances change.

VI. Towards an autonomous European defence: a need that can no longer be postponed

Europe needs – with an urgency that no longer allows for evasive rhetoric – an autonomous defence capability that does not depend on the will of the United States. This does not mean leaping into the void by leaving NATO overnight, which would be strategically reckless, but it does require building, in parallel, a military, technological and industrial structure that can function without the Atlantic umbrella.

In concrete terms, that means:

• Genuine European military integration that moves beyond the current patchwork of national armies towards common command, planning and deployment capabilities.
• A strategy of technological autonomy in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, cyber defence and data control that reduces dependence on US infrastructure and platforms.
• An energy policy that minimises vulnerability to sanctions decided by others, whether by the United States or by third countries, and that is aligned with a European – not a subordinate – security design.
• A regulatory and operational architecture that places Article 42(7) TEU at the top of the decision-making hierarchy, as the highest expression of European defence, rather than as a footnote to NATO’s Article 5.

None of this is possible while the European Union remains trapped by unanimity on defence and by the political comfort of Atlantic tutelage. France has understood this since de Gaulle; Germany is beginning to sense it; the rest of the continent wavers between unease and inertia.

VII. The deferred choice: sovereign power or administered territory

Europe faces a choice that is not technical but existential: whether it wants to be a sovereign actor in history or is resigned to being a territory administered by an external power under the reassuring narrative of ‘collective defence’.

NATO, in its current form, makes the first option unviable. Not because US intentions are necessarily predatory, but because the institutional architecture codifies a hierarchy that rules out symmetry. As long as Europe delegates its defence to Washington, it will delegate its foreign policy, its technology policy and, ultimately, its very sovereignty.

Thinking about a post-NATO horizon is not an exercise in anti-Americanism; it is an exercise in strategic maturity. Europe must equip itself with an autonomous defence capability that allows it to cooperate with the United States on an equal footing rather than from a position of dependence. Only then will the European Union stop being a sophisticated legal fiction and begin to exist as a fully fledged actor in the international system.