The study integrates two established theoretical frameworks to make sense of the divergence. The first is Fountain’s technology enactment framework, which holds that information technologies are not simply adopted by organizations but are actively shaped, or enacted, by the institutional structures that surround them. The second is Horowitz’s adoption-capacity theory, which argues that a state’s ability to absorb transformative military technology depends on the financial and organizational capital it can marshal. By combining these lenses, Parisini argues that money alone cannot explain why the United States and the European Union have followed such different trajectories, because organizational capital, the accumulated capacity of institutions to absorb and deploy new technology, is the critical determinant of effective AI implementation.

The comparison reveals two distinct governance models. The United States exhibits what the study calls competitive institutional appropriation, a capability-first approach characterized by concentrated investment and a race to translate AI research into operational military advantage. This model is anchored in a dense ecosystem of institutions, from the Department of Defense’s Data, Analytics, and Artificial Intelligence Adoption Strategy, published in 2023 under the banner of accelerating decision advantage, to executive orders from the White House on safe and trustworthy AI development and, later, on removing barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence. The National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Act of 2020 further institutionalized federal AI spending, and analyses of US government AI budgets show sustained growth in defense-related investment.

The European Union, by contrast, demonstrates fragmented institutional absorption. Rather than a single centralized push, AI adoption in European defence is distributed across member states and a lattice of EU frameworks, including Permanent Structured Cooperation, or PESCO, established by Council Decision in 2017, the European Defence Fund, and the Artificial Intelligence Act of 2024. The study finds that strategic choices within these frameworks have tended to reinforce member state autonomy rather than pool it, meaning that national capitals such as Paris and Berlin continue to chart their own courses. France, for example, has pursued defence AI through a dedicated defence innovation agency and one of Europe’s fastest classified supercomputers for defence applications, while Germany’s approach has been shaped by its own strategic reorientation. The result is a patchwork rather than a unified program.

The financial asymmetry between these two models is stark and consequential. The study highlights significant disparities in financial intensity between US and European defence AI efforts, a gap rooted in decades of divergent defence expenditure across EU countries. That spending gap, the analysis argues, creates technological dependencies, with European armed forces and defence industries relying on American platforms, standards, and infrastructure for critical AI capabilities. This dependency relationship poses profound implications for European strategic autonomy, the long-standing ambition that Europe should be able to act in security matters without critical reliance on external powers. In a domain as sensitive as military AI, where data pipelines, model architectures, and decision-support systems can determine battlefield outcomes, dependence on another bloc’s technology is a strategic vulnerability.

European policymakers are not blind to the problem. The study points to emerging strategic initiatives, most notably the European Commission’s White Paper for European Defence, known as Readiness 2030, published in 2025, as an attempt to close the gap and rearm Europe’s technological base. The White Paper sits alongside continued financing decisions for the European Defence Fund, which channels research and development money into collaborative defence technology projects. Yet the study’s central caution is that these initiatives will not succeed on funding alone. Because organizational capital, the trained personnel, institutional routines, data infrastructure, and decision-making structures that allow organizations to actually use AI, develops slowly, a surge of money without institutional reform risks reproducing the fragmentation that currently limits European absorption capacity.

The theoretical stakes of the finding extend beyond Europe. By showing that divergent implementation pathways reflect institutional logics rather than technological imperatives, the study challenges a common assumption that AI will naturally converge toward similar governance forms everywhere. Institutional theory has long held that organizations in the same field tend to grow alike through isomorphic pressures, yet the EU and US cases show that where those pressures come from, whether competitive markets, regulatory frameworks, or strategic traditions, shapes fundamentally different outcomes. In the American case, governance has been framed around competitive advantage and national security leadership; in the European case, around regulation, ethical safeguards, and the preservation of national sovereignty within a collective framework. Both are responses to the same technology, but they enact it in incompatible ways.

These divergences carry direct consequences for defence cooperation between the allies. The study suggests that successful transatlantic collaboration on military AI requires attention to both technical and institutional compatibility, while actively mitigating dependency risks. Interoperability between an American capability-first ecosystem and a fragmented European one is not merely a question of common data standards or shared interfaces; it requires aligning institutional logics that currently pull in different directions. The research also situates the issue in a broader geopolitical context, noting that the United States’ dominance of global arms exports has grown while Russian exports have fallen, and that Ukraine has become the world’s biggest arms importer, trends that raise the stakes of who controls the next generation of defence technology.

The methodological approach is a comparative case study, a design suited to tracing how institutional structures and organizational factors shape technology adoption in complex political settings. By examining documentary evidence ranging from the US Department of Defense’s AI adoption strategy and White House executive orders to the European AI Act, the Readiness 2030 White Paper, and national defence AI strategies from France and Germany, the study builds a picture of two governance systems operating at different speeds and with different centers of gravity. The author reports no competing interests, and the article appears in Volume 5 of Global Public Policy and Governance, pages 114 to 138.

For readers tracking the future of military technology, the study’s message is clear: the AI race in defence will not be won by algorithms alone. Governance structures mediate which technologies get adopted, how quickly, and under whose control, and the gulf between American competitive appropriation and European fragmented absorption is widening into a structural dependency that money alone cannot close. Whether initiatives like Readiness 2030 can build the organizational capital Europe needs, and whether transatlantic institutions can find enough common ground to cooperate on the most consequential technology of the era, are questions that will define European strategic autonomy for decades to come.

Subject of Research: Comparative governance of artificial intelligence adoption in the EU and US defence sectors

Article Title: Governing artificial intelligence in the defence sector: a comparative analysis of EU and US institutions

Article References: Parisini, E. (2025). Governing artificial intelligence in the defence sector: a comparative analysis of EU and US institutions. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(2), 114-138. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00115-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00115-x

Keywords: artificial intelligence, defence policy, European Union, United States, AI governance, military technology, strategic autonomy, institutional theory, European Defence Fund, AI Act, defence innovation, transatlantic cooperation

The starting point of the analysis is the scale of the external shock. The United States, historically Europe’s closest ally, is now using its enormous market power as a geoeconomic weapon, imposing tariffs and regulatory pressure on partners and adversaries alike. According to the paper, the Trump administration’s approach is not an aberration but the product of a coherent ideological project, documented in initiatives such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which seeks to reshape American governance and its relationship with the world. For the EU, this means confronting a dual challenge: an economic assault on its export-driven model and a political assault on the liberal-democratic norms on which the Union itself is founded.

