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The first challenge facing European defense isn’t a money issue but a coherence one. And coherence, unlike a budget, cannot be voted on every year. The lines that follow aim to show that if Europe wants to be able to defend itself in 2050, it must not only commit an extraordinary budget, but also align its research, its equipment, its human resources, its doctrine, and its strategic will so as to form a coherent and credible whole.
Europe has lived a twenty‑five year historical interlude, a generation’s time. The end of the Cold War seemed to confirm Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of “the end of history”: liberal democracy and the market had prevailed, we stood at the dawn of a world where economics would overshadow geopolitics and politics, interdependence would resolve conflicts, and the power dynamics that had governed states for centuries would vanish. Europe, more than its peers, embodied this dazzling promise, for it began as a civil power and a common market, a peaceful project grounded in the idea of integration, sheltered under the American umbrella, but largely ignoring the burden of its defense.
The interlude is closing. History is reminding us of what Robert Kagan calls “the return of history and the end of the dreams” (the return of power relations that this interlude had seemed to abolish): the high‑intensity wars unfolding on the European continent, coercion stemming from dependencies, the conditionality of alliances once believed permanent, and the open competition aimed at shaping the international order. Thirty years later, it is not that Fukuyama was wrong—the liberal democracy still retains its appeal—but what he described as a settled state was merely a moment in time.
The pause in power politics was a temporary exception that could not endure. Yet Europe organized itself around this exception, so it is ill‑prepared for the return to the rule. In his essay The Maze of the Lost: The West and Its Adversaries Amin Maalouf begins with a warning borrowed from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” That is precisely the mindset you want in mind for European defense.
We often interpret this return as a succession of warning shots. It’s a fitting image, yet it tends to treat them as distinct crises, each one surmountable, followed by a return to normal. What is overlooked is that the ground itself has changed. The “normal” implied by this return does not exist. In 1887, Albert Robida already imagined a century where war would no longer be an exception but a permanent state, a condition from which collective life would reorganize itself calmly. That satire today reads as a diagnosis. For defense, the consequences are stark. Europe, conceived as a civil, post‑strategic, dependent interlude, must relearn what power means.
It would be tempting to measure this effort by the volume of resources committed, but that would be a mistake. European defense budgets may be rising in every country, but they will yield only fragmented capabilities and production chains that duplicate each other, all without a coordinated political vision.
Digital Dependency and Strategic Fragmentation
Let’s begin with a state‑of‑play that honestly gives pause. Europe cannot defend itself if it does not have the backing or the means of the United States. We know how this dependency manifests: strategic facilitation, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, transport, and the nuclear umbrella. Yet among defense circles the most structural and least discussed dependency is of a digital nature.
Modern military power is increasingly tied to information technology. Command and control, targeting, fusion of intelligence, electronic warfare, battlefield logistics and battlefield connectivity rely on digital infrastructure and the people or programs that configure and maintain it. This is where the weakness lies. A defense that does not control its code cannot control its forces. If Europe does not master its own digital infrastructure and guarantee the skills that its sovereignty depends on, it condemns itself to a pure servitude. There is also a human dimension to this necessity: hardware can be bought, but a generation of engineers does not appear overnight.
We are dealing here with a concrete dependency that is becoming increasingly visible. European armed forces and the states backing them lean on American digital infrastructure: cloud services and digital platforms are provided by American hyperscalers, as well as the majority of office and collaboration software. This fragility is not theoretical. In Ukraine, commercial satellite connectivity in a combat zone has already fallen prey to a provider’s discretion. A 2026 study estimated an annual increase of cloud software costs for Europe between 2026 and 2030 at 140 billion euros, of which 93 billion would bring no corresponding Europe‑wide benefit. A defense that outsources its digital network is exposed to outages imposed by a third party. Two recent examples illustrate this: in August 2021, Google suspended Afghanistan’s government online services within minutes of Kabul’s capture by the Taliban, effectively cutting a state’s access. On August 20, 2025, the U.S. Treasury sanctioned French judge Nicolas Guillou at the International Criminal Court, cutting his access to American digital services, with the same effect on an individual scale. This kind of interference is possible and foreseeable; the only unknown is the scale at which it might be applied.
