Plain Sight

Part 2: Three Strategic Pathways and the Closing Window

By Publius (of the 21st Century)

This is Part 2 of a two-part analysis. Part 1 examined the collapse of NATO, Europe's power asymmetries, and why France-UK-Germany alignment cannot form quickly enough to address the immediate crisis. Part 2 examines concrete strategic options that remain available—if Europe has the political courage to pursue them.

Beyond Performative Protest: Three Concrete Strategic Options

Part 1 painted a bleak picture: Europe cannot respond militarily, cannot unify politically, and cannot align its major powers quickly enough. But this assessment assumes Europe remains trapped in its current strategic framework—attempting to preserve the transatlantic order while lacking the capability to do so.
What if Europe abandons that framework entirely? What if, instead of seeking to restore American protection or forge autonomous military capability on American timelines, Europe pursues asymmetric strategies that exploit American vulnerabilities?

Three options exist that are politically achievable, economically powerful, and strategically disruptive. None requires immediate military buildup. All require political courage to break with Atlanticist orthodoxy. And all must be executed within a narrow window before geopolitical conditions foreclose these possibilities.

Option 1: Playing the “China Card” — The Economic Pivot
Europe possesses a $19 trillion economy—comparable to the United States and far larger than Russia's or any individual Asian power. This economic mass is leverage. The question is whether Europe has the political will to use it.

The Mechanism

The 2025 NSS explicitly seeks to force Europe into “sole-source contracts” with U.S. firms, excluding Chinese competitors from European markets in critical sectors: telecommunications (5G/6G), semiconductors, AI systems, electric vehicles, battery production, and green energy infrastructure. The NSS frames this as “burden-shifting”—forcing allies to pay premium prices for American technology while foreclosing alternatives.

Europe plays the “China card” by refusing this exclusivity. Instead of treating Chinese technology as a security threat (the American framing), Europe treats it as market competition. By keeping European markets open to Chinese investment and technology, Europe forces the United States to compete for European market access rather than demanding it as tribute.

Strategic Leverage

If Europe aligns its regulatory standards with Chinese systems—or creates a third standard compatible with both but controlled by neither—it breaks the U.S. technological containment strategy. The United States cannot afford to lose the entire European market to Beijing. This makes Washington's threat of abandonment less credible because American firms depend on European consumers, industrial partners, and research collaboration.

The risk, of course, is Chinese technological dependency replacing American dependency. But dependency on two competing powers is qualitatively different from dependency on one hegemon. Europe gains bargaining leverage by making both the United States and China compete for European alignment. This is classic non-aligned movement strategy applied to the 21st-century technological domain.

Political Feasibility

This is the most politically achievable option because it does not require constitutional change, defense budget increases, or public mobilization. It requires only that European regulatory bodies—which already possess significant autonomy—refuse American demands for Chinese exclusion.

Germany's automotive industry already operates Chinese production lines and battery technology. France has attracted Chinese investment in green energy. Italy participates in Belt and Road Initiative projects. The infrastructure for economic non-alignment already exists. What's missing is political coordination to resist American pressure.

The Greenland crisis provides the justification. If the United States annexes the territory of a NATO ally, European leaders can credibly argue that blind Atlanticism is no longer tenable. Economic diversification becomes not betrayal but prudence.

Option 2: Open-Source AI vs. Closed-Source Technological Serfdom

The 2025 NSS lists maintaining U.S. dominance in artificial intelligence and enforcing “U.S. standards” as core strategic interests. This is not about innovation—it is about control. Proprietary AI systems function as technological serfdom: Europe pays for access to intelligence it cannot inspect, modify, or control.

The Dependency Trap

American AI systems (dominated by firms like OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic) operate as black boxes. European industries—automotive, pharmaceutical, defense, logistics—integrate these systems into critical infrastructure without understanding their decision-making processes, data handling, or vulnerability to remote manipulation.

This creates multiple dependencies:

— Operational dependency: European industries cannot function without American AI services
— Data dependency: Sensitive European industrial and personal data flows to American servers subject to U.S. legal jurisdiction
— Strategic dependency: The United States can “switch off” European AI access through export controls, sanctions, or simply service denial

The NSS explicitly intends this outcome. Technological dependency ensures European subordination even without military occupation.

The Open-Source Alternative

China has pursued a different model: open-source AI development that creates accessible ecosystems specifically to dilute U.S. hegemony. Models like DeepSeek, open-weight large language models, and transparent training datasets allow any actor to build sovereign AI infrastructure without dependency on proprietary American systems.

Europe should adopt and extend this approach—not by copying Chinese systems, but by building European open-source AI infrastructure. This means:
— Sovereign compute clusters: European data centers running European-controlled AI models
— Open-weight development: Transparent models that European researchers and firms can inspect, modify, and deploy without licensing restrictions
Interoperable standards: Systems designed to work with both Chinese and American platforms while controlled by neither
— France's Mistral AI represents a start, but is still insufficient. What i's required is coordinated European investment in open-source AI at scale—matching or exceeding American proprietary development budgets.

