Every serious account of Europe’s condition opens by calling this the gravest crisis since 1945. The claim should be abandoned. Europe survived 1956, 1968, the oil shock of 1973, the Euromissile confrontation, the Yugoslav wars, and the near-death of the euro. Several were worse on most measures.
The defensible claim is narrower and more disturbing. For the first time since 1945, the power that underwrites European security is itself a source of European risk. Every earlier crisis was survived by leaning on a guarantee that was not in question. Everything else was a difference of degree. This is a difference of kind.
That distinction is easier to see from outside Europe than within it. From Delhi, what Europe calls a polycrisis is legible as something more ordinary: it is what dependence feels like when the guarantor’s interests diverge from your own.
Most of the world has governed in that condition since decolonisation and built its statecraft around it, using non-alignment, hedging, strategic patience. Europe never had to, and its institutions were designed on the assumption that it never would. That is the novelty of 2026, and it is a problem of institutional design, not of Russian capability.
The five things going wrong are usually presented as a list. They are better read as a sequence, because the order is what makes them intractable.
It begins with withdrawal. Russia’s war is in its fifth year, with Moscow publicly refusing any settlement that freezes the current front and the September round of US-brokered talks in the Kremlin ending without a breakthrough.
Washington opened a six-month review of its European force posture in late July. Roughly 80,000 American personnel remain, against about 100,000 after the 2022 invasion, and the National Defense Strategy published in January commits Washington to support that is “critical but more limited".
NATO answered at Ankara with record spending pledges. But money is not capability, and some of the money is not new: Spain and Italy reached two per cent of GDP partly by reclassifying existing security expenditure. Europe cannot replicate American strategic lift, intelligence, air-defence suppression and extended nuclear deterrence inside a decade, whatever it spends.
Withdrawal exposed coercion. The Greenland episode is the year’s most under-analysed event. An American president declined to rule out force against the territory of a NATO member and threatened tariffs on eight European states—rising to 25 per cent—unless Denmark ceded the island.
European troops deployed to Greenland in January. Brussels debated its Anti-Coercion Instrument and a retaliatory package reported at some €90 billion, and used neither before the threat was withdrawn at Davos.
The precedent is not that Europe defended Denmark. It is that one ally can make a territorial claim on another and pay no material price.
Coercion met an economy with no reserves. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz following the war on Iran produced what the International Energy Agency called the largest supply disruption in the history of the oil market.
Crude and liquids through the strait averaged 4.9 million barrels a day in the second quarter of 2026, against 21.6 million in the final quarter of 2025; in early August, transits ran at 8-15 vessels a day against roughly 130 before the war.
Europe’s physical exposure to Gulf supply is modest; its price exposure is total, because it now bids against Asia for every flexible cargo. Having substituted Russian dependence for market dependence, Europe called it security.
The shock landed on arithmetic that does not close. Rearmament to the agreed 3.5 per cent of GDP in core military spending, with a further 1.5 per cent in related infrastructure by 2035, implies several hundred billion euros in additional annual outlay, atop debt ratios of 143.5 per cent in Greece, 138.9 in Italy and 117.6 in France—the last rising four points in a single year.
Guns, pensions, welfare, decarbonisation, and debt service cannot all be funded. Germany has been the most honest about this and has paid for the honesty: Berlin exempted defence spending above one per cent of GDP from its constitutional debt brake while leaving the brake intact elsewhere, so the offsets fell on pensions and health insurance, and the Chancellor conceded that the new pension floor will not maintain living standards.
Other capitals have not concluded that Germany chose wrongly. They have concluded that naming the loser is electorally costly, which is why most are still borrowing.
And that choice must be made by governments losing consent. On September 6, a party classified as right-wing extremist by German domestic intelligence took roughly 44 per cent in the Saxony-Anhalt state election—more than double the governing Christian Democrats—on turnout far above 2021. It leads national polling.
Across Hungary, France, Britain and Italy, the gains come less from majority conviction than from the fragmentation of everything arrayed against them. Nationalist politics advances fastest precisely where governments most need durable, expensive, multi-decade commitments.
Migration and demography belong in this story, but not on this list. Both are real and both are chronic. Including them dilutes the argument. They are the terrain on which the five crises are fought, not crises of the same order.
The three-power frame follows. Putin’s theory of victory was never conquest; it is outlasting Western coherence, which makes simultaneous negotiation and maximalism consistent rather than contradictory.
