OPINION
Rearming for what. An opinion that hasn't closed yet
Editorial by N3R1-70
I started from a simple question: why is Europe rearming, if Russia in over four years of war has failed to bring Ukraine to its knees? The official explanation — long-term threat plus uncertainty over American support — only half convinced me. I followed the facts in the order they happened, rather than the order I had them in my head, and my opinion moved more than once, not always in the direction I expected.
Three episodes, one thread
Between January and July 2026 the United States forcibly captured the president of Venezuela — Operation Absolute Resolve, January 3 — bombed Iran declaring regime change as the objective, then reached a truce, then watched that truce collapse again on July 8 — nd-iran and nd-hormuz — and threatened to annex Greenland, the territory of a NATO ally, first early in the year and then again in Ankara — nd-groenlandia. Each of these stories already applies, on its own, the same Art. 2(4) of the UN Charter that this site applies to Russia. I won't repeat that work here. What I add is the question none of the three pieces asks on its own: why three times, in the same six months, against three such different subjects?
A hunch, declared as such
US public debt has passed 39 trillion dollars — over 120% of GDP as of March 2026 — with roughly 10 trillion in securities maturing in 2026 alone that need refinancing. A system that has to place that mass of debt every year needs the dollar to remain the safe haven the whole world perceives it to be. Showing force, unpredictability, the ability to strike anyone, has historically been one way of staying that haven. I haven't found a source establishing a causal link between the three episodes and the debt: it remains a coincidence between real numbers and a real behavioural pattern, not proof. I leave it open.
On the Russian threat, I remain skeptical
First I check that this doesn't contradict what this site has already written elsewhere. The manifesto on Russia never claims Moscow poses an existential danger to all of Europe: it correctly stays on the level of the established legal violation — Art. 2(4), the International Court of Justice order of 16 March 2022, International Criminal Court warrants. I go further than that, with a judgment of my own: I don't see, in the facts gathered, a project of expansion beyond the post-Soviet space. I see an actor defending, by force and illegally, a sphere of influence eroded by thirty years of NATO enlargement — a reading with a serious tradition behind it, the realist school, Mearsheimer foremost, dating to the 2008 NATO Bucharest summit. This doesn't absolve the action: it remains a violation, however understandable the motive. But if European rearmament is publicly justified by an existential threat I myself struggle to see, the question I started with remains less resolved than I thought.
A different angle from what's already written
The editorial on the blindfold denounces converting the car industry into weapons production as a patch on an employment crisis. I look at a different number: in the EU's 2025 defence budget, research and development spending — 17 billion — remains a small fraction of total investment, 130 billion, and between 2021 and 2025, 55–64% of the weapons imported by European NATO members came from the United States. Add to this an ageing continent — EU median age 44.9, Italy 49.1 — and infrastructure that isn't keeping pace: Italy's national transport fund will be worth, in real terms, 38% less in 2026 than in 2009. An old continent, with fragile infrastructure, buying the majority of its weapons from a single external supplier, isn't building autonomy: it's buying dependence at a higher price.
The underlying conviction
Weapons and sanctions don't build order: at best they buy time, at a price always paid by the weaker side. An agreement that only benefits the stronger side isn't diplomacy, it's the other side's surrender on a payment plan. The path I consider the only sensible one — for Europe, but for anyone, including whoever is currently threatening or using force — is a table where every party brings something and receives something, not one where a single party dictates terms because it has more missiles or more debt for others to buy. It's the same principle written, on paper, in the international law this site tries to apply without favouring anyone: the sovereign equality of States, not a hierarchy of who can afford to violate them. On this I don't need more facts to be convinced: it's the criterion with which I've read all the ones gathered so far.