The News
European Union leaders agreed to boost defense spending with an €800 billion ($841.2 billion) plan at an emergency summit Thursday, described as a “watershed moment” for the continent by the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Leaders from the European Union’s 27 member states and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy gathered in Brussels Thursday for an emergency defense summit meant to shore up support for Ukraine after US President Donald Trump halted military aid and intelligence sharing with Kyiv this week.
The agreed-on defense plan marks the biggest defense package in EU history.
However, despite the accord, the summit also exposed sharp divisions in the bloc: Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán refused to back a statement promising “enduring” support for Kyiv.
The ideological splits “are asking existential questions of the bloc’s unity” in the face of US President Donald Trump’s effort to sideline and fracture the continent, Politico wrote.
SIGNALS
Europe mulls its own nuclear deterrent as US retreats
Ahead of the summit, French President Emmanuel Macron on Wednesday floated the possibility of extending France’s nuclear deterrent to European allies, a suggestion that underscored “the depth of concern,” the BBC wrote. Russia’s foreign minister said the comments were a “threat”: A French-led nuclear umbrella, a nuclear defense expert wrote, would be “a sign of European political solidarity that would make Moscow’s calculations difficult.” Still, France’s arsenal — and the UK’s — are too small to entirely replace America’s extended nuclear deterrence, and neither France nor the UK has a nuclear doctrine compatible with stationing the weapons in other countries, a Europe expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued.
To boost defense, Europe must make tough choices
Europe has the “economic and technological base” to better meet the challenge of Russian aggression, but the bloc’s leaders will also need the political will to divert resources to beef up defense, two International Institute for Strategic Studies experts argued. The continent has to face the fact that social security needs to be trimmed to make way for more military spending, a Financial Times columnist argued. In the UK, the Labour government could avoid some welfare cuts by reviving a wealth tax plan instead, a Prospect Magazine columnist argued. Other belt-tightening moves, like the British prime minister’s decision to cut foreign aid, could backfire: Aid and defense are “two sides of the same coin,” a former British Army officer argued in The Guardian.