Washington is converting alliances from insurance into transactions: Greenland, the tariff asymmetry, the drawdown, and the Indo-Pacific reallocation are one policy rather than five episodes.
Beijing’s gain is passive and therefore underrated, inheriting a Europe that is poorer, more dependent on Chinese inputs for its energy transition, and newly aware that Washington coerces friends. The question is not whether Europe pivots to China but whether it can still be recruited to contain it.
The strongest objection to this account deserves stating in its own terms. American withdrawal, on that reading, is producing in three years the adjustment that forty years of burden-sharing rhetoric could not.
European defence budgets have risen faster than at any point since the Cold War, the Europeanisation of NATO is a genuine institutional shift, and a Europe compelled to become a subject rather than a theatre is precisely the outcome we claim to want.
We think this confuses the measure. Autonomy is registered in refusals, not in euros. The test is not whether Europe spends more, but whether it can act against the guarantor’s stated preference and absorb the cost.
On the one occasion this year when that was directly posed, the instrument existed, was debated, and was not used. Capability accumulated to satisfy a patron is also capability that lapses when the patron’s attention moves. Adjustment under coercion and adjustment by choice look identical on a spreadsheet and behave differently under stress.
Three propositions follow, offered because diagnosis without them is commentary.
Buy the enablers rather than replicate them. Europe should contract for a decade of guaranteed access to American lift, tanking, and intelligence at commercial rates, funded from the increment already pledged, and spend the remainder on mass and munitions. Dependence acknowledged in a contract, with terms and a termination date, is cheaper and more governable than dependence denied in doctrine. Sovereignty theatre in capabilities Europe cannot field for twenty years is the most expensive form of dependence available.
Finish the fiscal argument Germany started. Berlin named the loser and absorbed the political cost alone. A common European instrument that spreads the adjustment rather than 27 separate national reckonings, each fought at a different election is the only version of this choice that does not simply transfer power to whichever opposition is nearest.
Stop promising enlargement Europe cannot deliver. Accession requires treaty change that cannot pass. Offer Ukraine and the Western Balkans graduated membership, single market access and security guarantees without voting rights, or admit the promise is decorative. Kyiv can plan around a smaller honest offer. It cannot plan around a large false one.
We ask that these be judged by three tests, and we apply them ourselves. Does the proposal require unanimity? Does it require money no member state has committed? Does it require an electorate to accept a cost before the threat is visible?
Our first passes all three: a coalition of the willing can contract without treaty change, and it reallocates money already pledged. That is why we expect it to be the only one adopted. Our third fails the unanimity test, which is why we expect the promise of enlargement to persist and the accession not to occur. Our second fails all three, and we hold to it anyway, because the alternative is that the arithmetic is resolved by a bond auction rather than a parliament.
Two forecasts, so that this argument can be marked rather than merely agreed with. The safer: by the end of 2027 the Union will not have used the Anti-Coercion Instrument against the United States, and will have let the December 2026 steel and aluminium deadline pass without suspending its tariff concessions.
The exposed one: no European government other than Germany will name a specific domestic offset for defence, an identified tax rise or benefit reduction, presented to voters as the price of rearmament before its next national election. France and the Netherlands can falsify this, and may. If they do, the consent problem described here is smaller than we claim and the argument should be discarded rather than qualified.
For India, the implications cut close. The Hormuz shortage is physical for Delhi and largely financial for Brussels, so a settlement that satisfies Europe may not satisfy India. The immobilisation of some €210 billion in Russian sovereign assets, sustained by qualified majority rather than unanimity, obliges every non-Western reserve manager to reprice European custody a precedent India benefits from opposing, and is tempted to stay silent on.
And the trade agreement concluded in January remains unfinished: it awaits ratification, the carbon border adjustment mechanism survived Indian objection, and mobility commitments that took nearly two decades to win must now survive the politics described above.
There is a harder point underneath. India has spent 70 years arguing that dependence on a distant guarantor is a form of vulnerability and has been told this was provincialism.
Europe is discovering the same thing at far greater cost. Delhi should resist the satisfaction.
A Europe that learns to be a subject rather than a theatre is the third pole India needs; a Europe that fails is a market, a migration dispute, and a lecture on carbon. The difference will be settled within five years, and India has more standing to influence it than it currently uses.
Rajesh Mehta is an International Affairs expert working on innovation and public policy. Manu Uniyal is a media consultant and columnist writing on India-EU geopolitics and geoeconomics.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of THE WEEK.
