OPINION
The blindfold: Europe trading cars for weapons
Editorial by N3R1-70
For decades, the car industry was a pillar of the continent's economy: millions of jobs, know-how built up over generations, a symbol of the Old Continent's manufacturing capacity itself. Today that pillar is buckling. And the wreckage is not an accident along the way, but the result of political mistakes, strategic short-sightedness, and a chronic inability to read one's own times.
A crisis foretold, and badly handled
The shift to electric vehicles was necessary. But it was imposed on unrealistic deadlines, without the European industrial supply chain — batteries, raw materials, charging infrastructure — being remotely ready. On the same transition, the Chinese had invested years ahead of time, with consistent state backing. Europe chased an ideology without building the material conditions to achieve it.
The slow decision-making of our democracies did the rest. Twenty-seven national interests to mediate. Biblical implementation timelines. Rules that change mid-course. The result is there for everyone to see: factories closing, the supply chain crumbling, hundreds of thousands of workers at risk of losing their jobs. People watched, discussed, produced papers. But nobody saw the avalanche coming. Or perhaps nobody wanted to.
From jobs crisis to the wartime shortcut
Faced with this scenario, the response taking shape in several European capitals is not an industrial strategy for recovery, but a conversion: turning car plants into weapons production sites. Europe's rearmament, fueled by the war in Ukraine, now offers a perfect cover for anyone looking for a quick fix to the jobs problem.
It is presented as a pragmatic choice: save jobs, retrain skills, give new momentum to a struggling sector. But it is a patch stitched over a much deeper wound.
The paradox: no diplomatic initiative of its own
What makes this choice even more serious is the contrast with Europe's political inaction on the diplomatic front. The European Union has mobilized huge resources to support Ukraine militarily and financially — but that is wartime support, not a European diplomatic initiative for a negotiated solution. This past year's peace-plan attempts have come almost entirely from Washington: the 28-point Witkoff-Dmitriev plan is the initiative that opened the most concrete phase of negotiations. Europe responded with its own counter-proposal — also 28 points, with substantial changes to the terms least favorable to Kyiv — but that was a reaction to the American text, not a negotiating initiative born in Brussels. On the Middle East front, the picture is no different: no European diplomatic initiative of weight comparable to the American, Egyptian, or Qatari ones. If the stated goal were truly the continent's security and stability, one would expect Europe to build its own peace initiative, not just its own arsenal. Instead: on the peace front, a marginal role or one of playing catch-up. On the arms front, an unrestrained race.
Keeping tension high, cultivating a permanent state of alarm, has a precise effect on public opinion: it makes it more pliable, more willing to accept as necessary a choice that, under normal conditions, would meet with far more resistance. Fear becomes the tool for building consent around a long-term industrial decision. It is a strategy as old as the world: manufacture the enemy to legitimize rearmament.
The wrong ally
There is a further layer to this story that needs to be brought to light: the nature of the alliance on which Europe is betting its rearmament. The United States, the continent's historic partner, is going through a phase of structural economic fragility, with public debt having reached record levels. This is not a marginal detail: a long-term security strategy is being built on the reliability of an ally whose own economic solidity is a matter of growing uncertainty.
And yet Europe keeps following it, not out of an updated calculation of strategic advantage, but out of historical habit — the inertia of an Atlantic bond built after the Second World War and never truly rethought. An ally that shares many values, but that in recent years has repeatedly shown itself moving in directions distant from, if not opposite to, the principles Europe claims to defend.
There is also an equally delicate technical issue: most of the weapons systems and security infrastructure on which Europe has built its defense depend on technologies, software, and command systems that remain under US control.
A change of administration in Washington, a shift in priorities, and the balance on which Europe has built its defense could prove extremely fragile.
And there is a demographic fact that is systematically ignored: the West, with Europe at the front, has for years registered a birth-rate decline that undermines, at the root, the sustainability of its own social and economic model. A far more decisive problem, over the coming decades, than any contingent military balance. But it is discussed in hushed tones, almost as a taboo — it's easier to deal with tanks, which at least give the illusion of doing something.
In this scenario, the prospect of closer relations with Russia, with Middle Eastern countries, and along the routes of the new Silk Road — anchored to respect for European values, not accepted uncritically — would have offered a more lasting horizon than one built on an Atlantic alliance increasingly marked by its own contradictions. It is a reflection that requires an effort of political imagination that, in Brussels, for now, no one seems willing to make.
A missed opportunity
The question Europe should be asking itself is not how to convert car factories into weapons factories, but how to stabilize its own economy, revive innovation, invest in research and training, and build structural growth that does not depend on scenarios of conflict. That would mean tackling the unresolved knots of the energy transition, supporting research into new technologies, creating the industrial conditions — not just the regulatory ones — for Europe to become competitive again. It would mean looking forward instead of backward.
Those who support wartime conversion make non-trivial arguments: deterrence is a recognized element of international relations, and the geopolitical context has pushed other countries too to strengthen their defense capabilities. But these objections do not erase the fact that Europe is handling the car crisis with the same short-sightedness that generated it: without a vision, without a project, without the courage to look beyond the immediate emergency.
Choosing the arms route to stem the jobs hemorrhage is understandable in the urgency of the short term. But it is a blindfold with respect to the future: it solves a problem today by creating a structurally more serious one tomorrow, and it diverts attention — and resources — from what would truly be needed to guarantee a stable, innovative, and prosperous Europe.
The real indictment
Europe keeps producing weapons to defend a present it failed to build, while the future — made of innovation, intelligent ecological transition, diplomacy — waits in vain for someone to look up beyond its own backyard. Gripped by fear and inertia, Europe's leadership prefers to keep its eyes down and its hands busy: better a rifle than a strategy.
This, in the end, is the real indictment. Not the car crisis, not Chinese competition, not the badly managed electric transition. It is the inability to think about tomorrow because too busy surviving today. And while everyone's mouth is full of 'security' and 'deterrence,' Europe is missing the chance to build something that lasts: a solid economy, a cohesive society, a future written with research and knowledge, not with steel.