Could US forces in Europe face a
refusal of supply and support?
US threats to abandon Ukraine and European allies leads to one outburst of anger. Experts say they could lead to more.
At the start of March, Norwegian marine fuel supplier Haltbakk Bunkers refused to service a United States warship, calling on others to boycott the US fleet.
Haltbakk CEO Gunnar Gran appeared to have been incensed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s public humiliation in the White House by US President Donald Trump for allegedly being ungrateful for US military support to defend his country from a Russian invasion.
Recommended Stories
. Europe working on plan to replace US in NATO in five to 10 years: Report
. Does Trump want Ukraine’s nuclear power plants, what has Kyiv said?
. Can Ukraine and Russia realistically reach peace?
. Putin wants US ‘recognition’ of Russian gains in Ukraine as legitimate
“Huge credit to the president of Ukraine restraining himself and for keeping calm even though USA put on a backstabbing TV show. It made us sick. … No Fuel to Americans!” the company wrote in a Facebook post.
The company later deleted the post, and the Norwegian government quickly insisted that US warships would continue to enjoy “the supply and support they require”.
But the incident highlighted the dependence of US forces in Europe on local suppliers and government goodwill.
There have been moments in history when European refusal to assist US forces has greatly complicated US operations.
At the outbreak of the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, both Greece and Cyprus refused to allow US ships and planes helping Israel to refuel, forcing them to rely on British assistance.
Days before then-President George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, Turkiye refused to allow US planes to use its air force base at Incirlik or to cross Turkish airspace.
Partly for such reasons, US forces have built redundancies into their supply chain.
The US Sixth Fleet has a major resupply base in Greece’s Souda Bay near Chania, Crete, whose mayor in 2005 wrote to the US ambassador saying, “We don’t want your warships. We want your cruise ships full of doctors and lawyers.”
Demetries Andrew Grimes was US naval attache to Greece at the time and in reaction to that expanded US access from three to 11 ports because other mayors found the offer attractive.
“A single small ship that comes in to use a port facility will run between $80,000 and $120,000 a day, [including] the water and the fuel and the supplies and the trash removal, tugboat operations. … We were spending about 350 million euros [$379m] a year in Greece just on bunkering fuel,” he told Al Jazeera.
In interviews with Al Jazeera, European NATO officers painted a picture of seamless cooperation.
“Military-to-military it’s business as usual,” a European military source told Al Jazeera. “We have no concerns whatsoever about the US commitment to its obligations in Europe. We just need to keep our head down, do a good job and be a good ally.”
Keir Giles, Russia and Eurasia expert at Chatham House think tank, told Al Jazeera that Haltbakk’s refusal of bunkering service was “counterproductive” because it alienated “precisely people that we need to keep on side, which is the US forces that are actually present in place”.
Changing assumptions?
Until now, the assumption was that the US saw European security as vital to its own.
“The access we have in Europe with our ports and bases from Spain to Italy to Greece to Türkiye to Germany – they’re there for our benefit,” retired US General Ben Hodges, who commanded US forces in Europe from 2014 to 2018, told Al Jazeera. “They’re not guarding Greeks or Turks or Germans.”
For instance, any Russian marine traffic sailing from St. Petersburg into the Atlantic Ocean has to cross Denmark’s Skagerrak Strait, less than 20km (12 miles) across at its widest point.
NATO officers told Al Jazeera that is an area where a sea denial operation can bar even Russian nuclear-armed submarines from getting through.
Russia has an alternative route into the Atlantic through the Barents Sea, but that is guarded by the navies of Norway and the United Kingdom, and the passages around Greenland, Iceland and Norway are sometimes referred to as a “kill zone” for Russian navy ships and submarines.
Yet the Trump administration has offended Denmark by asserting it will seize Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, and it has offended Norway and other European allies by saying it will not defend Europeans who “don’t pay” their fair share to NATO, calling its mutual defence clause into question – something no other US president has done.
0 Comments