2026-02-28 02:23:58
The CEPA Podcast is a series of dynamic interviews, bringing together leaders and experts from both sides of the Atlantic to explore the most important challenges shaping our world today.
In this episode, Dr. Kiana Aran, inventor and entrepreneur, a bioengineer at UC San Diego, unpacks how AI is reshaping the future of biotechnology. Dr. Alina Polyakova and Aran dive into how AI, semiconductors, and advanced biomanufacturing are transforming biotechnology, from data-driven “real-time biology” and harnessing other species’ biological “superpowers” to the geopolitical stakes of supply chains, innovation, and talent.
Speakers:
Moderated by:
Listen and subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, and wherever you get your podcasts.
The post Kiana Aran on AI & the Future of Biotech appeared first on CEPA.
2026-02-28 01:30:18
The Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service’s 2026 International Security Report contained a startling finding. It tested the Chinese open-source AI model DeepSeek for biased or incomplete answers.
“When discussing issues related to Estonia’s security, DeepSeek conceals key information and inserts Chinese propaganda into its answers,” the report warned.
This Estonian analysis forms one of three recent European assessments of Chinese-developed AI models. An audit by the non-profit Policy Genome and a detailed study funded by the Swedish Psychological Defence Agency highlight how leading Chinese models such as DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen family, and Moonshot’s Kimi embed content controls that extend well beyond China’s domestic political sensitivities.
Earlier scrutiny of Chinese AI models focused on domestically censored topics such as the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, Taiwan, and rights abuses involving Uyghurs, Tibetans, Hong Kong, and Falun Gong. Those constraints limit knowledge of China and silence European citizens from diverse diaspora communities and multi-ethnic faith groups.
The new studies reveal a broader pattern of content shaping. Two of the reports document distortions in information tied to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Estonian report found noticeable skewing when DeepSeek responded to queries about the war, including unprompted insertions of Chinese official positions. When asked about atrocities in Bucha, DeepSeek offered vague acknowledgments of international concerns while voluntarily adding that “China has consistently supported peace and dialogue.”
The Policy Genome audit examined seven questions on the Ukraine war across six models from different countries, including China. It found English and Ukrainian language replies from DeepSeek largely accurate, yet several Russian-language responses endorsed Kremlin talking points or introduced misleading details. The study’s conclusion captures this nuance: “The risk is not just ‘which model you use,’ but also which language you ask in.”
It’s not just Russian propaganda about Ukraine that pops up in the Chinese models, either. When researchers prompted the models to reveal their reasoning, they uncovered internal directives from DeepSeek to avoid common Communist Party taboos or from Qwen to keep answers on China “positive and constructive, avoid criticism, and emphasize achievements.” The same model was also instructed to remain “neutral and objective” on the United States, Kenya, or Belgium, while avoiding “any political or sensitive topics” for the latter two.
Another concerning finding relates to how Chinese Communist Party-driven content controls extend beyond the original models into applications built on them. Chinese models are open-source, powerful, and cheaper than proprietary American alternatives from firms such as OpenAI or Anthropic.
These advantages are driving rapid adoption by developers. According to the Swedish-funded study, Alibaba’s Qwen-family models alone recorded more than 9.5 million downloads from October to November 2025, and served as the base for roughly 2,800 derivative models, including a Brazilian legal research platform and a chatbot adapted for Ugandan languages.
Base models from China carry embedded content controls to their downstream apps — often without users or developers realizing the inherent manipulation. Although some retraining can reduce China-specific restrictions, the authors of the Swedish-funded study found the process incomplete: “Out of the ten companies whose models we tested for this report (including both original Chinese models and new models built on top of them), none were completely free of Chinese information guidance.” Traces of Chinese government controls from the original models were found in languages as diverse as English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Malay, Indonesian, Thai, and Hindi — collectively spoken by billions.
China’s AI exports also create cybersecurity risks or other vulnerabilities. When queried about the safety of Chinese technology, the Estonian report found that DeepSeek delivered polished, official-sounding assurances of reliability while omitting documented cases of hacking, cyber-espionage, or transnational repression linked to China-based actors.
The Swedish study noted that some versions of Chinese models, including DeepSeek and Qwen, proved susceptible to “jailbreaking” — techniques that bypass safeguards to elicit instructions for creating weapons or controlled substances such as fentanyl — a vulnerability that could be exploited by a range of bad actors.
