Europe Rearms: Why The Continent That Invented Total War Is Spending €800 Billion On Defence

In the summer of 1932, the German military budget was a rounding error. The Weimar Republic, shackled by the Treaty of Versailles, spent less than 1% of its national income on defence. Its army was capped at 100,000 men. It possessed no tanks, no military aircraft, no submarines. Germany was, on paper, the most thoroughly disarmed major nation in European history.

Seven years later it had the most powerful military machine the world had ever seen. Defence spending had reached 23% of GDP. The Wehrmacht fielded 4.5 million men, 3,600 tanks, and over 4,000 combat aircraft. The transformation from pacifist republic to continental war machine took less time than it takes to pay off a car loan.

This is not an anomaly in European history. It is the pattern.

In February 2026, European leaders gathered at the Munich Security Conference to discuss how to spend €800 billion on defence over the next four years, as part of the EU’s “ReArm Europe” plan. NATO members have committed to spending 3.5% of GDP on core defence by 2035, with an additional 1.5% on military infrastructure and resilience — a total of 5%. Poland is already spending over 4%. Germany has created a €100 billion special fund. Even historically neutral countries like Finland and Sweden have joined NATO.

What is happening right now is the sixth great European rearmament cycle in 400 years. History Future Now has tracked the previous five. Each followed the same basic template: a devastating war exhausts the continent; a period of relief and disarmament follows; a new threat emerges; there is a scramble to rearm; and then either deterrence holds, or war breaks out.

The critical question is not whether Europe should rearm. Given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, America’s increasingly transactional approach to NATO, and China’s expanding military reach, the case for stronger European defences is self-evident. The critical question is whether Europeans can break the historical pattern — whether this time, rearmament leads to sustained deterrence rather than to the catastrophe that has followed every previous cycle.

The Cycle

To understand the present you need to understand the pattern. Europe has gone through five distinct cycles of disarmament followed by frantic rearmament since the modern state system emerged in 1648. The dates are approximate, but the rhythm is unmistakable.

The first cycle ran from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 to the Wars of Louis XIV. The Thirty Years’ War had been the most destructive conflict in European history. It killed between 20% and 40% of Germany’s population and left much of Central Europe in ruins. The Peace of Westphalia was supposed to establish a new order based on state sovereignty and religious tolerance. For a few decades it worked. Military spending declined, armies shrank, and Europe recovered.

But France, under Louis XIV, used this period of relative peace to build the most formidable military on the continent. When war came again — the War of the Spanish Succession in 1701 — France’s neighbours had to scramble to rearm, forming expensive coalitions to contain French power. It would take 14 years of fighting across Europe and the Americas before the matter was settled. The pattern was established: peace was merely the incubation period for the next conflict.

The second cycle ran from the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 to the Crimean War. Napoleon’s campaigns had killed between 3 and 7 million people and redrawn the political map of Europe. The Concert of Europe, established at the Congress of Vienna, ushered in a period of relative peace among the great powers. Britain’s Royal Navy enforced a rough global order and military spending in continental Europe declined as governments turned their attention to industrialisation and internal reform.

But complacency set in. When Russia’s expansionism in the Black Sea region eventually forced Britain and France to intervene in Crimea in 1854, they discovered how quickly military capabilities had atrophied during forty years of peace. British soldiers arrived with equipment essentially unchanged since Waterloo. The logistics were catastrophic. More men died of disease than from enemy fire. Florence Nightingale became famous not because she was a great nurse, but because the medical provision for British soldiers was so appallingly inadequate that a wealthy woman with a talent for organisation could outperform the entire military establishment.

The third cycle, from the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, was different. This time there was no extended period of disarmament. Instead, Bismarck’s unification of Germany under Prussian leadership in 1871 triggered a continuous peacetime arms race that lasted over four decades. France, humiliated by its rapid defeat, rebuilt its military. Germany, fearing encirclement, expanded its army and built a world-class navy. Russia modernised. Britain, alarmed by Germany’s naval ambitions, launched the Dreadnought programme, which rendered all existing battleships obsolete overnight, including its own.

