EU to wargame mutual defense clause — report
REUTERS/Yves Herman
Brussels
plans to run a tabletop exercise next month to test how Article
42.7 of the Treaty of the European Union, the bloc’s mutual defense clause,
would work in practice, Politico reported
on April 17.
The exercise, overseen by EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Kaja Kallas, is meant to check the EU’s political, rather than military, response to an armed attack on a member state, the report said. After the tabletop session, officials plan exercises with defense ministers “to see how it works in practice,” one official told Politico.
“We'll follow up with an exercise with the [defense] ministers [after] to see how this works in practice," an unnamed official told Politico.
The simulation will be carried out in the EU Political and Security Committee, which is made up of senior European diplomats, according to the report.
Most EU members are also NATO members and therefore covered by NATO’s Article 5, which explicitly includes military assistance. But transatlantic tensions and threats by U.S. President Donald Trump, including his comments about annexing Greenland, have shaken confidence in Article 5 and renewed interest in EU security mechanisms, the report said.
Rising risks to EU states have also spurred interest in Article 42.7. Politico said Cyprus, after being targeted in March by drones launched from Lebanon, expressed interest in exploring how the clause would operate.
“In addition to the tabletop exercise, the EU's foreign
affairs and security branch, the External Action Service, is preparing a paper
to lay out how the security guarantees might work in practice,” Politico added.
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