Europe in the Turtle Trap: Defense Spending Alone Will Not Protect Us

At next week’s summit, EU leaders are set to adopt an exemption from the bloc’s debt rules to further boost defense investment. These reforms are crucial and pressing. But the dominant focus on the military is too narrow; European governments are making massive and underreported cuts to their funding for diplomacy, security, conflict prevention and post-conflict stabilization. The timing couldn’t be worse given the Trump administration’s almost total withdrawal of support for humanitarianism and global development – the catastrophic effects of which are already being felt around the world. Broadening the debt break to include ​“external security” alongside defense spending could go a long way in ensuring that these reforms actually improve Europe’s long-term security.

European spending on defense has already grown significantly in recent years. This is perhaps unsurprising given the uptick in the incidence of conflicts and violence worldwide. At the same time, as a series of GPPi analyses show, many countries are making deep cuts to their aid and diplomacy funding. Only UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has made his government’s arms-for-aid bargain explicit, but the same pattern is emerging at the EU level, in Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK and elsewhere. Since 2023, Germany has cut its overall development spending by 24 percent and its global emergency aid by 62 percent. The numbers for other EU countries look no better. When it comes to diplomacy, budgets are less transparent; however, we do know that Germany has already made drastic cuts to funding for diplomatic and cultural affairs initiatives, and Brussels plans to dramatically downsize EU delegations. 

These cuts show that European leaders are overlooking the vital role non-military aid plays in protecting their security interests. The same is true for the European Union’s joint funds. Between the 2021 – 24 period and recently announced plans for 2025 – 27, EU assistance aimed at stability, security and peace are being cut by 60 percent on average. Cuts in funding to extremely fragile countries have been even larger, at 72 percent. The EU’s geopolitical investment initiative (“Global Gateway”) is the only area not to see huge cuts. But unfortunately, many countries key to European security interests are too politically unstable to benefit from investment through this program. Even for countries that can receive this money, like Nigeria, Global Gateway funds tend to flow to more stable areas and sectors, rather than, for example, to those engaged in fighting Boko Haram.

The consequences of these cuts are perfectly captured by former head of the UK Army, General Sir Richard Dannatt, who wrote in opposition to Starmer’s aid-for-arms announcement: ​“We are not only stealing from the world’s poorest and most vulnerable, but we are also stealing from [our] taxpayers by investing in a policy that will ultimately cost us more.” This is because, like a turtle, the EU and its member states risk building a thick shell to protect themselves from military threats while leaving their vulnerable underbellies dangerously exposed to everything that military force cannot defend them from. The non-military security efforts that could protect Europe from these dangers are also dramatically cheaper than tanks or planes.

In the eighty countries worldwide facing acute crisis and conflict, Europe relies on local governments and civil society actors to contain armed groups, terrorists, and organized crime; keep malign actors at bay; fight the drug and weapons trade; control migration; and generally insulate it from the effects of violence. Military force does not work against any of these threats, and cutting the aid that does is self-defeating, inviting new spillovers of instability into the EU and leaving regions like the Western Balkans at the mercy of Russia and China. Some of the affected countries – think Turkey, Egypt, Algeria – are major export markets for Europe. Withdrawing development funding could undermine trade relations. All fragile countries and their neighbors also carry votes in multilateral forums where Europe aims to pass resolutions that suit its interests. And yet, few seem to consider how a massive withdrawal of support from these countries would reveal the hollowness of Europe’s much-touted values of global solidarity, undermining Europe’s soft power and vindicating those who have long made accusations about the double standards implicit in Western hegemony. 

Cutting aid to pay for defense, then, makes neither political nor financial sense. If Europe keeps walking the path into its turtle shell, some of the threats it needlessly risks are obvious: even if it safeguards non-military support to Ukraine, will it squander the opportunity to ensure stability in Syria, which sits right on Europe’s doorstep? What about Gaza, once a solution for effective governance is found? More crises will surely come. Given Europe’s track record with preparedness ahead of the conflicts in Ukraine, Afghanistan and Syria, it would be dangerously naïve to believe that Europe knows what lies ahead or how that will directly impact its core interests. 

Now, EU leaders are at risk of strengthening the fiscal incentive to cut soft power tools. At last week’s summit, they agreed to ​“to substantially increase expenditure on Europe’s security and defence” by exempting defense spending from EU debt rules. Doing so will not create fiscal space for non-military security spending to be protected. Infrastructure and social needs are far closer to the hearts of voters, and economic woes have left many budgets full of holes. Since aid polls badly, national politicians face strong incentives to make cuts where voters will not mind, regardless of the strategic consequences. 

Next week’s summit is expected to finalize that decision. But EU leaders have an opportunity to reshape these bad incentives: if they took their own objective seriously as they put it last week, they could exempt not just defense, but ​“external security and defense” spending from the debt limit. That would create the necessary opportunities for national investment in proactive rather than reactive approaches to ensuring sustainable security for Europe.

This exemption should not cover all aid: it should be focused on core security spending, from diplomacy to defense, including non-military investments in security, stability and peace that aim to protect European interests. This tweak to the escape clause would incentivize national governments to protect Europe against a broader range of threats, beyond purely military ones. It would be an irresponsible and risky bet to act now as if every major future threat will be one against which militaries alone can protect us.