Strategic Impact

This neutralizes American ability to “switch off” European economic or defense systems. It also makes European AI infrastructure attractive to Global South nations seeking alternatives to both American and Chinese dominance. Europe becomes a technological pole rather than a vassal.

Timeline

AI infrastructure can be built faster than conventional military capability. With aggressive investment, Europe could establish sovereign AI systems within 3-5 years—precisely the window before Russia reconstitutes offensive capability (see Option 4). This is achievable if treated as strategic priority equivalent to Cold War space programs.

Option 3: The Ukrainian Asymmetric Advantage — AI-Based Drone Warfare

While Ukraine has suffered enormously, its defense capabilities have transformed in ways that fundamentally alter European strategic calculations. As C.J. Chivers documents in his December 31, 2025 New York Times article “The Dawn of the A.I. Drone,” Ukrainian forces have pioneered AI-based autonomous drone warfare that represents a potential game-changer for European defense.

The Capability Gap That Ukraine Fills

Europe's conventional military weakness—depleted ammunition stocks, slow procurement, limited industrial base—makes symmetrical competition with either Russia or the United States impossible. But AI-driven drone warfare is asymmetric. It does not require the massive industrial infrastructure of traditional armaments. It requires:
— Rapid prototyping and iteration (Ukraine's wartime innovation model)
— Software development and AI integration (European tech capacity)
— Commercial off-the-shelf components (globally available)
— Distributed production (resilient to targeting)

Ukraine has developed precisely these capabilities under combat conditions. Ukrainian drone manufacturers produce thousands of units monthly using 3D printing, commercial electronics, and open-source flight control systems. More critically, they have integrated AI targeting, autonomous swarm coordination, and adaptive countermeasures—technologies that neutralize much of Russia's conventional advantage.

Integration into European Defense

A European security architecture that integrates Ukrainian drone warfare expertise gains several strategic advantages:
Immediate capability: Unlike conventional rearmament (which takes years), drone production can scale rapidly. Ukraine's industrial model can be replicated across Europe within months.
Cost asymmetry: AI drones cost thousands of dollars but can destroy targets worth millions—tanks, artillery, command posts, logistics nodes. This inverts the cost-exchange ratio that has historically favored large militaries.
Deterrence credibility: Russia's military reconstitution assumes it will face the same European weaknesses it exploited in 2022. A Europe armed with tens of thousands of AI-coordinated drones presents an entirely different threat calculus.
Technological sovereignty: Drone warfare technology can be developed independently of American systems. Ukraine has demonstrated this by necessity—European adoption would extend that independence.

The Political-Military Framework

Integrating Ukraine into a European defense structure accomplishes multiple objectives:

(1) Secures Ukrainian capability: Ensures Ukrainian military innovation continues even if U.S. support ends
(2) Provides European asymmetric deterrence: Makes Russian conventional superiority less decisive
(3) Bypasses Franco-German-British alignment paralysis: Poland, the Baltics, and Nordic states can integrate with Ukraine directly, creating an eastern defense axis that does not depend on Western European consensus
(4) Accelerates timeline: Drone warfare capacity can be operational within 1-2 years, not the 5-10 years conventional rearmament requires

The Open Question

This option requires European powers—especially Germany and France—to accept Ukraine as a full security partner, not merely an aid recipient. It requires treaty-level commitments to joint defense production, technology sharing, and mutual defense guarantees. It requires treating Ukrainian military innovation as a strategic asset rather than a wartime expedient.

The question is whether European political culture can overcome its instinct to view Ukraine as a problem requiring management rather than a capability offering leverage. If Europe fails to integrate Ukrainian drone warfare expertise, Russia will eventually neutralize it—and Europe will have squandered its most significant asymmetric advantage.

Option 4: The Russia Recovery Window — A Closing Opportunity

The timeline for European strategic action is not indefinite. A specific window exists, defined by Russian military exhaustion and reconstitution timelines. If Europe does not act within this window, the opportunity forecloses permanently.

Current Phase: Russian Exhaustion

Russia's military is currently degraded by three years of high-intensity warfare in Ukraine. Equipment losses, personnel casualties, ammunition depletion, and economic strain have reduced Russian offensive capability to levels not seen since the 1990s. The 2025 NSS seeks an “expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” precisely to “reestablish strategic stability”—meaning to allow Russia to recover while redirecting American focus to China and the Western Hemisphere.

The Reconstitution Timeline

Military analysts estimate 5-10 years for a major power to reconstitute a shattered land army to pre-war proficiency. This requires:
— Rebuilding equipment stocks (tanks, artillery, aircraft)
— Training new personnel to replace casualties
— Reconstituting command structures
— Restoring ammunition production and logistics
— Recovering economically from sanctions and war costs

Russia will emerge from this process with lessons learned from Ukraine: improved tactics, modernized systems, and clear understanding of NATO weaknesses. The reconstituted Russian military will be more dangerous than the force that invaded Ukraine in 2022.