Technically, the EU’s response rests on an expanding arsenal of geoeconomic instruments. The paper highlights the Anti-Coercion Instrument, adopted in December 2023 under Regulation (EU) 2023/2675, which allows the Union to retaliate against third countries that apply economic pressure on member states. Alongside it stand the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, which regulate the power of large technology platforms, and the International Procurement Instrument, which opens third-country public procurement markets reciprocally. The European Economic Security Strategy of 2023 adds a further layer, focusing on the resilience of supply chains, the prevention of technology leakage, and the integration of economic security monitoring into the European External Action Service. Together, these instruments mark what the author describes as a geo-economization of EU policy: the deliberate fusion of economic regulation with strategic objectives.

Yet the empirical record shows how difficult de-risking remains in practice. Despite the EU’s defensive measures, its strategic dependency on China has actually increased, as measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman index, according to research by the Peterson Institute for International Economics cited in the study. The EU’s own China Strategy of 2019 famously described China as a partner, a competitor and a systemic rival simultaneously, a formulation that captures the Union’s ambivalence. While Washington and Beijing decouple, Brussels and Beijing have deepened trade ties, leaving the EU exposed precisely at the moment it seeks strategic autonomy. This tension between declared policy and measurable dependency is one of the central weaknesses the analysis identifies in the Union’s current approach.

To diversify away from this exposure, the EU has accelerated an ambitious trade agenda. Negotiations on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement with Indonesia were finalised on 23 September 2025, with entry into force expected by 1 January 2027. The Commission has also proposed the adoption of the long-stalled Mercosur and Mexico agreements, and is developing new instruments such as clean trade and investment partnerships and raw-materials partnerships designed to secure critical inputs for the green and digital transitions. The Global Gateway initiative, the EU’s answer to China’s Belt and Road, channels infrastructure investment into partner countries as a tool of geopolitical influence. The paper treats these moves as evidence that Brussels is rediscovering itself as a geopolitical union, at least in the economic domain.

Security policy shows a similar pattern of pragmatic acceleration. The European Defence Fund, a component of the Common Security and Defence Policy with a budget of nearly 7.3 billion euros for 2021 to 2027, coordinates national investment in defence research and improves interoperability between national armed forces. The European Peace Facility has mobilised 6.1 billion euros to reimburse countries exporting defence equipment to Ukraine, and the EU and its member states had collectively committed 63.2 billion euros in military support for Ukraine as of September 2025. Under the ReArm Europe plan and the NATO summit declaration of The Hague in June 2025, allies committed to reaching defence spending of 5 percent of GDP by 2035, of which 3.5 percent counts as core defence expenditure and 1.5 percent covers defence-related items such as infrastructure. The proposed 2028 to 2034 EU budget further embeds defence as a Union-level funding priority.

What the Union conspicuously has not done, according to the study, is reform its own governance. Treaty change, qualified majority voting in foreign and security policy, and deeper fiscal integration all remain blocked by the lack of political will and consensus among member states. Governments in Hungary and Slovakia, along with much of Europe’s right-wing populist landscape, favour a different course altogether, arguing that Europe should seek a balance with Russia through trade and concessions even as Russia rebuilds an empire on the continent’s eastern frontier. The paper contrasts this position with the view, articulated in Foreign Affairs, that a settlement of the Ukraine war favouring Russia would pose an existential threat to Europe. This fundamental disagreement over strategy is precisely what makes governance reform impossible and policy reform the only feasible path.

The author characterises the focus on policy reform as a pragmatic approach with genuine merits. It allows the Union to act quickly with the instruments it already possesses, avoiding the years of intergovernmental negotiation that treaty change would require. It also preserves the institutional status quo at a moment when the legitimacy of the entire European project is under ideological attack, including from within the United States, as illustrated by Vice President JD Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, which criticised European democratic norms. In this reading, the EU’s regulatory state, its single market and its trade competence are its strongest cards, and playing them aggressively is a rational adaptation to a hostile environment.

But the strategy carries a structural vulnerability that the paper places at the centre of its conclusion. Policy reform depends on supportive governments in the member states, and those governments are precisely what Trumpism seeks to change. Right-wing populist parties across Europe, emboldened and networked by their American counterparts, could win power in large EU countries and reverse the geoeconomic turn from within, blocking sanctions, diluting the Anti-Coercion Instrument, and steering the Union toward accommodation with Moscow. The analysis, drawing on recent scholarship on the alliance of the new right, warns that the entire edifice of pragmatic reform rests on a political foundation that could erode at the ballot box. Policy instruments, however sophisticated, cannot protect an institution whose member states no longer share its strategic premises.

The study thus answers its own title question with a qualified negative. Policy reform short of governance reform may suffice to manage the economic shock of Trumpism in the short term, and the evidence of the past two years, from defence spending commitments to new trade agreements, shows a Union capable of remarkable tactical adaptation. Yet without eventual governance reform, the EU lacks the resilience to withstand a political shock, namely the capture of major member-state governments by forces hostile to the integration project itself. The paper frames the present moment as a window of opportunity in which the Union can use the external threat as a catalyst for internal renewal, while acknowledging that whether that window remains open is a question that European voters, not Brussels technocrats, will ultimately decide.

Subject of Research: EU policy and governance reform in response to Trumpism and geoeconomic pressure from the United States

Article Title: Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?

Article References: Regenbrecht, J. (2025). Trump and the European Union: will policy reform short of governance reform suffice to withstand Trumpism?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 422-432. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00126-8

Keywords: European Union, Trumpism, geoeconomics, governance reform, EU trade policy, economic security, defence policy, right-wing populism, strategic autonomy, Ukraine, China, NATO

The analytical core of the paper rests on a distinction between disruption and catalysis. Where much commentary has treated Trump’s approach to alliances as an anomaly to be waited out, Scotto contends that the phenomenon functions instead as an accelerant for dynamics that were already latent in the European project. The European Union has long possessed economic weight and regulatory power, often described through the notion of the Brussels Effect, in which EU standards shape global markets, but it has historically lacked the capacity for collective action in the domains of hard security and high politics. Scholars have described the EU as a regulatory polity, strong at setting rules for trade and product standards yet weak at integrating what are called core state powers: defense, policing, taxation, and the other instruments through which states ultimately guarantee their own survival. Trump’s return to the presidency, the paper argues, has exposed this asymmetry with unusual force.

The first of three interrelated dynamics identified in the study concerns the rebalancing of the transatlantic relationship itself. Since the founding decades of the Cold War, European security has rested on what the historian Geir Lundestad famously described as an empire by invitation, in which Western European states welcomed an American security umbrella in exchange for alignment. That bargain assumed a durable American commitment to European territorial integrity. Trump’s public skepticism toward NATO, his demands that European allies dramatically increase defense spending, and his framing of alliances as transactions in which the United States pays and everybody else benefits have converted that assumption into a conditional one. The paper traces this rhetorical lineage from Trump’s 2016 campaign statements, when he called NATO obsolete and suggested the alliance might be allowed to break up, through his 2024 Republican National Convention speech, showing how the conditional character of American protection has become an explicit feature of the strategic environment rather than a background assumption.