These patterns are not accidental. To operate inside China, models require approval from the country’s cyberspace administration and must comply with party-state censorship and propaganda.
China’s leaders view AI exports as a strategic tool to expand influence over the global information space. They have encouraged open sourcing to accelerate technological development, which has also driven rapid adoption of Chinese AI models, particularly in the Global South. Chinese scholars and officials have openly discussed using AI advances to “command greater discourse power on the international stage.”
The global spread of these Chinese models without adequate safeguards carries consequences for Western security and free expression around the world. Deep integration into global digital infrastructure raises legitimate concerns about future activation for influence operations, including around European, American, and other elections.
These recent reports underscore the need for urgent action. Democracies should make developers aware of carry-over dangers. They should strengthen transparency rules requiring disclosure of foundational models.
AI is transforming our information environment. China’s leaders treat its political dimensions as a strategic priority. Democracies must respond and direct resources to preserving open inquiry, minimizing hidden biases, and reinforcing resilience.
Sarah Cook is an independent researcher and consultant. She is also the author of the UnderReported China newsletter.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
A Roadmap for Europe-US Tech Cooperation
The post Chinese AI Models Spread Propaganda Globally appeared first on CEPA.
2026-02-28 01:22:37
Three weeks later, it’s possible to draw some important lessons that should inform Western armies as they plan for the next war. In short, drones give, and they take away; connectivity is everything; and attacking is extremely difficult under even the best circumstances.
Twin decisions wreaked havoc on Russian command and control early this month. At the behest of the Ukrainian government, billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink bricked the thousands of smuggled and stolen satellite communication terminals Russian forces relied on to control their drones and coordinate between front-line troops and their distant headquarters.
At the same time, the Kremlin — apparently seeking to shut off alternative news and chat apps — cut off military access to popular social media, including the Telegram messaging app, which many Russian troops use to exchange key information along the front line.
The combined effect was to partially blind and mute many Russian drone teams, assault groups, and regimental headquarters. Wireless drones couldn’t fly. Assault groups no longer knew where they were going. Headquarters lost contact with forward units.
Swiftly organizing brigade-sized battlegroups, the Ukrainians went on the attack—especially in the southeast, where Dnipropetrovsk Oblast borders Zaporizhzhia Oblast. It was here, just east of the town of Pokrovs’ke, that Russia’s 36 Combined Arms Army and its four front-line regiments had been swiftly advancing as recently as December. (Ukrainian brigades and Russian regiments both have around 2,000 troops apiece, on paper.)
In three heady weeks, the Ukrainians pushed back the 36th CAA and cleared potentially hundreds of square kilometers of Russian troops. The final outcome of the southeastern counteroffensive is unsettled, but as of the time of this writing, the Ukrainians still had the momentum, and the Russians were still in disarray. It’s not too soon to draw some broad conclusions.
The proliferation of tiny explosive drones has tilted the balance of power on the battlefield toward the defender. It’s now extremely perilous for infantry and vehicles to break cover and attack across the drone-patrolled no-man’s-land.
The Russian force in Ukraine has managed to advance in the two years since Ukraine’s ill-conceived 2023 counteroffensive ground to a halt under relentless Russian bombardment and well-constructed fixed defensive lines. But the cost in manpower and heavy equipment has been staggering. The Russians have captured perhaps 1% of Ukraine while losing thousands of vehicles and suffering hundreds of thousands of casualties (most recent estimates suggest 1.2 million Russian casualties, with around 325,000 dead).
The problem with a drone-first defense is that, despite the spread of hardwired fiber-optic drones, most still need a solid radio signal, either beamed directly to and from the operator or bounced off a satellite. Lose the signal over a wide area, as happened when the Russian Starlinks went down, and your best defense becomes a liability. There may not be enough infantry to defend your positions when your drones can’t fly.
The Russians’ recent disarray is a reminder that no technology is a panacea. And every technological measure has a countermeasure. That’s a strong argument for redundancy in force planning. Invest in drones, sure — but don’t disband the infantry to pay for it.
Without Starlink and Telegram, Russian troops struggled to communicate with each other. This was particularly vexing for newly mobilized Russian troops who had just arrived at the front. Unfamiliar with the terrain, they often relied on their distant commanders to guide them, one kilometer at a time, across no-man’s-land.
