A Germany with Europe's largest army, equipped with cutting edge tanks, missiles and jets, is a far cry from the shambolic Bundeswehr derided for its low morale and outdated equipment. That military power is tied to political and economic heft - and Europe will have to adapt to a dominant Germany.Germany does not now have the biggest army in Europe or the EU. (2) Even if we leave Russia and Ukrainne out of the count.
By 2029, Germany is expected to spend €153 billion a year on defense. That’s about 3.5 percent of GDP, the country’s most ambitious military expansion since reunification. France, by comparison, plans to reach about €80 billion by 2030. ...Europe will be working over the next few years toward a collective-security after Trump has convinced them that the NATO mutual-defense treaty is no longer one they can trust the US to honor. Not even in a confrontation with Russia. Or in Trump’s case, especially not in a conflict with Russia.
The fiscal realities are changing, too. With Paris struggling with debt above 110 percent of GDP and a deficit north of 5 percent, Berlin’s borrowing power gives it freedom that its neighbors can only envy. Poland is also fighting to keep public spending under control, exacerbated by the explosion in defense spending.
One EU official called the shift in Germany’s military potential “telluric,” or Earth-moving. Another diplomat put it more directly: “It’s the most important thing happening right now at EU level.” [my emphasis]
The big lift
This is a big lift. The EU countries will be very much involved, but the EU itself will not be the main coordinating body - although the EU Treaty does have a mutual defense clause. But the EU’s small collective military force will not be a new version of NATO Central Command.
Two major factors here are that Britain will need to be directly involved in new security agreements, and it is no longer an EU member. If Europe has to provide its own substitute for the US nuclear deterrent against Russia, they would want to have the two nuclear powers Britain and France to cooperate closely on playing that role.
Europe also has an incentive – whether they take it seriously enough or not – to change the current arrangement in which the NATO conventional defense forces are heavily dependent on American equipment, American satellites and intelligence capabilities, and on a command structure dominated by the US. That also means that Europe will build up its own domestic defense industries to achieve the necessary independence from the US.
The European countries with the largest armies are Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy and Spain. So, yes, Germany will have to build up its military capabilities.
This is a topic on which it’s important to remember that multiple things can be true at the same time. Even when they sometimes sound inconsistent. The fact that Germany has a very practical need to build up its military can be true at the same time that we recognize that anyone familiar with the basics of 20th century history – including Germans – will find it hard not to feel a bit of the heebie-jeebies at seeing headlines saying things like “Germany Undertakes a Massive Rearmament Program.”
Politico’s “Germany first” label for their picture for the story is a reminder of that. So is the reference quoted above that “Europe will have to adapt to a dominant Germany” - although “a dominant Germany” in economic policy is a very practical consideration, as noted below. Germany’s conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz is playing footsie with xenophobic anti-immigrant talk. But Germany isn’t presently pursuing anything like an analogy to the Trump 2.0 regime’s America First fascist/Christian nationalist course.
Rearmament and Austerity Economics
As the Politico article notes, Germany’s financial resources will be particularly important to the larger European rearmament effort. And this may be the biggest risk that Germany presents to the expansion of European military capabilities. Because Germany has been chronically committed to austerity economics. Including a reluctance to tax billionaires to support the common good.
It was a bad idea anyway. And it’s even more risky for countries in the eurozone, because the problems in the structure of the euro currency zone that caused the euro crisis of 2001-2015 are still there. They muddled through that one at serious cost to a sense of European solidarity.
Or, to hark back to President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” (3)
In other words, there will be lots of guns-vs.-butter debates over developing new European security arrangements. Austerity economics and a new euro crisis will not help make Europe safer or make it easier to maintain the kind of new security arrangements that are necessary to put in place.
I took an earlier look at the guns-vs.-butter issue in current European politics in A dose of antiwar left economics and politics 04/04/2025.
The Russo-Ukraine War context
The Obama Administration changed US National Security Policy in 2011 to define competition with China as the main security priority of the US. Which means a relative shift in American foreign policy priorities away from Europe. But it was the current Russo-Ukraine War that brought about the current state of US-Europe relations in which the US appears to be, at best, a far less reliable security partner.
It's always important, including with the Ukraine war, to keep in mind that multiple things can be true at the same time and that different political and strategic narratives may make different uses of that reality. It can be true that “color revolutions” can be primarily domestic phenomena and also that the US or another country sought to influence it.
It can be true that the US was reckless in a very practical sense in its open backing of the Maidan Revolution in Ukraine in 2014 and that Russia’s annexation of Crimea was an illegal act that was a serious act of international aggression.
It can be true that Putin’s government overestimated the threat posed by potential NATO and EU membership for Ukraine, and that the Cheney-Bush Administration acted foolishly and recklessly by insisting on a formal NATO declaration in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would definitely at some point become NATO members.