This conditionality has spurred a cascade of EU-level and national initiatives. The study points to the Strategic Compass adopted by the Council of the European Union in 2022, which set out an ambitious framework for the Union to act as a security provider, and to the 2016 EU Global Strategy, which had already urged the Union to learn what the then High Representative Josep Borrell later called the language of power. More concretely, the European Council established the Security Action for Europe, known as SAFE, in May 2025, reinforcing the European Defence Industry Instrument in order to expand joint procurement and strengthen the continent’s defense industrial base. These measures, the paper suggests, represent more than incremental policy adjustments. They signal an emerging recognition that the governance architecture of the EU, historically optimized for market integration and regulation, must now extend into domains that member states have jealously guarded as symbols of sovereignty.

The second dynamic examined in the study concerns Germany’s evolving role in European defense, a topic the author treats as one of the most consequential and most ambivalent dimensions of the current transformation. For decades, Germany was characterized in the scholarly literature as the EU’s reluctant hegemon, an economic giant whose political culture, historical memory, and constitutional constraints made it unwilling to translate its economic strength into military leadership. The Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Chancellor Olaf Scholz to declare a Zeitenwende, a historic turning point, announcing a fundamental reorientation of German security policy and a special fund for rearmament. Yet the paper highlights the dilemmas that persist beneath this rhetorical shift. German rearmament raises difficult questions about burden-sharing within the EU, about the appropriate relationship between national capabilities and collective European instruments, and about how a militarily stronger Germany would be embedded in European institutions so as to reassure rather than alarm its neighbors.

The third dynamic identified in the analysis is the emergence of a political nucleus for European defense and foreign policy through intergovernmental and minilateral cooperation. Rather than a grand treaty-based leap toward a federal European army, the paper observes that the most significant developments are occurring in smaller, flexible formats. The Weimar Triangle, bringing together France, Germany, and Poland, is cited as one such grouping with the potential to lead on both security and industrial policy. The Franco-German embedded bilateralism that scholars Ulrich Krotz and Joachim Schild have documented as the historical engine of European integration is being supplemented by wider coalitions of the willing and able. This minilateral pattern reflects what the author, drawing on his earlier work on intergovernmentalism in EU crises, sees as a recurring feature of European integration: progress tends to occur through improvised, crisis-driven arrangements negotiated among a small set of pivotal states, which may later be generalized to the Union as a whole.

The paper situates these contemporary developments within a longer intellectual history of transatlantic asymmetry. Robert Kagan’s influential formulation of Americans being from Mars and Europeans from Venus captured a period in which Europe, sheltered under American protection, could afford to invest in civilian and normative power while the United States exercised hard power. The paper also invokes Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the end of history, the post-Cold War expectation that liberal democracy and American-led order would face no fundamental challenger, and notes how that expectation has given way to a multipolar international system in which Europe must define its own position. Even Renaissance political thought, the author suggests in a historical aside drawing on Guicciardini’s account of Italy’s state system, offers precedents for how middle powers navigate between larger protectors and their own security imperatives. The point of these references is to underline that the current moment is not without historical parallel, even though its specific configuration is unprecedented.

Among the most sensitive questions the paper surveys is the nuclear dimension of European autonomy. A forum in the journal Survival in 2024 debated the prospects for a European nuclear deterrent, and a subsequent 2025 analysis by Lawrence Freedman examined the here and now of Europe’s nuclear options. The paper treats these debates as emblematic of the deeper transformation underway: if American extended deterrence becomes unreliable, European states must at least consider what strategic autonomy would mean at the highest level of escalation. The author does not present a European bomb as an imminent or settled prospect, but the very fact that such discussions have moved from the margins to the mainstream of strategic commentary illustrates how far the terms of the debate have shifted under the pressure of American retrenchment. Similarly, tensions over technology policy, including American criticism of European digital regulation described by the EU Institute for Security Studies as deepening the EU-US rift, show that the rebalancing extends well beyond defense into economic and regulatory affairs.

The paper’s conclusion is deliberately measured. Europe, Scotto argues, may be entering a post-American phase, but this phase is not defined by rupture with Washington. Rather, it is defined by the potential, still unfulfilled, for a rebalanced partnership with the United States and for a more autonomous European role in a multipolar order. The distinction matters: the analysis does not predict a clean break, nor does it claim that European strategic autonomy is already achieved. Instead, it identifies the institutional, industrial, and political building blocks that are being laid, from SAFE procurement instruments to German rearmament to minilateral defense coalitions, and asks whether they can cohere into durable governance. The answer, the paper suggests, will depend on whether Europe can convert crisis-driven improvisation into permanent capability, a challenge that has defeated earlier generations of European strategists but that the current conjuncture makes unusually urgent.

For observers of European politics, the study offers a framework for interpreting the accelerating stream of defense announcements, procurement deals, and diplomatic realignments emerging from Brussels and national capitals. Its central claim, that Trump operates less as a cause than as a catalyst of European governance change, implies that the transformation will not reverse with a change of administration in Washington. The unresolved questions of European defense, foreign policy coordination, and political integration that the American presidency has thrust into the open are, on this account, structural rather than episodic. Whether Europe seizes the moment to build governance commensurate with its economic weight, or continues to rely on an increasingly conditional American guarantee, remains the defining question of the continent’s security policy for the decade ahead.

Subject of Research: The impact of US repositioning under Trump on European Union defense and governance integration

Article Title: Toward a post-American Europe? Trump as a catalyst for EU governance

Article References: Scotto, M. (2025). Toward a post-American Europe? Trump as a catalyst for EU governance. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 433-443. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00128-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00128-6

Keywords: Donald Trump, European Union, EU governance, European defense, NATO, strategic autonomy, transatlantic relations, Germany, intergovernmentalism, multipolarity, foreign policy, defense industry

The analytical core of the article rests on the concept of transactionalism in international relations. Unlike traditional diplomacy, which embeds bilateral relationships in institutions, treaties, and shared norms, transactional diplomacy evaluates every interaction as a discrete exchange with measurable gains and losses. Linden notes that American presidents have always used elements of transactional foreign policy, but argues that the current approach differs in both degree and kind. Where earlier administrations balanced deal-making with commitment to alliances and democratic norms, the present model elevates the deal above the alliance itself. Personal relationships between leaders substitute for institutional channels, and long-standing partners are recast as competitors who have taken advantage of American generosity.

