Year XXXVIII, Number 3, November 2025

Roberto Castaldi  
Secretary of Movimento Federalista Europeo. Director of the Centre for Studies, Training, Communication and Planning on the European Union and Global Governance and of Euractiv.it..

The debate on European defense has intensified for two reasons. After first Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin transformed the Russian economy into a war economy, and while the intelligence services of various countries fear that Russia will attack an EU member state before 2030. Furthermore, the American guarantee of European security has disappeared, and it will never return.

The American strategic focus has undergone a structural strategy to the Pacific because the global hegemonic clash is with China. The “pivot to the Pacific” began with Obama, who called on Europeans to equip themselves for defense. Yet Europe squandered sixteen years, paralyzed by the fear that strengthening its own capabilities would only accelerate America’s disengagement. We lost 16 years, fearing that this would accelerate the American withdrawal. In July 2024, under the Biden presidency, NATO approved the ‘New Force Model’, which, in the event of a Russian attack on Europe, plans to mobilize 300,000 European troops within a month, before any American intervention. Trump reinforced the process by questioning Article 5 of NATO and the American commitment to intervene in defense of Europeans, seasoned with threats to Greenland, tariffs, and the idea that the EU is an enemy created to screw the US.
For 80 years, Europeans have been able to avoid substantial investment in and worrying about their own security, behaving like children sheltered by their parents’ protection. The survival of the West depends on rethinking NATO, transforming it from an instrument of American hegemony and protectorate over Europe, which the US is in any case unwilling to maintain, into a partnership between equals. This requires the EU as such to join the Atlantic Pact – of which NATO is the operational arm – and a European defense system as the European pillar of NATO.

The question of military spending
Instead of building a European defense, member states are seeking European funds for national rearmament. They already spend nominally more than Russia, and about the same in terms of power, without any deterrence capability. They purchase about 70% of their weapons outside the EU. They use 130 weapon systems, compared to 30 American ones, at a much higher unit cost. So much so that they spend about 30% of what the US spends with 10% of its capacity. In other words, two-thirds of national military spending produces nothing in terms of security, because 27 national defenses do not create a European defense.
Europeans have the necessity to increase their defense capabilities. In order to obtain them , they must identify what capabilities are lacking, what is needed to obtain them, and at what cost if implemented at the national or European level. At that point, the necessary level of defense spending can be identified. Instead, at the NATO summit, they adopted 5% only because Trump decided so, based on Trump’s decision , showing that the alliance is a garden with a single tree, surrounded by seedlings.

A European pillar of NATO
With the US demanding more from the EU for its own defense, the Berlin Plus Agreement between the EU and NATO could be strengthened to allow the EU to use SHAPE, NATO’s command and control center, facilitating the creation of European defense as a European pillar of NATO. It could be envisaged that the Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) would be appointed by the EU and would be the EU Chief of Staff, coordinating the nascent NATO New Force Model of 300,000 European troops, European military structures – including the multinational force established by willing countries – and national armed forces.

In this context, the Commission has appointed a Commissioner for Defense and presented proposals, but focusing more on the defense industry – which is also fundamental – than on defense itself. They intend to strengthen national defenses rather than European. The most important proposal consists in the Security Action Facility for Europe (SAFE), with a common debt of €150 billion to be lent to Member States. The inability of Member States to approve the own resources needed to repay the Next Generation EU, is forcing the Commission to envisage a use of SAFE that will ensure that Member States repay the debt. SAFE will only be used by the most indebted states, which pay a higher interest rate on their public debt than the EU. Those paying a lower rate will instead use the safeguard clause of the Stability and Growth Pact, up to 1.5% of GDP for defense spending.

Recently, the EU has set up various instruments, by limited objectives and funds: the European Defense Agency (it has only 180 employees!); the European Defense Fund (EDF) supports research and development in the defense sector with €7.3 billion for 2021- 2027; the European Peace Facility (funded by Member States’ contributions of over €17 billion for 2021-2027) for EU actions with military implications and support to third countries, such as Ukraine; The Munitions Production Support Act with over €500 million to support Ukraine; the strengthening of the European defense industry through the European Defense Industrial Procurement Act (EDIRPA) with €310 million in incentives has led to €11 billion in joint purchases (by at least three Member States), 10% of the total purchases of EU Member States; the Defense Equipment Facility (DEF) supports venture capital and private equity funds investing in innovative defense and dual-use technologies with €175 million. The European Space Agency (ESA) manages projects for a European secure communications satellite system. The ESA is not very effective due to the ‘fair return’ principle, whereby companies from a given country must receive contracts equal to that country’s contribution to the project, even if there are other companies capable of doing the work more quickly and efficiently. The European Defense Industry Program (EDIP) is currently being negotiated, with €1.5 billion to support the defense industry in the EU and third countries, including Ukraine.

All these instruments must become building blocks of a European defense system, extending its tasks and financial resources, and allocating a significant part of SAFE’s resources to them. Experience suggests that investing €5 billion from SAFE in EDIRPA and increasing the minimum number of countries required to benefit from joint procurement incentives could gradually and significantly reduce the number of weapon systems, increasing the effectiveness of defense spending. In addition, the EU should purchase ‘strategic enablers’ weapons systems – air defense, troop transport, intelligence, and secure satellite communication systems – that no Member State can afford on its own. Perhaps Joint Undertakings – collaborations between the Commission, Member States, and private entities – already used successfully for Galileo, supercomputers, and on other occasions, could be a useful tool for this purpose.
How to proceed?
European integration has consistently advanced through initiatives of pioneering groups of States The first European Coal and Steel, for instance, Community represents a vanguard in contrast to the Council of Europe. Similarly, direct elections to the European Parliament were envisaged for only some Member States. Schengen and the single currency were made possible thanks to a vanguard.

In the field of defense, the Treaties explicitly provide for the possibility of a vanguard through Permanent Structured Cooperation (PESCO), which can be activated by a qualified majority. Through PESCO, it would be possible to communitize existing forms of bilateral and multilateral cooperation between Member States and create a European multinational rapid reaction force, which was decided upon at the Helsinki European Council in 1999 but never implemented.

Six member states – Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands – alone account for 75 percent of EU defense expenditure. If they took the initiative, everyone would follow. Should they take the lead, it is highly likely that the remaining states would follow. Notably, Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez has already expressed his support for the establishment of a European army, partly as a means to mitigate the continued rise in defense spending.

A federal defense system, even if initially limited in scale, must nonetheless be autonomous and capable of effectively coordinating national military forces. The United States offers a useful historical parallel: until the Second World War, the federal army remained relatively small, yet it played a decisive role once mobilized within a broader national framework.

Mistakes not to be repeated
In 1971, the end of the Bretton Woods monetary system demanded for a single European currency. Member States did not agree with it and we had decades of monetary instability, inflation, and devaluations until the creation of the euro currency in 1999. Nowadays, we need a true European defense system, serving a foreign policy managed by a European federal government. We cannot wait 30 years.
In creating them, we must avoid any intermediate forms that could hinder the objective. Therefore, it must be underlined that all instruments are within the EU framework, even if open to the participation of third countries, avoiding the creation of coalitions of the willing or other intergovernmental instruments outside the EU together with third countries, which would be impossible to progressively communitize and would therefore hinder the creation of a true European defense.

This article summarizes – and develops in light of the subsequent debate – some reflections presented during the informal hearing at the XIV European Union Policies Committee of the Chamber of Deputies on the prospects for EU defense policy on October 30, 2024. Published in bimonthly bulletin“ID - Informazioni della Difesa”, n° 3-2025, Minister of Defence, Italy.