This is the fourth article in a series where I examine the structural conditions that would need to change for Europe to function as a genuinely independent strategic actor.
With the previous article I established that the design of decision-making structures consistently promotes solutions the available independent analysis does not support, because those structures are not designed to include the people holding the knowledge we cannot afford to miss before commitments are made.
In this article I examine what that design failure has accumulated in the domain where the consequences are most direct. The dependency in defense matters was the emergent output of decisions that made sense within the system producing them, politically coherent, socially expected, and economically convenient.
What the recent geopolitical events have done is remove the remaining political space for treating the accumulated result as a future problem. The questions that were once manageable to defer are now immediate, namely, where European defense actually stands, what it would need to deter or survive a high-intensity conventional conflict, and how the distance between those two points could be closed within a timeframe that the geopolitical situation has made finite.
The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and with it the military threat that had justified large standing armies, conscription systems, deep ammunition stockpiles, and the institutional infrastructure for mass mobilization ceased to exist in the form that had produced them. From the perspective of the early 1990s, this was the dissolution of the entire strategic context within which European defense had been organized for four decades. The Warsaw Pact had dissolved, and Russia was economically devastated, politically in flux, and in the dominant Western analytical framework of the time, genuinely expected to continue liberalizing.
The Partnership for Peace program launched in 1994 was designed to bring Russia into cooperative security arrangements, and eventually at least accept a stable European security architecture. Within that environment, the scenario that has since materialized, a Russia that reversed its political trajectory, rebuilt its military capacity, and adopted an explicitly expansionist doctrine over three decades, eventually invading neighboring countries and threatening NATO's eastern flank, was not a scenario that Western strategic planning assigned any meaningful probability to. It simply did not exist as a serious planning input, because the chain of developments required to produce it across 30 years was so remote from anything the available evidence suggested was likely that modeling it would have looked indistinguishable from modeling fantasy.
This matters because the decisions that shaped European defense posture were made in that decade by governments responding to the emotional and political environment the end of the Cold War had produced, a sense of relief, optimism, and a broadly shared sense that a chapter had closed.
European citizens had spent decades under the shadow of a war that did not come, and when the threat that had made that war conceivable dissolved, they concluded, on the basis of everything available to them, that the institutions designed for it could be scaled back. Conscription was largely abolished because the people subject to it felt, viscerally, that the military scenario it had prepared them for was over, the economies around them wanted their labor, and their governments wanted their approval. The military burden that had constrained lives for decades suddenly had no visible justification, and the social and political environment made maintaining it feel not just unnecessary but out of place.
Governments that reduced defense budgets, restructured for smaller professional forces, and redirected resources toward social investment were responding to the electoral, social, economic, and institutional pressures that all pointed in the same direction. That is what democratic governments do. Holding those decisions up as failures requires assuming that decision-makers should have acted against the emotional current of their societies, sustained costly institutional readiness across six or more electoral cycles, and maintained preparation for a catastrophic scenario whose probability was low enough that it fell entirely outside the planning horizons that any serious institution actually uses.
Scenario planning at any institutional level derives its operational confidence from concrete anchors, including known investment cycles, committed infrastructure, established actors with legible trajectories. Within those anchors, an 8-10 year horizon carries genuine traction. Beyond it, uncertainty compounds faster than the anchors can contain it. Longer-horizon governmental and strategic planning can extend that window, but only where a persistent actor with knowable structural characteristics provides the equivalent grounding.
The Soviet collapse removed precisely that anchor, and what replaced it was not a legible long-term adversary but an uncertain transitional state whose trajectory carried too many unresolved variables to support confident scenario modeling. In that specific condition, a scenario requiring 30 years of compounding political reversals in a state that had just ceased to exist in its prior form was not one any planning process was structurally equipped to hold open. What the subsequent decades would gradually restore, as Russia's trajectory reestablished itself as legible, is a different question, and a different kind of failure.
The deterrence-through-presence framework under American leadership within NATO's structures that emerged from this environment reflected the strategic assumptions the period made feel self-evident, and was genuinely the most coherent available strategic response to a security environment in which the probability of large-scale conventional war in Europe had fallen close to zero. Nothing in the political or emotional environment of the 1990s made it feel otherwise.
The forces European nation states maintained in that period were neither capable of deterrence nor were they reliably capable of much else independently. What kept them operational in the missions the period produced, the Balkans, Afghanistan, the Sahel, was not their own capability but the American command infrastructure underneath everything. That includes the intelligence, logistics, airlift, and the strategic enablers that European forces could not provide themselves.
