Menaced by an aggressive Russia and no longer able to count on the United States for its security, the European Union is scrambling to chart a way forward. For decades, Europe assumed that its U.S. ally would come to its defense if the continent faced a direct attack from its neighbor to the east. But U.S. President Donald Trump’s hostility toward Europe—demonstrated by his insults and threats during the war with Iran—has cast serious doubt on that arrangement. The question, now, is how to make sure Europe can defend itself.
The EU has responded to the crisis by developing new institutions and programs to channel hundreds of billions of euros toward a more rational and effective continental defense. But time is not on its side. In June 2025, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte predicted that “Russia could be ready to use military force against NATO within five years.” Since then, Russian warplanes have flown over Estonia, Russian hackers have struck Polish energy plants, and Russian drones have penetrated Poland. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has described these incursions as “a deliberate and targeted gray-zone campaign against Europe.” U.S. officials, meanwhile, were reported by Reuters last December to have told their European counterparts that they must assume primary responsibility for Europe’s defense by 2027.
Given these time pressures, and differing threat perceptions among European countries, the continent’s security will not be determined by Brussels. The process of EU-wide coordination is too slow to meet likely timelines for a U.S. withdrawal—not to mention further Russian troublemaking. As a consequence, European security for the foreseeable future will rely on the defense decisions of four important, self-interested, and frightened states. By far the largest effort, and ultimately the most policy influence, will come from a mobilized Germany. Poland has no choice but to provide the formidable covering force needed to resist any initial Russian attack, while France and the United Kingdom—the only states with nuclear weapons and the ability to project force outside the region—could play crucial supporting roles. Europe’s security depends on them, and only them.
BACK TO IT
The first step in the European project came in 1951, when France and Germany, motivated by the desire for collective security, decided to pool their coal and steel industries. The following year, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and West Germany agreed to establish the European Defense Community, which would have formed a European army. But the French parliament rejected the treaty, and European attention shifted to economic unification, leaving defense to national governments. And there it has mostly remained.
Periodically, Brussels has reinvolved itself with defense matters. Starting in the early years of the twenty-first century, the EU established a series of lightly staffed and poorly funded institutions, including the European Defense Agency, to incentivize collaborative efforts. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the EU tried again, producing a European Defense Industrial Strategy and a European Defense Fund to encourage joint capability development. Brussels now spends $4.6 billion a year on coordinated weapons research and procurement, but this amounts to only one percent of members’ combined defense budgets. The EU’s recent Security Action for Europe program will employ $175 billion in Brussels-backed loans to encourage joint weapons procurement, but faces numerous hurdles to success.
One alternative to Brussels-led defense cooperation is for national governments to bypass EU institutions and pursue joint projects themselves. But even the countries best poised to cooperate struggle to do so, as evidenced recently by the Future Combat Air System, a partnership between France, Germany, and Spain to produce new manned and unmanned combat aircraft. Announced in 2017, FCAS is currently snarled up in disagreements between Berlin, Paris, and the two countries’ respective firms. Although economic nationalism has certainly played a role, genuine strategic disagreements have made this collaboration challenging. France wants a light, flexible jet that can operate from an aircraft carrier and carry nuclear weapons. Germany wants a heavy, long-range workhorse capable of penetrating Russian air defenses. The program is almost certainly headed for radical reorganization, if not outright collapse.
Many European governments now look to rearmament as a means of reviving their countries’ flagging industrial sectors. By dangling economic growth, manufacturing jobs, and technological breakthroughs as benefits, policymakers have been able to imply that defense spending is almost self-funding. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has touted the “engine of national renewal” provided by a “defense dividend felt directly in the pockets of working people, creating the jobs of the future.” The highest growth in European defense firms has occurred not in such multinationals as EADS but in national champions including France’s Safran and Sweden’s Saab. These companies have strong relationships with domestic defense ministries and have received substantial government orders. The market cap of the once sleepy ammunition and vehicle maker Rheinmetall has risen tenfold since 2022 because of soaring German defense spending.
Defense budgets across Europe have grown quickly and substantially since 2022. The European Defense Agency reported that EU members spent $180 billion more on defense in 2024 than they did in 2021. But contributions remain lopsided. By nearly tripling its budget, Poland alone accounted for 14 percent of this overall increase. The continent’s largest economy, Germany, doubled its budget, making up 30 percent of the increase. Meanwhile, French and Italian budgets have risen by 41 percent and 35 percent respectively, accounting for 17 percent of the whole. Even after doubling its spending, Sweden covered only four percent of the collective increase.
