Shortly before my high school graduation, recruiting officers came to school to convince us boys (girls were not eligible in Austria in the 1970s) to join the army. Only a few years earlier a law had come into effect offering the possibility to opt out from obligatory conscription to do community service instead.
The alternative was alarmingly popular, hence the recruitment zeal. Most young men preferred to work in hospitals or old people’s homes, despite the longer service time of 12 months instead of nine. There were two reasons for this. The army training was notoriously dull, focusing more on “discipline” than actual weapons training. And then, we were all peaceniks. I was convinced that disarmament would be a better contribution to peace than sabre-rattling. At the conscription meeting I was claiming my ethical right “to refuse being trained to kill other people” – the catch phrase for opting out.
The Cold War was still on ‒ the Balance of Terror being its dominant theory of how to maintain peace. The fact that the opposing superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union – had amassed enough nuclear warheads to annihilate the world 10 times over was seen as the guarantor for the war staying cold; that is, if one ignored the proxy wars fought all over the world ‒ like the devastating Vietnam campaign, which demonstrated to all of us youngsters the senseless cruelty of war. We were also anti-nukes, of course, as the risk of the world coming apart by stupid human error seemed only too real. And then came 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the implosion of the Soviet Union, freedom for Eastern Europe and Pax Americana for the world.
The recruiting officers, explaining the defence needs of an officially neutral Austria with a nebulous ‘threat from the east’, showed to us school students what NATO truly was: a defence pact aimed exclusively against Russia. I found this disingenuous. If you considered war on European territory at the end of the 20th century even faintly possible (I was convinced it wasn’t), then we should see NATO as a European defence umbrella against all possible aggressors, not just Russia.
As a peacenik I was convinced that war was a form of misunderstanding. The better you know your supposed enemy, the more you befriend him, and the less likely war will become. But war is not happening between peoples. It is not that a populace would demand violence against another people.
War is happening because it can. It is born out of a country’s self-interest, as interpreted by its leaders. It is made possible by power imbalances, when one side is economically and militarily too weak to resist the overreach of an opponent. Other than what I thought as a teenager, it is defencelessness that provokes conflict.
Occupying the moral high ground is no defence. No good argument can help against overweening power. This has played out in Ukraine, and it is playing out with the United States now. Economic war, the imposition of embargoes, sanctions and punishing tariffs are a form of warfare with other means. The effects can be as devastating.
Meanwhile, the threat emanating from superior military capabilities need not be explicit. It is always present. It is part and parcel of all negotiations. This is how we must understand Trump’s designs on Greenland, Panama, Canada or Mexico. Tariffs are just the beginning. Europe is thus not only threatened to fend for itself against Putin’s expansionist dreams, but also threatened directly by the US, militarily. We will see how America’s public opinion will be shaped now and over time to that end.
The war in Ukraine has shown how shockingly unprepared we are to defend ourselves- Andreas Weitzer
The war in Ukraine has focused minds in Europe’s capitals, particularly now, when the US cannot be seen as an unconditional defender of Europe’s freedom any more and may even be perceived as a potential aggressor. Trump, in his first term as president, demanded from Europe the willingness to contribute two per cent of GDP per annum to its, and hence NATO’s, defence capabilities. Now that this threshold has been reached on average for the first time last year, he already talks about five per cent and more.
The reported €326 billion the EU has spent in 2024 on defence are unevenly distributed. Countries closer to Russia, like the Baltic countries, Poland and Finland, have spent significantly more per GDP than countries further away like Spain (1.5%). There are some egregious free riders: Ireland (0.2%), Austria (0.6%), Luxembourg (0.5%), and Malta (0.4%) are conspicuous examples.
To refrain from meaningful military expenditure was warranted when war seemed like a remote, unlikely risk, and defence was outsourced to the US and its dominant role in NATO. We used to talk about a “peace dividend”, when we spend money on other, more immediate needs. We thought about this as something virtuous, the moral opposite of “warmongers”. The film comedy Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? was our credo.
It is still hard to see defence spending as an overriding objective when the costly devastations of climate change revisit us in ever shorter intervals, budgets are overstretched (France, for instance, has a yearly budget deficit in excess of 6%), economies like Germany are stagnant, and political paralysis is crippling many European countries, like France, Germany, Spain and Luxembourg. It is hard to politically agree under such circumstances to better prepare for war.
Populists in these countries, and particularly in Austria, Slovakia and Hungary, are trivialising Putin’s threat to territorial integrity in Europe. They also dread the financial cost and unpopularity of upgrading defence capabilities. They may rightly understand how Putin’s revisionist designs and bitter resentment came about, but erroneously believe that signalling appeasement now would mollify him.
Yet here we are. The war in Ukraine has shown how shockingly unprepared we are to defend ourselves. We could not even produce enough ordnance to sustain a few months of artillery fire. Gradually it is dawning upon us that weakness is dangerous in a world where multinational institutions are dismantled, international law ignored and moral behaviour considered unsuitable for powerful states and their self-interest.
Our weakness not only lurks in insufficient hardware, or unpreparedness in planning. It also extends to a missing willingness to defend one’s way of life, the country, in the trenches. Real defence preparedness would mean its mental acceptance and physical participation of the citizenry.
Europe’s defence industry has now mutated from a vice investment like tobacco, to a virtue investment. Moral money is now pouring into industrials like Dassault (jets), ThyssenKrupp (submarines), or Thales (command and control systems). Defence-themed ETFs are composed to include companies like Saab, Safran, and Leonardo (naval weapons).
As a former peacenik I have long hesitated and only recently put some money into Rheinmetall, the German company producing tanks and ammunition. It has reached dangerous valuations, with a P/E of 45 and a price-to-book value of 10.23. Its shares, priced at €771 at the time of writing, have returned 132% within the last year. It is hard to believe much further upside. At least in peacetime.
Andreas Weitzer is an independent journalist based in Malta.