Why Europe Is Rearming — and What It Means for NATO
Something structurally significant is happening in European defense spending, and it is moving faster than most foreign policy watchers expected.
Germany, which for decades treated its post-war pacifism as a near-constitutional value, has committed to defense spending above 2% of GDP — a threshold it avoided for thirty years. Poland is on track to reach 5%. The UK announced its largest defense budget expansion since the Cold War. These are not incremental adjustments. They represent a fundamental reassessment of the security environment.
The driver is obvious: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine removed the assumption that large-scale conventional war in Europe was a historical artifact. Countries that shared a border with Russia or Belarus stopped theorizing and started buying. But the secondary driver is less discussed — a growing uncertainty about the reliability of the American security guarantee under a US administration that has openly questioned NATO’s value proposition.
For NATO as an institution, a more militarily capable Europe is theoretically good. The alliance functions better when burden-sharing is real rather than aspirational. But it also creates new tensions. A Europe that can defend itself does not need US backing in the same way, which changes the negotiating dynamic across every other dimension of the transatlantic relationship — trade, technology regulation, and China policy among them.
There is also a domestic politics dimension. Rearmament requires public support and budget trade-offs. Social spending versus defense spending is becoming an active political fault line in Germany, France, and Spain in ways it was not five years ago.
Europe is not becoming a military superpower. But it is becoming something it has not been in a generation: strategically serious about its own survival.