Europe’s Military Boom Masks A Strategic Void – OpEd
The ghost of the Cold War is not quite ready to rest. According to the latest SIPRI report, global military expenditure has reached a record high of $2.7 trillion. Europe, rattled by the cannon fire echoing from Ukraine, has responded with its most dramatic defense spending spree since the fall of the Berlin Wall: $693 billion, up 17 percent from the previous year.
As expected, the war in Ukraine is the proximate trigger. But scratch the surface and a deeper anxiety emerges: Europe is not only rearming against Russia; it is also bracing for the increasingly plausible scenario of an unreliable United States.
SIPRI researchers have delicately referred to “concerns about possible U.S. disengagement within the alliance.” In other words, Europe is beginning to realize what some have argued all along: the American security umbrella may one day close, not with a bang but with an election.
What has followed is a kind of budgetary panic. The EU’s recently relaxed fiscal rules allow defense expenditures to be neatly removed from deficit calculations. That’s one way of massaging the numbers. But it will take more than creative accounting and swelling arsenals to convince anyone that Europe is now ready to act independently of its transatlantic patron.
Take, for instance, Germany’s €1 trillion defense and infrastructure plan. Grand in ambition, it has been hailed as the Federal Republic’s largest post-war military revitalization. But turning cash into capacity—training soldiers, building modern systems, and ensuring supply chains—is not a transformation achieved by mere budget allocations.
The underlying ailment is Europe’s persistent failure to forge a coherent strategic vision. The continent’s defense architecture remains a patchwork quilt of competing priorities, national industries, and political egos. Collective defense procurement, the most obvious remedy to inefficiency, is treated more as a theoretical virtue than practical policy. The EU’s €150 billion STEP loan initiative is already mired in disagreement over whether foreign weapons producers should be allowed into the sandbox.
For all its newfound willingness to spend, Europe is still reluctant to think, which would require a degree of introspection uncomfortable for many of the continent’s leaders. After all, strategic autonomy demands more than the ability to launch airstrikes without dialing Washington. It means formulating independent foreign policies, occasionally disagreeing with the superpower, and—heresy of heresies—carrying the burden of consequences alone.
Vice President J.D. Vance, no friend of liberal internationalism, nonetheless made a point worth pondering. Citing France’s unsuccessful bid to dissuade the United States from the Iraq invasion, he argued that the problem wasn’t Europe’s dissent but its impotence. It simply lacked the military and diplomatic weight to force a pause in Washington’s imperial momentum.
The lesson still stands. Europe has rarely lacked for rhetoric; what it has lacked is leverage. In the post-9/11 world, it neither constrained American adventurism nor offered alternatives. Its strategic dependency was not a bug of transatlanticism, it was the system working as designed.
Today’s rearmament drive presents an opportunity to rewrite that script. But if history is a guide, the odds are not favorable. The temptation to pour billions into outdated weapons systems, duplicate national capabilities, and revive Cold War paradigms is strong. What is needed instead is a leaner, smarter approach: fewer tanks, more satellites; fewer Eurofighter variations, more unified command structures.
Nor will a militarized Europe automatically mean a more peaceful or morally grounded one. After all, the West’s claim to leadership has never rested solely on force projection. It also rested on liberal values, multilateralism, and a modicum of self-restraint. None of those qualities is necessarily enhanced by doubling defense budgets.
The problem, ultimately, is philosophical as much as logistical. Does Europe aspire to be a more equal partner in the Atlantic alliance or merely a better-equipped junior one? Strategic autonomy should not become shorthand for a more efficient dependency.
And here lies the uncomfortable paradox. A more self-reliant Europe could, in theory, help stabilize the West. But that requires a political maturity and coherence it has rarely displayed outside the EU’s bureaucratic corridors. The current trajectory risks producing an arms-heavy continent with little sense of what to do with its newfound capacity, except perhaps mirror America’s mistakes.
It is entirely possible that Europe’s future lies not in mimicking the Pentagon, but in remembering what made it distinct: a commitment to diplomacy, an aversion to hubris, and a skepticism of military solutions to political problems. In the end, guns and jets are poor substitutes for a sense of purpose.
- This article was published at FPIF
