24 February 2022 did not just mark a deep rift in international law: it was a brutal reality bath that reshuffled the continent’s priorities and made evident a fragility that had always been there for all to see, but which no one had ever really wanted to address.

For decades, the European equilibrium rested on three pillars. The first was the protective umbrella of the United States, guaranteed through NATO; the second, the political choice of peace dividends: a progressive reduction in military spending to support increasingly expensive welfare models (see Figure 1); the third, a defence industry built for times of stability, oriented more towards exports than the preparation for a high-intensity conflict (see Figure 2). This architecture worked as long as external conditions were favourable; as soon as Russia decided to test the credibility of our deterrence by initiating the invasion of Ukraine, the system showed all its dependence and vulnerability.

The European response has been surprisingly rapid, which may seem strange to those unfamiliar with the Union’s decision-making mechanisms, almost compressed in time; but it is precisely this acceleration that makes it necessary to distinguish between what has really been built and what still remains fragile.

Source: Oliver Wyman (2026), How Europe can meet defence readiness

The regulatory architecture: an unprecedented leap

If one goes beyond the surface of the public debate, a deeper change emerges than is often narrated. In just a few years, the European Union has built a regulatory and industrial structure that did not exist before. The ASAP Regulation (2023) supported the production of munitions; EDIRPA introduced joint procurement between member states;EDIS, the European Defence Industrial Strategy, published by the Commission in March 2024, set for the first time an industrial policy vision for the sector until 2035. The White Paper‘Readiness 2030‘, presented on 19 March 2025, set the target of 800 billion to be mobilised by the end of the decade.

The crowning glory of this sequence is EDIP, the European Defence Industry Programme, which was definitively approved by the EU Council on 8 December 2025 and entered into force the day after its publication. Its weight derives not so much from the initial resources (1.5 billion for the period 2025-2027, including 300 million for Ukraine) as from the change of logic it introduces. For the first time, it builds a common system for security of supply, creates the Framework for European Armament Programmes and affirms the ‘Buy European’ principle, with a 35% ceiling for components from non-associated third countries. It is the regulatory framework of a defence industrial policy that did not exist.

Precisely because this architecture is new, however, the problem inevitably shifts to how it is sustained over time. And it is here that the first cracks emerge.

Common debt without common taxation: the first crack

With the SAFE (Security Action for Europe) fund, formally adopted by the Council on 27 May 2025 (EU Reg. 2025/1106), and entered into force on 29 May, with an endowment of EUR 150 billion, the Union has chosen to use common debt to support defence. The mechanism is the same as the post-Covid Recovery Fund: the EU issues AAA-rated debt and transfers the benefit to the subscribing countries in the form of loans on more favourable terms than they would get by issuing national debt. The saving is all the greater the higher a country’s spread over Germany.

Subscription figures compiled by Citigroup in January 2026 show 19 countries participating, with Poland leading the way at EUR 43.7bn, followed by Romania at EUR 16.7bn, Hungary and France at EUR 16.2bn each, and Italy at EUR 14.9bn. Demand far exceeded initial expectations. Not surprisingly, therefore, the instrument was considered a success. But it is precisely this success that makes the underlying fragility more visible.

Common European debt, without common taxation, creates the structural conditions for systematic free riding. Countries with high spreads have a very strong incentive to resort to EU loans, not because industrial logic demands it, but because they are cheaper than issuing national debt. But purchasing decisions remain entirely national; the benefits are socialised and the fiscal discipline that should accompany every spending decision no longer has any real political anchor. The ‘virtuous’ countries, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, continue to guarantee, with their AAA rating, a debt from which they benefit marginally, financing choices over which they have no voice. It is a tension already familiar in the history of European integration, and one that tends to resurface every time integration accelerates without political governance keeping pace.

As the data on the three joint debt programmes from 2020 to date – SURE for 98 billion, NGEU/RRF for about 577 billion between grants and loans, SAFE for 150 billion – document, the distribution of benefits is highly concentrated. The answer is not to give up all forms of financial coordination, but to be clear about what common debt can and cannot do in the absence of shared fiscal governance.

Moving from the financial to the operational level, the picture changes significantly.

Joint programmes: where cooperation really works

It is in concrete industrial cooperation that European integration finds a more solid basis. Here the logic is not one of financial incentive, but of operational necessity: projects arise from the need to avoid costly duplication, not from the convenience of access to common debt at favourable rates.

More than seventy projects are active today throughEDA and PESCO. The military mobility programme aims to make it possible to move troops and vehicles quickly across the continent, overcoming bureaucratic obstacles that today slow down any intervention. TWISTER works on missile defence against space and ballistic threats. Cyber Rapid Response Teams build European response teams to cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. On the sea, the European Patrol Corvette sees Italy, France, Spain and Greece jointly developing a new class of naval units, while FREMM frigates and LSS logistic support ships, operated through OCCAR, are already a productive reality. In the missile field, the Meteor, developed by a consortium of six European nations, is the gold standard of long-range air-to-air missiles. HYDEF and HYDIS are working in parallel on a European hypersonic interceptor as a direct response to the Russian and Chinese missile threat.