They did this by connecting cameras to Starlink terminals and streaming forward-facing video so that commanders always saw what the assault troops saw. Remember when one Russian cavalry team — yes, you read that right — strapped a camera-Starlink combo to a horse? It was likely to aid navigation.
Without Starlink, assault groups got lost — and got wrecked by more experienced Ukrainian troops who still enjoyed strong connectivity. In one particularly dramatic skirmish, the better part of a Russian platoon riding in a single unarmored truck blundered into the path of the counterattacking Ukrainians near the town of Huliaipole. As many as 15 Russians died as Ukrainian drones, artillery, and infantry opened fire.
Again, redundancy is of utmost importance. When the loss of any single form of communication can lead to doom, you’d better have backup comms. It’s not for no reason that, according to CEPA contributor David Kirichenko, some Ukrainian drone units have heaped as many as 15 comms links onto a single robot.
Widespread loss of connectivity across multiple technologies could still be crippling, however. The solution is an old one: a concept called “mission command.” In mission command, the junior officers leading small infantry groups are expected to understand the mission and execute it entirely on their own without input from headquarters.
Only mission command is foolproof in an environment of comms denial. The Russians’ ongoing retreat amid their weeks-long comms meltdown is a sign they still haven’t mastered this.
For all their advantages, now that the Russians can’t reliably communicate, the Ukrainians have made modest gains. Yes, they’ve cleared Russian forces from hundreds of square kilometers. But that’s less than 0.1% of Ukraine — and barely 0.3% of the part of Ukraine under Russian occupation.
Long gone is the era when fast-moving mechanized forces could advance at a gallop, swiftly capturing thousands or tens of thousands of square kilometers in carefully orchestrated offensives. Satellites see every attempt to mass forces. Manned and unmanned air power, minefields and artillery complicate every attack. Even a comms meltdown on just one side of a 21st century land war probably won’t hand the other side a decisive advantage.
In that sense, land warfare has devolved by evolving. Satellites and drones have dragged us back to World War I, when armies routinely traded tens of thousands of lives to advance a kilometer. Everyone in leadership on either side of the East-West divide should expect every war to become a bloody, intractable grind. No matter how chaotic the enemy’s comms are.
David Axe is a journalist, author, and filmmaker in South Carolina. For 20 years, he has covered war for Forbes, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vice, The Village Voice, Voice of America, and others. He has reported from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere. Right now, he is focused on covering Russia’s wider war on Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
How Today’s Investments Will Shape Tomorrow’s Security
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
The post Sound of Silence — The Russian Military Comms Collapse appeared first on CEPA.
2026-02-28 01:09:29
Despite pouring vast resources into its defense sector and flooding the frontline with attack drones using Iranian and Chinese technology, Moscow still cannot match Kyiv’s heavy-lift capability. Putin was forced to admit his administration’s failure during his pre-Christmas TV broadcast.
“We are still short of heavy drones like the adversary’s Baba Yaga, but with respect to the number of drones, we are ahead of our adversary in almost all the segments of the frontline,” Putin said.
Ukraine’s Baba Yaga drones — the nickname for the heavy-lift class, and named after a witch in Slavic folklore — have served a vital role in the fighting, while smaller, mass-produced first-person-view (FPV), drones have taken the headlines.
Originally adapted from agricultural devices for spreading fertilizer, the heavy bombers perform numerous functions, from mining roads with anti-tank mines and resupplying soldiers to attacking Russian positions. Once near a target, within a few seconds, they can eliminate a group of soldiers by dropping several munitions in succession.
This heavy drone class includes models such as the Vampire and Kazhan, which are used on the frontline. Most have six or more large rotors and could originally carry about 15kg (33 lbs.) over distances of up to 20km (12 miles), but Ukrainian teams have gradually increased their capability.
Heavy lift multicopters have been developed that can carry as much as 40kg over 35-40km to resupply frontline units. Engineers are even working on a version that could evacuate wounded soldiers from the battlefield.
“Ukrainian ‘Vampire’ type heavy drones have a complementary role to FPVs,” said Roy Gardiner, an open-source weapons researcher and former Canadian officer. “While FPVs attack Russian logistics vehicles during the day, heavy drones attack the same vehicles at night by precision mining roads.”
At night, DJI Mavic drones with thermal cameras hunt for Russian soldiers, and once a large cluster is identified, the heavy bombers move in to drop explosives. The Vampire drone is also used to attack high-priority targets, such as Russian drone operators, when they are spotted.
