Threats to Danish sovereignty over Greenland in the West, and the continued Russian menace in the East, have left Europe facing what appears to be a geopolitical pincer movement. Despite growing calls, not least from President Macron, for Europe to start acting like the world power it should be, the continent is still struggling to scale up effectively, particularly in defence.

Moscow’s war machine and Washington’s shifting priorities have left Europe in a position it never expected to face. The safety net of American deterrence has become less certain, leaving fragile alliances, multilateral mistrust, technology-driven arms races, and tense political rhetoric. In Europe, the response has often amounted to general pledges about modernisation or rearmament, while budgets rise and policy papers multiply. Former Chancellor Scholz’s Zeitenwende speech in February 2022 appeared to mark a historic break. Yet four years on, Europe’s defence sector remains trapped in a structural paradox: its strategic ambitions still outpace its industrial and military capabilities.

Spending on the rise, but budgets spread thin

In February 2025, Friedrich Merz, who has since become Germany’s Chancellor, asserted that Europe must become less dependent on the US. President Macron has also proposed extending France’s nuclear umbrella to the whole of Europe. A strategic shift is underway, and there is no denying that a significant budgetary effort forms part of it.

Defence spending across the European Union is rising sharply. The latest figures from the European Defence Agency show EU-wide defence spending reaching around 2.1 per cent of GDP in 2025. At the same time, the 2025 NATO summit in The Hague saw alliance members agree to an ambitious new framework targeting defence and security spending equal to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035. The European Commission’s Readiness 2030 strategy aims to mobilise up to €800 billion by enabling member states to increase their defence budgets under relaxed EU fiscal rules. The President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has described these efforts as a response to a “real and present danger”.

Europe has to make up for capability gaps that were allowed to widen over decades of lower spending, especially in areas such as air and missile defence, suppression of enemy air defences, combat engineering, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, to name only a few. New capability needs driven by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, from drones and counter-drones to electronic warfare and space-based early warning systems, must now be funded alongside traditional hardware.

The result is that resources are being spread across so many needs that individual capability programmes often receive insufficient funding to deliver truly transformational effects. Air defence remains fragmented, long-range fires are scarce, and many armies still lack sufficient troops, logistics, and command-and-control cohesion to meet the demands of high-intensity conflict. The Readiness 2030 Roadmap outlines how Europe is expected to possess the full set of military capabilities required for credible deterrence, but this goal will depend on major investment and firm procurement orders.

Trying to plug the DPS gap

A striking example of the gap between rhetoric and reality is Europe’s pursuit of Deep Precision Strike, or DPS: long-range offensive firepower capable of reaching deep behind the frontline to target critical infrastructure, command centres, or supply lines.

Efforts are being made to close this capability gap. At the NATO summit in Washington in 2024, a group of European countries agreed on the European Long-Range Strike Approach, or ELSA, whose goal is to select the best industrial proposals in order to meet needs grouped into clusters. Participant states include Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

A year and a half later, the effort has yet to produce concrete solutions commensurate with a threat nevertheless presented as imminent, with some officials referring, for example, to the possibility of confrontation with Russia within three years. Only the United Kingdom and Germany have announced plans to start initial work on a capability with a range exceeding 2,000 km. This limited progress has led some observers to question the future of ELSA, noting the proliferation of national or bilateral initiatives. While Sweden stresses the need to build up its capabilities to counter Russia’s growing effort in this area, Germany is pursuing the Joint Fire Support Missile, with a range of 300–500 km, and is also developing the Taurus 350 in cooperation with Sweden.

However, momentum may now be shifting. In mid-February 2026, participating states signed a new Letter of Intent to sustain the effort. Among the four capabilities selected, emphasis was placed on one-way effectors, whose lower cost should allow production at very large scale to generate mass and saturate enemy air defences.

This represents a meaningful step forward, but it does not address the core requirement: the ability to penetrate even the most heavily defended targets using high-end, survivable missiles. President Emmanuel Macron underlined this point in mid-January, when he called for ELSA to be mobilised specifically to close this gap. His appeal appears to have gained little traction, despite France having proposed from the outset the MBDA Land Cruise Missile, which offers a range exceeding 1,000 km. Derived from the combat-proven French MdCN, and potentially available as early as 2027–2028, it would provide a sovereign European alternative to the US Tomahawk, on which several European countries continue to rely despite the limitations associated with such supply, whether in terms of waiting times, with resupplying the Pentagon now a top priority, or restrictions on use.

An overly defensive operational posture

Another revealing sign of Europe’s uneasy transition from aspiration to execution is its emphasis on defence. From air defence schemes such as the proposed European Sky Shield Initiative to enhanced border security initiatives, Europe’s focus has largely been defensive in nature. This emphasis is understandable and essential: modern air defence has demonstrated its value, with Ukraine intercepting a significant proportion of missiles and drones during sustained Russian strike campaigns, and Israel achieving high interception rates against massed aerial threats. Yet defence alone cannot shape an adversary’s calculations.

This stands in contrast to Russian doctrine, which has prioritised offensive deep fires and layered precision strike capabilities, and which has repeatedly demonstrated the psychological and physical effect of striking deep into enemy territory, including through continued attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure. European planners now acknowledge that without equivalent capabilities, deterrence lacks credibility.

Indeed, in a 2025 editorial in European Law Open, Marco Dani and Agustín José Menéndez Menéndez critiqued the European Commission’s defence plan, Readiness 2030, and Europe’s broader deterrence strategy, arguing that “‘Peace through deterrence’ seems to us an apt leitmotiv to encapsulate the vision underpinning the European Commission’s recent proposals… If indeed the Member States of the Union consider the risk of external aggression to be a real and imminent one, the measures put forward… appear to be ineffective in terms of deterrence, strategic autonomy, and capacity to deliver an effective military response.”

Realpolitik and real capability

Europe’s defence debate is no longer shaped solely by the Russian threat; it is also influenced by growing uncertainty about the reliability of American security guarantees. NATO leaders have stressed the need for Europeans to assume a larger share of the burden, and recent summits have framed higher spending targets as a matter of credibility rather than symbolism. Budgets are rising, yet capability does not materialise overnight. Governments remain divided on priorities, so the question is not whether Europe is spending more, but whether it is concentrating its efforts to turn political commitment into credible deterrence.