On the industrial side, the novelty of recent years is the appearance of permanent joint ventures: KNDS, between Krauss-Maffei Wegmann and Nexter, develops the main vehicle for the future European MGCS tank; Naviris, between Fincantieri and Naval Group, builds frigates and support ships. And, increasingly, Ukrainian industry is being integrated into this ecosystem. Rheinmetall Ukrainian Defence Industry produces APC Fuchs and armoured vehicles locally; several agreements cover drones and ammunition, in a logic that brings together support for the war effort and the construction of integrated production chains with the European industrial base.

But not all instruments work ‘by necessity’. Some only work if supported by a consistent political will over time.
If industrial cooperation holds because it responds to operational constraints, there is another area where Europe already has the right instrument, but whose effectiveness depends entirely on how, and how much, the Member States decide to use it.

Sanctions: the right instrument, the missing political credibility

Sanctions against Russia are the right instrument. This is not an ideological position, but the conclusion that emerges from the data. The price cap has eroded Russian profits from oil exports, with Russian Brent significantly down on the market. Sanctions on the shadow fleet have reduced export volumes from some Russian ports by up to 80%. The Russian market has become marginal for European exports and the continent’s economies have shown they can do without it.

The 19th package, adopted on 23 October 2025, further strengthened this system: a total ban on the import of Russian LNG will come into force on 1 January 2027; the price cap, set at USD 47 per barrel by the 18th sanctions package, was later upgraded to USD 44.10 in January 2026; and 557 ships of the shadow fleet were blacklisted.

The problem is not the instrument, but the political credibility with which it is applied: sanctions only work if the countries adopting them actually enforce them, even when it costs money. And on this front the picture is less reassuring. Italian exports to Kyrgyzstan (Robin Brooks’ analysis) have exploded from almost zero to over $35 million per month: a country with no tradition of importing European industrial products suddenly becomes a major trade hub. The mechanism is obvious, and it is not an isolated case. As long as controls on circumvention through third countries remain on paper, each sanctions package is partially emptied from within.

Added to this is an external variable that Europe does not control. The war in Iran, now in its eighth week, with more than eighty energy plants damaged in the Middle East and described by the IEA as the worst global supply disruption in history, has put pressure back on the price of crude oil, keeping it artificially high for weeks. When Tehran temporarily reopened the Strait of Hormuz, the price of Brent crude fell by 9% in a single session. The price cap stops biting when the Russian barrel can still be sold below the threshold without being sanctioned. But there is a second, less visible factor that further expands this window: on 17 April 2026, the Trump administration renewed for one month the sanction waiver that allows third countries to buy Russian oil loaded on ships during the transition period, replacing an earlier waiver that expired on 11 April.

The instrument was created as a response to pressure from Asian countries affected by the Iran war-related energy shock and, according to Reuters, was requested by US partners on the sidelines of the G20, World Bank, and IMF meetings in Washington. The combined result is that the price cap, already weakened by circumvention through the shadow fleet, is further drained from the outside whenever the energy crisis makes it politically expedient to look the other way. Not because the instrument is wrong, but because its effectiveness depends on conditions that can change in a matter of weeks.

In this context, the idea of going back to buying Russian gas, which periodically resurfaces in some European political circles as a pragmatic solution, is simply out of touch with reality and highly damaging. Not only because of the strategic implications of directly financing Moscow’s war effort, but because it would mean dismantling in a few months the energy diversification that Europe has been building at great cost since 2022. The credibility of a sanctions policy is not rebuilt after abandoning it for expediency.

And it is precisely credibility that is the thread that binds all the cracks in this construction site.

Credibility as a necessary condition

The thread linking all critical issues is always the same: the gap between economic integration and political integration. Common debt without common taxation structurally rewards free riding. Sanctions produce real results but are eroded from within when immediate economic interests prevail over long-term coherence. Joint industrial programmes, which are the most solid part of the architecture, risk remaining exceptions in a system that otherwise continues to buy on a national basis.

There is no European strategic autonomy without fiscal rigour, and there is no European fiscal rigour without common taxation. There is no effective pressure on Russia without the political will to maintain it even when prices rise and someone proposes shortcuts. There is no integrated European defence industry without national governments stopping buying according to their own internal consensus logic.

The building site is open. The foundations are there. But some of the cracks that can already be seen today will not be closed with another European regulation. They require political choices that the public debate, especially in Italy, is not yet willing to make.