As trust in the US falters, Europe reopens the debate on a common army

The idea of a European army has been floating around the EU for years — decades — without ever taking shape. But as the United States pulls away from Europe under President Donald Trump, despite the danger posed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the dynamics are shifting. The Greenland crisis has created an unusual consensus among European partners on the urgency of strengthening defensive autonomy, a situation that is reviving calls for a European military force outside the NATO framework. Doubts, however, remain.

Trump’s annexationist ambitions for the Arctic island were a turning point. This past January, at the height of the crisis, the European commissioner for defense, Andrius Kubilius, revived the idea of a “European military force” of 100,000 soldiers, capable of replacing the current U.S. presence on European soil.

Without openly advocating for a common army — many agree that what matters is not the name but having a more or less robust European defensive contingent — the president of the European Council, António Costa, also recently warned of the need for more integrated forces: “We don’t need 27 large armies; we need 27 Member States contributing to a common European defense,” he argued.

But in yet another sign of how divisive the issue remains, the European Commission itself played down Kubilius’s proposal. According to EU sources, a European army is not on the Commission’s agenda. The EU high representative for foreign policy, Kaja Kallas, even rejected the idea: “Every European country has an army, and 23 countries’ armies are also part of NATO’s structure, so I can’t imagine that countries will create a separate European army,” she said, shortly after NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte warned against it would create “a lot of duplication.”

On the eve of a meeting of defense ministers on Wednesday in Brussels — held behind closed doors to discuss the “2026 security and defense outlook,” where the idea could resurface — the Commission insisted on reducing it to a mere “academic debate.” Yet the fact that the idea is circulating, and could also reappear at Thursday’s NATO meeting, was evident on Tuesday, when it resurfaced — with arguments for and against — during a debate with Kubilius on strengthening European defense at the European Parliament’s plenary session in Strasbourg.

The idea of a “European army” is still very vague because it is a “politically difficult” issue in a Union where defense remains a national competence that few seem willing to delegate, notes Simon Van Hoeymissen, a researcher at Belgium’s Royal Higher Institute for Defence. “Europeans have shown interest in transferring some defense‑related competences to the Commission — in areas such as industrial efficiency, economies of scale, or military mobility — but they resist the idea of allowing it to set military requirements,” he explained by email.

Even so, Domènec Ruiz Devesa — senior researcher at CIDOB (the Barcelona Centre for International Affairs) and president of the Union of European Federalists — believes things are shifting: “Consensus is moving toward playing a European card for our own defense. Within that, there are debates within debates, and the European army is one of those debates within the debate. But the general direction is that Europe needs to have its own mechanism, so that we are not dependent on the Americans,” said the former Socialist MEP, who has long advocated for stronger European defense.

The idea of a joint military force dates back to the early days of the European project. In 1952, the creation of the European Defence Community (EDC) was agreed upon, but it never came into being because France refused to ratify it. Since then, the possibility of creating some kind of European force has resurfaced repeatedly — initially for international missions, as envisioned after the 1998 Franco‑British St.‑Malo declaration, which also ultimately led nowhere. Two decades later, French President Emmanuel Macron revived the idea of a European army, with the backing of then‑German chancellor Angela Merkel. “We should work on a vision to create a real European army one day,” she also said in Strasbourg.

The closest thing the Union currently has to its own military force is the EU Rapid Deployment Capacity (EU RDC), a contingent created when Spain’s Josep Borrell was the EU’s foreign policy chief. It allows for the deployment — outside EU territory — of up to 5,000 personnel for stabilization missions, humanitarian assistance, or conflict prevention, although it requires unanimous approval from all 27 Member States. It is not, as Borrell stressed, a “European army.”

Despite the reservations, the idea of some form of joint force continues to surface in an increasingly pessimistic climate. The latest Eurobarometer confirms that Europeans are highly concerned about security and that a majority want the EU to help ensure their safety.

Spain, in the words of Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares, advocates for Europe to move from “strategic autonomy” to “strategic sovereignty.” This implies not only boosting the single market, but also “ensuring that deterrence” is in the EU’s “own hands” and “moving towards a European army.”

According to the Spanish government, the model is the “coalition of volunteers” created to send troops and provide security guarantees to Ukraine once a peace agreement is reached. “If we are willing to support Ukraine’s defense, how could we not be willing to guarantee our own?” diplomatic sources stress. This formula would also make it possible to bypass the veto of certain EU partners reluctant to take this step, such as Hungary, and to form a core group of countries ready to move further and faster — much like what happened with the euro.

The goal is not to create an army in the strict sense, but to pool national capabilities, using the EU’s Rapid Deployment Capacity as a foundation but, unlike that mechanism, with the political will to actually use it. In a recent talk at the New Economy Forum in Brussels, the leader of the European People’s Party (EPP), Germany’s Manfred Weber, also said that this future European force in Ukraine could be the “starting point” for a “European army.”

Although a classic federal corps is not “realistic,” Poland’s foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski, also considers the creation of a “European legion — a brigade‑sized unit that citizens of Member States, and even of candidate countries, could join” to be feasible, and one that would be financed through the EU budget, he said in Brussels.

Kallas described the idea of any kind of autonomous European force as “extremely dangerous” because, she argued, “if you have the European army and then you have the NATO army, then the ball just falls between the chairs.”

But for Latvian MEP Martins Stakis, former deputy defense minister of his country and coordinator for the Greens in the European Parliament’s Defense and Security Committee, it is not necessarily a matter of choosing between EU defense and NATO.

“European strategic autonomy means having credible backup plans if relations with the U.S. continue to deteriorate,” he explained in a video conference with journalists. “We can have our Plan A, which is to work closely with our allies [within NATO] as we have done for the last 70 years, but we also need a Plan B and even a Plan C,” he warned.

A year ago, Max Bergmann, director of Europe, Asia, and Eurasia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, called for the idea to be reconsidered. “For the long term, Europe should get serious about building a common European force that can fight and act as one to defend Europe, that can replace the United States,” he wrote.

“Europe needs to fundamentally change its approach to fighting,” said Stakis.

According to Ruiz Devesa, “only the most naive can continue to think that Trump can be trusted to defend Europe.”

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