OPINION

How Europe could end up at war without choosing it

27 July 2026 — European Union / Russia / Iran

Methodological premise

This is not a news piece. It is a declared foresight exercise — what could happen, not what is happening — built on real, already-verified incidents, not pure speculation. Where forecast ends and fact begins is always explicitly flagged.

What is already happening

Between August 2024 and February 2026, per an International Institute for Strategic Studies report (July 2026), hundreds of drones flew over the airspace of a dozen NATO states plus Ireland — including bases tied to the Alliance’s nuclear deterrence, such as Ramstein in Germany. Poland invoked NATO Article 4 in September 2025 after 19 Russian drones entered its airspace. Romania suffered, in May 2026, a drone strike on a residential building in Galați, injuring two people — called by the Romanian president "the most serious security incident" since the war began. In Latvia, the defence minister and prime minister resigned in June 2026 after drones (likely Ukrainian, diverted by Russia) violated national airspace without timely public alerts. On the Iran front, during the February-April 2026 war, British bases in Bahrain, Qatar and Cyprus were directly hit by Iranian retaliation, with the RAF deployed defensively — direct European military involvement that has already happened, not a hypothesis.

Scenarios — Russia

The most likely is not a deliberate attack but the incident that spirals out of control: a drone — Russian or Ukrainian, its origin often ambiguous for days — hits a target with multiple casualties in a NATO country before warning systems work. With each subsequent incident, the threshold for a collective response (Article 5, not just Article 4) lowers through statistical accumulation, not a single political decision. Other, less likely but non-negligible scenarios: a formal judicial attribution of sabotage against undersea infrastructure (on the Nord Stream model, already covered elsewhere on this site); an air or naval engagement error between NATO and Russian fighters; a gradual escalation if European long-range weapons strike ever deeper into Russian territory, pushing Moscow to explicitly strike the supplying country’s own territory, not just Ukraine’s.

Scenarios — Iran

The precedent that has already occurred (British bases hit, RAF deployed) could repeat itself with a European power less resolute about staying "purely defensive." A disruption of merchant shipping in the Strait of Hormuz involving European vessels would turn an energy crisis into an incident requiring a direct naval response — a pattern already seen in the 1984-88 "Tanker War." More speculative, but not to be ruled out: an attack on European critical infrastructure attributed to Iranian proxies.

What diplomacy should do — the Russia/NATO front

The instrument that existed and is now missing is the Vienna Document on confidence- and security-building measures (OSCE, 1990-2011): annual military information exchanges, prior notification of exercises, mutual inspections among 57 states. Russia suspended it de facto from January 2022, formally from March 2022. This is the structural gap behind every drone incident: without prior notification or shared verification, any unidentified object remains ambiguous long enough to become dangerous. Concrete measures available: a bilateral technical deconfliction channel, separate from political channels, modelled on the 1972 US-USSR incidents-at-sea agreement or the US-Russia deconfliction line over Syria (2015-2024, which functioned even amid total political hostility); a rapid-attribution mechanism under OSCE auspices, which in 2026 has Switzerland holding the rotating chair; symmetrical pressure on Kyiv too, to limit long-range drone launches near NATO borders. None of these technical measures, however, replaces a negotiation on the underlying conflict: it reduces the frequency of incidents, not eliminates them.

What diplomacy should do — the Iran/Europe front

EMASoH (European Maritime Awareness in the Strait of Hormuz), a French-led mission launched in 2020 based in Abu Dhabi — a diplomatic track plus a military one (Operation Agenor), 9 European countries — already exists, explicitly designed for de-escalation through joint diplomatic and military presence. Recent sources (March 2026) describe it, however, as under growing pressure relative to its original mandate. Concrete measures: strengthening EMASoH’s diplomatic track, today less visible than the military one but specifically designed for regional dialogue; reinstating the E3 (France, Germany, UK) as a recognised negotiating channel on the nuclear file, not merely an observer of the US-Iran bilateral track; explicit European non-belligerence messaging, to formally distinguish the EU’s position from that of the US/Israel. Here too, the underlying limit remains the same: no European naval or diplomatic measure resolves the root cause, which is the 2018 collapse of the JCPOA.

Editorial judgment

On neither front does Europe today have the tools it had before 2022, or the ones it was conceived with in 2020. The most honest question is not "what should diplomacy do" in the abstract, but whether Europe is investing to rebuild dismantled channels or merely managing symptoms with tools undersized for the current scale of risk — the latter appears to be the reading most consistent with the facts gathered.

Fonti: IISS — drone incursions report (July 2026) · Al Jazeera — Romania drone incident (May 2026) · NATO — Article 4 statement (September 2025) · CS Monitor — Latvia government crisis (June 2026) · House of Commons Library — UK bases hit in Iran (2026) · Auswärtiges Amt / Arms Control Association — Vienna Document · European Leadership Network / GRC — EMASoH

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