A Drone Wall for the E.U.: Russian Aggression Assuages Euroskeptic States

Speaking after his meeting with U.S. President Trump in Alaska during the summer of 2025, Russia’s President Putin said that if no agreement is reached with Ukraine, the force of arms would decide the matter. In other words, might makes right, or at least military incursion is a legitimate way to decide political disputes between countries. I would have hoped that such a primitive mentality would be antiquated in the twentieth century, but, alas, human nature evolves only at a glacial pace undetected within the lifespan of a human being. In September, 2025, the United Nations was under attack from within the General Assembly because of the continuance of the veto held by five countries in the Security Council; the U.S. had just vetoed a resolution for an immediate cession of Israeli destruction in Gaza. As a former deputy secretary of the UN had admitted to me during the fall of 2024, the veto itself renders the UN unreformable; a new international organization would have to be established sans vetoes for efficacy to be possible. Even so, absent a real enforcement mechanism, such as a military force, a resolution even of a vetoless organization would merely be parchment. The impotence of the UN is one reason why NATO, a defensive military transatlantic alliance, has been valuable in the face of military threats by Russia. Yet in September 2025, after Russian drones had flown into four E.U. states, E.U. President Von der Leyen felt the need to take the lead by again stressing her proposal for a drone wall along the E.U.’s eastern border; she was not deferring to any international alliance, much less to the United Nations. I submit that Von der Leyen’s initiative is yet another means by which the E.U. can be distinguished from international “blocs,” alliances, and organizations. Unlike the latter three, the E.U. has exclusive competencies and is thus semi-sovereign (and the same goes for the state governments).

The full essay is at "A Drone Wall for the E.U."

Bottom-Heavy Federalism: The E.U. Stability and Growth Pact

With Russia still in Ukraine in 2025, the E.U. faced pressure to enact more laws and regulations at the federal, yes, federal level to reap the benefits of collective, coordinated action. Although the fear that Russia might invade one or more of the eastern E.U. states was probably unrealistic, given that Russia was still mired in Ukraine, the crisis of an invasion so close to the E.U. could legitimately serve as a “wake-up call” for the federal and state officials in the E.U. to get their federal system of dual sovereignty in order. The ability of state governments to successfully evade the state deficit and debt limits in the federal Stability and Growth Pact and the flipside of the Commission’s weakness can be read as indicative that more work is needed to get to a viable federal system. The states have been able to weaken the limitations successively over years, including by leveraging the fear of invasion by Russia as a call for more defense spending at the state rather than at the federal level.

By 1 May 2025, several E.U. states had notified the European Council of their intent “to make use of an exemption allowing them to go over budgetary limits in order to boost military spending. The Commission, the E.U.’s executive branch, had proposed earlier that year that E.U. state governments “could use an emergency clause to spend up to 1.5% of their GDP on defence investments over the next four years without breaching rules on public deficits and debt” at the state level.[i] The Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) mandates that any state’s government budget deficit be kept below 3% of GDP and government debt below 60% of GDP. The regulations are based on Articles 121 and 126 of the Functioning of the European Union basic (i.e., constitutional) law. The weakening of the strictures on states in violation has been the norm rather than the exception. In 2024, for example, the Commission suspended the debt limit out of concern that economic growth would be compromised by state governments raising taxes or cutting spending to reduce their respective total debt to below 60% of GDP. That such reasoning could be used at any time undermines the contention that 2024 uniquely justified the Commission’s caution.

I submit that in actuality, the Commission’s officials were coming to the realization after years of state violations that enforcement of the federal regulations was too difficult for such a weak federation. In other words, the state governments still had not delegated enough authority to the Commission that it could hold the states accountable on matters of exclusive federal competencies.

As for shared competencies (i.e., policy domains of authority), the lack of respect of several states for the federal regulations on deficits and debt suggest that the Commission has its work cut out for it in negotiating with state governments on cooperation on shared policies so federal and state policies on a given matter will not work at cross-purposes.

As for the competencies retained by the states, agreeing to shift at least some of them to the federal level (as enumerated federal powers) is needed so there is a check-and-balance between the states and the union. In other words, that state governments have gotten away with serially violating the Stability and Growth Pact suggests that the Commission does not have enough leverage even to enforce federal regulations on states. The overall balance of governmental sovereignty between the union and the states is itself problematic, or at least sub-optimal.

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1. Rory Sullivan, “Sixteen EU Countries to Trigger Clause Increasing Defence Spending,” Euronews.com, 1 May 2025.

