Tag: NATO
-
Between the Berlaymont and the Glass Palace: The Relative Roles of the EU and NATO in European Defence
Europe’s defence landscape is complex, and the relationship between the European Union and NATO is a prime example. Though only five kilometres apart in Brussels, the EU and NATO often appear worlds apart in practice. This new HCSS report by Davis Ellison and Daniel Fiott offers a clear-eyed assessment of this relationship and a roadmap for improvement. …
-
Europe’s Rearmament Dilemmas
Europe has entered a profound rearmament cycle driven by Russia’s war on Ukraine, sharpening US strategic conditionality, and intensifying global geopolitical rivalry. After decades of underinvestment, European states are attempting to rebuild depleted stockpiles, scale up industrial production, and reconcile defense investments with fiscal, political, and technological constraints. The European…
-
Assessing Europe’s Resilience and Preparedness in an Era of Strategic Risks
Europe’s security environment is increasingly shaped by “whole-of-society” shocks in which military threats intersect with climatic, economic and technological disruptions. This new reality demands that preparedness and resilience be treated as mutually reinforcing strategic imperatives for both the EU and NATO. Yet Europe’s baseline levels of resilience remain highly uneven.…
-
Beyond the Summit: Navigating the Future of NATO and European Defence
The Hague NATO Summit on 25 June 2025 will possibly go down in history as the moment when Europeans were put on serious notice by the United States that Washington was no longer going to subsidise European security. As a long-standing objective of the Trump administration, European allies were cajoled…
-
Ties That Truly Bind? The Potential for Defence Industrial Cooperation between South Korea, NATO and the European Union
Europe and South Korea are increasingly aligned in their pursuit of stronger defence industrial resilience amid intensifying geopolitical competition and technological disruption. Both actors recognise that defence production is now as much about economic sovereignty and technological leadership as it is about security. Europe and South Korea stand to benefit…
-
Counting on the Cloud? NATO, Digital Modernisation and Cloud Computing
NATO is enhancing its defence and deterrence in the face of grave geopolitical risks. While the major focus in 2025 is on ramping up the manufacturing of ammunition, missiles, tanks, armoured vehicles and more, there is a risk that the digital elements of the Alliance’s security and defence are marginalised…
-
Hanging Together or Hanging Separately? Europe and the Indo-Pacific in United States-China Rivalry
The United States appears to be consistent on the idea that “great power” or “strategic” competition and, more specifically, “competition with China” stands out as its overriding national security priority. Insofar as Trump administration’s strategic approach towards Ukraine and Europe appears to be significantly informed by China and Indo Pacific-related…
-
Primed for Deterrence? NATO and the Indo-Pacific in the Age of Great Power Competition
As the United States prioritises deterrence of China in the Indo-Pacific, the question of how Europeans can take primary responsibility for conventional defence in Europe will take centre stage at NATO’s upcoming 76th Summit in The Hague. Against this backdrop, the future of the Alliance’s own Indo-Pacific agenda hinges on…
-
Keep it Moving: From Mobility to Logistics in European Defence
The European Union (EU) has been developing military mobility, but so far with mixed results. It is time to rethink these efforts by investing more generally in military logistics. With the forthcoming “Niinistö Report” and defence White Paper, there is an opportunity to develop the EU’s defence preparedness and make…
-
NATO Summit in Washington: Critical Infrastructure Protection
Instituto da Defesa Nacional Portugal The recent NATO summit, held in Washington from 9 to 11 July, marked the 75th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, in the same city where, in 1949, twelve countries, including Portugal, signed this treaty to ensure their collective defence. The meeting brought together…
-
Order, Counter-Order, Disorder? Regional and Global Security Orders in the Shadow of Sino-American Competition
As part of an international security seminar organised by the US Military Academy, West Point, in February 2023, a collection of essays have been produced based on the panel sessions. I was extremely pleased to contribute three essays to the collection along with my great American colleagues. The three papers…
-
The Turning Tide? A European Agenda for the Washington Summit
War has raged in Ukraine for close to two years now, and Russia’s illegal war continues to pose a strategic dilemma for NATO and the European Union. Although allies are producing more ammunition and equipment, there is a risk that Europeans do too little, too late. There may only be…
-
Europe’s Geopolitical Coming of Age Requires Greater Defense Efforts