The economic dimension of this transformation is perhaps the most visible. European allies, historically treated as the cornerstone of American trade and security partnerships, have been threatened with sweeping tariffs and characterized as beneficiaries of an unbalanced relationship. In July 2025, the United States and the European Union reached a trade deal that the White House celebrated as a massive achievement, yet European leaders publicly criticized the agreement as unfair, with some describing its signing as a dark day for the union. The asymmetry between the American framing of the deal and the European reception of it illustrates the broader dynamic: what Washington presents as a win reflects a bargaining posture in which allied prosperity is treated as a cost to the United States rather than a shared foundation of the transatlantic economy, which by most measures remains the largest bilateral economic relationship in the world.

Territorial rhetoric has pushed this transactional logic into territory that analysts once considered unthinkable. The administration repeatedly floated the acquisition of Greenland, a self-governing territory of Denmark, prompting a January 2025 opinion poll showing that 85 percent of Greenlanders did not want to join the United States. Similar suggestions about making Canada the fifty-first American state circulated in late 2024. Linden argues that such statements are not merely rhetorical flourishes but expressions of a worldview in which the sovereignty of even the closest allies is negotiable. The suggestion that the United States might take over Gaza, described in early 2025 as transforming the territory into a Riviera of the Middle East, extended the same logic to the Middle East and alarmed European governments already struggling to coordinate a common position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Policy toward the war in Ukraine reveals how transactionalism has sacrificed traditional unity. Rather than sustaining the coalition-based support model of previous years, the administration reframed assistance as a commercial proposition. In May 2025, Trump approved the first shipment of arms to Ukraine, but as sales rather than aid, a shift documented by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The Kiel Institute’s Ukraine Support Tracker recorded that Europe had become the leading spender on weapons production for Ukraine, a milestone that underscores both European resolve and the widening gap in burden-sharing narratives. At the same time, the president publicly blamed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for the war following a massive Russian attack, and a summit with Vladimir Putin in August 2025 concluded without agreement but with considerable ceremony. The mixed signals extended to sanctions: while Washington imposed measures on top Russian oil companies Rosneft and Lukoil in October 2025, it earlier disbanded a task force targeting Russian oligarchs and granted Hungary a one-year exemption from penalties related to Russian oil purchases.

European far-right parties that had celebrated Trump’s return found themselves in an uncomfortable position when his Ukraine stance diverged from their own. Several of his key European allies publicly faulted his approach to the conflict, a rare instance of criticism from within his ideological camp. Meanwhile, the administration’s engagement with European politics took a more direct form. At the Munich Security Conference in February 2025, Vice President J. D. Vance delivered a message that shocked European audiences, promoting positions he had long advanced domestically and signaling sympathy for movements outside the political mainstream. Linden treats this intervention as evidence that personalist diplomacy does not stop at the border of allied domestic politics but actively reshapes them.

The security consequences for Europe have been immediate and measurable. At the NATO summit in The Hague in June 2025, allies agreed to boost defense spending to 5 percent of gross domestic product, a target the White House credited to presidential leadership but which European capitals largely interpreted as a response to doubts about American reliability. Germany announced plans to double its defense spending within five years, and the European Commission’s ReArm Europe plan, presented under the Readiness 2030 banner, is designed to boost defense funding across member states. The United Kingdom and the European Union signed a dedicated Security and Defence Partnership in May 2025, institutionalizing defense cooperation between the two blocs independent of NATO structures. Twenty-six countries committed in September 2025 to deploying troops to Ukraine in a postwar framework, a coalition of the willing assembled precisely because guarantees from Washington could no longer be assumed.

Trade diversification follows the same logic of hedging. European leaders held a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping in July 2025, with Brussels calling for real solutions even as trust remained thin, and the expanding BRICS group offers an alternative pole for economic alignment. Linden’s forthcoming work on EU-China relations suggests that Europe’s search for partners is driven less by enthusiasm for Beijing than by the arithmetic of reducing dependence on an unpredictable ally. The erosion of American democratic leadership compounds the problem. Carnegie Endowment analysts have documented American democratic backsliding in comparative perspective, and Freedom House’s 2025 report on freedom in the world describes an uphill battle to safeguard rights globally. When the country that long anchored the democratic world exhibits its own institutional strain, the normative foundation of the transatlantic relationship weakens alongside its material one.

The study also documents the costs to institutional transparency and democratic norms within the alliance itself. The disclosure that senior American officials, including Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, shared attack plans for a March strike on Houthi rebels in Yemen through an unsecured messaging channel raised questions about operational discipline at the highest levels. The administration declined to participate in a United Nations conference on a two-state solution, and a June 2025 report by the Office of the Special EU Representative for Human Rights suggested that Israel’s actions might violate the longstanding EU-Israel association agreement, exposing further divergence between European legal-normative frameworks and American diplomatic practice. European favorability toward the United States fell sharply following Trump’s return, according to YouGov polling, reflecting a public-level cooling that mirrors the elite-level estrangement.

Linden’s conclusion is that the transformation is structural rather than episodic. The push for Europe to reduce defense dependence on the United States, the drive to find other trade partners, and the erosion of American democratic leadership together point toward a Europe that may be post-American in orientation even if it remains Western in identity. Analysts such as Mario Draghi have urged Europe to turn skepticism into action, arguing that the continent possesses the scale to act autonomously if it chooses to aggregate its economic and technological capacity. Whether the transactional turn proves to be a lasting rupture or a catalyst that finally forces European strategic consolidation is the central question the article leaves open. What is clear, on the evidence assembled, is that the assumptions underpinning eight decades of transatlantic order, that allies share interests, that institutions outlast administrations, and that democracy anchors the alliance, can no longer be taken as given.

Subject of Research: The impact of transactional US foreign policy on transatlantic relations and European strategic autonomy

Article Title: Trump and Europe: a transactional transformation

Article References: Linden, R. H. (2025). Trump and Europe: a transactional transformation. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 444-456. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00129-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00129-5

Keywords: transactionalism, US-European relations, NATO, tariffs, Ukraine, Russia, European Union, democracy, defense spending, trade policy, Greenland, strategic autonomy

The starting point of the analysis is the sheer unpredictability of the new American posture. Political positions, the paper observes, now change like daily specials on a menu, and a flood of true and false information makes fact-based political discourse increasingly difficult. The United States under Trump 2.0 still wants to be a hegemonic power, but no longer a hegemon in the sense of the liberal, rules-based world order that it largely built itself. Secretary of State Marco Rubio made this explicit in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, describing the post-Cold War belief that all nations would join a democratic, Western-led community as a dangerous delusion rather than a fantasy. For a political community like the EU, which is founded on rules- and values-based reliability, this is more than uncomfortable news; it is the counter-concept to everything the supranational project was designed to represent.

