Speaking notes by Commissioner Kubilius: "On “Europeanization” Of European Conventional Defence: The Case For A European Security Council"

Speaking notes by Commissioner Kubilius: "On “Europeanization” Of European Conventional Defence..."

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... HomePress corner Speaking notes by Commissioner Kubilius: "On “Europeanization” Of European Conventional Defence..."

Available languages: English Speech Mar 2, 2026 Brussels 38 min read

Speaking notes by Commissioner Kubilius: "On “Europeanization” Of European Conventional Defence: The Case For A European Security Council"

"Check against delivery"

Published as a separate text on 28 January 2026 on https://andriuskubilius.lt/en/on-europeanization-of-european-conventional-defence/

Used as speaking notes on various occasions in discussions and other events in January-March 2026 in Brussels, Munich, Ljubljana, Madrid, Kyiv

On “Europeanization” Of European Conventional Defence: The Case For A European Security Council

We are witnessing global geopolitical changes on an unprecedented scale. On the one hand: Russian aggression in Ukraine and the possibility of a Russian attack on EU or NATO member states during the next 2 to 3 years, predicted by intelligence services of EU countries. On the other hand: the understandable demand by the US for burden sharing in Europe and the possibility of their presence diminished to a supplementary role in the case of need (including nuclear umbrella), and shifting their conventional resources from Europe to the Indo Pacific or Western Hemisphere, as is very clearly stated in the new National Defence Strategy.

“This is Europe's independence moment,” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen told the European Parliament in her recent statement. I cannot agree more! This is Europe's independence in defence moment!

Similarly, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently warned that the “times of “Pax Americana” are over”. He summarized the European defence agenda in four guiding points: “support for Ukraine for as long as it needs it; cohesion within the European Union; the preservation of the NATO alliance for as long as possible; and finally, massive investment in our own defence capabilities.”

President Macron in his recent powerful speech on defence spoke about a “Europe of defence” and stressed: “To remain free, one must be feared, and to be feared, one must be powerful. To be powerful in this brutal world, we must act faster and stronger.”

Independence and power of European defence have become a clear strategic priority for the European Union.

NATO and the transatlantic partnership will certainly remain the cornerstone of Europe's security architecture, but at the same time Europe needs to be prepared to take on more and more responsibility for defence of the continent on its own shoulders. This is also a very clear message of the US National Defence Strategy: “As U.S. forces focus on Homeland defense and the Indo-Pacific, our allies and partners elsewhere will take primary responsibility for their own defense with critical but more limited support from American forces.”

Independence for Europe means responsibility and readiness.

Both European and American experts have recently published important analytical commentaries and papers on the future of European independence in defence, such as the European Policy Centre's Roadmap to a European Way of War and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS): “How Europe can defend itself with less America”.

CSIS warn us that the “United States would run out of essential munitions—particularly long-range missiles—within a few days of entering a conflict with China over Taiwan. This would severely limit Washington's ability to supply Europe with certain critical munitions in the short-to-medium term.”

This is an additional reason why we need to urgently build our own defence capabilities: we cannot live with empty hopes that Americans will always be able to provide us with what is needed for our defence.

A historical tectonic shift is starting to happen: Europeans are on their way to independence. At least, they are starting to understand that this is unavoidable.

But the road to defence independence is not an easy one. Europeans have repeatedly discussed this over the last decades.

Already in 2017, then Commission President Jean Claude Juncker stated: “The protection of Europe can no longer be outsourced.” In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron, while commemorating the centenary of end of the First World War, declared that “Russia had shown it could be a threat and Europe had to be able to defend itself better alone." One week later, German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned the European Parliament: “The times when we could fully rely on others have ended. This means nothing other than that, if we Europeans want to survive as a community, we must make a greater effort to take our destiny into our own hands”.

But until now these statements have not had real world consequences.

We need to answer the simple, but most important question: why not? And what do we need to do differently in order to overcome this impasse?

One of the possible answers to the question “why not?” has been proposed by Max Bergman, director of the Europe, Russia, and Eurasia Program at CSIS. He argues that until now the United States have resisted European initiatives to strengthen their own defence capabilities: “After all, the biggest opponent of an integrated European defense, of the European Union doing anything on defense, or of NATO creating a European pillar was the United States. This leaves Europe in the lurch.”

But now positions change as we see fundamental global and geopolitical changes taking place. As German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently put it: “We can no longer rely on the US to defend us, on China to supply us with raw materials, or on Russia to eventually return to the path of peace. /…/ The world is changing, and Europe must respond.”

That is a clear conclusion about our times: they demand from us to think, to speak, and act differently, than we did before.

We cannot predict the strategies of our transatlantic partners. We can hope that for some time they will continue their engagement with the security of Europe, but it would be tragic mistake on our side to again postpone important decisions about ourselves for another ten years. Especially if we take into account media reports, that “the United States wants Europe to take over the majority of NATO's conventional defense capabilities, from intelligence to missiles, by 2027.”

For the time being, both internally and externally we are in a whirlpool of different emotions, ideas and pragmatic considerations.

On the one hand, the new USA National Security Strategy shows that the US administration is concerned about the European Union becoming stronger and more united, on the other hand, the Washington D.C. based think tank CSIS, advises us the opposite: “Europeans must transform their defence efforts with an eye toward the task of fighting as Europe.” That means, fighting not as a collection of 27 “bonsai armies” (as former EU High Representative Josep Borrell called national EU armies back in 2022) but as one single entity.

