PESCO, Strategic Autonomy, and Ambition

Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO) is the means to achieve strategic autonomy, as demanded by the EU Global Strategy. The EU habitually downplays its own ambitions though, and appears beholden to the reticence expressed by its U.S. ally. In spite of its rhetoric, the capability implications of strategic autonomy have not actually been defined. As a result, PESCO is to some extent operating in a void. The EU should decide on the core tasks that it wants to be capable of performing alone, if necessary, and translate these into a list of operations that it should be able to conduct concurrently.