Kotzur grounds the debate in etymology and political philosophy. Autonomy, from the ancient Greek autos and nomos, means the ability to live under one’s own laws, to make informed and uncoerced decisions. Strategy derives from the art of leading an army. Combining the two, the EU implicitly makes a dual claim: the capacity to decide independently, and the capacity to do so in light of its own interests and values. Strategic autonomy therefore fuses factuality and normativity. It demands a pragmatic view of what is realistically possible and a self-confident view of what ought ideally to be done. Crucially, the paper identifies two preconditions that apply across all dimensions of the concept. Autonomy does not mean total self-sufficiency; it means not being overly reliant on any single other actor, and it means possessing genuine influence, understood not as coercion but as the ability to build sustainable partnerships.

French President Emmanuel Macron articulated the vision of strategic autonomy, or even strategic sovereignty, in 2017, partly in response to internal crises and partly to Trump’s first-term attacks on NATO. For too long, the analysis notes, other member states including Germany ignored the ambition. Macron was not proposing a new political theory of integration or a radical rebalancing of powers between Brussels and the capitals. He was calling for a concrete power to act, above all the potential to become a serious but more independent global player in security and defence. The second Trump term, with its more elaborate version of Trumpism, has given that call renewed urgency and taught Europeans, rather the hard way, that their honeymoon with history is over.

That honeymoon had deep roots. From the founding of the Coal and Steel Community in 1951, the EU saw itself as a pure force for peace, a normative power that could afford to neglect hard military capability because it believed it could rely completely on American protection. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine exposed this self-conception as short-sighted, and Trump’s tariff politics have done the same for the EU’s role as a global economic player. An impactful peacekeeping actor, the paper argues, must be ready to defend itself and capable of military action if it wants to be taken seriously as a global peacemaker. The geopolitical awakening triggered by the war and by shifting American priorities now demands innovative readjustment in all three dimensions of the Union’s claimed abilities to act.

On the geopolitical dimension, the analysis traces the pressure back to the Helsinki Final Act, the mid-1970s foundation of European security that Russia shattered with its invasion of Ukraine and its attempt to unilaterally reshape the continent’s security architecture. This breach creates military as well as political pressure and serves as a litmus test for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and its integral defence component. The Union’s legal competence is comprehensive, extending to all areas of foreign policy and all matters of security, including conflict prevention, conflict management and post-conflict rehabilitation. Trumpism has intensified the strain, through demands for fairer burden-sharing within NATO, nonchalant attacks on the territorial sovereignty of Greenland, and contradictory remarks on alliance obligations, while simultaneously seeking to isolate EU member states from one another. Paradoxically, the paper suggests, Trump acts as a catalyst for EU governance.

Reform options are on the table. One would be to communitise foreign, security and defence policy, replacing intergovernmental unanimity with qualified majority voting and gradually building a Security and Defence Union. Another, less likely scenario would remove these competences from EU structures altogether. Neither appears probable. More plausible, in keeping with the piecemeal engineering that has shaped integration since its beginnings, are incremental steps of the kind outlined in the Strategic Compass of 2022: joint risk analysis and a gradual shift of competences to the EU level. Twenty-five member states have already established Permanent Structured Cooperation under the Lisbon Treaty, a framework that seeks to balance national sovereignty with credible collective defence. Such coordination, the paper stresses, requires a shared strategic culture and, above all, money. Strategic autonomy does not come for free. Early in March 2025, ahead of the EU crisis summit on Ukraine, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented a plan to rearm Europe, including greater flexibility in debt rules, which the Commission says could mobilise almost 800 billion euros. Without Trump’s pressure, the paper notes, it would never have reached the Commission’s agenda. Discussions of a French nuclear umbrella and Franco-British cooperation on a coalition of the willing for Ukraine point in the same direction.

The economic dimension is equally turbulent. At the 2025 Davos World Economic Forum, von der Leyen declared that the cooperative world order imagined twenty-five years ago had not materialised, and that the world had entered an era of fierce geostrategic competition in which sanctions, export controls and tariffs are used routinely. Trumpism has adopted an aggressive tariff policy that disregards international trade norms, yet the Union still seeks to stand for rules-based multilateral trade, the lowering of barriers, a revival of World Trade Organization principles, and goals such as the European Green Deal and carbon neutrality by 2050. At the same time, the paper highlights an uncomfortable concession: the European Commission has admitted that its own trade deal with the United States most likely does not meet WTO standards, and the promise of purchasing American weapon systems after a meeting at Trump’s private golf club can be read as surrendering a degree of autonomy. The author warns of a neo-feudal style of politics in which strategic accommodation replaces strategic autonomy. Even so, he argues, transatlantic cooperation is not over; its parameters have simply changed fundamentally. Europe must now confront the United States as a strong actor with its own agenda, relying on its economic strength, innovation capacity and proven ability to generate new integration dynamics, as shown by recent trade agreements with Indonesia and New Zealand and the opportunities presented by MERCOSUR.

The third dimension is normative. Article 3(5) of the Treaty on European Union commits the Union to upholding and promoting its values, contributing to peace, sustainable development, free and fair trade, the eradication of poverty, human rights and the strict observance of international law. Trumpism stands in stark contrast: drastic cuts to foreign aid, defiance of international norms such as unlawful attacks on smuggling boats in the Caribbean, and broad threats to rules-based multilateralism. Yet the paper recalls that the EU’s self-image as a legal community, a creation of law in the words of the first Commission President Walter Hallstein, has always been more than functional. Law, conceived as an antidote to force and a carrier of a new spirit of cooperation, can become the cement holding divergent forces together. The EU should therefore continue to act as a mediator for democracy, the rule of law and universal human rights, fill the gaps Trumpism has opened in multilateralism, and pursue genuine dialogue on an equal footing, especially with the countries of the Global South.

The deeper lesson, Kotzur concludes, is that the old transatlantic normality was always partly an illusion. Even before Trump, America’s advocacy of law-based multilateralism was driven to some extent by an America First mentality, and scepticism toward multilateral institutions has grown as China, Russia and Global South states assert their own right to shape international norms. After the first Trump presidency, European leaders erred in dismissing him as a temporary phenomenon. The new normality demands pragmatism, conceptual clarity and self-assurance: the capacity to defend itself as a geopolitical actor, new trade partners and free trade agreements as an economic actor, and honest alliances built on mutual understanding as a norm-setter. Values and interests, realism and idealism, should not be played off against each other in dichotomous thinking. Trump 2.0, the analysis suggests, is keeping Europe on its toes, which may not be such a bad thing if old Europe wants to reinvent itself as a better version of what it has been so far.

