The numbers are finally moving. European defence budgets are rising, equipment orders are climbing, and the continent’s politicians have discovered a shared vocabulary of readiness, resilience and strategic autonomy. All of this is welcome. None of it answers the question that has been waiting for thirty years: what is European military power actually for?
This is not a rhetorical question. It is the question that determines everything else — force structure, procurement, doctrine, alliances. For most of the post-Cold War era, Europe avoided it by letting the answer be supplied from Washington. The alliance’s structure meant Europe could afford the luxury of not deciding: the United States provided the guarantee, the framework and, to a significant degree, the strategic imagination. The questions of what Europe would fight for, where and to what end were answered by default, in Washington.
That default is gone. The strategic centre of gravity of the alliance has shifted, and the European members are left holding a set of increasingly capable armed forces with an increasingly unresolved purpose. The debates about spending percentages are useful, but they are a displacement activity. You cannot settle what 2.5 percent of GDP is for by arguing about 2.5 percent of GDP.
The honest versions of this debate are beginning in Berlin and Warsaw, but they are still shadowed by the old divisions. Is the purpose of European defence to deter a specific adversary — the working assumption of the eastern flank — or to build a general capacity for European security independent of any particular threat, the longer-standing French position? These are not the same strategy. They produce different armies, different doctrines and different relationships with the United States.
My argument is simple: Europe should decide that its military power exists to guarantee the integrity and security of the European continent — including its eastern borders, its maritime approaches and the security arrangements of its immediate neighbourhood — in cooperation with, but not in dependence on, the United States. That formulation is not anti-American. It is the condition for a genuine partnership: an alliance between a Europe that can defend itself and an America that respects the fact.
The alternative is the current trajectory, in which Europe rearms in response to the last crisis, funded to the level of the latest budget agreement, without a strategic destination. That is the most expensive possible form of defence: maximum cost, maximum dependence, minimum deterrence value. The adversary sees through it, and the alliance’s own cohesion suffers from the ambiguity.
The continent has a genuine defence moment. It should use it to answer the question it has postponed for three decades — not with a doctrine paper, but with decisions: what Europe will defend, what it will not, and how it will tell its allies and its adversaries the difference.