“They’re both effective, but each has its nuances,” said Danylo Makarov, a drone pilot from Ukraine’s 108 Territorial Defense Brigade who has worked with both systems. “FPVs are more effective against pinpoint targets, where the scale of damage doesn’t matter but accuracy does.”
When it comes to hardened positions such as fortified bunkers, entrenched infantry, or reinforced structures, “a Vampire drone can drop a couple of TM-62 mines and take care of it,” Makarov said. But there are drawbacks: “It’s a big drone, bulky, and requires a crew. It’s harder to work with,” he added.
The Vampire heavy bomber was one of Ukraine’s most effective strike platforms during last year’s fighting. According to data presented at the Army of Drones 2025 event, and figures from the ePoints program, the system ranked at or near the top across several operational categories, including enemy casualties, the number of bomber strikes, and being the most ordered bomber system.
Since spring 2023, Vampire drones have carried out more than 2.5 million combat missions. Equipped with a GNSS antenna, a bispectral camera, and strong resistance to electronic warfare, they can operate both day and night.
SkyFall, the company behind the Vampire drone, said production capacity has doubled to as many as 100,000 units a year. Vulnerable foreign components have been replaced with domestic alternatives, and the company expects the drone to be fully Ukrainian-made by the end of this year.
Costs have also fallen sharply, to about $8,500 per drone compared to about $20,000 in 2022.
Russian forces have attempted a range of countermeasures, including attaching long sticks to FPV drones in an effort to intercept the bombers midair. In one engagement, a Ukrainian heavy drone under pursuit could be seen emitting a bright flash just as a Russian FPV closed in, overwhelming the attacker’s sensor so the operator momentarily lost visual contact.
In November, the development of a killer drone that could disable the Baba Yaga was reported in Russian media, reflecting how important and high profile the task of countering Kyiv’s heavy-lift superiority has become.
Russian pro-war Telegram channels have also acknowledged the scale of the problem. One Russian blogger known as “Military Manager” described Ukrainian heavy drones as “literally ubiquitous,” performing “a huge amount of incredibly important and complex work.”
He warned that the drones have become the “backbone” of Ukraine’s FPV operations by acting as aerial relay stations to extend the connectivity and effectiveness of smaller strike drones.
With the Russians lacking an equivalent heavy platform of their own, units often retrieve and repair downed Ukrainian drones for reuse. “We have captured Baba Yaga drones . . . Some crews use them to deliver provisions, ammunition, and fuel,” one Russian soldier told state media.
Moscow has blamed component shortages and the time required to localize production for its inability to keep up with Kyiv, according to Samuel Bendett, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
At the end of January, Russia’s Defense Ministry finally announced its first heavy-duty “Koschei” FPV drones had been assembled, tested, and prepared for delivery to frontline units.
While Russia has narrowed the gap, it has yet to replicate Ukraine’s success with heavy bombers. Moscow has often taken proven Ukrainian innovations and produced them on an industrial scale, but the heavy-lift segment has proved harder to copy.
David Kirichenko is a freelance journalist and an Associate Research Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society. He can be found on X/Twitter @DVKirichenko.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
How Today’s Investments Will Shape Tomorrow’s Security
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
The post Putin Exposed by Ukraine’s Wicked Witches appeared first on CEPA.
2026-02-27 02:50:40
The fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a solemn occasion for state TV’s propagandists. Their long faces gave away just how much things have changed.
On February 21, 2022, Margarita Simonyan, head of RT, a Kremlin propaganda outlet, demanded champagne in the studio and described her euphoria about the anticipated annexation of Ukraine.
In May of the same year, Vice Chairman of the State Duma Pyotr Tolstoy appeared on state television and relished the idea of drinking coffee in Kyiv before too long.
In 2026, thoughts of beverages would likely include taking notice of how much more expensive coffee and other everyday items have become back home.
Even the most enthusiastic pro-war cheerleaders can’t avoid talking about the beating the Russian economy has taken in recent years. Host Vladimir Solovyov, obsequiously described by Simonyan as the most influential propagandist in Russia, admitted that he is tired of talking about the economy and wondered out loud why other countries have more money than his warring Motherland.
During his TV and radio shows, he rails against inflation, high interest rates, and the lack of technical innovation — but never pins the blame on Vladimir Putin for starting the war that caused and compounded Russia’s woes.
