Are Europe’s Capability Gaps Choosing Its Defence Partners?

Germany "needs new partnerships more than ever," declared Chancellor Friedrich Merz as he opened a tour of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE, announcing along the way that Berlin would loosen its long-standing restrictions on arms exports to the Gulf. Such words from a German chancellor would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. Yet the scene fits a wider pattern now visible across the continent: Korean tanks arriving at Polish ports, Turkish drones ordered for Baltic skies, Brazilian transport aircraft entering European fleets, and Gulf sovereign wealth courted from London to Berlin. Europe, long accustomed to a single security patron, is visibly assembling a new roster of defence partners, and officials on all sides describe it as a strategy of diversification. The pattern reaches its most symbolic setting this week, as NATO leaders convene in Ankara, the capital of the very partner Europe has never quite decided how to treat. But strategies imply choice, and choice implies a chooser. The pressing question is: is Europe actually selecting its new partners, or is something else doing the choosing?

A common reading holds that Europe’s search for new defense partners began with the second Trump administration. The record says otherwise. What the current moment has changed is not the behavior but its meaning.

The diversification began as procurement, not geopolitics. South Korea entered the European market in 2014, when the K9 self-propelled howitzer met urgent needs in Eastern and Northern Europe after Russia’s annexation of Crimea. It was chosen for NATO interoperability and, above all, for delivery speed that European producers could not match. Turkish systems followed a similar path: drones, armored vehicles, and naval programs finding buyers in Central Europe and the Balkans well before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This was gap-filling by individual states, without strategy and largely without Brussels.

The second phase, from 2022, gave the pattern institutions. The EU’s Strategic Compass made “partnering” one of the four pillars of its security policy, spawning a network of tailored Security and Defence Partnerships that now spans Japan, South Korea, Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, Australia, India, and others. The “ReArm” Europe initiative and the SAFE fund followed. Crucially, all of this was framed as complementing American power, not hedging against it.

Only in the third phase, the current one, has the hedge become explicit. When Germany’s chancellor toured Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE in February 2026, announcing a looser arms-export policy toward the Gulf, the trip was framed openly as reducing dependence on the U.S. and China. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared that Berlin “needs new partnerships more than ever,” and warning that Europe may need alternatives to the American guarantee, would have been unthinkable rhetoric in 2021.

The instinct is to read Europe’s new partnerships as a single trend. They are better understood as three different transactions, each revealing a distinct European deficit. Europe is not choosing these partners; its shortfalls are assigning them.

South Korea exposes the production deficit: Consider Poland. Its contracts, roughly 180 K2 tanks, more than 200 K9 howitzers, 48 FA-50 aircraft, a package exceeding twelve billion dollars, made Seoul Warsaw’s second defense supplier after Washington, and Norway’s follow-on howitzer orders confirmed the pattern was not only Polish. What Korea sells is not technology Europe lacks but throughput Europe lacks: the ability to deliver at the speed the threat demands. The relationship is now moving from sales to structure, with technology transfer, localized production, and a formal Korean request for its industry to access the EU’s SAFE procurement funds. That last step matters most. An instrument designed to build European industrial sovereignty is, within a year of its creation, being opened to non-European producers, because the alternative is rearmament on a timeline the threat will not respect. The tension between “buy European” and “buy fast” is being resolved, contract by contract, in favor of fast.

Turkey exposes the decision deficit: Turkish firms now hold a larger share of defense exports to Europe than American ones did as recently as 2023, with production facilities in Hungary, Romania, and Estonia, drone sales across the Baltic and Balkan states, and a cascade of recent deals: a Baykar–Leonardo joint venture on unmanned systems, a British Eurofighter sale to Ankara with training and support attached, a Turkish–Spanish arrangement on jet trainers through Airbus. Yet no European institution has answered the underlying question of what Turkey is: partner, rival, or member-in-waiting. Because governments cannot decide, companies are deciding for them. Each joint venture makes Turkey harder to exclude from Europe’s defense architecture without Europe ever having resolved to include it. The unresolved history, the S-400 acquisition that fractured NATO’s air-defense architecture, the record of sanctions evasion toward Iran, has not been overcome; it has been priced in silently and deferred. Integration by industrial default is still integration. It is simply integration nobody voted for.

The Gulf exposes the resource and reach deficit: The relationship accelerating between Europe and the Gulf states is not, at its core, an arms relationship. It is capital, energy security, and strategic reach. The Iran war and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrated that Gulf stability is a European interest of the first order, and the diplomacy has responded accordingly: emergency EU–GCC ministerials, a new annual Europe–Gulf leaders’ forum, and Berlin’s export-policy reversal. Meanwhile Gulf sovereign wealth is moving toward the defense-technology frontier, including landmark drone and defense cooperation agreements signed with Ukraine in the spring. The Gulf states are explicit that they do not view Europe as a security guarantor. What is being built is something different: a partnership of complementary strengths, in which Europe gains investment and energy insurance, and the Gulf moves from customer to stakeholder in a defense-technology base it increasingly helps finance.
 
