Former European Commission president calls for a stronger European defense pillar within NATO — and says the war in Ukraine is the wake-up call the continent can no longer ignore
When José Manuel Barroso invokes an ancient Roman military strategist to make a case about modern European security, he is not being theatrical. He means it.
"Si vis pacem, para bellum," the former European Commission president said during an exclusive interview with Storm Media on May 6, citing the first-century dictum from Vegetius'sDe re militari. "If you want peace, you must prepare for war — so that your adversary has no desire to attack you. I believe this is Europe's situation today."
Barroso, 70, was speaking in Taipei ahead of a keynote address at the annual forum of the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI), a regional think tank. It was his first visit to Taiwan. The trip placed him at the intersection of two of the world's most consequential security flashpoints — and he came with a clear message for both.
A Union Built for Peace, Caught Unprepared for War
The European Union was never designed with collective hard power in mind. Barroso traced its institutional DNA back to the European Coal and Steel Community, founded in 1951 by six nations — France, West Germany, Italy, and the Benelux countries — as a direct response to two catastrophic world wars rooted in extreme nationalism. The logic was economic interdependence as structural deterrence: if the economies are fused, the political incentive for war diminishes.
By most measures, that experiment succeeded. Today's 27-member EU represents what Barroso described as the most successful economic integration in human history. But that very success came with a blind spot: the bloc built institutions for prosperity and diplomacy, not for war-fighting. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe's defense posture was simply not calibrated for the threat.
Four years on, Barroso argues, the calculus has shifted — though not yet far enough.
"Europe has been a geopolitical adolescent for too long," he said. "That must change."
The 'Europeanization' of NATO
Central to Barroso's argument is what he calls the "Europeanization" of NATO: European member states must dramatically increase their own defense capacity so the European pillar of the transatlantic alliance can stand independently, rather than relying on American military power as its structural foundation.
That argument has taken on fresh urgency since Donald Trump returned to the U.S. presidency in January 2025. Trump has repeatedly signaled a desire to reduce American military commitments in Europe — and has at times threatened a broader U.S. withdrawal from NATO altogether. Earlier this month, he floated withdrawing 5,000 troops from Germany, where the United States currently stations approximately 38,000 personnel. Additional reductions in Italy and Spain have also been mentioned.
With more than70,000 U.S. troops deployed across Europe — roughly 12,000 in Italy, around 10,000 each in Poland and the United Kingdom — even a partial drawdown represents a significant shift in the alliance's center of gravity. European governments are watching carefully, and not just because of troop numbers.
The Missile Gap No One Wants to Talk About
The deeper anxiety, defense analysts note, concerns long-range strike capability. According to research published last year by the International Institute forStrategic Studies (IISS), the U.S. Tomahawk cruise missile — with a range of approximately 1,600 kilometers — is the longest-range strike weapon available to Western forces in Europe and represents the alliance's most credible conventional deterrent against Russian military planners. Reports in 2024 indicated that Washington had planned to deploy Tomahawks in Germany. That plan was reversed after Trump took office.
Europe's own cruise missiles fall considerably short of that benchmark. The Taurus, a joint German-Swedish air-launched system, reaches roughly 700 kilometers. The British-French Storm Shadow has a range of around 600 kilometers. France's ship-launched MdCN missile can reach approximately 1,000 kilometers, but production was halted in 2021 — thoughFrench media reported this month that Paris intends to reopen the MdCN production line in response to continued Russian pressure and concerns about U.S. commitment.
None of these systems match the Tomahawk's reach. That gap is why Trump's suggestions of troop reductions resonate so sharply in European capitals. Deterrence is not simply a question of how many soldiers are stationed where — it is also about what weapons they carry and what threats those weapons are capable of neutralizing.
Germany and Finland: Two Canaries in the Security Coal Mine
Barroso pointed to two specific cases as evidence that European strategic thinking is genuinely evolving, even if slowly.
Germany — historically constrained by its postwar constitutional framework — amended its Basic Law in March 2025 to relax the so-called "debt brake," which had capped federal borrowing at 0.35 percent of GDP annually. The amendment carves out exceptions specifically for defense, civil defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity spending. For a country that spent decades making a virtue of fiscal restraint and military modesty, it represents a significant philosophical shift.
Finland's trajectory is equally striking. Sharing a border with Russia longer than Ukraine's, Finland spent the Cold War and its aftermath as a carefully non-aligned state. Russia's 2022 invasion changed that calculation almost overnight: Helsinki applied for NATO membership, and Finland formally joined the alliance in April 2023. Sweden followed in March 2024.
"The way Europe thinks about defense is changing," Barroso said.
NATO's 3.5 Percent Target — and What It Really Means
At the NATO Summit in June 2025, member states agreed to a new spending benchmark: by 2035, each country should allocate at least 3.5 percent of GDP to NATO-defined defense expenditure, plus an additional 1.5 percent to security-related spending — covering critical infrastructure protection, cybersecurity, societal resilience, and defense industrial capacity.
"Most EU countries are NATO members, and most NATO members are EU countries — the two are deeply interconnected," Barroso said. "Raising the share of GDP dedicated to defense represents a very significant change."
Significant, but not yet sufficient in his view. The EU was designed to produce peace through integration. That mission has not failed — but it has left the bloc structurally unprepared to defend the peace it created.
Barroso's prescription is not militarism; it is deterrence. The distinction, he suggested, matters. The ancient Romans, it seems, still have something to teach the architects of modern Europe."I hope no one will again choose to attack a NATO or EU member state," he said.
José Manuel Barroso served as President of the European Commission from 2004 to 2014 and as Prime Minister of Portugal before that. He currently serves as Chairman of the Luso-American Development Foundation (FLAD), Chairman of the EurAfrican Forum, and Chairman of the International Advisory Board of Goldman Sachs International. From 2021 to 2025, he chaired the Board of GAVI, the global vaccine alliance.
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