Subject of Research: European Union strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism and the erosion of multilateralism

Article Title: Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism

Article References: Kotzur, M. (2025). Europe’s quest for strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 457-466. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00133-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00133-9

Keywords: strategic autonomy, European Union, Trumpism, multilateralism, Common Security and Defence Policy, NATO, trade policy, normative power, Global South, Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, World Trade Organization

The paper, published open access on 14 August 2026, tackles a puzzle that has been accumulating in the research literature for years. Some studies find that circularity strengthens resilience by reducing reliance on virgin materials and extending the availability of critical resources; work on electric vehicle battery supply chains, for example, has shown that circular strategies can ease dependence on scarce raw materials. Other studies warn of the opposite effect. Kennedy and Linnenluecke, in an influential 2022 research agenda, cautioned that efficiency-oriented circular strategies may remove the buffers, diversity, and slack resources that systems need to withstand and adapt to shocks. A third group of studies reports conditional results, finding that outcomes hinge on network topology, supply-risk exposure, institutional anchoring, business model design, and organizational capabilities. Rather than treating these findings as contradictory noise, the German team treats them as the phenomenon to be explained.

The key to their explanation is a distinction borrowed from resilience theory in social-ecological systems research: the difference between specified and general resilience, a distinction that traces back to Carpenter and colleagues’ famous question of resilience ‘of what, to what?’ Specified resilience refers to the capacity of a particular supply chain, infrastructure, territory, or material system to withstand an identifiable disturbance. General resilience refers to the broader capacity to absorb, adapt to, or reorganize under unfamiliar or cross-cutting disturbances. Once this distinction is applied, the heterogeneous findings in circular economy research fall into a coherent pattern. Positive results typically concern specified resilience to known risks such as raw-material scarcity or supply-chain interruption, while critical results concern losses of general resilience through reduced response diversity, diminished slack, and eroded adaptive capacity.

The mechanisms by which circularity erodes general resilience are concrete and, in some cases, counterintuitive. Closing loops can reduce import dependence but create dependence on specialized reverse-logistics systems that did not previously exist. Standardizing secondary-material streams improves efficiency and interoperability but reduces diversity and substitutability. Tight network integration improves the circulation of materials but also increases the speed at which a disruption at one node propagates around the loop, eliminating the exit option of sourcing outside the network. In a linear economy, interdependencies arise incidentally; in a circular economy, they are deliberately engineered. A disruption to a standardized secondary-material stream therefore cannot simply be bypassed, because the stream itself depends on ecosystem-wide participation.

To capture what is lost when these capacities disappear, the authors introduce the concept of ‘system options’: collectively valuable capacities that preserve alternative courses of action under disturbance. These include redundancy, modularity, response diversity, adaptive slack, and learning infrastructures. What makes system options distinctive, the authors argue, is their cost structure. Their benefits are diffuse, delayed, or system-wide, while their costs are concentrated on particular actors. Redundancy requires spare capacity, slack requires carrying costs, modularity requires design investment, and diversity may sacrifice economies of scale. Under competitive pressure, such capacities are systematically underprovided, because no single firm captures the full value of maintaining them. This is not a technical problem but a governance problem: which options should be preserved, who pays, how are costs and benefits distributed, and how are commitments sustained over time?

To organize this governance challenge, the study applies the ordonomic approach, an analytical framework developed by Pies that distinguishes three interdependent levels of social order: operations, governance, and semantics. At the operational level, circular strategies such as repair, reuse, remanufacturing, and recycling are enacted under given rules and competitive pressures. At the governance level, rules, standards, incentives, contracts, and collaborative institutions determine whether costly system options are designed, financed, monitored, and sustained. At the semantic level, ideas and narratives determine whether resilience costs are interpreted as reasonable and necessary, or dismissed as wasteful and inefficient. The framework’s diagnostic power lies in showing how failures at one level can masquerade as problems at another: treating a governance problem as an operational one leads to efficiency optimization that strips out system options, while treating a semantic problem as a governance one produces institutional designs that collapse under discursive contestation.

The framework yields testable propositions with direct policy relevance. Efficiency-oriented circular strategies are likely to strengthen specified resilience when they measurably reduce exposure to identifiable disturbances, but likely to weaken general resilience when they increase systemic interdependence, narrow response diversity, reduce adaptive slack, and deepen dependence on specialized infrastructures. General resilience is more likely to be preserved when governance arrangements match each system option to its cost structure, observability, and beneficiary structure: reserve obligations and capacity contracts for slack and redundancy, standards and procurement for modularity, ecosystem governance for shared infrastructures, and anti-concentration rules for response diversity. Mismatched governance fails in patterned ways, the authors predict: free riding when benefits are diffuse, resistance when costs are concentrated, capture when standards allocate rents, and the quiet dismantling of reserves during calm periods when disruption memories fade.

Perhaps the most provocative element of the paper concerns legitimation, the discursive work of making resilience costs publicly intelligible. Many circular economy discourses are strongly efficiency-coded, equating circularity with waste elimination, lean operations, and short-run cost minimization. Within such frames, redundancy appears as duplication, slack as waste, and diversity as fragmentation. The authors argue that resilience-oriented governance is more politically durable when the costs of system options are framed as preparedness, insurance, option value, fairness, continuity protection, or strategic autonomy. Notably, they suggest that post-2022 strategic-autonomy discourse in Europe has opened political space for interpreting circularity not only as environmental policy but also as material-security policy. They even caution against a reflexive assumption that broader stakeholder participation always strengthens governance: in circular contexts, widening participation can surface cost-distribution conflicts that resilience reframing had suppressed, potentially destabilizing otherwise workable arrangements.

The implications reach both boardrooms and ministries. For managers, the study recommends asking of every circular strategy which disturbance it protects against, which options it removes, whether it deepens dependence on a specific supplier, recycler, standard, or platform, and whether fallback pathways remain available. Because many system options cannot be maintained by individual firms alone, firms have a strategic interest in inter-firm and public-private arrangements that share the costs of reverse logistics, interoperable standards, and reserve processing capacity. For policymakers, the message is sharper still: resilience is not an automatic co-benefit of circularity. Policies that improve protection against one risk may weaken adaptability if they create dependence on a narrow infrastructure, a single technology, or a rigid recovery pathway. Policymakers should specify the resilience object and the disturbance, distinguish specified from general resilience, map costs and beneficiaries, and select governance mechanisms matched to each system option.

