For some time, rhetoric toward Türkiye has been building across multiple fronts -- at times critical, and in some cases even adversarial. While these strands often appear disconnected, they converge at the geopolitical level around a common effect: increasing friction with a country that has consistently contributed to international stability across NATO missions, from Afghanistan to the Balkans -- effectively drawing it into a dynamic of sustained antagonism. More recently, some of these lines have moved beyond criticism of Türkiye itself to challenge the structural foundations of Euro-Atlantic defense, extending into assumptions that risk weakening the allied cohesion in NATO.
These approaches overlook several hard constraints. The first is a basic military balance, visible in open-source defense data: absent the combat capacity of Türkiye -- as well as Ukraine -- the defense of Europe and the security of the Euro-Atlantic space become technically strained.
War is, at its core, about numbers -- mass, readiness, and deployable combat power. Recent remarks by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy reinforce the point. Zelenskyy warned that Europe’s defense would face serious vulnerabilities without contributions from Türkiye, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and Norway -- none of them members of the EU.
By contrast, comments attributed to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission -- that “Europe cannot be left to Turkish, Russian, or Chinese influence” -- illustrate a different tendency: political framing that risks drifting from operational realities. The issue is not diplomatic rhetoric per se, but the gap it can open between military-strategic requirements to defend Europe and unrealistic, narrow Euro-centric public positioning.
Zelenskyy, a wartime leader operating under continuous missile and drone salvos even from his presidential office, does not have the luxury of political daydreaming, at all. His perspective is shaped by immediate military constraints rather than political signaling. Early in the invasion, as Kyiv came under direct threat and some Western voices urged the Ukrainian government to evacuate the capital, several European nations initially limited their support to non-lethal aid, such as helmets and body armor. In that same period, Bayraktar TB-2 drones were already conducting effective combat sorties against Russian platforms. The contrast underscored a mere fact: combat-ready capability, not narrative, sets the terms of defense planning when strategic imperatives harden.
The political divergence between the White House and Brussels is widening, making Europe’s reliance on non-EU actors of the continent more visible, not less. Estimates indicate that replacing the capabilities the US currently fields in Europe would require on the order of $1 trillion in long-term investment [1]. In 2025, NATO’s European members spent roughly $500 billion on defense; the aggregate outlays of EU members alone remain below that broader NATO-Europe benchmark, underscoring a persistent gap between ambition and capacity.
More critically, the picture grows more constrained when assessed in terms of combat-deployable deterrence. As of 2024, nearly half of EU member states are reported to field neither fighter aircraft nor main battle tanks in meaningful inventories [2]. At the high-end, EU members also lack sufficient quantities of key strategic enablers required for combat operations at scale -- AWACS platforms, aerial refueling tankers, space-based ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance), and long-endurance unmanned systems -- remaining heavily reliant on American-provided capabilities within the NATO framework. Europe faces additional shortfalls in integrated air and missile defense, counter-drone architectures, and in deep-strike assets, including tactical ballistic missile capabilities able to hit an adversary’s rear area -- requirements underscored by the operational realities of the Russia-Ukraine war.
A more severe political crisis along the American administration-Brussels axis is not required for Europe’s predicaments to deepen or for its reliance on non-EU actors, such as Türkiye and Ukraine, to grow. The timeline outlined by Admiral Philip Davidson -- widely referred to as the “Davidson Window”-- identifies 2027 as a potential threshold for a Chinese move against Taiwan. In such a contingency, European security would likely rank below Indo-Pacific priorities in American force-generation. At the same time, the ongoing conflict in the Middle East is placing additional demands on US resource allocation. Taken together, these pressures suggest a more constrained American role in Europe at precisely the moment European requirements are expanding.
The near future may hold considerable risks for the Euro-Atlantic system. Danish intelligence assessments, for example, point to a deteriorating outlook. Particularly, under conditions in which the war in Ukraine is frozen and American engagement in European security declines, Russia could be positioned to launch a large-scale campaign on the continent within approximately five years [3]. Similar assessments have been echoed by other Western intelligence services and political leaders.
NATO’s principal framework for such a contingency is the NATO Force Model (NFM). Built around a tiered readiness structure, the NFM envisages eventually generating a roughly 500,000-strong force within 180 days tops -- an effort without precedent in the Alliance’s history. On the European continent, few actors match the land power mass and recent combat experience of Russian forces in the Moscow and Leningrad military districts, or the formations operating in occupied Ukraine. The Turkish and Ukrainian militaries stand out in both scale and combat-readiness.
This raises a direct question: to what extent have alternative military concepts -- those prioritizing EU-centric defense arrangements, excluding Türkiye, leaving Ukraine out in the cold, or assuming a diminished role for NATO and American combat formations -- been thoroughly war-gamed in EU circles in Brussels? If Danish projections materialize, can EU capabilities alone generate comparable operational mass without Türkiye, or without a NATO framework underpinned by the US’ warfighting edge?
Distinctive military characteristics in Türkiye and Ukraine merit attention. In several areas, both are approaching critical capability thresholds. For example, the Bayraktar TB-3 drone autonomously launched from the amphibious assault ship TCG Anadolu during NATO’s Steadfast Dart 2026 exercise, engaging targets with Roketsan’s MAM-L precision munitions. In April, the same platform struck a moving unmanned surface vessel during a national exercise. Meanwhile, Ukrainian forces -- likely employing a Magura USV under the Unmanned Systems Command -- reportedly intercepted a Russian-Iranian Shahed drone in mid-air using an interceptor drone.
The operational implication is straightforward: setting aside the US, how many European allies can replicate these concepts of employment today? How many could field comparable capabilities within the next year? And on what timeline could the European Union as a whole close that gap?
Certain constraints sit, or should sit, above politically-driven debates. The grammar of military power is unforgiving: defense architectures that exclude Türkiye, non-EU NATO nations, or Ukraine; and rest on assumptions of European strategic autonomy are structurally insufficient -- they will neither deter a credible threat to Europe nor prevail if deterrence fails.
[1] Ben Barry, et.al. Defending Europe Without the United States: Costs and Consequences, IISS, 2025.
[2] Camille Grand, “Defending Europe with Less America”, European Council on Foreign Relations, Temmuz 2024.
[3] Opdateret vurdering af truslen fra Rusland mod Rigsfællesskabet, https://www.fe-ddis.dk/globalassets/fe/dokumenter/2025/trusselsvurderinger/-20250209_opdateret_vurdering_af_truslen_fra_rusland_mod--.pdf, 2025.
*Opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Anadolu
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