Since 2016, the EU has moved forward with a Global Strategy centered around a Common Annual Review of Defense (CARD), a European Defense Fund (EDF), and a Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) agreement. European Union leaders are working to deepen integration on the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy and Common Security and Defense Policy as a way to ensure that the 28 member states are able to defend themselves and preserve, protect, and promote the liberal international order, interests, and values of Europe. China is increasingly recognized as a state whose interests, governance model, and political influence operations seek to undercut liberal order and may therefore pose a threat to a more robust, unified EU. How does China view PESCO and the broader quest for a more integrated European Union defense capability? Is this seen as additive to NATO, perhaps freeing U.S. resources for other worldwide assignment (including in East Asia)? Or is it seen as dividing NATO and splitting the trans-Atlantic alliance? Or does China think the initiatives are too small or too likely to fail? The answers may contain implications for the prospective success or failure of Europe’s next steps on defense cooperation.
Scott W. Harold will lay out recent European defense integration steps, how the world is reacting, how China has responded, what this all means, and where it is likely heading. He is a Political Scientist and Associate Director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Policy at the RAND Corporation. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor of Security Studies at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where he has taught since 2006.
About Scott W. Harold
Scott W. Harold is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and an affiliate faculty member at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. He specializes in the foreign and defense policies of China, Japan, North and South Korea, and Taiwan.
Prior to joining RAND in August 2008, Harold worked at the Brookings Institution’s John L. Thornton China Center from 2006 to 2008. In addition to his work at RAND, since 2006 Harold has been an adjunct professor of security studies in the Security Studies Program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is also an adjunct professor in international affairs in the School of International and Public Administration at Columbia University where he has taught East Asian security and Chinese politics, and an adjunct professor of international affairs in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University.
From 2012 – 2017, Harold was a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations; he has also held visiting fellowships at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, Germany in 2018 and Institut Montaigne in Paris, France in 2019. He is currently a member of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Foundation US – Japan Network for the Future’s Cohort V. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. His doctorate is in political science from Columbia University, where he wrote a thesis on China’s foreign policy decisionmaking with respect to joining the World Trade Organization.