The study’s conclusion reframes the entire debate in a single sentence: circular systems remain resilient not simply because they close loops, but because they preserve alternative pathways when preferred loops fail. The authors call for future research to measure specified and general resilience separately, using indicators such as supply continuity and recovery time for the former, and response diversity, modularity, substitutability, network redundancy, and cross-shock performance for the latter. They also flag a critical failure condition: when a small set of actors bears concentrated, visible, and immediate resilience costs while system-wide benefits remain contingent and delayed, no amount of framing can sustain the arrangement without transfers or participation rules. The circular economy, on this reading, will deliver security not when it becomes perfectly efficient, but when it remains capable of acting otherwise under disturbance. In an era of geopolitical volatility and critical-material insecurity, that distinction may prove to be one of the most consequential ideas in industrial ecology.

Subject of Research: The relationship between circular economy strategies and specified versus general resilience, conceptualized as the governance of system options

Article Title: Circular economy resilience as the governance of system options: specified and general resilience in circular transitions

Article References: Schultz, F. C., Valentinov, V., & Pies, I. (2026). Circular economy resilience as the governance of system options: specified and general resilience in circular transitions. Journal of Industrial Ecology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44498-026-00158-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44498-026-00158-1

Keywords: circular economy, resilience, specified resilience, general resilience, system options, governance, supply chain, industrial ecology, critical raw materials, redundancy, adaptive capacity, strategic autonomy

The study adopts a qualitative approach that combines document analysis with a case study method, conceptualizing Vietnam as a representative middle power. Middle powers occupy an awkward middle ground in international politics: too large and capable to simply bandwagon with a stronger state, yet too small to shape the international system on their own. For such states, hedging offers an alternative to the binary choices of balancing against one power or aligning with another. Instead of committing, a hedging state keeps its options open, spreading its dependencies so that no single great power can dictate its foreign policy.

What makes Vietnam’s version of hedging distinctive is its ideological framing. The country’s leadership has articulated the approach through the metaphor of bamboo diplomacy, first systematically laid out by General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong at the National Conference on Foreign Affairs in December 2021. Trong described a distinctive school of foreign affairs rooted in the image of the Vietnamese bamboo, characterized by firm roots, a solid trunk, and flexible branches. The metaphor captures the technical logic of the strategy: principles remain fixed while tactics bend with circumstances. The bamboo sways in the storm but does not break, and it does not uproot itself to escape the wind.

The security dimension of this doctrine is codified in Vietnam’s 2019 National Defence White Paper, which commits the country to what analysts describe as a set of explicit refusals. Vietnam will not join military alliances, will not align with one country against another, will not allow foreign states to establish military bases on its territory or use Vietnamese soil for military activities against other nations, and will not use force or threaten its use in international relations. This stands in deliberate contrast to, for example, NATO members bound by Article 5, which treats an attack on one ally as an attack on all and obligates collective response. Hanoi’s four noes are designed precisely to avoid such binding entanglements that would collapse its maneuvering space into a single bloc.

Economically, the hedging strategy manifests as simultaneous deepening of ties with both rivals. Vietnam and China have recorded unprecedented expansion in bilateral trade, with China remaining deeply embedded in Vietnamese supply chains as a source of inputs and machinery. At the same time, the United States has become one of Vietnam’s most important export markets and a growing source of multi-sectoral investment trending toward higher value chains. The study notes that this dual dependence functions almost as a form of mutual deterrence: each superpower has substantial economic stakes in Vietnam, giving both reasons to compete for Hanoi’s goodwill rather than coerce it. Researchers have described this dynamic as economic mutual assured dependence, a strategic tool that middle powers can wield against far larger rivals.

The return of President Donald Trump and the America First agenda has injected new stress into this equilibrium. The study documents how Washington’s tariff decisions have directly tested Vietnamese resilience, prompting high-level engagement from Hanoi, including discussions between General Secretary To Lam and President Trump aimed at reducing import tariffs, with Vietnam signaling readiness to negotiate tariff levels down to zero percent. The authors frame these episodes as evidence that hedging is not passive. It requires constant active management, as Vietnamese officials pursue economic and trade policy dialogues with the United States while simultaneously cultivating stable foundations for relations with China.

The diplomatic record of 2025 and early 2026 illustrates the balancing act in fine grain. Vietnam has consistently described the United States as a leading strategic partner, upgrading the relationship to a comprehensive strategic partnership, the highest tier in its diplomatic hierarchy. Yet in the same period, Vietnam conducted its first joint army drill with China, an episode analysts at the Carnegie Endowment interpreted as a signal that Hanoi remains neither comrade nor ally to either power. The study reads these seemingly contradictory moves as coherent within the hedging framework: each gesture toward one power is counterweighted by a gesture toward the other, preventing either from claiming exclusive influence.

The analytical core of the paper lies in its assessment of conditions. The authors find that hedging has enabled Vietnam to maintain strategic maneuvering space and derive short to medium term benefits from engagement with both Washington and Beijing. But they emphasize that the strategy is conditional rather than permanent. Hedging can be sustained only so long as strategic polarization between the United States and China does not cross the threshold that compels states to align explicitly. In other words, hedging works while the great powers compete but do not demand commitments. Its inherent limitations, the study argues, are likely to become increasingly pronounced as competition escalates, echoing earlier scholarship warning of the structural dangers of a Thucydides trap dynamic between an established and a rising power.

The research also situates Vietnam within a broader global pattern. Companion studies in the same journal examine how Europe pursues strategic autonomy in response to Trumpism and how Trump-era policies are reshaping China’s global strategies, suggesting a worldwide reassessment of how states dependent on American security guarantees and Chinese economic integration should position themselves. For Southeast Asian states watching Vietnam’s experience, the findings carry practical weight: hedging is viable and rewarding, but it is a strategy for an intermediate phase of rivalry, not a permanent shield.

Funded by Vietnam National University Ho Chi Minh City, the study ultimately offers a sober assessment rather than a celebration. Vietnam’s bamboo diplomacy has proven remarkably effective at keeping options open in a polarizing world, allowing a middle power to talk trade with Washington one week and drill with the People’s Liberation Army the next. But the authors’ central conclusion is that flexibility has structural limits. If the US-China contest intensifies to the point where both capitals demand that smaller states choose, the bamboo may bend as far as it can, and Vietnam, like other middle powers, will face the unenviable arithmetic of alignment.

Subject of Research: Vietnam's hedging strategy toward US-China great power competition

Article Title: Vietnam’s hedging strategies amid intensified US-China competition

Article References: Nghi, N. T., & Tu, N. C. (2026). Vietnam’s hedging strategies amid intensified US-China competition. Global Public Policy and Governance, 6(1), 82-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-026-00141-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-026-00141-3

Keywords: Vietnam, hedging strategy, US-China competition, bamboo diplomacy, middle power, strategic autonomy, Trump tariffs, South China Sea, foreign policy, Southeast Asia, comprehensive strategic partnership, economic dependence

The quantitative contrast between NATO’s first and most recent strategic documents is striking. The 1991 Strategic Concept, drafted amid the disintegration of the Soviet Union, described the security environment as fundamentally transformed and mentioned Russia only twice, each time in the context of cooperation. The word cooperation appeared 37 times in that document, while deterrence appeared just 14 times. The 2022 Strategic Concept, adopted at the Madrid Summit after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, references Russia 23 times and characterizes it as the most significant and direct threat to Allied security. In that document, deterrence appears 31 times while cooperation appears only 12. These word-level shifts, the study argues, quantify a deep reorientation of the alliance’s institutional identity from partnership-building toward territorial defense and deterrence.