Solovyov and other prominent talking heads have, throughout the intervening years, argued that Russia is poised to achieve a resounding victory. This triumph of hope over experience is unsurprising; these, after all, were the people whose confident pre-war predictions included promises that Ukrainians would welcome their invaders or quickly be crushed trying to repel them.
When neither of these scenarios panned out, Moscow’s mouthpieces claimed that US President Donald Trump would force Ukraine to capitulate by pulling American aid and intelligence.
This propensity to deny Ukraine’s agency and misread important participants led Russia to continually make badly flawed assumptions, and the population took notice. Leading propagandists complain that they are losing viewers and subscribers as the war grinds on, while they’re now forced to admit that it won’t end anytime soon.
During February 24’s broadcast of The Evening With Vladimir Solovyov, the host tried to cheer up his remaining viewers by focusing on Russia’s territorial gains. The title of the segment exposed the intended message with total clarity: “Special Military Operation is one of the Russian Army’s most successful military operations.” A recent US think tank report called Russian losses “extraordinary” and showed Russian forces were advancing at a slower rate than British soldiers at the notorious Battle of the Somme in 1916. Solovyov did not refer to these and similar findings, but argued that the West has been lying about Russia’s achievements and described it as “a war of narratives.”
He instead compared the ongoing invasion to the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to World War II, and boasted that Russia’s territorial gains exceeded those of the Soviet Union (they don’t). He rejoiced that since this war is not taking place on Russian territory, its losses are also significantly smaller than the estimated 27 million casualties experienced by the USSR. The broadcaster, like his colleagues, does not refer to Russian dead and wounded, but estimates often range from 1 million to 1.2 million, more than the losses in all the country’s post-World War II wars combined.
Solovyov claimed that Russia’s demographic gap was alleviated by millions of Ukrainians who he said immigrated to join their invaders, in addition to the people living in the occupied regions. Using this Orwellian math (and effectively claiming the supposed new arrivals outnumber nearly 1 million Russians who have left the country), he went on to argue that the Russian Federation hadn’t experienced a decline in its population due to its war against Ukraine, but that the opposite was true and that it had experienced population growth. Solovyov concluded his peroration by asserting: “Truth is simple.”
Likewise, the host asserted that Russia’s economy is in a much better shape than the USSR during World War II. He described how Russia’s military-industrial complex had grown during its “special military operation” and that this exceeds the expansion achieved by the Soviet Union. Solovyov said: “Objectively speaking, if we look solely at the numbers, this is one of the most successful military operations, if not the most successful military operation carried out by the Russian Army.” He urged everyone to ponder the wealth of mineral resources and land acquired by the Russian Federation during this war, in a bid to convince the struggling population that it was all worthwhile.
Nor was the good news at an end. Solovyov explained that the number of Russian traitors or collaborators was negligible compared to the Great Patriotic War. He urged viewers to disregard Western reporting that downplays Russia’s successes and highlights its losses.
Solovyov’s grim-faced guests stood around in an awkward silence, most of them staring down, but they understood the assignment. Political scientist Dmitry Kulikov claimed that Russia’s armed forces have been advancing nonstop since 2023. “Who would have believed it?” he asked of this manifest untruth.
Professor Stanislav Tkachenko, who heads the diplomacy program at the St. Petersburg State University, chimed in with this claim: “The absence of European unity is perhaps one of the most important diplomatic results of the special military operation.”
This statement was nothing more than wishful thinking, because one of the most consistent lessons of the last four years is that Europe has continued to fund and arm Ukraine, despite the best efforts of the Kremlin and its allies.
Julia Davis is a columnist for The Daily Beast and the creator of the Russian Media Monitor. She is a member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the Screen Actors Guild, and Women In Film.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
How Today’s Investments Will Shape Tomorrow’s Security
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
The post The War? Getting Better and Better, Say Kremlin Mouthpieces appeared first on CEPA.
2026-02-26 23:39:13
A meter-tall kamikaze drone stood on display like jewelry. Nobody stared at it too long, yet everyone stared long enough. A distinctly new, European security-era ambiance surrounded the event, one of many in town during the 2026 Munich Security Conference.
The host was Stark Defence, a German drone manufacturer that only a few years ago would have struggled to secure a bank meeting and would have lived on the margins of policy conferences, a curiosity for engineers. Now it’s hosting government ministers, investors, and senior military officers.
