Shashank Joshi is defence editor of the UK magazine The Economist, a former member of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London and currently serves on its advisory board. He also lectures at the UK Defence College and King’s College London.
In an interview with Al-Ahram Weekly, he discussed the growing concerns in Europe regarding the actions of the US Trump administration and the options available to European decision-makers as they consider the future of Europe’s security.
How would you describe the policy of US President Donald Trump and its impact on international security and US superpower status?
I think that what we see in the United States today is a series of cacophonous voices with different views on foreign policy. For instance, to take Ukraine policy, we have one camp that believes America needs to put pressure on Russia to secure a balanced and sustainable agreement to end the conflict in Ukraine. And you might put people like [Secretary of State] Marco Rubio, [National Security Adviser] Mike Waltz, and John Ratcliffe, the Director of the CIA in that camp.
On the other side, you have what you might call the Mar-a-Lago Camp, the people associated with President Trump’s golf club in Florida. Those would be people like Steve Witkoff, his envoy for numerous issues, and [Homeland Security Adviser] Stephen Miller in the White House, who are much more unorthodox voices and believe that America has become overextended in the world and who effectively would like America to retrench back to the United States and the continental United States.
But on other issues, we also have voices that are in between. For instance, you have voices who you might be put under the category of being so-called prioritisers who believe that America should do less in Europe but ought to do more in Asia. These are not isolationist voices by any stretch of the imagination. But they are voices that I think would be quite radical towards existing US foreign policy.
So, I think that it’s a mistake to talk about American foreign policy right now as if it is a singular, coherent thing. In a way, American foreign policy is, to use a term from biology or computer science, an emergent property of these debates taking place in quite a chaotic system that is not operating according to the familiar structured process of an interagency system that we are accustomed to in the United States, whether that is Ukraine policy, whether that’s Iran policy, whether that is Taiwan policy.
I think you see these discordant contradictory voices vying for the attention of the president vying for dominance in the policy making process. And that’s why we see policy swinging between these extremes on so many issues today.
What is the effect of the Trump administration’s policies towards US allies on the Western alliance represented by NATO?
I think you can see that we’re in a moment of profound, maybe existential, doubt in Europe. And to take an example of that, look at the comments made by Friedrich Merz, Germany’s Chancellor-elect, the day he was elected as Germany’s next likely leader. He expressed doubt, or he asked the question, of whether NATO would exist in its current form even by the time of the leaders’ summit in The Hague in June. This was the leader of Europe’s biggest economy, its biggest military spender, asking out loud in public whether NATO will exist by June.
On balance, the European countries believe that America is not going to pull out its forces from Europe unexpectedly or suddenly, not least because that would require the acquiescence of Congress. And Congress, of course, has a much more traditional voice to it. But I believe they are concerned that if an Article Five situation were to arise, such as a Russian attack on a member of NATO in Eastern Europe, there would be the question of whether Trump would come to the aid of Europeans or whether he would seek to force a compromise or settlement onto his allies in the same way that he has done for Ukraine.
What you are seeing is a frenetic rush in Europe to spend more on defence and to think about the future of European defence, not only to prove to Trump that the Europeans are serious, but also to hedge against the possibility that he simply abandons Europe. The preference is that this be done in a staged, managed, and orderly way, a transition that is negotiated with the United States. But the Europeans are, I think, preparing for a world in which it is a disorderly withdrawal from Europe. And they certainly have not ruled that out yet.
If the parties involved in the Ukrainian conflict reach a ceasefire, how would you describe the outcome of the conflict? Is it relevant to discuss victory in this situation, and which party has an advantage?
It’s very difficult to talk about clear winners and losers. I think that, on the one hand, Russia would have captured significant amounts of Ukraine and would have become the first country to change borders by force of arms in Europe since 1945, if you exclude the Yugoslav wars. And depending on the nature of a peace deal, it could result in a deal that leaves Ukraine with limited or no security guarantees and vulnerable to Russian invasion in the future.
However, I don’t think that means we can say that Russia has won, because fundamentally Russia will still have lost and destroyed its army, destroyed a generation of officers, destroyed its economy, increased its dependence on China, will have failed in its original goals of conquering Kyiv, will have failed to capture any major Ukrainian city in two and a half years, and will have prompted the expansion of NATO to include Finland and Sweden in a conflict that was designed to push NATO further away.
My answer is this: the degree to which Russia wins or loses this war will be largely determined by the nature of a peace deal, the restraints that it imposes on Ukraine, the level of security guarantees it gives Ukraine, and ultimately whether it leaves Ukraine in long-term position to defend itself. So, in other words, whether Russia can capitalise on a weak Ukraine after a deal, or whether Ukraine can in fact use that time more effectively to rearm, defend itself, and prevent any future Russian invasion whilst Ukraine integrates with the European Union and with the West. So, in a way, I think that the winner or loser of this war is not going to be known for many years to come. We’re going to have to see what the future brings. And that’s a very unsatisfying answer, but I think it’s the only honest one.