THE CRUCIAL FOUR
Ultimately, the defense of Europe will not depend on Brussels but on the actions of a few key states. The burden of conventional air and ground defense will fall almost entirely on Poland and Germany. France and the United Kingdom could play a crucial supporting role by bringing their expeditionary forces and, of even greater strategic importance, their nuclear deterrents into the mix. This division of labor is unlikely to produce stronger EU defense institutions, collective policy decisions, or continental industrial cooperation. But these four countries can provide sufficient deterrent capability against Russia, filling the gaps that the United States is likely to leave.
As the largest economy on Europe’s eastern front, Poland is busy acquiring the enormous amounts of munitions, artillery, armor, and air defense required to contact and disrupt advancing Russian forces. Warsaw’s growing economy and lower-than-average debt levels have allowed it to devote a massive 4.5 percent of GDP to defense. Poland will buy from any exporter that can quickly supply weapons, which means South Korea and the United States are receiving the bulk of its orders. Because Warsaw wants to use its defense budget to boost its economy and build a manufacturing base, Poland’s procurement decisions prioritize suppliers’ willingness to license and support domestic production. South Korea has willingly complied. European suppliers, however, largely have not. Even if Poland perfectly executes its rearmament plan, a conflict with Russia will still require major support from countries farther from the front. But making Russian aggression costly by slowing an initial onslaught remains essential to continental security.
Even more than Warsaw, European defense will depend on Berlin. Shrugging off eight decades of aversion to military spending, Germany now has the fourth-largest defense budget in the world, behind only China, Russia, and the United States. Berlin’s planned $750 billion of military spending over the next four years will underpin European defense and present a lifeline to a large German manufacturing sector buffeted by high energy costs and Chinese competition. If a German company can produce a weapon, it will get the contract. Any system too advanced for German companies is likely beyond other European firms’ capability, and will therefore be sourced from the United States or, occasionally, Israel. As a consequence, German orders from other EU members’ firms have plunged since 2022. Going forward, Germany will likely need to assume the uncomfortable role of Europe’s standard-setter and planner, a role formerly played by Washington, to ensure that smaller states are protected and make meaningful contributions to collective defense.
The defense of Europe will depend on the actions of a few key states.
France possesses critical capabilities that Germany and Poland do not have. First and foremost, it has the EU’s only sovereign nuclear deterrent. Paris also has an experienced expeditionary military, a large air force, and a fleet of nuclear-powered submarines, as well as an aircraft carrier. In a continental war, other than the small EU Rapid Deployment Capacity, the French army remains the force most able to quickly move to the eastern front. French capability could also play a useful role in crises beyond Europe, as a significant portion of Paris’s air and naval forces have deployed to the eastern Mediterranean and Gulf bases in response to the Iran war. But despite French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for a wartime economy, France’s precarious politics and tattered public finances leave little room for large defense spending increases. Paris’s long-standing policy of avoiding dependence on other countries for weapons may look prescient, but it comes at the cost of defense industrial addiction to non-EU exports, mainly to India and the Middle East. It is telling that Macron is aggressively pursuing a deal to sell four years’ worth of the Rafale fighter jet’s entire production run to New Delhi amid a European security crisis. If Germany is unlikely to purchase many weapons from the rest of Europe, France almost certainly will not.
The United Kingdom can play a similar role to France in a future conflict. To date London has, despite straitened financial circumstances, maintained a nuclear deterrent and a thin but deployable joint land, air, and naval force. The invasion of Ukraine, the fraying U.S. relationship with NATO, and the security and economic crisis induced by war in the Middle East have pushed the United Kingdom closer to Europe and to France in particular, with discussions ongoing concerning nuclear cooperation. London’s large budget and solid defense industrial base could make it an important part of Europe’s defense. Yet London and Brussels remain unable to agree on terms allowing British access to the new EU collective defense initiatives. The best short-term step the EU can take for collective defense may be to ease its sovereignty-obsessed neighbor’s reentry into the continent’s defense funds and institutions.
For at least the next decade, Europe’s security will depend almost entirely on self-interested decisions made by the continent’s four defense heavyweights. Each appears to regard the overall defense of Europe as a vital national interest, and between them, they are rapidly generating conventional power and inching toward a more convincing European nuclear deterrent. By 2029, Germany alone plans to spend about $189 billion annually on defense, roughly on par with Russia’s fully mobilized war economy. These four countries’ largely unilateral self-defense efforts will not serve the larger project of European security integration. But their combined efforts should provide Europe with enough defense capability to counter Russian aggression—or, ideally, deter the very idea of an attack.
Loading…