Added to this dependency is a second vulnerability: fragmentation. On the one hand, we have a power that uses a single system; on the other, Europe sees a proliferation of incompatible systems. The data are now well established and damning: the European Union operates about 178 distinct weapon systems—roughly a dozen main battle tank families and as many frigate models—whereas the United States operates around thirty. Only about 18% of European equipment spending goes to cooperative programs, and about one euro in two goes to suppliers located outside Europe, with a third of that outside the continent, including the United States.
Samuel Faure speaks of an “archipelagization” of European defense to describe this multiplicity of national poles pursuing the same objectives yet acting without coordination. Each duplication corresponds to a separate production chain, a separate logistics chain, and a separate training track, so that economies of scale and interoperability are sacrificed each time. To spend more without addressing fragmentation is to multiply this kind of clash. If there is a lesson from the war in Ukraine, it is that mass, resilience, and the ability to produce ammunition matter more than the elegance of an isolated platform, precisely the three attributes that fragmentation undermines. This implies a deeper shift in the tempo of war.
As Olivier Schmitt noted, contemporary conflicts are both faster and slower: tactically, they speed up—drones, sensors and precision strikes shrink decision time—while operationally and strategically they slow down because logistics, industrial capacity and endurance determine the outcome. The conclusion is clear. Europe must learn to fight faster, but it must also learn to endure. An optimized defense that aims for tactical speed but lacks strategic endurance, industry, ammunition, logistics, reserves, and long‑term alliance cohesion is a force that wins battles but loses wars.
At the last Ankara summit, on July 8, 2026, the Alliance pledged an extra 50 billion dollars for new purchases, based on a projected rise to 139 billion dollars above 2025 levels. More tellingly, it committed to creating an interoperable “combat cloud” across the Atlantic and to adopting powerful AI models, all conceived as a shared capability. Data‑centric architectures and zero‑trust requirements from quantum and AI demand sovereign and interoperable clouds and AI models, connected where Europe chooses to connect them and closed where they must remain. Ankara only stated what is required, without specifying who should implement it or on what infrastructure. Rather than leaving this to American hyperscalers once again, it is essential to seize the opportunities this openness offers.
The Four Axes to Embrace by 2050
You cannot build the defense of 2050 without setting it against the threats identified in 2026. In twenty‑five years, the greatest challenges will come in the form of strategic ruptures and discontinuities that will not merely magnify existing risks but will constitute inflection points that alter the very nature of those risks, often due to cascading reactions that cannot be foreseen until they occur. Four domains are identified—technological, societal, geopolitical, and environmental—which form not a catalog of threats but a map of uncertainties that Europe must learn to navigate. Each domain should allow Europe to test the capacity of its organizations, skills, and doctrine to evolve together rather than in isolation. Because ruptures provide the best tests of coherence.
Technology is the most evident domain. Agentic artificial intelligence is not a new tool to bolt onto existing forces; it is a rupture that compels an evolution of organizations, skills, and doctrine. An army that procures an autonomous decision‑support system without rethinking its command structures, offering training, or revising its doctrine gains no real advantage. Quantum computing represents a second rupture because it upends existing digital architectures and demands the adoption of a “zero trust” paradigm and data‑driven security. Its effects ripple beyond cryptography to detection, navigation, and computation. The technology rupture is primarily a digital challenge Europe can only overcome if it controls its IT infrastructure and the human experts who maintain it. That said, history invites humility: the promise that data and algorithms would “optimize” military decision‑making—much pursued by the United States in the 2000s—was never fully realized. It wasn’t a fault of the technology, but of focusing on hardware and software while neglecting organization, doctrine, and training; such an approach yields a glossy capability without real substance.
Automation and robotics sit at the crossroads of technology and society. They raise ethical questions and affect how military force is used (doctrine). They also sharpen the “integration versus coordination” dilemma: for instance, should European nations aim to integrate or merely coordinate the doctrine governing autonomous and robotic systems? There is no room for ad hoc answers whenever a crisis looms.
