Europe is entering a moment of historical truth. For the first time since the finish of the Cold War, it is no longer facing a temporary crisis, but a structural challenge to its very position within the international order. High-intensity warfare on its eastern flank, persistent instability to the south, exposed energy depfinishencies, sustained migratory pressure, internal political fractures and the unabashed return of economic predation toobtainher compose a strategic landscape in which power has once again become the central language of international relations.
Taken toobtainher, these simultaneous shocks reveal a long-deferred reality, the European Union was designed to prevent war, not to confront the return of force.
In this context, the publication of the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS 2025) does not represent a tactical adjustment, but rather the culmination of a doctrinal cycle. It enshrines a profound shift in which power is no longer confined to military intervention alone, but extfinishs to the integrated control of strategic flows; industrial, technological, energy-related and logistical. Hence, under this new grammar of power, Europe appears less as a structuring actor of the international system than as a fragmented, depfinishent and reactive space. Europe now stands before a historical alternative, strategic revival or lasting downgrading.
A Europe Compelled Towards Power, Yet Politically Disarmed
Europe is now confronted with a cluster of crises that it can no longer outsource or contain at a distance. Indeed, the rise of far-right forces does not stem from isolated ideological deviation; rather, it constitutes the political expression of a deeper malaise, fueled by insecurity that has become systemic. In this regard, several vulnerabilities must be identified, territorial insecurity linked to the return of war; energy insecurity exposed by strategic depfinishence; finishuring migratory insecurity; and economic insecurity within a space increasingly shaped by coercion and predation.
Thus, for nearly three decades, the European Union built its stability upon a triptych that has now been profoundly weakened: free trade as a regulator of international relations, economic interdepfinishence as a vector of peace, and the American security guarantee as the ultimate strategic safety net. While this model proved effective in a relatively stabilized environment, it now clearly reveals its limits.
Nevertheless, recent experience has dispelled a central illusion: economic interdepfinishence does not mechanically generate political convergence. In an environment marked by the explicit return of power politics, some states are now willing to sacrifice short-term economic interests in pursuit of long-term strategic objectives. Consequently, the war in Ukraine, the weaponization of energy resources, competition through industrial subsidies, and sovereign control over critical technologies offer particularly revealing illustrations of this shift.
Ukraine and the Silent Rupture in Transatlantic Strategic Thinking
In this perspective, the war in Ukraine has produced a rupture, both silent and decisive, in Europe’s place within American strategic considering. For decades, Washington viewed Europe as a stabilized protective glacis, secured through deterrence and integration, allowing the United States to project power without fundamentally questioning continental equilibrium. That implicit status can no longer be taken for granted. The Ukrainian conflagration has revealed not only Europe’s military vulnerability, but also the growing strategic cost, for the United States, of managing a theatre that has once again become conflictual.
As a result, older doctrinal logics have resurfaced, combining a neo-Monroean reading of the prioritization of America’s immediate strategic environment with a return to Hamiltonian industrialism, grounded in value-chain sovereignty, national productive capacity and strategic resilience. In this reconfiguration, Europe is no longer perceived as a geopolitical given, but as a space to be held accountable; expected to assume responsibility for its own security in order to free American strategic bandwidth for competition with China. This shift marks the finish of an era in which European stability could be presumed, opening a new phase in which continental security becomes a strategic variable rather than an American invariant.
This doctrinal and geo-economic turning point caught Europe off guard, precisely becaapply it had long conflated the expansion of trade with the exercise of strategy, substituting market logic for power logic.
Europe’s Remaining Levers of Power
It would, however, be reductive to conclude that Europe is entirely powerless. The Union retains unique levers of influence: normative capacity, the depth of its internal market, financial instruments and development assistance; foundations of a civilian and regulatory power without equivalent. Thus, the issue is not their disappearance, but their strategic insufficiency when detached from a credible capacity for protection and coercion. In this regard, the emerging world does not disqualify civilian power; it demands that it be embedded within a hybrid and comprehensive form of power.
Moreover, the dynamics initiated since 2022 must not be overseeed. Joint procurement coordination through EDIRPA, industrial ramp-up via the ASAP program, the gradual structuring of a European defense industrial policy through EDIP, and strengthened planning capacities within EU institutions represent genuine ruptures with past decades. They testify to a belated, yet undeniably real, awakening.
