The last installment closed on a specific claim: that if strategy is a wager continuously remade as conditions shift, then the question of where strategic weight sits within an alliance can’t be treated as fixed either. This installment picks up exactly that thread — the geography of European defense, and how far it has moved from the framing Robbin Laird’s original analysis was built on.
Why the Franco-German Relationship Was the Original Center
Laird’s original analysis properly placed the Franco-German relationship at the center of Europeanization, and Preziosa is careful not to dismiss the reasoning. France brought nuclear deterrence, strategic independence, military experience, and an explicit conception of European strategic agency. Germany brought economic and political weight, geographic centrality, and a multilateral political culture capable of translating national initiatives into broader European arrangements. The relationship was never merely bilateral — it functioned as a possible mechanism through which different conceptions of European security could be reconciled into something wider.
Necessary, No Longer Sufficient
Preziosa’s retrospective judgment is blunt: the Franco-German relationship remains necessary without any longer being sufficient. The same differences that made it potentially productive also kept constraining its ability to convert political convergence into operational capability. France and Germany could agree on broad ambition while continuing to diverge over command, nuclear deterrence, industrial leadership, operational requirements, sovereignty, and the distribution of responsibility.
More importantly, the ground under the relationship has physically moved. Finland and Sweden’s accession to NATO did more than add two members — it altered the geometry of deterrence, reinforcement, maritime access, intelligence, and airpower across the whole of Northern Europe. At the same time, Poland, the Baltic states, and the Nordic countries have gained influence over alliance priorities simply because geography, proximity to the threat, military preparedness, and political urgency have made them more central to how the system actually functions.
Europeanization, in Preziosa’s phrase, hasn’t disappeared. It has been redistributed.
A Network, Not an Engine
That redistribution points to a broader principle worth stating on its own: the political, economic, and strategic-operational centers of an alliance don’t have to coincide. Geography doesn’t just distribute vulnerability — as strategic conditions change, it redistributes influence too. States once treated as peripheral can become strategically central once their location, capabilities, operational experience, or understanding of the threat becomes critical to how the wider system functions.
The emerging European pillar, on this reading, no longer has a single engine. It looks more like a network of differentiated strategic functions, each contributor supplying something distinct:
- Germany — geography, infrastructure, industrial capacity, and position along the reinforcement routes to the eastern flank, making it an indispensable continental hub
- France — nuclear deterrence, strategic reach, operational experience, and a political culture built around thinking through the relationship between sovereignty and military power
- Britain — nuclear capability, intelligence relationships, military experience, technological base, and the capacity to organize operational coalitions, despite sitting outside the EU
- Poland and the eastern flank — military mass, geographic centrality to direct defense, political urgency, and rapidly expanding capability
- The Nordic countries — technological competence, advanced military forces, resilient societies, strategic depth, and a deeply rooted culture of total defense
Ukraine as Teacher, Not Just Recipient
Ukraine occupies a distinctive place in this system that’s worth pulling out on its own. Through the brutal experience of sustained war, it has become more than a recipient of Western assistance — it has become a source of operational knowledge and accelerated innovation in drone warfare, distributed sensing, electronic warfare, software adaptation, and battlefield-driven technological development. Preziosa is explicit that Laird treats Ukraine as an operational teacher and co-developer, not simply a beneficiary, contributing directly to the wider democratic military knowledge base.
This redistribution changes what alliance leadership actually means. In a networked alliance, strategic value becomes functional rather than purely hierarchical — a state’s importance depends not just on its aggregate power but on the specific critical function it performs for the wider system. Leadership doesn’t have to mean directing the whole. It can mean providing a capability others organize around: nuclear deterrence, logistics, air and missile defense, industrial production, intelligence, infrastructure, maritime access, technological innovation, or operational experience. France and Germany remain indispensable — but they now operate as critical nodes within a broader network, not as its presumed engine.
The Institutional Layer: NATO, the EU, and Coalitions
The same shift is visible institutionally. The old question of whether European defense should run primarily through NATO or the EU is, in Preziosa’s view, increasingly the wrong question, because neither institution was designed to hold every instrument contemporary defense requires. NATO remains the indispensable military core — collective defense, operational planning, interoperability, command structures, the transatlantic connection deterrence still depends on. But sustained military power increasingly rests on systems that sit partly or entirely outside NATO’s institutional reach: energy, transportation infrastructure, industrial policy, investment, critical supply chains, digital networks. The EU has real instruments in many of these domains while remaining structurally unsuited to replace NATO’s military command and deterrence functions. Smaller coalitions and capability-based groupings supply yet another function — operational speed and specialization when larger institutions can’t move fast enough.
What’s emerged under the pressure of the Ukraine war, Preziosa argues, is less institutional confusion than functional differentiation: a layered architecture in which NATO, the EU, and coalitions perform different but potentially complementary roles. The strategic problem isn’t institutional uniformity — it’s functional coherence. A layered system can actually be more adaptive than a centralized one, because different institutions operate at different speeds and mobilize different instruments against different dimensions of the same problem. But that only holds if the layers are connected well enough that differentiation produces complementary capability rather than competition or fragmentation — which is exactly why Preziosa singles out Laird’s line that coalitions need to be “built to move, not merely to deliberate,” while adding the caveat that their ability to move ultimately depends on preserving the political legitimacy that makes sustained collective action possible in the first place.
Next in the Series
Installment four turns from geography and institutions to the industrial question underneath both: what it actually takes to convert resources into usable strategic power, and why Preziosa treats force generation — and regeneration under the pressure of sustained war — as the mechanism that decides whether any of this architecture holds up in practice.