The societal dimension is strategic because an army draws its strength from the society it serves. Three ruptures stand out. The struggle for information and trust, disinformation, citizen distrust, and eroding legitimacy of institutions have turned the cohesion of each population into a battlefield front. The weakening of ties between the armed forces and the nation, strained recruitment, shrinking reserves, and the erosion of a national culture of resilience all undermine the human foundation of defense. Finally, demographic decline contracts the talent pool at a moment when the capacity demands more. Regardless of budget, a divided, wary, or indifferent society cannot have credible defense.
The geopolitical thread argues for rebalancing the world’s great powers. The American alliance, now conditional, creates an urgent rupture. Add to this the militarization of interdependence, which turns supply chains, critical minerals, and access to technology into coercive tools—China has shown willingness to do this—as well as the instrumentalization of energy and migration flows to pressure European societies. The race to control strategic chokepoints, from the Red Sea to the Hormuz Strait, demonstrates that distant upheavals can abruptly expose Europe to risk. Europe is destined to operate in a world where the unity of the West cannot be taken for granted.
Environmental considerations force us to rethink the missions entrusted to the armed forces and the conditions under which they might operate. The climate‑driven pressures on Europe’s periphery—the Sahel, the Mediterranean basin, and the Middle East—fuel instability and migratory streams that the armed forces increasingly have to manage. Access to resources—water and essential minerals—has become a source of conflict. Finally, new domains such as the Arctic, the seabed, and space open up arenas that were largely absent from operational planning not long ago.
None of the four axes can be tackled in isolation. Their interaction forms the matrix of the 2050 strategic environment, and they do not point to a single predictable threat to which European defense could be tuned. The challenge lies here: the 2050 environment will be defined by uncertainty, by the interaction of tipping points no model can anticipate, and by scenarios that seem unlikely until they occur. European defense must draw strength from its ability to absorb shocks, buy time, and coordinate to adapt, rather than from its ability to forecast. This requires, beyond hardware and doctrine, a mindset built on the willingness to organize for discontinuity rather than continuity, to train for strategic surprises, to safeguard the strength of institutions, and to maintain command reflexes capable of meeting a first strike. An Europe that prepares only for the threats it anticipates will not prepare for the world’s uncertainty.
If the conduct of war is upended, what will we inherit?
The ruptures described are not limited to new tools; they reshape the very conduct of war. Three questions follow.
First, to what extent is the inherited structure of forces still fit for purpose? The Ukrainian battlefield is transparent and saturated with drones, offering a risky visibility of armored concentrations and large static formations. On the other hand, precision—now cheaper—undermines the survivability of high‑end platforms. It isn’t a call to discard the premium platforms, but to rebalance by pairing “decision‑making weapons” with affordable “wear‑and‑tear” weapons that can be produced in quantity.
Second, is war becoming less costly? Tactically, yes: an FPV drone costing a few hundred euros can destroy a vehicle worth several million. Strategically, not: you cannot prevail without a mass air defense that spans multiple levels (interceptors are often more expensive than the threats they neutralize), mastery of sea spaces from the surface to the deep, and sustained protections for the rear over time. Costs have shifted from the platform to the system, then to production, stocks, and resilience.
Third, Russia and Ukraine, advancing little on the front lines, are increasingly trying to win on the rear via long‑range strikes targeting energy infrastructure, transport hubs, and civilian morale—far beyond the front line. War is becoming a contest of depth and endurance, not just front‑line maneuvers. A Europe that focuses only on the front line is misreading the war: depth, energy networks, logistic nodes, digital infrastructure, and civilian morale must be defended as seriously as borders. What Europe experienced in 2026—without a single shot fired on its soil—demonstrates that a drone surge above allied territory, likely emanating from a “ghost fleet” operating in international waters, can reveal comprehensive gaps in air defense, legal authority, and political cohesion, and also that the threshold for collective response is higher than Europe’s deterence posture would suggest. Defending the homeland’s rear is also a matter of logistical discipline, captured by the planners’ refrain: “Infantry wins battles; logistics win wars.” Projection lines must be shielded from drones and sabotage, dispersed and recurrent rather than hypothetical. A doctrine of deep strikes obliges Europe to reframe its defense: the rear has become a front that must be prepared for.