E.U. Defense: The State Governments Exploit a Conflict of Interest

Sometimes lemons can make use of political gravity to become lemonade. Of course, behind the lemons are human beings, who are of course innately economizers, political actors and moral agents. When accosted by proposals that additional governmental sovereignty be delegated from state governments to the federal level, state-government officials feeling the gravitas of narrow self-interest are inclined to resist even if the transfer is in the political and economic interest of the union as well as all of its states. I am of course describing a drawback that goes with state governments having too much power in a federal system, whose interests are not always identical with those of a particular state or even those that pertain to the state level as distinct from the federal level. I submit that a federal system in which such dynamics are ignored in favor of focusing on particular issues, such as the E.U.’s increased need for defense given Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, can gradually slip “off the rails” toward dissolution or consolidation. By ceding the E.U. itself (i.e., the federal level) additional authority, including for revenues and expenditures, the European Council, which is composed of the state governors, could “kill two birds with one stone,” as that saying goes. Those birds would be unbalanced state power in the E.U. at the expense of a common purpose, and Russian President Putin’s military adventurism in Eastern Europe.

One casualty of excessive state power in a federal system is accountability that the federal institutions could exercise on state governments whose officials willfully violate federal laws and regulations. Those officials, I submit, are all too acclimated to turning the “lemon” of being held accountable in the federal system into “lemonade” by turning a proposal made by a branch of government at the federal level for more authority at the expense of the power of the state governments (and thus of their respective officials!) into a proposal to suspend the federal measure of accountability on the state governments. In short, the state governors would be saying to the federal officials: You want more federal power? We reject that and will exercise the requested power ourselves and we need you to waive a federal constraint, which some of us have been violating, in order for us to exercise the power. I contend that this is how the following can (and should) be interpreted and understood.

On February 14, 2025, the President of the E.U.’s executive branch, the Commission—a name that seems more imposing than The White House—announced that she would “propose to activate the escape clause in the [union’s] fiscal rules in a bid to ‘substantially’ boost member states’ defense investment.”[1] Alternatively, the federal president could have carried through with her earlier proposal to increase the E.U.’s own authority in defense, thus enabling the union to benefit in terms of security from collective action instead of each state doing its own thing. Arguably, such collective action would be necessary should the U.S. back off from defending the E.U. against potential and actualized threats from Russia.

From the perspective of a governor of a state in the E.U., the benefits from going beyond coordinating to pool military defense at the federal level are less important than gutting the federal requirement (in the Stability and Growth Pact, which is really a federal law rather than a pact) that state fiscal deficits be “under 3% of GDP and debt under 60% of GDP” of a given state.[2]  Seeking to obviate the Commission’s Excessive Deficit Procedure (EDP), which includes penalties, including fines, on violators, the governors meeting in the European Council had only weeks earlier stated a preference for putting the EDP on ice so the states could increase their defense spending (and not have to pay fines) instead of enhancing the Commission’s defense competency (i.e., enumerated power) at the expense of the remaining sovereignty that the states still had.

Eight states—Belgium, France, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia—were in violation of the limits on deficits and/or debt. It is no coincidence that the governments of the E.U. states of Poland, Italy, Greece and the Baltic states had been requesting that the Commission review the required limits on state deficits and debt. It also no coincidence that at the “informal” session of the European Council held only weeks earlier, the state officials considered lifting the required limits to be “among the least controversial options on the table.”[3] Waiving being held accountable is of course not controversial for the people who would otherwise be held accountable. Relative to the Council, the power of the Commission and the Parliament individually and even combined was insufficient to object, citing both a federal system’s need that state governments be held accountable when they violate federal law and regulations and the defense-benefits from the collective action in energizing the E.U. competency on defense.

Put another way, to the E.U. state governors, removing the federal constraint on state spending that is not covered by tax revenue and resisting the delegation of additional governmental sovereignty to the federal government are more important—both for self-interested reasons—than strengthening both the union’s federal system, such that the federal level could effectively hold violating state governments accountable and thus make federal law real rather than mere parchment, and the union’s ability to stand up militarily as a unit rather than conglomeration to Putin, especially as the U.S. was sending clear signals of a desire to pull back from defending Europe from Russia. The triumph of narrow, private-benefit-delimited—self-interest over the good of the whole—in this case, Europe—and the related (i.e., not coincidental!) political weakness of federal officials to be a check on the exploitation of the conflict of interest at the state level are themselves (and especially together!) internal threats to the viability of the European Union. Lest the threat be presumed to be solely external, from Russia being militarily in the Ukraine, E.U. citizens could have done worse than exchange their binoculars for microscopes, at least for a while.  

