There is a passage in a speech delivered by a German chancellor in 1990 that I keep returning to. It speaks of a Europe whole and free, of a peace dividend that would allow democratic societies to redirect resources from weapons to welfare, of a new security architecture that would make large standing armies unnecessary. The speech is eloquent and the vision it describes was genuinely held by most of a generation of European political leaders. It was also, we now know, built on a set of assumptions about Russian behaviour that turned out to be catastrophically wrong.

I do not want to be glib about this. The instinct that drove European defence budgets below two percent of GDP for thirty years was not laziness or naivety alone. It was also a considered bet that the costs of maintaining large military establishments — in money, in political culture, in the risk of making conflict more rather than less likely — outweighed the benefits in an environment where the Soviet threat had dissolved and no comparable threat had replaced it. That bet looked reasonable for twenty years. The invasion of Ukraine in 2022 revealed it as a bet that was always contingent on factors outside European control.

What frustrates me about the current European defence debate is not the pace of spending increases, which has been faster than most observers expected. It is the persistent framing of rearmament as a regrettable necessity that polite societies should hasten to reverse as soon as conditions allow. This framing misunderstands what deterrence requires. Deterrence is not a temporary expedient. It is a permanent feature of a world in which states have conflicting interests and the capacity to pursue those interests by force. Treating it as a temporary expedient is precisely what allowed the conditions that made 2022 possible.

The European countries that have understood this most clearly — Poland, Finland, the Baltic states — are the ones that share a border with Russia or have recent historical experience of what Russian power means in practice. Their urgency is not warmongering. It is memory functioning as it should.

The rest of Europe is getting there. It needs to get there faster, and it needs to get there with a clearer understanding that what it is building is not temporary. The luxury of cultivated military weakness was pleasant while it lasted. It is over.