For an Europe Capable of Defending Itself
If we follow the method outlined here, the so‑called “Singapore method”—not starting from what is politically feasible today but from 2050 and reasoning backward—becomes essential. This is all the more important because European defense initiatives, built on the “ReArm Europe” and “Readiness 2030” plans, are framed by urgency, notably stockpile replenishment. But without a long‑term objective, urgency simply encourages accumulating capabilities without a clear direction. Hence the value of a twenty‑five‑year horizon as well.
By 2050, Europe’s core can defend itself. It does not need to establish a single European army or political union. Yet, in the longer term, it will require something more specific: a Europe with coherent and coordinated capabilities and a shared political will to deter and, if necessary, act across the entire spectrum—from conventional defense to cyber, economic, and information warfare. Europe’s security must no longer be outsourced. We speak of deep, sustained sovereignty—not symbolic, declarative sovereignty.
Concretely, the 2050 horizon frees us from today’s constraints to transform mindsets and organizations. It implies first a digital sovereignty: control over the infrastructures and the experts who empower a software‑defined war, backed by metal. It is coherent and precise and translates a shared strategic will into coordinated action, without paralysis. The deadline is far enough to ensure a genuine industrial base, stockpiles, reserves, a resilient logistics system, and a politically firm alliance, aware that the wars this framework is designed to deter will demand endurance as much as immediacy. It remains anchored in and fully integrated with the transatlantic alliance, as a partner that assumes its responsibilities. Finally, it is flexible, built to respond to strategic surprises and uncertainty, ensuring coherent action across a wide range of unforeseen scenarios. Each question that follows is a step in the method of starting from this end state and working back to decisions to be made now.
From Budget to Coherence
What level of defense effort should Europe aim for? This is the first question. One might be tempted to answer in terms of a percentage of GDP: 2%, 3%, or even 5%. But that would be overly simplistic. A share of GDP measures contribution, not capability. It tells us little about a country’s defense potential.
What makes an army strong and a country resilient is coherence and the simultaneity of several dimensions: research and development, equipment, human resources and soldiers’ living conditions, doctrine and training. An army that buys hardware without an ad‑hoc team, adopts a doctrine for which it has not trained, or relies on platforms its industry cannot sustain, is not a strong army regardless of its expenditure. Conversely, an army in which these elements reinforce one another yields a power far greater than what its budget share would imply. The Europe‑wide objective is therefore not a number but a standard—a sustainable level of effort by 2050, measured by the coherence and outcomes it yields rather than the share of national wealth it absorbs.
This reframing has a practical consequence. Rather than forcing European countries to debate annual percentages in line with changing political cycles, it invites them to consider how they construct a coherent and resilient defense system. The first option would be routine; the second would require embracing the discipline demanded by the epochal shift we are living through.
Coordinate or Integrate?
Are interoperability and coordination enough, or does Europe need genuine integration? It’s the core question of the debate, but it cannot be answered in a binary way. Europe requires coordination at some levels and integration at others. The dividing line must be drawn in the right place.
Forces must be coordinated, not merged. Each nation’s armed forces should remain rooted in its society and its traditional command structure, bearing responsibility at the national level. This anchorage is a source of strength and legitimacy, not a barrier to overcome. The goal is interoperability among coordinated forces, with common standards, joint exercises, unified doctrine, and the ability to align actions between them.
However, when it comes to strategic decisions, Europe must aim for the integration of political decision‑making—a shared view of vital interests. The continent’s principal weakness is not a lack of military consultation but the absence of a common strategic vision that would allow action consistent with that vision. Hence the urgency of a shared political intent, which presumes a common interpretation of threats and the same objectives guiding implementation. A single strategic intent with coordinated execution is better than a plethora of interoperable units dependent on twenty‑seven separate decisions. The gap to close concerns not just capacities but the distance, as Samuel Faure calls it, between decision and action—the strategic intimacy among states that would translate a common interpretation into timely and binding commitments, rather than leaving it to hollow declarations.