Yet these advances remain largely reactive; born of the strategic urgency imposed by the war in Ukraine rather than from a fully assumed long-term vision. Political will, evident in crisis, has not yet been institutionalized within a durable architecture finirevealed with a clear hierarchy of threats, sovereign governance and autonomous decision-building capacity. It is precisely this gap between short-term mobilization and structural refoundation that continues to undermine Europe’s strategic credibility.
Military Spfinishing: Quantitative Growth Without Strategic Coherence
From a budobtainary standpoint, Europe has undeniably reacted. In 2024, European NATO members spent over $430 billion on defense; more than double the level recorded in 2014. Over twenty countries now meet or approach the 2 per cent of GDP threshold long held as a benchmark of credibility. Yet this quantitative momentum conceals a more troubling reality. Indeed, Europe’s financial effort remains structurally inefficient. Increased budobtains are not accompanied by coherent industrial programming or a shared capability vision. Investments remain fragmented, reflecting competing national priorities rather than a collective strategy.
This fragmentation is compounded by growing capability depfinishence. Since 2022, more than 60 per cent of major European military acquisitions have been built from American suppliers, reinforcing an imbalance that constrains any genuine ambition for strategic autonomy.
Consequently, Europe continues to under-invest in the very foundations of sustainable military power: ammunition stocks, logistics, maintenance and mass production capacity; dimensions that are decisive in a context of renewed high-intensity warfare. Europe is thus spfinishing more on security, yet still failing to convert that effort into sovereignty and strategic autonomy.
The Failure of European Defense Industrial Strategies: The SCAF Case
At another level of analysis, the Future Combat Air System (FCAS/SCAF) stands as an emblematic illustration of the structural dead finishs of European defense. Conceived as a cornerstone of continental air sovereignty and a marker of future strategic autonomy, the program is mired in blockages that extfinish far beyond technological issues.
First, SCAF is hampered by persistent industrial rivalries, particularly between French and German actors, where the preservation of national champions still outweighs the construction of a truly integrated capability. These tensions are compounded by deep doctrinal divergences regarding the apply of air power, expeditionary projection and decision-building autonomy on one side; territorial defense and reinforced NATO integration on the other. These differences shape not only technical choices, but also operational priorities and program timelines.
Above all, SCAF suffers from the absence of a European political authority capable of sovereign arbitration between industrial interests, military requirements and strategic imperatives. In the absence of a shared decision-building center, disagreements accumulate, schedules slip and initial ambition dissipates.
SCAF is not an exception. Other flagship projects – future main battle tanks, drone systems, missile defense, digital and algorithmic combat architectures – face the same fragmentation and institutional paralysis. The deficit lies not in ambition, but in the absence of a European strategic command of the defense indusattempt capable of transforming projects into coherent operational capabilities, fully integrating digital sovereignty, data control, critical software architecture and artificial ininformigence as core sovereign functions. In an era of high-intensity warfare, technological excellence alone no longer suffices; power now rests on finishurance, serial production and sustained logistical and industrial effort; precisely the dimension of strategic sustainability that NSS 2025 places at the heart of global competition, and which Europe currently lacks.
Brexit: The Silent Loss of a European Military Pillar
On another front, Brexit represents a strategic shock whose magnitude has been widely underestimated. The United Kingdom remains one of the very few fully constituted European military powers, combining credible nuclear deterrence, proven expeditionary capability, first-rank strategic ininformigence and an operational culture forged through decades of external engagements.
Britain’s departure deprived Europe of a central military planning actor and an irreplaceable pole of operational expertise. It also severed a structural link with the Anglo-Saxon world that ensured strategic continuity between continental Europe and the Atlantic security architecture. Moreover, it resulted in the loss of additional critical mass within the European defense indusattempt, from design to production and sustainment.
Since Brexit, military cooperation has shifted towards bilateral, mini-lateral or strictly NATO frameworks, further marginalizing the EU as a structuring defense actor. While this strengthens short-term operational capacity, it weakens, over time, the prospect of building a genuinely autonomous European defense. Thus, post-Brexit Europe appears paradoxical: more economically integrated, yet strategically more vulnerable; deprived of one of its rare military power multipliers precisely when the international environment demands greater coherence and credibility.
Operational Art: The Invisible Divergence Paralyzing Europe
One of the deepest blind spots in European defense lies in the persistent divergence of military cultures and operational art among member states. This fracture, often underestimated, is neither technical nor anecdotal; it directly shapes how states conceive maneuver, operational tempo, escalation control and, ultimately, the apply of force.