1. Alice Tidey, “EU Commission to Activate Fiscal Escape Clause to Boost Defence Spending,” Euronews.com, February 14, 2025.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.

On the United Technologies-Raytheon Merger: The Macro Level of Analysis

In analyzing a merger, incorporating the macro context is vital. For very large mergers, for instance, public policy concerns inevitably surface even if they are typically ignored not only in merger analyses, but also by in societal and even governmental public discourse. Analysis at this level takes a societal standpoint, including on the relationship of business and government. This does not diminish the salience of firm-level analysis, for even how the respective organizational cultures would mesh is very important to a functional merged company. This is even true regarding the respective business-ethics climates, for it is not a given that a healthy organizational culture dominates an unethical one.

In June, 2019, United Technologies “doubled down on the aerospace market with an all-stock deal to merge with defense contractor Raytheon Co., after UTC executives early chose to exit from the escalator and air-conditioning businesses.”[1] The anticipated combined company, “valued at more than $100 billion after planned spinoffs, would be the world’s second-largest aerospace-and-defense company by sales behind Boeing.”[2] The annual revenue for 2019 would be $74 billion. UTC’s CEO at the time estimated a billion dollars in cost-savings. Additionally, spending on research could be increased.

On the macro scale, the merger would intensify the consolidation in the aerospace and defense industry. Better terms from supplies and the Pentagon had been putting pressure on contractors “to cut costs and invest more of their own money in new technologies, such as space systems and cyber security.”[3] Consolidation has a major drawback, however, in that competition and thus trade can be stifled. Society, through its government, rather than consolidated industries must resolve anti-trust problems, and this is difficult when those industries have significant power over legislative bodies and regulatory agencies. Hence, for example, anti-trust law had not been applied to the five largest American banks even after their complicity in the financial crisis of 2008. In fact, the bankers were able to use government funds to pay themselves bonuses!  So the question can legitimately be raised whether anti-trust law even can be enforced when the consolidated company or industry is not in favor.

If very large consolidated companies can rebuff regulatory attempts to constrain or limit those companies, then even very unethical managements can enjoy perches of power that are worrisome from a societal standpoint. In the late 1990’s, for example, Hughes Aircraft merged with Raytheon Missile Systems. In 2002, dioxane, a carcinogenic chemical that Hughes Aircraft/Raytheon had been using as a solvent, was discovered in the ground water under South Tucson, Arizona. Previously, Hughes had used cancer-causing trichloroethylene since 1981, and several local residents had won settlements on that chemical from Hughes.[4] Perhaps Raytheon’s management fail to use adequate oversight over Hughes, especially given that company’s track record, or was the purchasing company tacitly involved. Something to ponder for a company on the cusp of growing substantially through another merger in 2019, for an environmentally callous group to be so big would indeed be a big deal.

At the company level, a board of directors subservient to management or even a sordid corporate culture, such as that of Enron, can be enough to thwart efforts to clean up from unethical conduct. Wells Fargo, for instance, faced an entrenched corporate culture in “efforts” to stop charging customers for unordered products. Plutocracy, or the rule of wealth, at a governmental level means that such companies can not only continue acting unethically but also extract monopoly or oligarchic rents. In the case of the defense industry, the increasing power of the major contractors can even result in pressure on lawmakers to go to war when diplomacy would have been a better route. Indeed, a government’s spending can become loop-sided in favor of defense because the major contractors are powerful enough to demand it because it is good business. Hence U.S. President Lyndon Johnson kept the Vietnam conflict going in large part because he was getting kick-backs from certain contractors. In short, from being able to evade anti-trust enforcement to being able to pressure or pay off presidents in favor of military engagements, consolidated defense contractors can be said to have too much power. 

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[1] Cara Lombardo and Doug Cameron, “Merger to Create Aerospace Giant,” The New York Times, June 10, 2019.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Tony Davis, “South-side Tucsonans Mobilize for Another Water-Pollution Struggle,” Arizona Daily Star, April 16, 2017.

Sustenance: A Human Right in America?