Peace President Trump’s latest move in favor of a 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine presents the same caution that multiple things can be true simultaneously. From CNN:
A new Trump administration plan for the end of the war in Ukraine would see Kyiv cede territory to Russia, US “de facto” recognition of Crimea and other Ukrainian territory forcibly seized by the Kremlin as Russian, and limits to the size of Ukraine’s military, according to a draft of the plan obtained Thursday by CNN.In this case it can simultaneously be true that freezing the conflict in place as apparently envisioned in this plan is the best that Ukraine could hope for at this moment and that this plan is hopeless, for the likely reasons described in this Times Radio podcast by Sir Ben Wallace, Britain’s Secretary of State for Defence 2019-2023. (5)
The draft’s veracity was confirmed to CNN by a US official. Many of the ideas put forward in the 28-point plan have been rejected in previous negotiations by Ukraine and European officials and would be seen as concessions to Russia.
US officials said the plan was still being worked on, and that any final agreement would require concessions from both sides, not just Ukraine. Some of the points being circulated now – including some that appear weighted toward Moscow’s demands – are not final, officials said, and will almost certainly evolve. During a Thursday afternoon briefing, the White House press secretary said the plan remained “in flux.” (4)
It's always been the case that Ukraine would need some kind of security assurances and clear aid commitments from the US and/or Europe to agree to even a long-term armistice. And Zelenskyy’s government would have a hard time agreeing to a de facto surrender, which is what this plan sounds to be.
As Ben Wallace emphasizes, Trump 2.0 has been strikingly incompetent at diplomacy. We see that in his Eternal Peace Plan for Israel-Gaza, which at this point is in practice consists only of a ceasefire that Israel is very clearly not observing. Although the Trump family stands to get some substantial bribes out of the thing, however incompetent to actual international diplomacy may be.
In geopolitical calculations, there are substantive strategic and international-law grounds for the US and Europe to not accept any explicit recognition of Russian sovereignty over the conquered territory in Ukraine, including Crimea. In the context of a larger reset of US-Russia relations, one could picture some formula in which Ukrainian sovereignty over Crimea would be established both formally and practically but with Russia having long-term basing rights for its Black Sea fleet there. But we’re a long way from that.
Another coldly pragmatic is still very much in play. In the view of the Biden Administration, there was a value in having Russia involved in an active, protracted war in Ukraine. That partly has to do with the almost mystical belief by many American foreign policy analysts that the Soviet war in Afghanistan was a key factor, even the decisive one, in the end of the USSR, I would argue that neither the Obama nor the Biden Administrations fully exploited the potential for improving relations with Russia. Of course, Russia is its own country and its calculations of its own security interest don’t always agree with official American views on the subject.
European nations do perceive a security interest in supporting Ukraine as much as feasible. In the absence of a substantive long-term settlement of the current war, that’s a practical consideration that even the most peace-oriented European governments would have to take into account. Russia, and the USSR before it, were and are known for their hard-nosed negotiation style and their willingness to engage in the kind of provocations that Ben Wallace describes in his interview. He doesn’t talk about the kinds of Western provocations that are surely taking place at the same time. But he does explain them in a way that gives a glimpse of the kind of jockeying that major powers engage in all the time.
European nations, with some exceptions like Hungary at the moment, have good reason to take Russia’s diplomatic and military moves seriously. In the “it can also be true that …” category, European governments can make the judgment that Russia has no intention of committing serious military aggression against Europe but also take care to realistically evaluate Russia’s capabilities to do so. (It is often said that evaluating a potential adversary’s intentions is the job of civilian officials while evaluating their capabilities is that of the military. Although in practice, that division of labor isn’t nearly so sharply defined.)
But that also means that European officials will be very much aware of the potential benefit of a prolonged active war between Russia and Ukraine to potentially weaken Russia and to give themselves more time to build up a more credible European deterrence capability.
Notes:
(1) Lunday, Christ (2025): Germany’s rearmament upends Europe’s power balance. Politico EU 11/12/2025. <https://www.politico.eu/article/germany-rearmament-upends-europes-power-balance-military/> (Accessed: 2025-17-11).
(2) Military Size by Country 2025. World Population Review. <https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-size-by-country> (Accessed: 2025-21-11).
(3) Eisenhower, Dwight (1953): Address "The Chance for Peace" Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors. 04/16/1953. The American Presidency Project. <https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-chance-for-peace-delivered-before-the-american-society-newspaper-editors> (Accessed: 2024-04-04).
(4) Hansler, Jennifer et al (2025): Trump’s 28-point peace proposal for Ukraine would require land concessions and military reduction. CNN 11/21/2025. <https://edition.cnn.com/2025/11/20/politics/ukraine-russia-trump-peace-proposal> (Accessed: 2025-21-11).
(5) Trump’s Ukraine envoy quits after ‘grubby stitch up’ leaks - Sir Ben Wallace. Times Radio 11/20/2025. <https://youtu.be/sYI2MxV8xZw?si=KvomAWRoAr9ByGwW> (Accessed: 2025-21-11).
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