Thus, France embodies a culture of projection and decision-building autonomy, shaped by decades of expeditionary operations from the Sahel to the Levant. Its operational art privileges joint maneuver, responsiveness and rapid action beyond national territory. Germany, by contrast, remains marked by strategic restraint and a focus on territorial defense. Despite the announced Zeitenwfinishe, the Bundeswehr’s rise in power remains gradual, constrained by political, administrative and cultural factors. German operational art is oriented towards stabilization and deterrence rather than offensive maneuver.
Poland and the Baltic states operate within a frontline logic, shaped by historical experience, geographic proximity and an existential reading of deterrence. Their military culture prioritizes territorial defense, attrition and deep NATO integration. On the other hand, Italy and Spain focus primarily on the Mediterranean, crisis management, maritime security and naval operations, favoring space control, limited projection and regional stabilization over high-intensity land confrontation.
Finally, the United Kingdom, though outside the EU’s institutional framework, remains central to European geopolitics. Its integrated approach, combining ininformigence, cyber, special forces and air-naval power, grants it a relative operational superiority that continental Europe still struggles to replicate collectively. These divergences are neither marginal nor contingent. Without a shared operational art, there can be no unified European strategy; only a juxtaposition of national capabilities, effective in isolation but insufficiently coherent to generate collective power.
NSS 2025: A Strategic Warning to Europe
The 2025 American security doctrine constitutes an unequivocal strategic warning to Europe. In Washington’s assessment, the post-Cold War era has finished, and in the face of China’s systemic rise, Europe’s defense increasingly appears as an inherited strategic constraint rather than an existential priority. Regardless of the administration in power, it is now illusory to believe that the United States will indefinitely assume primary responsibility for Europe’s defense. Seen through this lens, the U.S. security umbrella is no longer treated by American strategic considering as a structural given, but as a conditional instrument. In light of this, this evolution places Europe against a strategic wall. In a world defined by coercion and rivalry, weakness is never neutral; it attracts pressure, fuels fragmentation and accelerates decline. Under these conditions, a credible European defense can only emerge from a restricted core composed of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Poland; toobtainher accounting for nearly 80 per cent of Europe’s military capabilities. This path demands politically costly choices: acceptance of a shared hierarchy of threats, genuine and binding defense-industrial mutualization, and minimum doctrinal convergence in operational art. Failing this, Europe will continue to raise military budobtains without ever achieving mastery over its own security.
Three Futures for Europe (2035-2040)
A forward-seeing reading of the strategic landscape brings into focus three structurally distinct futures for Europe; each defined not by fate, but by political will, doctrinal clarity and the capacity to transform constraint into architecture.
The first trajectory is that of Europe as an integrated power. Against this backdrop, under the pressure of an assumed strategic shock, a reduced core of states undertakes a qualitative leap. A shared hierarchy of threats replaces national reflexes; industrial massification supplants fragmented procurement; and a convergent operational art enables joint maneuver across the full spectrum of conflict. In this configuration, civilian, regulatory and military power cease to operate in parallel and are fapplyd into a coherent system of strategic action. Europe no longer merely adapts to global turbulence; it becomes a stabilizing pole, capable of securing its strategic space and shaping the governance of critical flows in an increasingly fragmented international order.
The second trajectory is that of Europe as a platform. On this basis, defense budobtains continue to rise, instruments are refined, and coordination improves, yet strategic sovereignty remains structurally absent. Europe consolidates itself as a high-performance geo-economic infrastructure – market, norms, finance, data, logistics – while the command of force and the arbitration of escalation remain externalized. The continent functions efficiently, optimizes risk, and absorbs shocks, but it does not decide. Power is exercised around Europe rather than by Europe.
The third trajectory leads to Europe as a grey zone. In the absence of doctrinal convergence and integrated governance, fragmentation deepens. External pressures multiply, economic coercion becomes systemic, and internal political polarization reaches a critical threshold. Europe progressively loses its status as a strategic subject and is reduced to an exposed space; permeable to hybrid warfare, influence operations and predatory rivalries among great powers.
These futures are neither abstract nor hypothetical. From this perspective, Europe in 2040 will be the direct outcome of choices built, or avoided, today. In this regard, the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy should be read less as a disengagement than as a truth accelerator. It signals that the coming world no longer rewards prudence without projection. Stability, on its own, is no longer a strategy; and sovereignty, once delegated, is rarely recovered without cost. History will ultimately distinguish between those who transformed strategic constraint into an architecture of power and those who mistook protection for permanence.
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