The dilemma isn’t new. The aim is not to create a fully integrated European army. That would be neither desirable nor necessary. This mirrors what the European Defence Community sought to do from 1950 to 1954—integrate forces down to the battalion level. Lacking a political community to back the decision, it failed. The lesson applies in reverse: it is not the army that must be integrated, but the political decision to defend shared values and the spaces—territorial, digital, space, and sea—that Europeans share. Forces should stay coordinated, not fused. Yet the decision to act to defend these values cannot be parceled out into twenty‑seven sub‑decisions.
This is where the logic of differentiated integration and the “coalition of willing” comes into play. Demanding unanimity from all members every time force is needed paralyzes action. Realism suggests there should be a core that agrees on a strategic intent and acts accordingly while remaining open to others, rather than a treaty that hinges on a final veto being raised.
It is essential that this core possess the political and military power to decide to deploy forces, even without American agreement or the consent of any ally. Today, NATO’s command structure does not guarantee this: consensus means any one ally can block a mandate, no matter how Europanized the chain of command becomes. Autonomy cannot emerge from NATO’s integrated structure; it must come from the European Union’s “planning and military conduct capability” and its “rapid deployment capacity,” or from ad hoc coalitions placed under national or multinational command. It isn’t a break with the Alliance but the ability to act when the Alliance itself does not, i.e., an operational sense of strategic autonomy.
Nuclear Deterrence: Not Shared, but Advanced
The governance of nuclear deterrence is the most thorny issue and calls for a precise answer. The most realistic and responsible option is not to share the deterrent force. The credibility and unity of a nation’s decision to use force rest on its sovereignty. Diluting it within a collective mechanism would weaken it and turn a real guarantee into a symbolic gesture.
The posture that is both lucid and meaningful is “advanced” or extended deterrence, as defined by the French President at Île Longue in March 2026. France’s deterrent has an inherently European dimension because it protects vital interests closely linked to those of its closest neighbors. “Advanced deterrence” thus has tangible reach. It involves European partners through support measures, the deployment of dual‑capability French aircraft, joint nuclear exercises, structured consultations, and conventional intelligence and early warning support, while leaving the decision to employ force solely to the President. It operates state‑to‑state, independently of the Union, and strengthens Europe’s position without transferring the decision to another actor or “sharing” the weapon or undermining the sovereign core on which credible deterrence rests.
This distinction—a shared posture rather than a common trigger—embodies a logic whose collective aim is ambitious yet candid about the irreducibility of a nation’s character. It complements, rather than replaces, the American umbrella, which remains a major contribution that only France, among European powers, is able to offer.
Human and Moral Foundation, Cohesion, and Military Singularity
Apart from capabilities, budgets, and command structures, the bedrock of defense is the cohesion and the distinctive character of the military tool. These are intangible assets, certainly not abstractions, because they justify why a nation maintains an army, goes to war, and knows what it is prepared to defend. It is inconceivable to build a European defense architecture without these two elements, which are too easily overlooked.
Cohesion operates on two distinct levels, requiring different actions and not to be confused. The first is national cohesion: the link in each country between population, institutions, and armed forces, the will to defend, societal resilience, and the legitimacy of force. In this sense, action remains national. The second is European cohesion: the link between European nations, what they share, and their willingness to defend it together. This level requires establishing a common foundation of values and vital interests, and agreeing on the degree of solidarity that unites these nations. One cannot substitute for the other. European cohesion cannot simply be imposed by decree if the national base is fragile, nor can strong national cohesion automatically cohere into a European whole. What binds European nations? The question is relevant, and the answer is more cultural than institutional. As Milan Kundera wrote, Europe is a value, not a geography; being European means belonging to a shared culture that the East once “kidnapped” from a Europe that had never ceased to be Western. European defense rests above all on what “binds.”
