If Europe fails this moment, the consequences will be measured in far more than drone wreckage
When 19 Russian drones strayed into Polish skies on Wednesday morning, they were not just testing Warsaw’s air defences. They were probing Europe’s strategic nerve.
The incursion was contained – jets scrambled, drones downed, consultations under NATO’s Article 4 requested. But the episode was a reminder that the continent is increasingly on the front line of a geopolitical storm, and that its response is still tentative.
Moscow’s drones were a low-cost provocation, but their significance lies in what they revealed. Russia has grown adept at using grey-zone tactics – cyberattacks, disinformation, energy blackmail, and now aerial harassment – to stretch Western attention and probe for weakness. Poland is not Ukraine: it is both an European Union and NATO member. That Vladimir Putin’s regime feels able to risk such a stunt is telling.
It is also awkwardly timed. On the other side of the Atlantic, Donald Trump is still casting doubt on America’s security guarantees. His studied indifference to the Polish incursion, brushing it off as “perhaps a mistake,” only deepens Europe’s sense of vulnerability.
A view from a transport military plane shows Russian airborne combat vehicles descending beneath parachutes during the previous ‘Zapad-2021’ military exercises staged by the armed forces of Russia and Belarus in Kaliningrad Region, Russia, in September 2021 (Photo: Vitaly Nevar/Reuters)
That Trump rolled out the red carpet to Putin in Alaska last month is seen as a humiliation to Europe. It also came on the back of the EU’s “surrender deal” with the US in July, when it meekly accepted a one-sided tariff deal with Trump. Nor is Britain exempt from such coercion: its own deal in May was no better.
Europeans have long fretted that American protection could not be assumed forever; now they face the reality of its unreliability under Trump’s transactional administration. For Russia, the ambiguity is useful. For Europe, it is dangerous.
Russia is hardly the only concern. China looms as both economic partner and systemic rival, able to squeeze Europe through its grip on critical raw materials and technologies. EU officials talk of “de-risking” from Beijing, but European unity is patchy. Berlin’s carmakers remain wedded to the Chinese market; southern economies fret about antagonising their biggest non-Western investor.
Meanwhile, Europe’s house is not in order. Its economy has been stuttering for the past two decades and is still unable to complete the single market promised in the 1980s in areas like banking, energy and defence. National budgets remain constrained, industrial policy fragmented, procurement splintered. “Strategic autonomy” remains more slogan than structure.
Nonetheless, when European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen delivered her State of the Union address just hours after the Russian drones were shot down, she was more strident than usual, warning that Europe is in “A fight for our values and our democracies” and asking, “Does Europe have the stomach for this fight?”
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen meets with US President Donald Trump at Trump Turnberry golf club on July 27, 2025 in Turnberry, Scotland (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
She is echoed by politicians, who urge the EU and NATO to move quickly in the face of a fast-changing world. “We face an existential threat,” says Valerie Hayer, an MEP and key ally of French President Emmanuel Macron. “The world is reorganising before our eyes, and global powers want to marginalise us. Russia is at the EU’s borders. This new world is hostile to us.”
There are signs that Europe is moving: NATO members agreed in June to spend 3.5 per cent of GDP on core defence spending. And they are backed by the public: opinion polls show that four in five Europeans want a common defence and security policy.
But it is still slow, and many bemoan the deference still paid to the US. “Europe’s role on the world stage clearly can no longer just be that of most loyal ally of the US,” says Sven Biscop, a director at Egmont, a Brussels think tank. “The EU needs to decide what its role is, build up strength and thus autonomy, and then use the leverage that it does have to act.”
Key tests loom: can governments deliver on their defence pledges while maintaining other priorities on, say, climate? Are they ready to assume more responsibility as Washington recedes from the European stage?
In her speech this week, von der Leyen seemed aware that Europe’s drift is no longer tolerable. If the continent is serious about its security, it must complete the single market, spend collectively and coherently on defence, and harden itself against both Russia’s aggression and China’s leverage.
If Europe fails this moment, the consequences will be measured in far more than drone wreckage.