Strategic Autonomy or Strategic Illusion: Europe's Defense Dilemma

Photo: Open AI

By Tinatin Gachechiladze

For the last thirty years, the concept of European strategic autonomy has been cycling between aspiration and institutional reality. The defense dilemma Europe deals with is not new, but it has never been more profound. The continent possesses solid economic weight, an industrial base, and political institutions to strengthen its own security. Regardless, it has not done so. On paper, Europe's means look formidable: European NATO allies outspent Russia on defense by a factor of four in 2023. Their combined forces exceed those of Russia or the United States, and five European countries rank among the top ten global arms exporters. In practice, the underinvestment, fragmented procurement, and habitual reliance on American leadership have left Europe structurally unprepared to defend itself without U.S. support at scale. Spring 2026 has made that gap impossible to conceal as the 2026 U.S. National Defense Strategy (NDS) has ended, with an implicit guarantee that Washington would bear primary responsibility for Europe's conventional defense. The question now facing European capitals is whether the strategic autonomy they have long proclaimed is a genuine capacity, or merely a convenient fiction that dissolves under pressure.

A double Dilemma

At the heart of Europe's predicament lies a paradox that has never been honestly resolved. Every EU member state agrees that European defense should be strengthened. Besides, all are careful not to do too much, for fear of precipitating the very outcome they seek to avoid: American disengagement from NATO. In the meantime, the American pivot is not cyclical but politically structural. The 2026 NDS ranks homeland defense and deterrence of China as its top priorities, relegating Europe to a secondary theatre. Eropean allies are now described as rich and capable, and therefore responsible for managing the Russian threat themselves. Washington has made clear it will remain in NATO, maintain its nuclear deterrent role, and provide high-end enablers, but the default backstop for European conventional defense is explicitly withdrawn. Secretary Hegseth's declaration that "stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe" clearly underlines it.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has recently dismissed both the idea of a European army and a stronger European pillar within NATO. A contradiction that captures the bind precisely is that Europe is urged to spend more, while being discouraged from acquiring the autonomous capacity that spending is meant to produce. The result is a structural allocation crisis, not merely a spending issue. In the first year of Russia's war on Ukraine, 78% of EU defense procurement was sourced outside the bloc, with 63% from U.S. suppliers. Europe has been funding American industrial capacity while declaring European strategic ambition.

The Industrial and Institutional Gap

The structural constraints are well-documented and persistently underestimated in political discourse. Europe's defense industry (with a 2024 turnover of €183 billion), remains fragmented, under-scaled, and nationally segmented. Three decades of post-Cold War underinvestment have hollowed out key industrial competencies, leaving firms with outdated production lines and limited surge capacity. The EU has launched an array of collaborative frameworks, including PESCO, the European Defense Fund, and the Defense Industry Programme (EDIP).  Yet most PESCO projects remain in the design or execution phase years after launch, and the EU Commission's Defense Readiness Roadmap 2030 faces the persistent reality that national capitals treat Brussels' intrusion into defense matters with deep suspicion. Political fragmentation is not an anomaly in European defense, but almost a physiological condition. Meanwhile, China controls approximately 70% of global rare-earth processing, which is essential for defense production. Thus, dependency as such compounds the problem of autonomy at the most fundamental material level.

Divergent Threat Perceptions and the East-West Fault Line

Compounding the industrial constraints is a deep divergence in threat perception across member states. That makes coherent European defense planning structurally difficult. For NATO’s eastern flank, Poland and the Baltic states, Russia represents an existential threat that requires immediate, overwhelming conventional deterrence. This very reason makes U.S. involvement non-negotiable and any weakening of the transatlantic link intolerable. For France, to some extent, southern European members, the threat landscape is more diffuse: coercive statecraft, migration pressures, and hybrid warfare. This underlines not only a policy disagreement but geostrategic differences and historical preferences.  The Iran episode materialized this fault line. When the U.S.-Israeli war began on 28 February 2026, and Washington called for NATO allies for support, Europe was divided and largely unified to offer a coherent collective response. For example, Spain defying Washington outright, Germany and France equivocating on international law, and others offering qualified support. Trump labelled NATO a “paper tiger”. European governments (for the first time after the Greenland case) began quietly preparing contingency plans for a post-U.S. alliance scenario.

What Is Being Built and at What Cost

Against this backdrop, the Global defense spending reached USD 2.63 trillion in 2025, driven substantially by European powers, and the political commitment to the 5% NATO GDP benchmark marks a genuine break from the past. Bilaterally, the Lancaster House 2.0 declaration and the accompanying Northwood Declaration state that British and French nuclear deterrents can be coordinated in extreme scenarios. This represents the most significant development in European nuclear thinking since the Cold War. The Kensington Treaty between the UK and Germany adds a legally binding third node to an emerging strategic triangle. These bilateral arrangements may prove more durable than EU institutional frameworks precisely as they bypass the consensus problem that has historically blunted CSDP ambitions. Regardless, replacing assumed U.S. contributions to European defense would cost hundreds of billions in investment.

In addition, if Europe needs to strengthen NATO adaptation (with Canadian, Japanese, and Australian, and even South Korean forces), EU defense integration, and coalitions of willing and capable states, Ukraine should have a central place in any long-term European security architecture. For the simple reason, no sustainable continental order is conceivable without integrating the one European state that has demonstrated, at enormous cost, the will and capacity to resist Russian aggression.

Therefore, this is what requires a timeline of years and political will that has not yet been consistently demonstrated.

Conclusion

Europe’s defense dilemma in 2026 is ultimately political, even if it manifests in industrial and institutional forms. There is a deepening consensus across European capitals regarding the diagnosis. The disagreement concerns the remedy, its cost, and the distribution of that burden. It requires the capacity to make independent strategic decisions, sustain credible military power, and negotiate effectively within an interdependent international system. That, in reality, requires resolving the allocation crisis, rebuilding industrial capability, narrowing divergences in threat perception, and sustaining political commitment across electoral cycles.

None of these conditions is fully present today. None is unattainable. What has already been demonstrated is that the pressure on European security autonomy is no longer abstract. It is arriving simultaneously from both east and west, and Europe is running out of time to treat strategic autonomy as a long-term aspiration rather than an immediate operational necessity.

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Tinatin Gachechiladze is a Head of Transatlantic Area Program at the Strategic Security Initiative (SSI)