The study emphasizes that this transformation did not begin in February 2022. Warning signs accumulated over years, starting with Russia’s war in Georgia in 2008, followed by the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the conflict in the Donbas region. At the 2016 Warsaw Summit, NATO agreed to deploy four multinational battlegroups to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland under the Enhanced Forward Presence framework, a move described in the literature as a historic day for the Baltic states. These battalion-sized units, each led by a framework nation such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, or the United States, were deliberately designed as tripwires: forces too small to repel an invasion alone but large enough to guarantee that any attack would immediately draw the entire alliance into conflict. Since 2022, all four battlegroups have been expanded to brigade level, and NATO’s overall response force has grown to 300,000 troops on high readiness.

The composition and capability of these forward deployments vary considerably, and the study documents these disparities in detail. The British-led battlegroup in Estonia has maintained roughly 1,200 troops with heavy armor including Challenger 2 tanks, while the Canadian-led group in Latvia has struggled with force generation and depends heavily on contributions from Spain, Italy, and Poland. The German-led battlegroup in Lithuania is notable for incorporating Patriot air defense systems, reflecting Berlin’s deepening commitment since 2022, and the American-led formation in Poland is the largest, supported by artillery, aviation assets, and a division-level headquarters. Total forward-deployed personnel on NATO’s eastern flank rose from approximately 5,000 in 2014 to more than 40,000 in 2024, although the study notes that quality remains inconsistent across contributors.

Beyond conventional forces, the research highlights how NATO has adapted to a threat environment that is now explicitly multi-domain. The 2016 Warsaw Summit formally recognized cyberspace as an operational domain, and the alliance has acknowledged that cyberattacks can in principle trigger Article 5 collective defense obligations. Attribution, however, remains a formidable technical and legal obstacle, since identifying the origin of a cyber operation with sufficient certainty to justify a collective response is often impossible. NATO has also confronted hybrid threats, a category of aggression that combines cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, economic coercion, and political subversion while deliberately staying below the threshold of armed attack. The alliance established a Hybrid Centre of Excellence in Helsinki and created Cyber Rapid Response Teams, while also setting minimum national resilience standards covering critical infrastructure, supply chain security, and societal resistance to manipulation.

Perhaps the most dramatic empirical evidence of changed threat perceptions came from two countries that had avoided military alliances for decades. Finland, which had pursued neutrality since the Cold War era of Finlandization, saw public support for NATO membership surge from roughly 30 percent in 2021 to more than 80 percent in 2022. Swedish support rose from about 35 percent to over 70 percent. Both nations applied for membership, and their accession fundamentally redrew Europe’s strategic map. Finland’s entry brought a 1,340-kilometer border with Russia inside the alliance, roughly doubling the NATO-Russia frontier and complicating Russian military planning in Northern Europe. Finland contributes a modern air force transitioning to F-35 aircraft, while Sweden brings one of the Baltic region’s most capable navies, including Gotland-class submarines designed for shallow littoral waters, along with extensive Arctic and sub-Arctic operational expertise.

The accession process, however, also exposed the internal frictions that consensus-based decision-making can create. Turkey delayed Sweden’s membership for more than a year over disputes concerning Kurdish organizations and extradition requests, and Hungary’s ratification also lagged for largely political reasons. The study argues that these episodes demonstrate how even strategically urgent decisions can be held hostage by bilateral grievances, a structural vulnerability inherent in an alliance of now 32 members that operates by unanimity. Burden-sharing presents a parallel challenge. At the 2014 Wales Summit, NATO set a guideline of 2 percent of GDP for defense spending, a benchmark met by only three members at the time. By 2024, 23 of 32 members had reached or exceeded the target, with Poland at 4.04 percent, the United States at roughly 3.5 percent, and the United Kingdom at about 2.29 percent. Yet the study notes that spending quality matters as much as quantity: only seven members met the separate 20 percent benchmark for major equipment investment, and much of the new money has gone to personnel costs rather than capabilities.

European defense industrial capacity emerges as a critical weakness. The study cites assessments that Europe’s defense industrial base lacks the scale to sustain a major conflict without American support, a concern underscored by the European Union’s failure to deliver its pledge of one million artillery shells to Ukraine within twelve months. Decades of post-Cold War contraction and fragmentation have left national industries without economies of scale, producing deep reliance on United States equipment. This dependency intersects uncomfortably with Washington’s strategic pivot toward Asia and with ongoing debates over European strategic autonomy. France and others have pushed for the European Union to develop independent military capacity through initiatives such as PESCO and the European Defence Fund, while frontline states including Poland and the Baltic members remain skeptical of anything that might dilute the American security guarantee. The 2022 Strategic Concept attempts to square this circle by welcoming EU defense initiatives while insisting they remain supplementary to NATO, which it declares the cornerstone of Euro-Atlantic security.

Theoretically, the study frames NATO’s endurance through three complementary lenses. Realism, particularly Stephen Walt’s balance of threat theory, explains the alliance’s resurgence as a rational response to Russian power, proximity, and demonstrated intent to use force. Liberal institutionalism, drawing on Robert Keohane’s work, accounts for NATO’s survival after its original adversary vanished, since dense institutionalized relationships generate their own inertia by reducing transaction costs and stabilizing expectations. Constructivism, following Alexander Wendt’s insight that anarchy is what states make of it, explains why former Warsaw Pact states sought membership not merely for security guarantees but to affirm their identities as democratic European nations. The study concludes that NATO’s future relevance will depend on whether it can sustain a political coalition capable of supporting both military deterrence and continuous innovation in technology and strategic thought, a test that an increasingly unpredictable security environment will keep applying for years to come.

Subject of Research: NATO's post-Cold War institutional transformation and its response to Russian revisionism in the European security environment

Article Title: NATO’s evolution and European security dynamics

Article References: Edmond, C. (2026). NATO’s evolution and European security dynamics. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 234. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00594-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00594-1

Keywords: NATO, European security, collective defense, deterrence, Russia, Ukraine war, hybrid threats, cyber defense, Finland, Sweden, burden sharing, strategic autonomy