In the fall of 2010, the following was said on Fox News: “The government should spend more on the war in Afghanistan in order to fight terrorism. The problem is that the government has gotten into entitlements.”  The latter presumably includes food stamps, public housing, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.  To say that government ought to be engaged in defense and not in supplying needy citizens with food, shelter and health-care is distinct from saying that the federal government should concentrate on foreign policy and defense, while entitlements are formulated and funded by the state governments as their domestic programs. In other words, advocacy for a certain priority in government and for less government is distinct from advocacy for restoring balanced federalism.

Most Europeans in the E.U. undoubtedly view the redistributive right for sustenance resources as founded on human rights and thus as a legitimate part of government.  In contrast, Americans do not typically apply a human rights justification to entitlements for other Americans even as foreign aid may be justified in part on this basis.

For example, on June 3, 2011, Donald Trump told a forum in Washington, D.C.: "A certain Republican representative, two nights ago -– I watched on television -– Representative Cantor, who [sic] I like, said we don't want to give money to the tornado victims, . . . (a)nd yet, in Afghanistan we are spending ten billion dollars a month but we don't want to help the people that are devastated by tornadoes -- wiped out, killed, maimed, injured. We don't have money for them but we are spending ten billion dollars a month in Afghanistan. We are spending billions of dollars in Iraq where they have the second largest oil fields in the world … and we can't help people that got flooded in Mississippi that got hit horribly by tornadoes." The U.S. House Majority Leader was holding up funds for basic necessities at home as leverage in debt-ceiling negotiations with the Democrats, while allowing billions of dollars to continue to flow in foreign aid (and to the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan).  Canter’s antipathy toward government aiding citizens who would otherwise be left to the state of nature represents a rather warped understanding of a social contract.

People such as Eric Canter believe that the market mechanism trumps any right to have one’s basic needs satisfied. Resources are viewed as commodities produced and distributed by private enterprise, even though the market does not guarantee that every citizen’s basic needs are met. Even so, it can be asked whether the right to survival (i.e., life) is part of the American social contract. If so, then relying on the market mechanism alone is not sufficient.

If life is not part of the social contract, then the hungry and homeless, as well as the untreated sick, are (and can legitimately behave as if) in the state of nature. As much as some of the rich do not want to be taxed so the least fortunate can survive, the prospect of the latter behaving as if in the state of nature must surely be even less palatable.

James Madison writes in Federalist #51, “the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger” in the state of nature. Nor is the weaker secured against starvation and sickness.  Without the police to protect their property, are the rich sufficiently strong to ward off the hungry and homeless? Who is the strong and who is the weak in a dog-eat-dog contest between two human beings—one with a bank account and the other with a left hook? Life, Thomas Hobbes writes, is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” in the state of nature are all equal in the sense that any one of us can be killed in our sleep. Suddenly having some of one’s tax directed on a human-rights basis may not sound so bad.

What keeps those whose survival is so tenuous from simply taking from the rich is of course the funded social contract that protects property with police force even as there is no guarantee for survival. Such a warped social contract is an aberration in terms of social contract theory.

  The social contract undergirding a political society is meant to alleviate the fear of the want of necessities (and self-defense) while working for the happiness of the members.  In other words, there is a right to shelter, food and medical care. Otherwise, the society is only marginal or partial in obviating the insecurity that exists in the state of nature.

Therefore, to say that government should merely defend citizens from the insecurity of foreign invasion does not go far enough from the standpoint of why government is instituted as part of a social contract that takes people out of the state of nature. However, to say that an empire-level government ought to be charged with protection from foreign invasion, while the individual republics are tasked with ascertaining their citizens with protection from starvation, the elements, and sickness. Without anxiety, foreign or domestic, every citizen—rich or poor—would be freed up from a basic insecurity that without a viable social contract is simply part of life.

Sources:

The Federalist, ed. Jacob E. Cooke, Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Press, 1961.

Sam Stein, “Trump Takes Aim at Cantor, Krauthammer, U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Huffington Post, June 3, 2011.

Military Sacred Cows: A Matter of Contrived Camulflage

"The most significant threat to our national security is our debt."

Micheal Mullen, Jount Chiefs of Staff Chairman, August, 2010.

The defense budget in 2010--$664 billion (not counting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars)--equalled that of the rest of the world combined.  One dollar of every five spent by the U.S. Government was for defense. The amount spent represents 80% growth since 2000. Why?  One reason: the big weapon systems oriented to fighting other empires (e.g., Russia and China). For example, $600 million for the littoral combat ship and $13 billion for amphibious landing vehicles (whose purpose has even been questioned by Sec. of Defense William Gates).  It would seem that the military contractors--the military industrial complex, moreover--are firmly entrenched and in control. That is to say, the defense spending is indicative of the influence of big business over government in the United States.  That this influence goes unhampered may tell us something about the leanings of our societal norms.