At the very heart of this defense lies what one could call military singularity: only armed forces have the right to kill on command (the essential basis of a military status). No public institution possesses this power. Beyond the status, this singularity has structural consequences that any European architecture must respect. It shapes governance because the legitimacy chain authorizing the use of lethal force cannot be diluted or left ambiguous; strategic decisions may be made, but the actual use of force and deterrence rest on a national core that cannot be compromised. It shapes the organization of armed forces, grounded in discipline, hierarchy, and sacrifice, rather than civil‑institution logic. It shapes the availability of manpower, based on an unreserved commitment, incomparable to ordinary employment contracts. And it upends the civil/military relationship at a time when the historical link “army–nation” is under pressure from societal strains noted above. It is time to renew the civil‑military relationship and replace the old one with a deliberate link between the armed forces and the society they serve, rather than pretending it is an inherent and seamless bond.
This singularity also requires limiting the automation of force. When targeting is delegated to algorithmic signatures, moral and legal accountability becomes diluted along the human‑machine chain. You cannot entrust a machine with the right to kill. That right must be exercised by people within a chain of command capable of being held to account. Therefore, integrating a strategic decision does not mean turning it into automated action.
This is the human face of coherence. A Europe that lines up budgets, industry, and doctrine but neglects cohesion and military singularity is a hollow body, a force with no real deterrent effect or adaptive capacity.
Industry, Equipment Procurement, and the Common “Why”
Now, to the question of buying military hardware: how can we overcome national interests, achieve economies of scale, and reduce dependence on American technology? Once again, the framing we are used to is unsatisfactory.
You cannot, and must not, ignore national interests when it comes to defense industry. These interests must be preserved because industrial integration follows cohesion, as we have shown, and only holds if Europeans know what they are prepared to defend together. The priority is to fix this shared “why.” Industrial pooling, economies of scale, a collectively defined defense market framework, the “28th defense regime” to borrow a phrase from the manifesto—these come after nations understand what they are prepared to defend together. If you do the reverse, the slightest economies of scale will be accused of selling vital interests short.
A coherent industrial doctrine must reconcile two types of capabilities shown by Ukraine to be more complementary than competitive: “decision‑making” weapons—high‑end systems that are determinative—and “wear‑and‑tear” weapons—lean, affordable, mass‑produced. The low end saturates, repairs, and renews quickly; the high end yields the intended effect at the right moment. Europe needs both and must design them around a target cost.
To achieve this, we must reconcile two industrial regimes: established suppliers who master system integration, certification, sovereignty, and economies of scale; and new players in defense technologies who bring speed and software‑driven iteration. The aim is to explicitly pair traditional partners with startups, not to privilege one over the other, favoring open architectures of the plug‑and‑fight variety rather than locked configurations, built on data regarded as a common and sovereign asset, and supported by sovereign capital financing research, industrialization, and scale‑up. Fragmentation can be overcome by building a perfectly interoperable ecosystem rather than crowning a single champion.
Technological dependence also follows the same coherence logic. The objective is a deliberate hierarchy of dependencies rather than autarky. Digital resources and software constitute the riskiest dependency, the priority area for long‑term investment.
Aligning European defense with NATO means distributing tasks rather than pitting multiple action frameworks against each other. NATO remains the framework for collective defense, integrated military planning, and high‑level command. The European Union serves as the framework in which industry, mobility for military personnel, funding, and societal resilience take shape. Its role is to act as a mediator of sovereignty and to ensure co‑funding of cooperative programs that reflect a European preference, using public procurement to spur innovation and ensuring that member states meet their commitments against common indicators. It is essential to avoid two redundant processes: an EU defense project that ignores NATO objectives, or vice versa. The aim is a single set of forces serving both, with a robust European pillar capable of planning, commanding, and executing the closest missions, even if American attention shifts elsewhere.
The solution is to rebalance NATO’s centers of gravity rather than exit the alliance, using three levers: more European capacity planning, more European mission command where possible, and greater industrial and logistical mutualization among European Allies. Together, these reduce Europe’s dependence without harming interoperability, which remains an asset.
