Rearmament Without Strategy: Why Europe Risks Another Bleak Year In 2026

Via Middle East Eye

Addressing his party on 14 December, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz made headlines with remarks unprecedented in postwar Europe.

“Dear friends, the decades of Pax Americana are largely over for us in Europe, and for us in Germany as well. It no longer exists as we know it. And nostalgia won’t change that. The Americans are now very, very ruthlessly pursuing their own interests. And this cannot have a different answer than that it is time that we also pursue our own interests. And dear friends, here we are not weak, we are not small.”

Pax Americana, the US-led security order that has come to define American and European partnerships since the end of the Second World War, is now being openly questioned. Indeed, Merz has crossed a line that few European leaders have even contemplated since the Cold War – triggered by the shock generated by the new US National Security Strategy (NSS), issued earlier this month.

The document no longer even identifies Russia as a threat, describing it instead as a factor in the Trump administration’s efforts to reach peace in Ukraine, an objective now presented as a strategic interest for Washington, alongside the stabilisation of relations with Moscow.

To rub salt into the wound, the NSS states that “the perception and reality of Nato in constant expansion must stop”. In a single sentence, nearly three decades of western narrative, which has brazenly denied any link between Nato’s eastward expansion and the war in Ukraine, were quietly discarded by the alliance’s leading power.

It is no surprise, then, that the NSS was received in Europe with consternation. But what is harder to justify is the sense of surprise. The document merely puts into writing what US President Donald Trump has been stating, with characteristic bluntness, for over a decade.

European elites were even forewarned last February, when Trump dispatched Vice President JD Vance to the Munich Security Conference to deliver an unequivocal message about what lay ahead.

Merz’s remarks followed similar declarations from Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, who delivered an apocalyptic speech in Berlin, as well as from France’s Chief of Defence Staff General Fabien Mandon and Nato Military Committee chair Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone. In an interview with the Financial Times, Cavo Dragone went so far as to advocate pre-emptive or preventive hybrid attacks against Russia.

It is difficult to avoid the impression that this chorus of fearmongering is intended to build public support for the EU’s recently announced 800 billion euro ($942bn) rearmament plan, ostensibly designed to fill the vacuum left by a US administration increasingly determined to disengage, while confronting a heavily exaggerated Russian threat.

Rearmament without strategy

This narrative becomes even more disturbing when viewed against the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), which has come under accusations of ideological links to Nazism, at a time when Germany is being urged to rearm on a massive scale. Yet this contradiction appears lost on Europe’s liberal elites, who remain fixated on the supposed threat posed by “Russian autocracy”.

Merz has made clear what this means in practice. If Germany fails to expand its military rapidly enough, compulsory military service may become “inevitable”. Similar sentiments are now being echoed by ruling elites in the UK, France, Italy, Poland and across the Nordic and Baltic states.

The premise underlying these calls, however, is highly questionable. The claim that Germany, or Europe more broadly, faces an imminent military threat from Russia is deeply contested. Moscow appears to lack both the resources and the capability to invade Nato countries. After nearly four years of war, it has not even succeeded in occupying all of Ukraine.

Likewise, Germany and a number of other European states lack the capacity to reintroduce conscription at scale or to rapidly convert their industrial base to a war economy. Its volunteer forces are shrinking and ageing, recruitment targets are consistently missed and training systems remain sluggish.

Germany’s industrial base has been hollowed out, while its automotive sector is struggling under pressure from Chinese competition. Ultimately, its poorly concealed ambition to maintain its industrial edge by pivoting towards weapons manufacturing is easy to proclaim, but far more difficult to realise. Similar structural constraints affect much of Europe. The result is a surreal situation in which militarization is presented as a substitute for diplomacy, as if conscription could fill the political vacuum created by the near-total abandonment of serious diplomatic engagement across the continent.

Some describe this moment as a Zeitenwende, a historic turning point framed as Europe finally assuming “responsibility” for its own security. In reality, it represents little more than burden-shifting within the Atlantic alliance, which it could have potentially withstood were it not for the fact that the main escalatory power remains firmly across the Atlantic. At the same time, Europe is now expected to provide the workforce, social discipline and political compliance.

Strategy, therefore, continues to be conceived and remotely controlled by Washington, while Europe bears all the risks and consequences.

Europe’s hollow power

If Merz and his EU counterparts believe that massive rearmament offers an escape from the cul-de-sac they have created, they are deluding themselves. Since 2022, European leaders have undermined their own energy security, lost competitiveness, hollowed out industrial capacity and embraced deindustrialization as a virtue – all in the name of a war they are unlikely to win, not least because it is being fought through a strategy they do not control.

In regular times, this would induce political vertigo. Instead, the German chancellor has the audacity to insist that his country is neither weak nor small.

Across Europe, factories are closing, energy prices are skyrocketing and supply chains are migrating. Yet EU decision-makers persist in a state of cognitive dissonance, functioning on autopilot. There appears to be no vision. Diplomacy has vanished. No credible new security architecture for the continent is even discussed. Instead, everything is filtered through a single matrix known as Russophobia, a sentiment masquerading as strategy.

And then there is the mother of all paradoxes. The EU claims to defend freedom while openly discussing and approving coercive laws that restrict freedom of thought and expression at home.

Can it seriously be argued that French President Emmanuel Macron respected the will of voters in the most recent elections? Or that the events surrounding Romania’s recent electoral process were remotely normal? How is it possible that EU institutions can increasingly sanction individuals without due legal process, simply for holding dissenting views?

Militarization is now chosen over common sense and realism. Fear is obsessively instilled into public opinions and unconvincing narratives are replacing strategic thinking.  

Rather than reconsidering this self-destructive trajectory, Merz, together with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and much of the EU leadership, has doubled down. They attempted to confiscate frozen Russian assets held in European banks to finance the war in Ukraine, ignoring warnings from the European Central Bank and discreet alerts from ratings agencies about the risks to Europe’s financial credibility.

After the political folly of seeking Russia’s “strategic defeat”, the economic damage inflicted by sanctions and the abandonment of Russian gas, Europe nearly added financial self-sabotage to the list.

Strategic self-harm

Will European leaders ever learn a lesson?

Fortunately, their plan failed miserably. Last week, the European Council declined to approve the measure. Belgium, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy and even France raised objections. Instead, the EU opted to burden its already strained taxpayers with a new 90 billion euro loan to Ukraine.

When historians look back on this period, they may be surprised to conclude that it was a relatively obscure Belgian prime minister, Bart De Wever, derided by much of the mainstream press, who played a decisive role in saving Europe’s financial credibility.

Looking ahead to 2026, there is little evidence that Europe’s leaders are prepared to abandon their mistaken course. There is, however, a faint glimmer of change. Macron has signalled a renewed willingness to engage in dialogue with Russia. It is an encouraging albeit insufficient step.

Any genuine shift would require two fundamental principles to be upheld: the first is the indivisibility of security, the idea that one state’s security cannot be pursued at the expense of others in the same region.

Eastern European states, including Ukraine, cannot plausibly insist that their security depends solely on Nato membership if Russia perceives that outcome as an existential threat. Security arrangements must take into account all parties’ perceptions, rather than privileging some at the expense of others.

The second is recognition of the security dilemma, a core concept in international relations theory. When one state enhances its military capabilities, others may perceive this as threatening, regardless of intent.

Applied to Europe today, the question is obvious: why should Russia view the EU’s 800 billion euro rearmament program as purely defensive when EU member states already spend more than four times as much as Russia on military procurement?

Without integrating these principles into European strategic thinking, particularly in negotiations over Ukraine, 2026 risks becoming yet another bleak year for peace on the continent.