Having already experienced what life is like under a Donald Trump US presidency, the Europeans presently seem rather blasé about what a potential second Trump administration could entail for the European Union and NATO. For all his (very real) sins, Trump gave voice to the long-standing tensions at the heart…
-
Deterrence and Economic Security: A Dialogue in Japan
I spent the best part of a week in Japan as part of a NATO Science for Peace and Security (SPS) project we are running on future trends in the Indo-Pacific. It was an intensive week of events and meetings and I was privileged to exchange views with government(al) representatives…
-
NATO and the Current Security Context
In many respects, the NATO Vilnius Summit of 11-12 July 2023 revealed one of the core issues facing the alliance today: how, when and if to enlarge to include Ukraine. Enlargement has always been a sensitive and contested issue for NATO, but the prospect of taking on a country that…
-
Cooperation in an Era of Strategic Competition: EU-NATO Relations in the Context of War and Rivalry
This Policy Brief looks at the growing relations and cooperation between the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It does so in the context of a return to war in Europe and growing strategic rivalry between the United States (US) and China. Europeans have long been…
-
Disorder: the War and Russia’s Economic Statecraft
Abstract Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the West has looked to support Kyiv and impose crushing economic measures on the Russian economy. Sanctions and divestment have punctured a hole in Russia’s war fighting machine, but there are also fears that the Kremlin has been able to use…
-
Order: the Financing of Alliances and Western Power
Abstract Russia’s war on Ukraine and the rise of China are raising serious questions about order in international politics. If the West is to have a fighting chance at maintaining its military supremacy and upholding global order, it needs to answer some fundamental questions about the United States (US)-led alliance…
-
Navigating the Euro-Atlantic Defence Innovation Landscape
This report set out to analyse emerging transatlantic defence innovation systems and the extent to which EU and NATO efforts in the domain overlap, are in conflict or have potential synergies. The overarching finding is that EU and NATO systems are separate but heavily interdependent. They are separate in terms…
-
Solid Foundation, Rocky Future? Assessing Transatlantic Defence and Security Ties after NATO’s Madrid Summit
Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised serious questions about European security, but it has also led to much greater transatlantic unity. This Policy Insights paper argues that the war on Ukraine has given rise to a new consensus among large parts of NATO and the EU to reinvest in collective…
-
Agenda Exterior: OTAN y autonomía estratégica europea
La vuelta a la defensa colectiva en Europa ha provocado, como era de esperar, una revitalización de la alianza de la OTAN. No solo Finlandia y Suecia están llamando a la puerta de la OTAN, sino que la huella militar de la alianza en el este de Europa ha aumentado…
-
EU – NATO Relations: Defence Industry, Industrial Cooperation and Military Mobility
Abstract Issues pertaining to the defence industrial sector represent a perennial tension in EU- NATO relations. The tension exists both between the two organisations and the con- stituent members of each body. In short, the possibilities for and limits to EU-NATO cooperation on defence-industrial matters are conditioned by considerations of…
-
EU-NATO Cooperation: The Case of Defense R&D
The aim of this chapter is to analyze how the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) stimulate defense research and development (R&D) cooperation among their respective members. The chapter also seeks to understand how, if at all, the EU and NATO cooperate with each other as…
-
Modernising NATO’s Defence Infrastructure with EU Funds
A quietly important element of NATO’s Readiness Action Plan (RAP), agreed at the 2014 Wales Summit, is the Alliance’s need ‘to reinforce its eastern Allies through preparation of national infrastructure, such as airfields and ports’. Put simply, without the necessary infrastructure, including transportation networks and hubs, and energy supply lines,…
-
The State of Defence in Europe: State of Emergency?
When a doctor calls for a thorough examination of the state of a patient’s health, he hopes that everything will turn out to be alright, but it really means that he fears there is a serious problem. Likewise, when Herman Van Rompuy called for the European Council of which he…
-
Europe and the Rest of the World
There were a number of leitmotifs by which to identify the European Union’s activities in 2012. The first of these was the eurozone crisis. A second theme was the change (or not) of key personnel: the election of François Hollande in France, the re-election of American President Barack Obama in…
Daniel Fiott 