By 1914 European powers were spending between 3% and 5% of GDP on defence — enormous sums for the era. This arms race did not prevent war. Many historians argue it made war more likely, because each nation became convinced that its window of military advantage was closing and that it was better to fight now than to fight later.

The fourth cycle, from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939, is the one that most closely mirrors what is happening in Europe today. After the carnage of the Western Front, European publics wanted nothing to do with war. The prevailing mood was captured by the famous Oxford Union debate of 1933, in which students voted that “This house will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country.” Military budgets were slashed across the continent.

Britain adopted the Ten Year Rule in 1919, which assumed that there would be no major war for at least a decade and planned defence spending accordingly. The rule was renewed annually until 1932. France poured its limited military budget into the Maginot Line, a purely defensive fortification that reflected the nation’s psychological exhaustion. The assumption behind the Maginot Line was that the next war would be like the last one — a static, attritional grind. It was not. Germany rearmed in secret and then openly. From 1% of GDP in 1932, German military spending surged to 23% of GDP by 1939. The Rhineland was remilitarised in 1936. Austria was absorbed in 1938. Czechoslovakia was dismembered the same year. Britain and France, having allowed their militaries to atrophy, were in no position to respond with anything other than appeasement and stern words.

When war came in September 1939, the democracies had to rearm in a desperate rush, under the worst possible conditions. The results were predictable. France fell in six weeks. Britain survived only because of the English Channel and the Royal Air Force, and even then it required American financial support to stay in the fight.

The fifth cycle ran from the end of the Cold War in 1991 to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This was the most dramatic European disarmament in modern history. The collapse of the Soviet Union triggered what was euphemistically called the “peace dividend” — a sustained, continent-wide drawdown in military capability that lasted three decades.

The Three Decades of Peace Dividend

The numbers tell the story. Germany reduced its active military from 585,000 in 1990 to 183,000 by 2023. The Bundeswehr went from having 7,000 main battle tanks to fewer than 300. The Netherlands sold its entire tank fleet. Belgium’s military became so underfunded that soldiers reportedly had to shout “bang bang” during exercises because they lacked live ammunition for training. Italy’s defence budget stagnated for decades. Spain treated NATO’s 2% of GDP target as an aspiration rather than a commitment. Even Britain, which prided itself on maintaining a serious military, cut its army to its smallest size since the Napoleonic Wars.

The assumptions underlying this disarmament were threefold: that Russia had been permanently defanged; that America would always guarantee European security through NATO; and that economic interdependence had made large-scale war in Europe impossible.

All three proved wrong. Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, annexed Crimea in 2014, and launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. America’s commitment to European defence became increasingly conditional, first under Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia,” then more dramatically under Donald Trump, who openly questioned whether the United States would honour Article 5 for allies that refused to spend adequately on their own defence. And economic interdependence, far from preventing conflict, gave Russia leverage over Europe through energy dependence — as Europeans discovered to their horror when gas prices quadrupled after the invasion of Ukraine.

During the Cold War, Western European NATO members collectively maintained roughly 3 million men under arms, backed by tens of thousands of tanks, armoured vehicles, artillery pieces, and combat aircraft. West Germany alone fielded 12 army divisions and could mobilise a further 6 within days. The infrastructure to support this military — barracks, ammunition depots, fuel storage, command centres, training grounds — was vast.

After 1991, all of this was systematically dismantled. Barracks were closed or converted into housing. Ammunition depots were emptied and the ammunition was destroyed or sold off. Training grounds were returned to civilian use. Factories that had produced tanks, artillery shells, and military vehicles either closed, converted to civilian production, or dramatically reduced their capacity. The skilled workforce — the engineers, technicians, and craftsmen who knew how to build military equipment — retired and were not replaced.

This went far beyond sensible post-Cold War adjustment. What happened was the deliberate dismantling of the industrial base needed to produce military equipment at scale. European governments were not just spending less on defence. They were destroying the ability to spend more in the future, even if they wanted to.