The Strategic Trap

The American strategy attempts to freeze the conflict now to achieve two objectives:

(a) Free Russia to serve as a counterbalance to China
(b) Free American resources to focus on the Western Hemisphere (Greenland, Panama, Venezuela)

If Europe does not unify its defense and economic structures within the 5-year Russian recovery window, it will face a reconstituted Russian threat without American protection. This is not hypothetical—it is the explicit logic of the 2025 NSS.

The Greenland annexation accelerates this timeline by demonstrating that NATO is already dead. If Denmark cannot rely on alliance protection against the United States itself, no European state can rely on alliance protection against Russia.

What Europe Must Do Within the Window

The 5-year timeline is non-negotiable. Within this period, Europe must:

(1) Integrate Ukrainian drone warfare capacity into a European defense production system
(2) Deploy open-source AI infrastructure immune to American cutoff
(3) Leverage the China card to break exclusive U.S. technological dependence
(4) Federalize critical defense production: Harmonize procurement, standardize equipment, integrate supply chains
(5) Establish minimal command integration: Joint operational coordination for drone warfare and air defense (achievable faster than full conventional force integration)
(6) Expand industrial capacity: Scale drone production, ammunition manufacturing, air defense systems
(7) Extend French nuclear deterrence through binding treaties (even if limited to specific scenarios)

This is revolutionary transformation compressed into a brief window. It requires treating European security as an existential crisis—which it is.

The Closing Window

If Europe fails to act within this window, the outcome is foreordained. Russia recovers offensive capability. The United States continues withdrawing security guarantees. European states, unable to defend themselves individually and unable to coordinate collectively, negotiate separate accommodations with Moscow and Washington. European unity fractures. Strategic autonomy becomes impossible.

The window exists now because Russia is exhausted and the American betrayal is undeniable. In five years, neither condition will obtain. Russia will have recovered. European publics will have normalized American domination. The possibility of independent European action will have passed.

The Integration of Options: A Coherent Strategy

These options are not alternatives—they are components of a single strategic framework.
The China card provides economic leverage to resist American coercion without requiring military confrontation. It breaks Europe's exclusive dependence on American technology and capital.
Open-source AI provides technological sovereignty, ensuring that European industries and defense systems cannot be remotely disabled by American export controls or service denial.
Ukrainian drone warfare provides immediate asymmetric military capability that does not require the decade-long conventional rearmament Europe cannot achieve.
The Russia recovery window provides the timeline within which these options must be executed. After Russian reconstitution, Europe faces threats on two fronts without the capability to defend itself. The window for building that capability is now.

Politically, these options are more feasible than immediate massive military buildup or rapid France-UK-Germany alignment because they do not require:

— Constitutional amendments
— Massive defense budget increases that trigger domestic political backlash (drone warfare is cost-effective)
— Surrender of national sovereignty to supranational command structures
— Public mobilization for military service

They require only:

— Regulatory courage to resist American technological exclusivity demands
— Investment in European AI infrastructure (substantial but economically viable)
— Integration of Ukrainian military innovation into European production
— Political coordination among European leaders to treat the 5-year window as a hard deadline

The Greenland crisis provides the political justification for all four. If European leaders lack the courage to exploit this justification now—when American betrayal is undeniable—they will never find it.

Conclusion: The Tragedy of Hesitation

The tragedy is not that Europe lacks options. The tragedy is that Europe has four concrete strategic pathways—economic leverage through the China card, technological sovereignty through open-source AI, military asymmetry through Ukrainian drone warfare, and a 5-year window to execute before Russian reconstitution—and will almost certainly fail to pursue any of them.

The obstacles are not material. They are psychological and political. European leaders remain psychologically trapped in Atlanticist frameworks even as those frameworks collapse. They continue treating American demands as legitimate even after territorial annexation of a NATO ally. They prioritize fiscal orthodoxy over existential security. They refuse to communicate honestly with their populations about costs, timelines, and trade-offs.

Germany, in particular, cannot escape its guilt-pride paralysis. It will not accept Ukrainian military partnership as equal collaboration. It will not defy American technological exclusivity demands. It will not invest in open-source AI at necessary scale. It will not subordinate fiscal rules to security imperatives.

France will not extend nuclear deterrence without guarantees no one can provide. Britain will not rupture Five Eyes unless forced. Eastern Europe will not trust Western Europe's commitment. The EU will not transform into a strategic actor because transformation requires surrendering the illusion of consensus.

The four options outlined above remain available. But the political will to execute them does not exist. And in five years, when Russia has recovered and the United States has fully withdrawn, Europeans will ask themselves why they did not act when they had the chance.

The answer, tragically, is already clear: because acting would have required admitting that the comfortable assumptions of the postwar era were illusions. And illusions, once cherished, are harder to abandon than territory.

Reference:
 Chivers, C.J. (2025, December 31). “The Dawn of the A.I. Drone.” The New York Times.

End of Part 2