Concrete proposals exist. Czech President Petr Pavel, former head of NATO’s Military Committee, recommends institutionalizing the European dimension of the Alliance by embedding it in planning, budgets, and deployment procedures and adding a European officer to every senior command post, so that Europe‑specific operations are possible without active participation by the United States. In practice, this would be a genuine rebalancing: a robust pillar that can survive American disengagement without creating a parallel structure.
The aim is to guard against drift without sacrificing autonomy. Doubling up command posts does not alter NATO’s consensus rule; no redistribution of command posts would change the possibility of veto at the Council level. The proposal concerns strategic level—NATO’s Allied Command Operations HQ—not a wholesale duplication of the alliance’s entire command structure, which European senior officers would not accept nor could their defense budgets support. From this perspective, Pavel’s proposal helps maintain continuity if a mission is authorized but U.S. forces are redirected, allowing the European officer on the ground to take over without a new mandate. It also strengthens, rather than undermines, transatlantic solidarity by building a pool of high‑ranking generals experienced in multinational operations. It is an experience that genuine autonomous capability will require. It does not by itself solve the question of how to distribute posts among member states—whether by contribution, specialization, or rotation. A serious rebalancing should address that directly rather than by default.
The essential point is to distinguish, with full awareness, between acceptable dependencies and critical ones. Europe can remain integrated within NATO while gaining more influence in force generation, air defense, logistics, munitions, tactical intelligence, and its own command and control capacity. This is where obtaining new shares is most feasible and where dependence is strongest and least acceptable. The drone incursions of 2026 remind us that air defense, along with its legal and political governance, is part of the equation. Last but not least, some NATO members are not in the European Union (the United Kingdom, Norway, Turkey) while others are in the EU but not in NATO (Austria, Ireland, Cyprus, Malta), which means the European pillar we speak of does not map exactly onto the EU. It is a volunteer coalition, open to all who share the same strategic intent, regardless of official membership.
This requires a real shift in mindset. NATO is European and American. It is not an American institution to which Europeans belong; it is what its members choose to make of it. In essence, it is more of a psychological constraint than an institutional one. Europeans are fully entitled to compensate for Europe’s lack of vision and leadership within NATO. That would be the single most decisive step Europe could take, one that costs nothing in interoperability.
Act Now for Autonomy: Three Decisions to Make
A vision only informs if it translates into dated decisions with accountability. Having precise deadlines—such as phasing out internal combustion engines by 2035—helps to structure expectations and investments. We will identify three major decisions that would enable Europe to progress in defense along this path.
- First decision. By 2030, Europe creates a defense software sovereignty program, takes control of its critical digital infrastructure, and maintains a cadre of European software and AI engineers as a strategic capability. Since modern military power is defined by software, these elements are both Europe’s greatest vulnerability and the foundation of coherence.
- Second decision. By 2028, Europe establishes a mechanism of common strategic intent—a small core or coalition of willing states capable of interpreting threats, deciding, and acting without requiring unanimity. This coalition should rely more on the Union’s planning and direction capabilities than on NATO’s integrated command when a specifically European mandate is required. Integrating decision‑making, rather than attempting to unify force structures, turns interoperable units into real operational power.
- Third decision. By 2030, Europe implements the European, or advanced, dimension of its deterrence—the “advanced deterrence” defined by the President at Île Longue—in the form of a structured strategic dialogue among voluntary partners rather than shared decision‑making.
These three steps must be binding, with tight deadlines and an up‑to‑date indicator, such as a minimum “European 1%”—i.e., at least 1% of GDP allocated to European‑made military equipment—verified in an annual review.
Without discipline, an ambition remains a dead letter, and crises reproduce the habits they purport to erase. None of these decisions requires Europe to leave NATO, sign a new treaty, or impose uniformity among members.
They require only what is currently lacking: coherence and the will to guarantee it. They also reveal a discomfiting truth. The success of the European project is not guaranteed, and an Europe unable to defend itself has little chance of remaining autonomous. The choice is between coherence and decline, more than between ambition and realism.