And in addition, there is Ukraine, where the future of the whole of Europe is going to be decided.

And there is also Russia, which in 2025 spent 7.2% of its GDP for military needs, which in PPP terms amounts to 85% of defence spending of the entire European Union: 514 billion USD (Russia) versus 614 billion USD (EU).

Something big and sometimes difficult to grasp is happening or is going to happen with defence on the European continent. That is why there is a clear need for big answers.

In 2025, the European Commission presented the ReArmEU programme, with new financial resources and a new defence industrial policy. As Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stated in the European Parliament, more was done during this one year on the EU level on defence than it was possible to do in the whole last decade.

Those are big enough decisions.

But are they big enough?

Will we really be ready for 2030? What about 2027?

Is it enough for our defence readiness if EU Member States simply spend more on defence?

Is it enough for us just to increase the defence capabilities of 27 European armies (in some cases “bonsai armies”) to face a single Russian battle tested army, when Russia is spending for military needs almost the same amount as all 27 EU Member States are spending together?

These questions are worth discussing, because simply increasing investment into defence does not solve all the most important issues related to our defence readiness.

As Max Bergman critically points out in his remarks: “…the focus of European discussions is almost entirely on funding, not the tremendous structural problem of Europe's fractured defense landscape made up of 25 or more bespoke militaries. To put it bluntly, these militaries are not designed to defend Europe. It is good that Europe is thinking big when it comes to funding, but they also need to think big when it comes to reform and integrating Europe's forces.”

The same point is made by Christian Mölling and Torben Schütz:

“Thus far, some European leaders seem to have persuaded themselves that managing US withdrawal is a mix of money and material: Europe simply has to buy what it would otherwise lose. /…/ Before buying kit, however, Europe must replace something harder to substitute: US political and military leadership. The US has been the centre of gravity due to its military and economic power, enabling NATO collective strategy and military operations. Without the ability and authority to lead, more weapons would be useless: who decides what to buy, based on which defence plans, and who authorises the use of weapons?”

Such critical remarks by experts remind us we should not become complacent by increased defence spending and production.

It reminds us that our defence readiness is based on three key pillars. If any of these three pillars fail, our entire defence readiness fails. And the development of each pillar raises its own questions:

a) the pillar of material defence readiness: how do we build our defence capabilities: production, procurement, finances, etc?

b) the pillar of institutional defence readiness: how do we organise defence on the European continent, especially when the Americans are going to diminish their presence; how are we going to build a “European Pillar of NATO”; how are we preparing ourselves “to fight as Europe”?

c) the pillar of political defence readiness: how do we mobilise the political will to deter, defend, if need be, to fight? How do we defend the “hearts and minds” of our people against Russian hybrid attempts to undermine the political will of our societies to defend ourselves?

Until now we have concentrated our efforts only on the first pillar, on “material defence readiness”. We have achieved a lot, but even developing our material defence readiness has limits, which we can only surmount if we overcome deep-seated challenges, related with our institutional defence readiness.

After assessing that Europeans spent 3.1 trillion euros on defence in the last ten years with unimpressive outcomes, the famous British economist and historian Adam Tooze angrily comments: “To justify the increase, you have to believe that new money will transform Europe's moribund and demoralised relics of 20th-century militarism into 21st-century fighting forces. You have to believe that a quantitative surge in spending will somehow bring about a qualitative improvement.”

Qualitative improvement will come only if our institutional defence readiness is essentially transformed and unified at the EU level.

To see why, let's ask ourselves an out of the box question, which is easy to answer: would the United States be militarily stronger, if they had 50 armies on the states' level, 50 sovereign state level defence policies and 50 defence budgets?

If we understand that unity is stronger than fragmentation, than what are we waiting for?

Especially when European citizens are dramatically shifting in their opinion to demand more European unity in defence and more European defence.

Our citizens have a very clear understanding what they want for their defence: a recent publication in “Politico” and an opinion poll survey quoted in the article, show that in Spain, Belgium and Germany around 70% of citizens prefer defence of their country by a European Army instead of a national army (10%) or NATO (12%).

Why we are not asking ourselves the “historical” question: if in 1954 the ratification had not failed of the Treaty establishing a European Defence Community with a single European Army, proposed by Pleven, Adenauer, Schuman, Monnet, would we now be stronger in our European defence or not?

If our answer to this question is “yes”, are we going to correct the mistakes of the past?

And when, if not now?

If defence policies in Europe stay fragmented, our defence industries in Europe will remain fragmented, and will become even more fragmented with larger national defence spending.

If we continue with the same institutional defence policy arrangements we have today, we will also have the same duplications, fragmentations, lack of standardization and lack of harmonization.

And it is obvious even bigger institutional issues need addressing when considering the question “how can Europe defend itself with less America?”.

Not only which European country will send its general to become a new SACEUR, but what the back-bone military force on the European continent will look like, if the Americans would significantly diminish the number of their troops in Europe: will it be a rapidly growing German military army, or a loose association of 27 national “bonsai armies” of Member States, or maybe a pan-European military force, established in complementary to national military forces?

Or maybe there is a possibility, as Denys Shmyhal, Prime Minister of Ukraine at that time, proposed almost a year ago: following a peace in Ukraine to transform at least part of Ukraine's 800,000 battle tested military force into the backbone of a European new defence architecture, of a new European army?

Those are the questions, which we shall need to answer in the nearest future.

The question is: how and where to find those answers