Europe Is Seriously Rearming. What Does It Mean for Japan?

Europe is arming itself — and this time, it looks like the real thing. By 2026, European defense spending has reached levels not seen since the Cold War. Germany has amended its constitution to unlock up to 500 billion euros for defense and infrastructure investment. NATO has set a new target asking member states to allocate 3.5% of GDP to defense by 2035 — a dramatic jump from the 2% threshold that was already proving difficult for many. Poland is already at over 4% of GDP. This is not incremental adjustment. This is a structural transformation of European security, the likes of which we have not seen in our lifetimes.

To understand why this is happening now, you have to look at what changed. The single biggest catalyst is the Trump administration’s openly conditional approach to NATO. Trump has consistently asked — sometimes demanded — that Europe pay its own way in defense. His handling of the Ukraine war reinforced a message that had been building for years: the American security umbrella is no longer unconditional. When Washington signaled it was willing to negotiate with Moscow over Ukraine’s head, European capitals drew a conclusion they had been avoiding: they may need to be able to defend themselves without American guarantees. That is a seismic shift in how Europe has organized its security since 1945.

Germany’s transformation deserves special attention, because it was the last country you would have expected to lead this charge. For decades, Germany embedded a deep aversion to military power into its national identity — a direct response to the catastrophes of the 20th century. The word “Kriegstüchtigkeit” (war readiness) now appearing in official government documents would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. Germany’s 2026 defense budget stands at approximately 82.7 billion euros, roughly 15% of the total federal budget. The additional 500 billion euro framework is earmarked for defense infrastructure, cybersecurity, and transportation — a broad definition of security investment that signals how comprehensively the government is rethinking national resilience. The era of “rich but unarmed” Germany appears to be ending.

I think people outside Europe sometimes misread this as purely a reaction to Russia. It is that, but it is also something larger. What is happening across the continent is a reckoning with three decades of strategic complacency. After the Cold War ended, European governments cut defense budgets and spent the peace dividend on welfare, infrastructure, and integration. That choice made sense at the time. But it left military readiness hollowed out — underfunded equipment, shrunken armies, dependency on American logistics. The Ukraine war did not just expose Russia’s revanchism; it exposed how unprepared much of Europe was to respond to it. What we are watching now is a crash program to rebuild something that took generations to let decay.

So what does any of this have to do with Japan? More than most people realize. The first connection is strategic: Japan and Europe’s democratic nations are confronting the same fundamental challenge — rising authoritarian powers backed by military force, and an American patron whose commitments feel increasingly transactional. The European approach — doubling down on indigenous defense capability and deepening alliances among democracies — is a template Japan is also moving toward, sometimes consciously, sometimes by parallel logic.

The second connection is GCAP — the Global Combat Air Programme. Japan’s joint development of a next-generation fighter jet with the UK and Italy is one of the most significant outcomes of Japan’s defense export liberalization. It is not just a procurement deal. It is a technology-sharing, industrial integration, and strategic trust-building exercise between Japan and key European NATO members. As Europe’s defense industrial base scales up, Japan’s precision manufacturing, optics, and advanced components sectors are well positioned to benefit from expanded procurement relationships. The rearmament of Europe is creating an industrial ecosystem in which Japan has a stake.

Japan’s own defense spending trajectory looks different when viewed against this global backdrop. Japan’s commitment to raise defense spending to 2% of GDP was greeted domestically with alarm by some and hesitation by others. But by 2026, as NATO sets a 3.5% target and Poland fields 4%+, the 2% Japan is targeting begins to look like the floor rather than the ceiling of what serious democracies are spending on security. Japan’s 2025 defense budget reached approximately 60 billion dollars — substantial in absolute terms, but still below what the strategic environment arguably demands. The domestic political obstacles — financing questions, constitutional ambiguity, public resistance — have not gone away. But the global reference frame has shifted around Japan even as the debate at home continues.

There is also an economic dimension that is easy to overlook. Five hundred billion euros in European defense investment represents an enormous demand shock to global defense industries. European steel, electronics, aerospace, and shipbuilding sectors will absorb much of this, but supply chains are global and Japan’s advanced manufacturing companies — not just defense contractors but precision instrument makers and materials specialists — are positioned to participate. On the other side of the ledger, every government that dramatically expands defense spending is making tradeoffs with social programs, climate investment, and education. The guns versus butter debate that Europe settled decisively in favor of butter after 1990 is back, and this time butter is losing.

Russia’s situation is relevant here too. The irony of the current moment is that European rearmament is happening precisely as Russia’s military capacity is being ground down in Ukraine. A Russia that entered 2022 confident in its ability to rapidly reshape European borders is, four years later, depleted in equipment and personnel, internationally isolated, and economically strained by sanctions. This does not make Russia safe — a wounded, isolated power led by a risk-tolerant leadership can be more dangerous, not less. But it does mean that the conventional threat European rearmament is designed to deter is itself weaker than it was. Deterrence may be working before the guns are fully built.

What I find most significant about this moment is what it represents symbolically: the end of the post-Cold War holiday from history. From 1991 until roughly 2014, much of the developed democratic world operated on the assumption that the era of great power conflict was behind us. The idea that a major European land war was possible — that Germany might need to think seriously about Kriegstüchtigkeit — would have seemed absurd as recently as 2020. That assumption is gone, and it is not coming back. For Japan, which lived through its own version of this holiday — Article 9, the peace constitution, a public that largely opposed military power — the European rearmament provides both a mirror and a form of moral company.

I want to be honest about what concerns me in all this, because cheerleading for rearmament serves no one well. The security dilemma is real. When one state increases military spending, its neighbors may perceive that as threatening and respond in kind, creating a spiral that makes everyone less secure even as everyone spends more. Russia will use European rearmament as propaganda to justify its own posture domestically and sustain its coalition with China. The assumption underlying deterrence theory — that the adversary is rational and will be deterred — is not guaranteed when dealing with a leadership that has already made one catastrophic miscalculation about Ukraine.

The critical variable going forward is domestic political sustainability in the major European countries. Poland and the Baltic states will spend what they say they will spend — the threat is too proximate and visceral for them to hesitate. Germany and France are different cases. Both have significant political forces skeptical of military spending — left parties that see welfare tradeoffs, right-populist parties with complicated relationships to Russia. Whether current governments can lock in 3.5% GDP commitments in ways that survive elections is genuinely uncertain. NATO targets are only as meaningful as the domestic politics that back them up.

For Japan, the key takeaway from Europe’s rearmament is not simply “spend more.” It is the logic behind the spending that matters. Europe is not arming itself because it wants to project power; it is arming itself because it has learned, painfully, that the structures of peace require active maintenance and that relying entirely on a single external guarantor is a strategic vulnerability. Japan faces a version of the same lesson. The US alliance remains central to Japanese security. But the broader principle — that democracies need to invest in the capacity to defend themselves and deepen bonds of practical cooperation with each other — is one that the GCAP project, the growing Japan-NATO dialogue, and the 2% defense commitment all reflect. Europe’s hard reckoning with strategic complacency is a lesson Japan would do well to learn at lower cost.