Strip out that contribution and most of those missions would not have been executable at the scale they were. What European defense actually was in that period was a coalition contribution, small enough and professional enough to participate meaningfully in American-led operations. That is a substantially more limited claim than adequacy, and it matters for understanding what the current situation actually requires, because it means European defense reconstruction is not a matter of restoring something that once worked. Much of what the situation would now require was decommissioned in the post-Cold War era and gradually dismantled as part of ongoing optimization efforts.
What happened to European defense after 1991 follows a logic that any system exhibits when the external condition justifying its existence disappears. The apparatus had been built around a specific and present threat, and when that threat dissolved, so did the functional justification for every component of it. While military institutions across Europe searched for a new purpose to organize around, governments scaled back funding, personnel, industrial capacity, and readiness steadily and continuously. By the time the threat that had originally justified the apparatus re-emerged in recognizable form, the apparatus itself had already been largely dismantled.
One may ask what happens when actors in a system behave "rationally" within their own perceived context? Citizens preferred civilian employment to conscription, economies absorbed the released labor, governments aligned with popular sentiment, defense planners optimized within the resulting resource constraints operating inside an institutional logic that had already reorganized itself around a new set of assumptions. That led to a system that, as a whole, accumulated a condition that none of those actors individually chose and that none of them would have endorsed if the full 30-year trajectory had been visible at the outset.
The vulnerability was the emergent output of a large number of individually sensible decisions building in the same direction over three decades, in a domain where the scenario that would eventually make those accumulated costs consequential was not expected to arrive within any timeframe that planning processes are designed to address.
The energy dependency on Russian gas followed the same structure, individually rational decisions, a coherent strategic framework in Wandel durch Handel, legitimate economic logic, and an accumulated vulnerability that became legible all at once when the environment changed. The defense situation follows the same structure operating over a longer horizon and across more actors, which is why the accumulated costs are larger, the reconstruction timelines are longer, and the gap between where European defense currently stands and what the situation now requires is harder to close quickly than any of the policy responses currently underway are willing to state plainly.
The failure described here is not one uniform thing. For the decision-makers of the early 1990s, the scenario that has since materialized had genuine claim to being structurally unforeseeable, as it required a chain of compounding reversals across 30 years that fell entirely outside any operational planning horizon, in a period when the actor-persistence anchor that makes longer-horizon planning viable had dissolved entirely.
That the scenario eventually produced warning signals long before it fully materialized, and that those signals were available and largely unacted upon, does not make the original decisions indefensible. It does mean the later phase represents a different kind of failure, one where the knowledge existed, some actors held it, and the decision-making structures did not route it to where it could affect outcomes. The Munich speech of 2007 had made Russia's revised strategic intentions legible to anyone prepared to read them as doctrine rather than rhetoric, and the 2008 invasion of Georgia confirmed that those intentions carried a willingness to act on them militarily. That second failure is the one most directly addressed by changes to how European strategic decision-making is structured.
The absence of a policy response to the 2008 Georgia war across most Western European governments is not adequately explained by the same structural logic that applies to the 1990s decisions. A more precise account requires recognizing that the post-Cold War engagement framework had by that point constituted the operative strategic paradigm for seventeen years, which is long enough that the institutions and actors working within it had organized their assumptions, investment commitments, and professional identities around its continuation.
When the 2008 signal arrived, it arrived as a challenge to a paradigm still understood as successful, and the response that challenge produced followed the pattern that inertia consistently generates in systems that have not yet recognized that the conditions justifying their current strategy have changed. As a result, the signal was absorbed into the existing framework rather than registered as a reason to question it, prior commitments were reinforced rather than reconsidered, and the confirming evidence that engagement remained viable, the Medvedev presidency, the continuation of diplomatic channels, the economic logic of energy interdependence, was weighted against it.
The differential response of Baltic and Eastern European governments is not an anomaly in this account but a confirmation of the same mechanism operating from a different starting position. Those governments had never internalized the engagement paradigm that Western Europe was defending, carried institutional memory that made Russian expansionary behavior a baseline expectation rather than a paradigm-threatening signal, and consequently had no prior framework to work through before the 2008 event could register as what it was.
The question of why the decision-making structures failed to route available signals to where they could affect outcomes after 2008 is therefore only partially answered by reference to institutional structure. It is equally answered by reference to the cognitive and psychological state of the actors within those structures, and the degree to which the forces I outlined in OCS #2: Paradigm Shifts — How the Game Is Advancing explain why even legible signals, arriving before the actors holding them have reached acceptance of what those signals require, do not translate into the behavioral change the situation demands.
What February 2022 obliterated were the assumptions on which three decades of decisions had depended, and it did so in a way that removed the remaining political space for treating the accumulated costs as a future problem.
The next two articles will examine what high-intensity conventional warfare actually consumes, and what the geography of the eastern flank requires from forces that were designed by individuals for a war that those individuals assumed would not come.