Beyond the three headline cases, the pattern generalizes. Brazil’s C-390 transport aircraft has broken into European fleets through Portugal, competing directly with American airframes. Ukraine, the recipient of European arms, is becoming a supplier in its own right, of battle-tested drone technology and the largest modern battlefield dataset in existence, now marketed from Warsaw to Riyadh. Wherever Europe has a gap, a partner has appeared to fill it. That is the reassuring reading. The less reassuring one is what filling those gaps quietly costs.

Diversification is being celebrated as resilience. Unmanaged, it produces four kinds of fragmentation that Europe has not yet priced. The first is industrial. Two decades of European policy sought to consolidate a defense industrial base splintered across national champions. The current wave risks entrenching something worse: national champions plus a patchwork of foreign platforms with local assembly lines, each politically protected by the jobs it creates. Every externally sourced system procured for speed today is demand withdrawn from the consolidated European industry the entire project was meant to build.

The second is operational. A continent fielding German, Korean, Turkish, American, and Brazilian platforms multiplies logistics chains, munitions stockpiles, and training pipelines, and the problem is compounding, because interoperability is increasingly a software and data problem rather than a hardware one. Integrating a Korean howitzer into NATO artillery doctrine is a solved problem. Integrating Korean, Turkish, and European battle-management systems into a single command architecture is not.

The third is political, and it is the least discussed. Partnerships are being chosen nationally while the dependencies they create are collective. Hungary and the Balkans deepen with Ankara; Poland and the Nordics with Seoul; Berlin, Paris, and London compete for Gulf investment. When the next EU–Turkey political crisis arrives, over Cyprus, the Aegean, or domestic repression, member states hosting Turkish production lines will have materially different interests from those that do not. Diversification abroad can translate directly into division at home.

The fourth is the most fundamental: much of what is called dependency reduction is in fact dependency redistribution. Reliance on Korean production timelines, Turkish geography, and Gulf capital each carries political exposure of its own. Europe applies rigorous screening to Chinese investment in critical infrastructure; no equivalent discipline yet applies to friendly-country integration into the defense industrial base, where the exposure is subtler but the sector more sensitive.

None of this argues against diversification. No single industrial base, American, European, or otherwise, can meet the scale of rearmament now underway, and the partnerships genuinely accelerate production and innovation. The risk is not diversification, it is diversification without doctrine.

Here lies the deeper shift, and the one most likely to define the coming decade. For thirty years, Europe set the terms of partnership: access to its market and institutions was conditioned on alignment with its norms. In defense, the flow has inverted. Korea negotiates the terms of technology transfer and fund access. Turkey converts joint ventures into political facts that constrain Europe’s future choices. Gulf investment, like all strategic investment, carries priorities of its own about where Europe’s defense-technology base should grow. The conditioning power increasingly sits with the partners, a reverse conditionality in which Europe’s deficits, not its standards, define the relationship.

The 2026 NATO summit in Ankara displayed this inversion in miniature. Host governments shape summit agendas, and Turkey pressed for deepening NATO’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative with the Gulf states, an alliance-level architecture decision advanced by the very partner Europe has declined to define, on behalf of the partners Europe most needs financially. The gaps are not merely being filled; they are being organized by others.

Escaping reverse conditionality does not require choosing between autonomy and openness. It requires converting an accumulation of improvisations into a deliberate architecture, and three principles would go most of the way.

First, the partnerships should be tiered explicitly. The instruments already exist, the Security and Defence Partnerships, SAFE access decisions, industrial participation rules, but they are applied reactively, case by case. A doctrine would state what each tier of partner receives and what it requires in return: capability partners gaining procurement access in exchange for technology transfer and localized production; geography partners gaining structured industrial integration bound to explicit political guardrails, so that each deepening step is a negotiated rung rather than a corporate fait accompli; capital partners gaining co-investment frameworks with clear and mutually agreed rules.

Second, political risk should be priced alongside delivery schedules. Procurement decisions currently optimize for speed and cost; the S-400 episode illustrates what unpriced political exposure eventually costs an alliance. Major external contracts should carry a collective assessment of the dependency they create, extending to friendly capitals the discipline already applied to adversarial ones.

Third, the choices should be owned collectively even where they cannot be made collectively. Centralized procurement is politically unattainable; a standing, shared map of who is building which dependency where is not. The minimum requirement of a common security space is that when one member deepens with Ankara or courts Riyadh, the collective exposure is known before a crisis tests it.

Europe set out to close its gaps. Left unmanaged, the gaps will keep doing what they are doing now: writing the terms, assigning the partners, and drawing the map. The question is not whether Europe diversifies. It is whether Europe, or its deficits, holds the pen.

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