NATO’s European members are finally spending serious money on defence. The IISS analysis says the rise is real, rapid and historically significant: European NATO budgets are expected to climb by almost 10 percent in 2026, reaching around $639 billion. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, nominal spending has surged by more than 90 percent.

Europe is facing a new cyber threat that its rulebooks are not built to handle. The Carnegie Europe paper warns that autonomous AI agents are moving into cyberspace as tools that can scan, reason, adapt and act with far less human supervision than traditional software.

France is trying to turn its nuclear arsenal into a wider European shield. The Responsible Statecraft analysis argues that Emmanuel Macron’s new doctrine of forward deterrence may look like Europe finally taking security seriously, but could instead drag the continent into a more dangerous nuclear stand-off with Russia.

Europe has two giant institutions meant to protect it – NATO and the EU – yet the CEPA analysis argues that they still fail to work together with the urgency the threat demands. The problem is not a lack of summits, statements or polite language.

DGAP’s white paper delivers a sharp warning to Berlin: the wake-up-call phase is over. Germany is already under hybrid attack, from drones and cyber strikes to sabotage, disinformation and economic espionage.

RUSI’s paper gives the UK a hard defence-industry warning. Ministers want more weapons, more innovation and more factory capacity, but the public purse is already under strain.

War on the Rocks delivers a ruthless twist on the usual NATO panic. The problem, it argues, is not that Trump is truly abandoning Europe.