The House Republicans' "Pledge to America" formulated in 2010 promises to exempt the military from any cost-cutting that might be entailed in reducing deficit spending. Even so, Sen. Tom Coburn wrote, "Taking defense spending off the table is indefensible. We need to protect our nation, not the Pentagon's sacred cows."  This statement is significant because it gets at the problem of the debt and the influence of big business in government.  That is to say, it kills two birds with one stone.  Indeed, these two birds may well be the achilles heel of the United States as a viable entity or going concern.  The fatal flaw may well be within, rather than from an external threat.  This is the meaning of Micheal Mullen's statement above. To be sure, Republicans believe that defense is government's core function. Along with regulating interstate commerce, this is particularly true of the federal government.  It is less true, I would argue, of the state governments.  So the plank can be viewed as primarily federalist rather than in terms of limited government itself.  The probably-unfixable $14 tillion US Government debt and the consolidation of public governance in the U.S. into the federal government at the expense of federalism (and the checks therein) are related; both are indications of a basic inbalance that is unsustainable. In the face of this state of affairs, it is telling that the question in late 2010 was who should continue to get a tax.

Source: Michael Crowley, "The Sacred Cows," Time, December 13, 2010, pp. 55-58.

The U.S. Tea Party: Anti-War and Pro-States?

When he was the republican nominee for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, Rand Paul claimed that there was not enough money in entitlement programs to counter the federal government’s deficit for 2010. Approximately 40% of the budget was military. Accordingly, the candidate said, “Part of the reason we are bankrupt as a country is that we are fighting so many foreign wars and have so many military bases around the world.”[1] The Tea Party is animated by opposition to the exorbitant levels of federal spending and indebtedness. Applying their frugality to foreign policy, the party could make a clean break from the neo-cons such as Dick Cheney.

According to Randolph Bourne, in War is the Health of the State (1918), “As a general rule, the longer a war lasts, the more centrally planned and government-controlled the entire economy becomes.” Robert Higgs wrote in Crisis and Leviathan (1992) that among the effects of WWI were “massive government collusion with organized special-interest groups; the de facto nationalization of the ocean shipping and railroad industries; the increased federal intrusion in labor markets, capital markets, communications, and agriculture.” Thomas DiLorenzo points to these quotes and adds that inflationary war finance “inevitably leads to calls for price controls, which inflict even greater damage on the private enterprise system by generating shortages of goods and services.”[1] Such shortages in turn can serve as an excuse for even greater central-planning powers.

The Tea Party could thus have good reason for opposing even a standing army. Rand Paul wanted the federal budget to be 80% national defense, yet this did not mean he was for giving the Pentagon a black check. “So I believe that the defense of our country may be the primary enumerated power,” he said, “Does that mean I believe in a blank check for the military? No.”[2] This, in short, is the argument for why the Tea Party could come out against the war machine while still viewing the federal government as being primarily occupied with providing the Union’s united defense and foreign policy. The accent on the military here has more to do with the U.S. Government being on the imperial, or empire, level than on any desire to increase defense spending.

Futhermore, the Tea Party being in favor of federalism could mean that social spending should be raised and spent by the several states individually, rather than by the general government. In being for this shift, the Tea Party would not necessarily be opposing social spending per se—only that which is at the empire-level of government of the United States. Rarely is this distinction made; it allows for the federalists in the Tea Party to accept even universal health-care in any state where the majority vote for it through their legislatures.

It is typically assumed that if someone opposes a federal program, one does not want it at all; it could be that the person is oriented to re-establishing federalism rather than being opposed to the policy itself. Although the Tea Party has been oriented to both, this need not be so. The Tea Party could be agnostic on whether a given state has a sustenance net while being against the U.S. Government having any involvement in entitlement programs. The question for the Tea Party would be whether there is any sustenance-floor to which any American has a right.

1. W. James Antle, “Rand Plan: Will the Tea Parties Turn Anti-war?” The American Conservative (August, 2010), 8-9. See Thomas Di Lorenzo, “Inflating War: Central Banking and Militarism are Intimately Linked,” The American Conservative (August, 2010), 16-18.

2. Ibid.

See "In Defense of the Tea Party."