The heart of French defense, and therefore of European defense, lies in the region of Bourges, a splendid town of seventy thousand inhabitants located on the \u201cdiagonal of emptiness,\u201d the line that cuts the country from north to south, the part of France that became depopulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even Bourges, the city of cobblestones, of the Saint Etienne cathedral, of half-timbered houses, has experienced years of depression: little work, little hope. But now everything is changing, the expansion is gigantic, and the socialist mayor almost fell off his chair when he learned the amount of the incoming investment: \u201cOne billion euros, can you believe it?\u201d Two major European defense companies have their factories here: MBDA, which produces missiles and missile systems, and the Franco-German KNDS, which produces the Caesar and 155mm munitions. Together, they will invest one billion euros, precisely, over the next five years: they are already expanding, there are cranes and open construction sites on the outskirts of Bourges, they expect to add 2,500 well-paid jobs, and the local economy has been revived. The city has been coming back to life for a few years now, since the increase in the defense budget that President Emmanuel Macron wanted as early as 2019: the unemployment rate fell from 10.3 percent in 2015 to 6.7 percent in 2024, below the national average.<\/p>\n
On June 25, NATO allies decided to increase the share of GDP allocated to defense to 3.5 percent (so far the target was 2) and to allocate an additional 1.5 percent to security-related expenses. If the goal is reached by 2035, as the agreement provides, it means that the allies will spend 700 billion euros more each year than they did before Russia decided to invade Ukraine in 2022. There is a profound issue of political awareness, particularly for the \u201cEuropean pillar\u201d of NATO: it is necessary to build a sustainable defense that breaks the historic dependence on the United States. Donald Trump was courted as never before at the Alliance summit held in The Hague, and he, vain as he is, was very pleased, reciprocating European obsequiousness with compliments, with T-shirts bearing the word \u201cdaddy\u201d (a nickname we owe to NATO Secretary Mark Rutte, who called Trump just that, daddy), and with excellent promises of military supplies to Ukraine. All well and good, but the issue raised by the American president, with his scornful manner, is existential for Europe and is not exhausted by the grand announcements about the continent\u2019s rearmament. When the Americans \u2013 not just Trump, the first was the beloved Barack Obama, and many think as they do, only the tone changes \u2013 say that Europe was able to build its welfare states because it never had to think about defending itself alone, they are right. The pact between Mars and Venus, America as the army and Europe as diplomacy, has been this for eighty years, not without recriminations and reprimands, of course, but it was still taken for granted, in the European collective consciousness, that defense was a residual expense: in case of need, there are the United States.<\/p>\n
Trump has upended this pact, in the midst of a European war (and also in the Middle East, but Israel has increased its defense budget to 8 percent of GDP and is supported by the United States), with the constant Russian threat that for a long time, even after the invasion of Ukraine, remained misunderstood in Western Europe, which is geographically less close to Russia, economically dependent on Russia, and diplomatically engaged in rapprochement with Russia. Today, there is understanding; indeed, many European diplomats insist that the reason for rearmament is not Trump with his disengagement, but Vladimir Putin with his aggression. To be generous, we can say that the two forces go hand in hand, and that Trump\u2019s outbursts combined with Putin\u2019s violence have finally convinced Europeans to make this major investment.<\/p>\n
The European economy has long been gripped by low internal growth, now it is also squeezed between the threat of American tariffs and an increase in imports from China, and deindustrialization has always loomed, as can be seen in many European areas, and as was long seen in Bourges itself. Investment in defense offers what experts call a bright spot: Germany has changed its deficit rules to allow for defense spending on credit; other countries in northern and eastern Europe, such as Denmark, Sweden, and Poland, have announced investments ranging from 3 to 5 percent of their national GDPs. These expenditures will change the face of European economies. Many politicians are selling rearmament to citizens by pairing the benefits to security with those to the economy. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has promised that increased defense spending will offer \u201cthe next generation secure and well-paid jobs\u201d. The European Commission presents a collective advantage guaranteed to all, but one can only speak of guarantees if the economic benefits in terms of jobs and increased incomes outweigh the inevitable decrease in public spending on education, health, pensions \u2013 in short, on social spending. Because debts are already excessive, governments are already under pressure due to the aging European population and high interest rates, and production in the defense sector is much more automated than in many other sectors. EY, the former Ernst & Young, a global consulting firm, has estimated that the \u201cEuropean pillar\u201d of NATO (which includes European countries, Norway, and the United Kingdom) will have to spend 137 billion euros on military material in the coming years, that is, 65 billion more than current spending; the increase in European spending on its own defense, with the connected supply chain, will be 35.7 billion euros, about 1.5 percent of the total manufacturing sector, which corresponds to roughly 500,000 more jobs \u2013 very few, considering that 30 million Europeans are employed in manufacturing.<\/p>\n
The necessary rearmament, now that the Russian threat is understood, poses a very significant cultural question for European leaders: Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez, seeking to negotiate an exemption from the 5 percent of GDP defense spending required by NATO, made it clear when he said he cannot imagine a future Spain that reduces its investments in schools or hospitals to produce more cannons. The \u201cdefense dividend\u201d now appears to be an opportunity for many European areas \u2013 like Bourges, like Unterl\u00fcss, a thriving town near Hanover where the German military giant Rheinmetall is based, like Stalowa Wola, where the Borsuks, the first military vehicles to be entirely built in Poland, are produced \u2013 and according to European Commission estimates, it will increase the continent\u2019s GDP by 0.5 percent by 2028. But if it does not offer a concrete, perceptible, real benefit to Europeans, it risks once again strengthening the most extreme parties, which exploit security as they have already done with the environment and with immigrants. They are playing with fire, but what is needed are leaders who know how to guide this gigantic transformation, avoiding a conflagration.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The heart of French defense, and therefore of European defense, lies in the region of Bourges, a splendid town of seventy thousand inhabitants located on the \u201cdiagonal of emptiness,\u201d the line that cuts the country from north to south, the part of France that became depopulated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even Bourges, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"iawp_total_views":23,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-senza-categoria"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4696"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4933,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4696\/revisions\/4933"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foglioeuropeo.ilfoglio.it\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}