Security
Trump Shocks the Old World
For what purpose does Switzerland need overpriced fighter jets with obscure capabilities?
A Swiss F-35 Dilemma
Paying Americans for Their Defense Capacities Proposed
Europe Has Found a New Way to Increase Defense Spending
Do the Baltic Countries Have a Prospect of Coming under French Forward Deterrence?
A French Coast for the Baltic Sea
The Old World becomes more dependent on the USA, but its leaders avoid condemning the war in order not to displease Trump.
America Pulling Europe Closer
This conclusion is made by a big team of European security experts from leading think tanks: the Centre for European Policy Studies, Institute for European Policymaking, Royal United Services Institute, and Clingendael. Their analysis of the European defense development problems has resulted in a common report entitled More Europe in Defence – Three Pathways.
The EU Countries Face Numerous Military Capability Gaps
Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Romania are supporting the war against Iran in the hope that Trump will decide to station his troops, to be withdrawn from Germany, in their territory.
NATO’s frontline countries jockey for U.S. troops after Trump’s Germany withdrawal
On 2 March 2026, French President Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech on nuclear deterrence. European NATO allies have welcomed the speech and accompanying initiatives. Yet there remain questions about the durability and implementation of Macron’s nuclear initiatives. Defense analysts Zuzanna Gwadera and Alexander K. Bollfrass discuss this in their article entitled French nuclear deterrence: Vive l’évolution on the website of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Macron Ready to Swap French Nuclear Deterrence for Allies’ Participation in Other Defense Spending
In the article The EU’s Technocratic Trap in Libya: How Brussels Is Ceding the Mediterranean published at the Stimson Center website, Andrea Cellino, a Swiss Italian expert and vice president of Middle East Institute Switzerland, makes a hard and painful statement about the European policy: 15 years after the fall of the Gaddafi regime the EU remains the largest donor of Libya having poured hundreds of millions of euro into the country but having lost any political clout there all together. Brussels has turned into a miserable onlooker, as countries like Russia, Turkey, and the UAE really determine the future of the country.
The EU’s Technocratic Trap in Libya: a Disgraceful Surrender of Brussels in the Mediterranean
In the article Europe: doctrinal shift towards violence, Aneela Shahzad, a Pakistani geopolitics, makes a harsh and extremely uncomfortable conclusion: Europe eventually stopped pretending to be a peaceful, humanistic, and liberal continent. It is openly and deliberately rebuilding its economy for war and making a radical doctrinal pivot towards militarism and preparing for a large-scale military conflict.
Europe: doctrinal shift towards violence. Transition to a war economy instead of a “liberal democracy”
In their report Defending Europe without the United States? The future of the European security (CIDOB, April 2026) following the results of the 24th conference “War and Peace in the 21st Century”, experts Clàudia Domeque and Matthew McLaughlan make an extremely depressing conclusion: the second term of Donald Trump has put the transatlantic relations on the brink of complete separation.
Defending Europe without the US: an illusion of strategic autonomy and a reality of strategic helplessness
In the article Les Français et les enjeux de défense, Jeanne Lebaudy from the well-known French L'Institut Montaigne reveals with crushing sincerity an extremely uncomfortable and deeply significant contradiction of today’s French and, by extension, European society: the French increasingly state that defense is one of the important problems but at the same time they flatly do not wish to embrace real consequences of this “importance”.
France and matters of defense: big talk instead of real war-readiness