The consequences became brutally apparent after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When the EU pledged to deliver one million artillery shells to Ukraine within a year, it could not meet the target. Rheinmetall, one of Europe’s largest defence companies, was producing around 70,000 artillery shells per year. Russia was producing an estimated 3 million. The EU’s combined GDP was over ten times Russia’s, but it could produce a fraction of Russia’s military output. The problem was not money. It was capacity.

To put this in historical context, during World War II the United States went from producing 800 military aircraft in 1939 to over 96,000 in 1944. Britain went from 3,000 to 26,000. Even the Soviet Union, which lost most of its industrial heartland to the German invasion, relocated over 1,500 factories east of the Urals and was outproducing Germany by 1943. Today’s Europe, with all its wealth, cannot produce enough basic ammunition for a single war in Ukraine.

This is what three decades of peace dividend actually bought: an atrophied industrial base, a hollowed-out military, and the comfortable assumption that serious conflict in Europe was over for good.

The Geography of Fear

One of the most striking features of today’s rearmament is how closely it correlates with geography. There is an almost perfect relationship between a European country’s distance from Russia and its willingness to spend on defence.

Poland, which borders both Russia’s Kaliningrad exclave and Russia’s ally Belarus, is spending over 4% of GDP on defence — more than twice the old NATO target. The three Baltic states, each of which has a significant Russian-speaking minority and traumatic memories of Soviet occupation, are spending between 3% and 6% of GDP. Finland, which shares a 1,340-kilometre border with Russia and which was invaded by the Soviet Union in 1939, abandoned its long-standing neutrality to join NATO. Norway, which borders Russia in the Arctic, is spending over 3%.

Then look at the other end of the scale. Spain explicitly refused to commit to NATO’s new 3.5% target, with Prime Minister Sánchez capping defence spending at 2.1% of GDP and declaring it “sufficient.” Italy’s defence budget is expected to remain flat through 2027. Portugal and Belgium have been slow to increase spending.

This geographical divide echoes every previous rearmament cycle. In the 1930s, the countries closest to Germany — Czechoslovakia, Poland, France — were the most alarmed and most willing to arm. Britain, separated by the English Channel, was slower to react. The United States, separated by an ocean, was slowest of all.

Geography shapes threat perception. Threat perception shapes spending. Uneven spending creates fault lines within alliances. Today, Poland and the Baltic states are frustrated by what they see as Western European complacency. They look at Spain spending 2.1% and wonder what exactly Spain thinks NATO membership entails. France and Germany talk about “European strategic autonomy” — the ability to act independently of America — while Eastern European members remain deeply sceptical of any framework that weakens the American security guarantee. A Pole or an Estonian looks at a French proposal for European strategic autonomy and sees, quite rationally, an invitation to replace a reliable American guarantee with an unreliable French one.

These divisions are manageable during peacetime. They would become critical in a crisis.

The €800 Billion Question

So Europe is rearming. The question is whether it can do so effectively.

The scale of the challenge is daunting. Europe currently has 27 separate national armies within the EU alone. It operates 20 different types of main battle tank, where the US operates one. It has 29 different classes of naval frigate, where the US has one. It uses 12 different types of infantry fighting vehicle. This fragmentation means that European armed forces cannot easily share ammunition, spare parts, communications systems, or logistics infrastructure. Two European armies standing side by side on the same battlefield might not be able to talk to each other.

The fragmentation also means that Europe gets far less military capability per euro than it should. The EU collectively spent €343 billion on defence in 2024, versus Russia’s reported €107 billion. But Russia gets considerably more fighting power for its money because it has one army, one procurement system, one logistics chain, and one command structure. Europe’s defence spending is spread across 27 separate bureaucracies, each with its own priorities, its own domestic defence industry to protect, and its own political constraints.

In 2022–2023, 78% of European defence procurement was sourced from outside Europe, with 63% coming from the United States. Europe is, in effect, paying America to defend it through purchases of American weapons, while simultaneously talking about strategic autonomy from America. The contradiction is so obvious that it hardly needs pointing out.