Can Europe build the long-discussed European NATO or autonomous defence system in isolation from the US? In other words, can it reestablish its own deterrence?
Well, Europe is a large and wealthy continent that has more people than Russia and more men of military age than Russia. It has more wealth than Russia, and it has two powers with nuclear weapons, the United Kingdom and France. So, in theory, it has the ingredients for its own defence. But the problem is that I’m sure in the military world resources do not translate into capability, in a simple, direct, or rapid way. First, European defence is fragmented across nearly 30 countries. Therefore, there is a great deal of duplication on the weapons that they produce and on overheads such as defence ministries and command structures. There is not the culture of projecting armed force in difficult ways that has atrophied since the end of the Cold War.
The European militaries have allowed their munitions stockpiles to dwindle to dangerously low levels, and we saw evidence of this 14 years ago in the Libya operation, when the Europeans ran out of weapons and had to be bailed out by the United States. But above all, I think the challenge is that even if Europe were to spend three per cent of GDP on defence this year, that would not allow it to generate the defence industrial capacity or the equipment or the complex military equipment to make a difference in a few years. That can take up to 10 years.
If we take all these issues in aggregate, military culture, duplication, the translation of manpower into trained recruits, the translation of money into weapons, munitions and kit, I think that we are looking at a timeline of above five years for any serious European effort to replace the United States, and more likely 10 years. And that’s even before we get into the difficult question of nuclear deterrence and the ways in which France and Britain would struggle to replicate American capability.
Will other European nations like Germany join the nuclear club?
I think that right now there is no plausible world in which you have a collective European force of the kind that was discussed during the Cold War in the 1960s and again later on because neither France nor Britain is willing to share nuclear launch authority with its allies and neither country is, I think, willing to proliferate nuclear weapons to its allies either at this stage.
So, what is being discussed right now is not really a form of proliferation or shared nuclear authority. It is movement towards nuclear sharing or nuclear assurance. By that I mean scenarios such as France stationing nuclear-capable aircraft on the soil of Germany, or Poland or other countries, or other European allies participating in French nuclear exercises in the way that Italy has already done, and others have expressed interest in doing.
Now, would that lead to a situation in which there is a greater sense of European trust in British or French extended nuclear deterrence? Maybe, but we already see that with America today how difficult is to persuade allies that you would really use nuclear weapons on their behalf.
What role will the UK play in this shift, considering its close ties with the United States?
It is particularly difficult because Britain, on the one hand, already extends nuclear deterrence over Europe. It already commits its nuclear forces to the defence of NATO. But the UK is already heavily dependent on the United States for the maintenance and sustainability of its nuclear forces, including the lease of the nuclear missiles. Right now, I don’t think that there is necessarily a contradiction between the UK doing more to extend nuclear deterrence over Europe and relying on the United States. But if America moves in a more hostile and confrontational direction, there will then be many voices in the UK that begin to ask whether the UK needs to think about more extended and deep nuclear cooperation with France, for example, on the next generation of nuclear missiles. That’s quite a dramatic shift given the enormous dependence of the UK right now that has been built up over 80 years of cooperation with the US.
What are the main defence capabilities Europe should invest in the foreseeable future to make up for the possible changes in US priorities?
The main question of deep-strike conventional missiles that can strike high-value targets deep inside Russia or at a greater distance into Russia, I should say, because many of these systems have a range of 300 km and maybe 400 or 500 km. But that’s obviously only a limited amount of penetration in a country with the enormous size and strategic depth of Russia.
There are several options for this. Britain and France have Storm Shadow scalp missiles. Germany has Taurus missiles. Finland has JASM-ER missiles, which can be fired from planes, and these can reach, I think, all the way to St Petersburg. That’s the current generation of forces. Then you have the question of future forces in development. There is a programme called ELSA, the European Long Range Strike Approach, in which a few countries, including the UK, France, and Poland are working on a next generation of long-range strike systems and conventional strike systems. And you also have Ukrainian systems which are things like the Neptune missile, and the Ukranians have been striking ever deeper into Russia with greater and greater success. Of course, they rely in part on American assistance with intelligence and targeting, but they can conduct some strikes themselves. So, I would also allow for the possibility that you begin to see greater European cooperation with Ukraine on some of these long-range strike systems.
Those are primarily the conventional means of deterrence that I would be looking at. Of course, conventional deterrence is not just about deterrence by punishment. It’s also about deterrence by denial, and then all the traditional European conventional forces are also relevant. The last thing I want to mention on this is that if we’re thinking about deterrence, many Europeans are looking at Ukraine’s ability to hold back a Russian force that is many times its size with modern technology, including sensors and drones, and particularly short-range strike drones, and they are asking whether this might also allow Europe to engage in a kind of low-cost defence deterrence strategy without America in a way that would have been much more difficult and expensive 10 or 15 years ago. So, I think part of the answer in this will also be technology.
