Europe’s Rearmament Is a Performance—and Everyone Knows It
The Announcement
Europe says it is rearming. This is announced with great fanfare. Europe has finally woken up, we are told, to the fact that it must be able to defend itself. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte publicly thanks Donald Trump for forcing Europe to see this and make the commitments.
Europe is not going to rearm without bombs hitting their cities. LOL.
The question has never been whether Europe can write strategies. It’s whether it will ever do the hard part. And the answer, again, is later. Always later.
Germany has a new chancellor now, Friedrich Merz. Talk of sending Taurus cruise missiles to Ukraine surfaced again—and disappeared just as quickly when it came time to act.
Follow the timelines. The serious spending comes years from now. The factories will be built later. Ammunition will be produced later. The political pain will be absorbed by future governments. Much of it, not coincidentally, comes due after Donald Trump is no longer in office.
The bad man will go away and a new Obama will appear that will be dignified who has tea and fine pastries at the party with them and is not sneaking out for a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder.
This avoidance isn’t an accident. It’s the plan.
An Army of Meetings
Europe has been doing this for years. Crimea produced speeches. Ukraine produced urgency—but still not execution. The NATO 2 percent target lived on paper for most of a decade. Now the percentages look better, but the stockpiles don’t. Numbers go up; readiness lags.
What Europe reliably produces is process. Eloquent speeches. Summits. Task forces. Frameworks. Strategic concepts. Coordination mechanisms. Emergency meetings about follow-up meetings.
Europe has not produced an army. It has produced an army of meetings.
If meetings won wars, Europe would rule the planet.
Defense, unfortunately, is not a lifestyle choice. You cannot deter with intent. You cannot fight with consensus. You need shells, factories, trained units, and the ability to replace losses quickly. On those measures, Europe remains thin.
Europe is in a holding pattern. Waiting. Waiting for what?
The Dance
Trump’s return has forced Europeans to say things they have avoided for years. He is rude about it, but not wrong: U.S. protection is not unconditional. Free-riding is not a virtue. Defense is not something you outsource forever.
Europe hears this—and responds in the only language it has mastered. It announces. It pledges. It schedules. And it assumes—correctly—that Trump announces, moves on, and leaves the consequences to someone else. He can take credit for having “forced” NATO toward a 5 percent target everyone knows will never be met.
Europe has adapted perfectly to this style of politics. Announcements are met with announcements. Pressure is met with timelines. Everyone performs urgency. Nobody enforces completion.
Europe’s cities are not being bombed, so urgency remains performative rather than real.
Tone, Not Threat
Europe’s sudden calls to action are not responses to Russia so much as responses to Trump. His rudeness, his insults, his refusal to observe diplomatic niceties—those are the red lines. Not invasion. Not artillery shortages. Not the prospect of having to fight. Just the discomfort of being spoken to plainly.
As long as the threat remains abstract, Europe can remain quiet. When the language turns crude, it finds its voice. That tells you where the real boundaries are—and where they are not.
Europe’s generals have been warning them to prepare for decades. The public and the politicians don’t want to hear it. Sacrifice is not on the menu.
The Habit
Europe is willing to scold the United States, flirt with Beijing, and make a show of diplomatic independence in response to insult. It will call Washington unreliable, lecture it on values, and then fly to China to shake hands and prove a point. All of that is safe. What Europe is not willing to do is act as if the American backstop might actually fail. The performance of independence coexists comfortably with dependence—because Europe still assumes U.S. power will show up when it matters.
This is not new. It’s European habit.
The only real difference between Europe today and Europe a hundred years ago is that it is no longer at war with itself every twenty years. The bickering, the self-dealing, the obsession with internal balance over external danger—all of that remains. What once produced catastrophe now produces meetings and paralysis.
So here we are: a continent of roughly 450 million people cowering before Russia, a country with an economy roughly comparable to Italy’s.
Beneath it all is a quiet hope: that if Europe waits long enough, the Russia problem will resolve itself. That exhaustion, decay, or internal change will do the work Europe refuses to do.
Ukraine is doing that work right now.
The Guarantee
There is another assumption underlying all of this, rarely stated but widely believed: that if Europe itself were attacked, the United States would come anyway. Despite the rhetoric about “strategic autonomy” and “not being able to depend on Washington,” European behavior suggests the opposite. They are acting like people who believe the American guarantee is still real, still automatic, and still someone else’s burden to honor.
That belief is probably correct. And it explains a great deal. It makes delay tolerable, underinvestment rational, and moral outsourcing easy. Ukraine absorbs the violence, America provides the backstop, and Europe preserves its comfort. The language is solidarity; the behavior is selfishness.
What is unreliable is Europe’s commitment to defend itself, not the United States’ willingness to help. Europe bristles at insults more than at artillery. Tone, not threat, is what moves it. Being spoken to rudely nudges leaders into action—not action, exactly, but performance. Their unity and strength suddenly emerge, but only on stage.
Guns and Butter
Europe’s priority is not deterrence but domestic calm. It is far more worried about its own voters, its own budgets, and the political cost of disruption while it struggles to sustain lavish social programs built on the assumption that someone else will handle security. Rearmament threatens that equilibrium. It competes with pensions, subsidies, and entitlements. So it is delayed, diluted, and rebranded—anything to avoid admitting that guns and butter were never meant to coexist at this scale.
Avoidance
For three years, a serious, industrial-scale war has been raging in Europe’s backyard. Europe, meanwhile, convenes. It coordinates. It worries about legal liability. It holds extended debates about whether frozen Russian assets can be used without setting an uncomfortable precedent.
Three years into the war, this is not prudence. It is avoidance.
Europe has not done nothing—but it has very deliberately avoided acting as if the war is its problem to solve. Aid is calibrated. Risk is managed. Mobilization is deferred. They act as if it is America’s problem to solve.
Personally, I think that America should be helping, but two administrations have sidestepped deeper involvement. The American public is tired of European freeloading. It’s in Europe’s backyard—let them do something for a change.
There are exceptions. Poland and the Baltic states act like countries that believe the threat is real; much of Western Europe still behaves as if this is a policy dispute that can be managed.
To be fair, spending is surging faster than “later, always later” suggests. All NATO allies are expected to hit 2% in 2025 for the first time ever. Production ramps are real, especially ammunition—the EU targeted two million 155mm shells per year by end of 2025 and mostly achieved it. Poland and the Baltics are already near 4-5% of GDP. The gap with Russia is closing faster than pre-2022 inertia predicted. But it’s still not wartime speed—and for too many capitals, the performance critique still lands.
The Rebrand
When rearmament becomes unavoidable, Europe will still spend money. It just won’t spend it on the things that matter. “Resilience” will expand to include everything except weapons. Infrastructure will be rebranded as deterrence. Solar farms will be counted as defense. The numbers will rise; capability will not.
This is easier than building factories. Easier than stockpiling ammunition. Easier than telling voters the peace dividend is over.
The Bill
Europe is betting that time will save it—that Russia will change, America will stay patient, and Ukraine will keep absorbing the damage.
Ukraine, despite all its amazing effort and ingenuity, could still lose the war because of this unconscionable selfishness on the part of Europe.