The ReArm Europe plan attempts to address some of this by encouraging joint procurement and incentivising European defence industrial cooperation. The €150 billion SAFE loan mechanism and the broader €800 billion spending framework are designed to channel money toward European producers and encourage countries to buy the same equipment. Whether this will work is another matter. Joint European procurement programmes have a dismal track record. The Eurofighter Typhoon, designed by four countries, took 23 years from design to full production and cost far more than originally budgeted. The A400M military transport aircraft was seven years late and billions over budget.

The fundamental problem is that defence procurement is industrial policy, and every European government wants its domestic industry to benefit. Germany wants Leopard tanks built in Germany. France wants Rafale fighters built in France. Italy wants naval vessels built in Italy. Each country’s defence minister answers to a domestic electorate that cares about local jobs, not about pan-European military efficiency. Until that political incentive changes, European defence spending will continue to produce less capability than it should.

Why This Time Might Be Different

There are, however, reasons to think that this sixth cycle could break the historical pattern.

First, nuclear weapons have fundamentally altered the calculus of war between great powers. In every previous cycle, the rearmament phase eventually led to a major war because the perceived cost of fighting was bearable. Nations could fight, lose, recover, and fight again within a generation. Nuclear weapons make total war between nuclear-armed powers suicidal. This means that rearmament can sustain a permanent standoff without escalating to open conflict — as it did during the Cold War. The Cold War was, in many respects, the first time the pattern was broken: massive rearmament on both sides that led to deterrence, not war.

Second, the institutional framework is incomparably stronger than in any previous cycle. NATO provides a coordinating mechanism that simply did not exist before 1949. The EU adds another layer of economic and political cooperation. Previous rearmament cycles were characterised by shifting alliances, mutual suspicion, and the absence of any credible collective security mechanism. Each nation armed independently and feared its neighbours’ preparations as much as any external threat. That dynamic is substantially different today. Germany and France are not rearming against each other. They are rearming together.

Third, the economic foundation for European rearmament is solid. The EU’s combined GDP exceeds $18 trillion — larger than China’s and four times Russia’s. Europe has the economic capacity to sustain 3.5% of GDP on defence without the ruinous trade-offs that characterised earlier cycles. European societies are wealthy enough to afford both welfare states and serious defence, if they choose to.

But history offers uncomfortable warnings as well.

What Nobody Is Talking About

Every previous rearmament cycle changed the societies that undertook it. Once military-industrial complexes are built, they develop their own political constituencies, their own institutional momentum, and their own logic. President Eisenhower’s warning about the “military-industrial complex” in his 1961 farewell address was not hypothetical. It was based on his direct observation, as both a general and a president, of how defence spending creates self-perpetuating demand for more defence spending. Contractors lobby for new programmes. Generals argue for more capabilities. Politicians compete to bring military spending to their constituencies. The result is a ratchet effect: defence budgets go up but they rarely come back down.

Europe’s historically low military spending since 1991 has been one of the foundations of its generous welfare states. The money that did not go to tanks and fighter jets went to healthcare, pensions, education, and social housing. Shifting hundreds of billions toward defence will create real pressure on social budgets, particularly in countries that are already running significant deficits. France’s debt-to-GDP ratio is already over 110%. Italy’s is over 140%. The idea that these countries can find an additional 1.5% to 3% of GDP for defence without cutting something else is optimistic at best.

Then there is the question of where the threat goes next. The current rearmament is premised on a specific threat: Russia. European governments are spending more because Russia invaded Ukraine and because Russia might, in the future, threaten NATO territory. This is a rational response.

But the geopolitical landscape of the 2040s and 2050s will not look like the geopolitical landscape of the 2020s. China’s military power is growing at a rate that dwarfs Russia’s. Africa’s population is set to double by 2050, from 1.4 billion to 2.8 billion, and the continent’s northern coast is just 14 kilometres from Europe at the Strait of Gibraltar. The Mediterranean, which History Future Now has written about extensively, could become a contested frontier again as climate change, water scarcity, and population pressure drive instability in North Africa and the Middle East. A well-armed Europe in the 2040s may find itself facing challenges that have nothing to do with Russia and using its military capabilities in ways that its citizens never anticipated.