That was the atmosphere that framed much of the 2026 Munich conference. The MSC’s formal program still spoke the language of alliances and reassurance, yet the conversations around it had changed. A year earlier, participants tried to interpret signals from the Trump administration, including controversial remarks by Vice President JD Vance.
This year, there were far fewer comments on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s more mildly worded explanation of Trump administration policy. The prevailing view, rarely stated on stage but common in private, was that the US has abandoned its post-Cold War role as continental security guarantor.
Whether reality follows the rhetoric is a separate matter. The adjustment needed for Europe to act alone is uncomfortable for Europeans, because it collides with another reality. At the operational level, they cannot separate from the United States even if they wanted to.
Military capabilities still depend on American enablers, and quick replacements are unfeasible. Cybersecurity systems and hyperscalers largely rely on American firms. Energy markets are being quietly rewired with US oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) replacing Russian pipeline supplies. Financial and technologicalinfrastructure connect daily governance to systems developed and maintained across the Atlantic. These cannot be rapidly changed.
What is happening is thus less a withdrawal and more a rebalancing. The US is reducing guarantees while expanding influence in domains that matter more each year; areas like technology, finance, and energy. At the same time, individual European states are encouraged to manage key relationships bilaterally.
Every capital has reasons to do so. Each deal promises efficiency. And yet, taken together, they erode the collective leverage the EU has painstakingly tried to build, for example, through joint gas procurement.
The resulting risk is not a dramatic rupture but slow fragmentation. Rational national decisions accumulate into continental weakness. And European institutions are unprepared for this.
Take the EU, which has built an extraordinary capacity to regulate markets and coordinate policy. It has much less experience of a world organized around hard power competition, notwithstanding its efforts to become “geopolitical”.
That was clear at the inaugural meeting of President Trump’s “Board of Peace”, where the presence of a European commissioner started a firefight between the EU’s executive and several member states and political parties. Agreement on how to navigate this new world is proving difficult to find.
What makes the moment more complex is that change is occurring on several levels simultaneously.
At the technological level, influence flows through infrastructure, not declarations. Cloud systems, satellite networks, artificial intelligence platforms, and cybersecurity architecture shape sovereignty in ways treaties cannot easily capture. Dependence becomes technical before it becomes political.
At the environmental level, weather extremes intensify every vulnerability. Energy stability, migration, infrastructure resilience, and disaster response increasingly overlap with security policy. As one senior German energy industry representative told me, climate pressures have become his foremost operational concern, precisely because their unpredictability makes them difficult to quantify, even more so than the investments required to harden the German grid against wartime risk. Crises interact rather than follow one another.
Because these layers reinforce each other, the challenge facing Europe is not layered. It is systemic. Fragmented procurement weakens industrial capacity. Technological dependence narrows political choice. Environmental shocks test both simultaneously.
At the national level, governments are relearning the practice of hedging. Alliances remain essential but are no longer treated as permanent conditions. Planning increasingly includes scenarios once considered implausible. Think of Poland, which is simultaneously seeking a connection to NATO’s western pipeline system while rallying others in its region who often share a stronger interest in countering Russia than many in Western or Southern Europe.
The essential question now is whether Europe can avoid drifting into a pattern where each state seeks its own accommodation with the big powers, or even Russia, while the collective position dissolves. Preventing that requires unity to operate in practice, shared procurement, coordinated infrastructure, integrated defense planning and intelligence sharing, and common industrial priorities that make cooperation the default rather than the exception.
The harder adjustment is mental.
Recognition of a problem is not a plan to fix it. For decades, the end-of-history mindset in Warsaw, Berlin, and even Paris treated geopolitics as an occasional interruption to an order shaped by law and interdependence. The surrounding world now treats interdependence as leverage.
And there I was on a Munich terrace, staring at a European-made drone carrying a 5kg (11 lb.) explosive warhead, surrounded by a new generation of arms sellers only recently derided as merchants of death. A sector once considered morally ambiguous and politically peripheral has become a necessary commonplace.
Munich did not reveal a Europe in denial. It revealed a continent facing a dilemma that it understands but cannot yet resolve.
Maciej Filip Bukowski is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw, and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
How Today’s Investments Will Shape Tomorrow’s Security
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
The post Europe Stops Pretending appeared first on CEPA.
