Europe’s Defence Deficit Is a Deficit of Will

In the first week of January the American president said, of Greenland, that his country needed it for reasons of security. What struck me was the silence that followed in European capitals, which told me more than any reply could have.

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
— President Donald Trump, January 2026, as reported by the Stockholm-based Institute for Security and Development Policy

The island belongs to Denmark, a founding member of NATO, and the man claiming it leads the alliance’s most powerful state. After years of covering summits, I know that diplomats reach for euphemism the way other people reach for an umbrella. Plainness, when it comes, is startling. My argument is a narrow one, and admirers of the West may not enjoy it: Europe’s predicament is not chiefly about money or machinery. It is about political will. Moscow has noticed, and so has Beijing, and so has every middle power watching from the stands.

What happened over Greenland matters less than what it exposed. On 7 January, leaders from Germany, France and the Nordic states rallied behind Denmark, warning that any American move would violate Danish sovereignty and fracture NATO. European soldiers then arrived on the island, which is an odd sight for an alliance built on the assumption that its troops would never find themselves facing each other’s flags. By February, allies were saying the storm had passed, now that an Arctic mission had been launched. It hadn’t, not quite. At July’s NATO summit Trump renewed the demand; he threatened to pull American troops out of NATO countries if Greenland was not handed over, and faulted Europe for not helping in his Iran war. Sophia Besch of Carnegie Europe had already put her finger on the lasting damage.

“The episode matters because it crossed a line that cannot be uncrossed.”
— Sophia Besch, Carnegie Europe, quoted in Fortune

Lavrov, predictably, called it a “deep crisis” for NATO. Others disagree. Latvia’s defence minister said he would “not over-dramatise” the matter, and the alliance’s secretary general has dismissed fears that it could collapse. They may well be right. Still, an alliance that has to be reassured this often is already something less than an alliance.

Take the money, where Europe’s case looks strongest. At The Hague in June 2025, all 32 members pledged to invest 5 per cent of GDP annually in defence and security by 2035: 3.5 per cent for core military needs, and 1.5 per cent for broader “defence-related” areas such as cybersecurity and infrastructure. Mark Rutte called it historic.

“A quantum leap that is ambitious, historic and fundamental.”
— NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, The Hague, June 2025

The fine print is where it frays. Spain spent 1.24 per cent of GDP on defence in 2024, according to NATO estimates, the lowest in the alliance, and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, once he had signed, described his country’s lower figure in telling terms.

“Sufficient, realistic and compatible with our social model and welfare state.”
— Pedro Sánchez, Spanish Prime Minister, June 2025

There, in a sentence, is the real quarrel: guns against the welfare state. European electorates have never been asked to settle it.

The economy makes the choice harder still. Mario Draghi’s 2024 report on competitiveness, commissioned by the European Commission, put the additional investment needed at €750–800 billion a year, or 4.4 to 4.7 per cent of EU GDP. It also observed that only four of the world’s top 50 technology companies are European. His warning was blunt.

“If Europe cannot become more productive, we will be forced to choose.”
— Mario Draghi, presenting his report on European competitiveness, September 2024

The report went further, saying that without reform the bloc would have to scale back its ambitions on climate and on greater defence spending. Rearmament, in other words, was never separable from growth.

Then comes demography, the slowest and surest of pressures. On 1 January 2025 the EU had an estimated 450.6 million people, 22 per cent of them aged 65 or over, with a median age of 44.9. That works out to just over three people of working age for every person past 65; in Italy, Bulgaria and Portugal, fewer than three. Eurostat projects an 11.7 per cent fall in the EU’s population between 2025 and 2100, with the share aged 80 and over rising from 6 per cent to 16 per cent. What follows is my inference, not Eurostat’s, but I think it holds: an older electorate, leaning harder on pensions and health care, will find it difficult to vote for a defence budget that competes with them.

The dependence, meanwhile, is concrete. Roughly 84,000 American troops are stationed in Europe, and any reduction would leave European allies to fill the gaps. A continent that cannot finance its own defence, and whose security guarantor has wondered aloud about leaving, is not a pole in a multipolar order. It is a prize in one. Russia is the threat the Hague declaration itself names, the “long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic security”. China, for its part, is a competitor whose lead Draghi measured, noting that the EU invests less in research and development than China does.

We in Pakistan hardly need a lecture on the nature of alliances. We know they are instruments of interest, and that a patron’s attention can wander. Middle powers everywhere are drawing the obvious conclusion and hedging accordingly. Europe’s own answer is visible too, in Danish exercises with a number of NATO allies in and around Greenland, and in talk of an Arctic role for the continent’s militaries. A start, then, though a small one.

Hegemony is rarely seized. More often it is surrendered, in budgets deferred, reforms postponed, choices left unmade. Draghi told Europe it would have to choose. The tragedy would be to let others do the choosing on its behalf.