Can you provide an assessment of the military situation in Ukraine in relation to Russian advancements? Is it characterised by significant progress or a state of attrition?
Russia is still making very slow and gradual gains at extremely high cost that in recent months have equated to more than 1,000 dead and wounded per day. So, this is a hugely costly offensive. Right now, the conversations that I and my colleagues are having in Ukraine suggest that Ukrainian commanders feel quite confident that they can hold the line, that there is going to be no big Russian breakthrough, that even if the Russians can make slow gains, they do not have the competence, the skill, the resources to conduct a major breakthrough and advance to Ukrainian cities. And drone technology has played an important role in creating that defensive advantage.
Of course, Ukraine does have some significant weaknesses. It’s suffering very badly from Russian glide bomb strikes, which have been quite effective. It’s suffering with low rates of mobilisation. So, its manpower situation is quite poor. And if American aid is effectively cut off in the long term and no new aid replaces it, and no new allocations of American aid are made, Ukraine will suffer from an increasing disparity in shellfire and an increasing disparity in certain types of key capabilities like air defence interceptors. And all of that could intensify the rate at which Russia make progress. But right now, I have to say the Ukrainians are not in a despondent mood. They feel they can still hold the line and keep things relatively stable for the next year or so.
What are the lessons of the war in Ukraine for the future of warfare in terms of tactics, strategies, and technologies?
The things we can see in Ukraine were prefigured in other campaigns, whether that’s the growth of precision weapons, whether that’s the importance of digital networks connecting sensors and weapons, whether that’s the use of drones and uncrewed technologies. But what we have seen in Ukraine is a military environment in which these technologies have been tested, developed, and honed for three years under conditions of intense high-intensity warfare in a way that we haven’t seen in Europe for decades. And so, in a way, the lessons may be the same, but the applications of the technology have been revealed in new ways.
For example, the intensity of the electronic warfare environment and the limitations that places on drones would not have been obvious or apparent to people looking at this conflict in 2022, where large, fixed-wing drones were initially highly effective and very visible. It would have been difficult to understand that small, disposable, attractable strike drones used in enormous numbers, millions per year, would come to dominate the battlefield and in some cases be even more effective than artillery.
It would not have been obvious, I think, for instance, that naval drones and uncrewed surface vehicles, along with traditional missiles, would have been able to push the Black Sea fleet away from Ukrainian coastlines. I think that’s another important lesson that we may have suspected prior to the war, but we didn’t know it in any reliable way. And I think we also wouldn’t have really understood the specific bottlenecks and constraints that tend to arise in conflicts like this. For instance, the enormous pressure placed on drones’ components and the stranglehold that China has on those supply chains. That is something that we may have really learned sharply only in the last few years when people have attempted to build four million drones in a year, and they have run into these problems.
I guess the only other thing I would point out is that it’s not just about the weapons; it’s about all the things that make the weapons effective, including the intelligence and mission support that helps with the targeting. And I think the Europeans have learned this lesson very sharply. Many Europeans have been shocked to fully understand the degree to which their ability to use effectively some of their weapons, including HIMARS missile launchers and storm shadow missiles, have been dependent on American intelligence. And that’s not a new lesson, but it’s one that has become very publicly apparent to many Europeans, and one that’s become more politically sensitive given the breakdown of transatlantic ties.
Has AI weaponisation ushered in a new era of military competition?
We have seen how military innovation is greatly dependent on private-sector involvement. That’s critical. Many of the companies building these UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles] and other technologies are private firms. They’re not governments. So, that’s number one. I think number two is that we are seeing how much software is integral to this. So, it’s not about hardware, about the airframe, about the physical device. It’s about the code that goes in it, and in a way the lesson is that this is potentially a huge opportunity for middle powers who do not have a traditional defence industrial base.
Ukraine obviously does have a long history of defence industrial expertise going back to the Soviet Union, but nonetheless its IT industry has also been fundamental to developing some of the advanced military technology it has today. And other countries with IT industries, I’m thinking here about the UAE, Singapore, and smaller countries with less experience of these technologies, I think they have an opportunity to kind of leapfrog other producers in some areas.
I think the other thing I would point out is that data is proving to be key, and data from the battlefield is particularly important. You can have very good AI military systems that are very good at object recognition and very good at navigation. But unless you have had battlefield data on specific environments, on how your technology fares under battlefield conditions, under specific jamming frequencies, under specific types of terrain, under specific types of weather conditions, you won’t have fully mature products.
So, countries which can test their products in a real-world environment I think will also have an advantage in this regard. And that’s what I’m seeing in Ukraine, when many of the companies that are involved, one of the things they find most valuable is not the monetary benefit from Ukraine, it is the opportunity to test their products in that hostile, very realistic, and demanding environment.
The interviewer is head of the Strategic Foresight Programme at the Future Centre for Advanced Research and Studies in Abu Dhabi (FARAS).
This interview is published in coordination with Itigihat Al-Ahdath, a publication by FARAS.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 1 May, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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