Leading Article: Europe must prepare to look after its own defence interests

THE TALKS between the leaders of Britain and France at Downing Street yesterday concerned beef, their differing models of economic and social reform, and, first and foremost, defence co-operation. Not only is defence the hottest current topic of the European debate; in discussing it, Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac were dealing with the most fundamental issue facing the Western alliance - the future relationship between Europe and the United States of America.

In many respects, the defence initiative due to take shape at next month's European Union summit, in Helsinki, resembles the single currency. Both issues are acid tests of the extent to which EU member states are prepared to pool sovereignty. Both, too, raise the age-old American ambivalence towards the European project: a strong Europe is fine in so far as it takes weight off US shoulders - but not if it challenges American primacy. Washington talks glowingly of European economic unity, provided, of course, that the euro does not erode the dollar's role as a reserve currency. So, too, it encourages Europe to increase its own defence capabilities - but, it is now warning, not to the point of undermining the primacy of Nato, which is overwhelmingly American-armed and American-run.

After the massive and humiliating deficiencies revealed by the Kosovo conflict, few would dispute the need for Europe to get its defence act together. "Never again", says America, will it bear so disproportionate a share of a Nato war. In some respects, Britain and France stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. By history and instinct, we are the most Atlanticist of the European powers, ever dreaming (as the Prime Minister did in his Guildhall speech on Monday evening) of being a "bridge" between the US and Europe. France, however, eternally suspicious of America the "hyperpower", shuns Nato's military structures, and is ever prone to see ourselves and the alliance as tools of the American domination of Europe. But as Europe's two nuclear powers, with its best-equipped conventional forces, we and France are the essential motors of the project.

For the moment, Washington's anxieties are much overstated. In George Robertson and Javier Solana, Atlanticists of impeccable pedigree hold the key political jobs at Nato and the EU. The lesson of Kosovo was that a Europe able to mount a major autonomous military venture is pure fantasy, for a decade at least - such is its dependence on the US in the key fields of transport and logistics. And for all the rhetoric about "doing more and doing better", Europe's defence spending is in fact falling.

Even so, Nato's glue is thinning. No common security threat binds us to the US; for all the talk of a new Cold War, Russia is simply no longer a global rival for the West. Why, to borrow the words of Pat Buchanan, the possible US presidential candidate, "should 260 million Americans be asked to defend 350 million rich Europeans from 140 million impoverished Russians?" The mood of the Republican-controlled Congress is one of "America first". The US has refused to ratify the Test Ban Treaty, and toys with the idea of a national missile defence system, whose consequence inevitably would be further to decouple its security interests from our own. L'Europe de la defense is a worthy goal. But we should not lose sight of where, injudiciously managed, it might lead.