This is not speculation. It is the pattern. In the 1930s, Britain rearmed against Germany. Twenty years later it was in a Cold War against the Soviet Union. In the 1950s, America armed to fight the Soviets. Fifteen years later it was using that military in Vietnam. The weapons you build for one threat get used for another.

The Twist

But there is one final dimension to this story that takes us beyond the familiar cycle, and it may be the most consequential of all.

Europe has attempted, over the past 80 years, one of the most extraordinary political experiments in human history: the peaceful integration of nations that spent centuries trying to destroy each other. France and Germany, which fought three devastating wars between 1870 and 1945, are now so economically intertwined that armed conflict between them is essentially unthinkable. This achievement is often dismissed as naive idealism. It is nothing of the sort. It is one of the most remarkable accomplishments in the history of statecraft.

What if European rearmament, done correctly, actually accelerates this integration?

Consider the logic. If European nations want genuine military capability for their €800 billion, they cannot achieve it as 27 separate countries buying 20 different tanks. They will have to rationalise, standardise, and integrate their defence industries. They will need joint procurement systems, shared logistics chains, common communications platforms, and interoperable command structures. They will have to do in defence what they have already done in trade, regulation, and monetary policy.

This is precisely what happened in the United States. Before the Civil War, each American state had its own militia with its own equipment, training, and command structure. The enormous military mobilisations required by the Civil War, and later by the two World Wars, forced the creation of a genuinely national military — and that national military became one of the most powerful integrating forces in American society. Young men from Alabama trained alongside young men from Massachusetts. They used the same equipment, followed the same orders, and developed shared loyalties that transcended their state identities.

European rearmament could, paradoxically, be the catalyst that finally forces the creation of integrated European defence. Not out of idealism, but out of necessity. When you are spending 5% of GDP on security, you simply cannot afford to waste it on duplication and fragmentation. The economic pressure to consolidate will be immense. And consolidation in defence tends to spill over into other areas — shared industrial policy, common foreign policy, integrated command and control.

If this happens — and it is a very big if — then Europe’s sixth rearmament cycle would produce something genuinely unprecedented in the continent’s 400-year history of rearmament cycles: a collective military capability that makes the continent more secure without making it more dangerous. Not 27 separate armies that might, in a crisis, turn on each other, as they have done in every previous century — but a single defensive force that is too strong for any external power to challenge and too deeply integrated for any single member to misuse.

The European Union was born from the ashes of the Second World War. Its founding insight, embedded in the European Coal and Steel Community of 1951, was that countries that share their steel industry cannot easily go to war with each other. The next step in that logic is that countries that share an army cannot go to war with each other at all.

That would genuinely break the pattern. That would be the most important strategic development of the twenty-first century. And it would transform a continent that invented total war into the most powerful force for stability the world has ever seen.

Whether Europe is wise enough to achieve it is the €800 billion question.

But consider this final thought — and it is the thought that should make you send this article to someone you care about.

Every person alive in Europe today was born during an anomaly. The 80 years since 1945 represent the longest period of great-power peace in European history. Not the longest period of peace — there were wars in Yugoslavia, in Ukraine, in the Caucasus. But the longest period without a direct military conflict between major European states. No France versus Germany. No Britain versus anyone on the continent. No coalition wars, no continental conflagrations, no conscription of an entire generation.

This is not normal. For the previous 400 years, major European wars occurred roughly every 30 to 40 years. The average European born in 1600 had a high probability of experiencing at least one devastating continental conflict in their lifetime. The average European born in 1950 experienced none.

We have lived our entire lives inside the exception. We have mistaken the exception for the rule. We have built our economies, our welfare states, our retirement plans, our assumptions about the future, on the foundation of a peace that, historically, is wildly improbable.

The €800 billion now being poured into European defence is, at its core, an insurance premium on the most valuable anomaly in European history. The question is not whether Europe can afford to pay it. It is whether Europe can afford not to — and whether, having started, it can do what no previous generation of Europeans has managed: turn the machinery of war permanently into the architecture of peace.

The bill has arrived. The answer will define the century.