Eastern Europe races to rearm as US commitment to NATO wavers

Central and eastern European governments are moving from anxiety to action. The June 2025 NATO summit in The Hague produced a headline commitment, combined defence and related spending rising to 5% of GDP by 2035, but the decade-long glide path and elastic definitions of what counts leave Warsaw, Vilnius, Tallinn and Bucharest unconvinced that deterrence will hold in the interim.

The Hague agreement and its loopholes

The summit communiqué splits the 5% target into 3.5% for core military capabilities and 1.5% for broader security measures: logistics, cyber resilience and direct support for Ukraine. That latter category is where the flexibility lives. Aid to Kyiv, infrastructure upgrades and software projects all qualify, meaning a government can meet the nominal target without fielding a single additional tank or artillery piece. A review is scheduled for 2029, but eastern flank officials argue that Russia's reconstitution timeline does not wait for NATO's bureaucratic checkpoints.

The unease predates the summit. Since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Kremlin has probed Article 5 resolve repeatedly. In February 2024, Russian electronic warfare units disrupted GPS signals across eastern Estonia, degrading both civilian navigation and military communications. One month later, a Russian cruise missile traversed 39 seconds of Polish airspace before turning back into Ukraine. In August 2023, Russian fighters executed dangerous intercepts of NATO surveillance aircraft over the Baltic Sea. None triggered a collective response.

Trump's transactional calculus

The return of Donald Trump to the White House has sharpened the dilemma. The president has made no secret of his desire to be remembered as a "peacemaker and unifier", a phrase he repeated in his second inaugural address. His advisers have circulated frameworks that would freeze the front lines, recognise Russian control of Crimea and parts of Donbas, and block Ukraine's NATO accession. For the Baltic states and Poland, such a settlement would not end the threat; it would legitimise territorial conquest and give Moscow a reconstituted army on their borders.

The diplomatic tone has been caustic. In a March 2025 Signal group chat later revealed by journalists, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth described European NATO allies as "pathetic" and accused them of "freeloading". The following month, Trump used a meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte to announce that the United States would send Patriot air defence batteries to Europe "for Ukraine", but insisted that European governments donate the interceptor missiles themselves. The pattern is consistent: Washington offers platforms, Europe pays for the consumables.

Historical memory drives present urgency

The region's alarm is not abstract. The 1938 Munich Agreement, when Britain and France acquiesced to Hitler's dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, remains the reference point in every strategic document issued from Warsaw to Tallinn. The lesson drawn is that diplomatic decoupling from Washington correlates with heightened vulnerability on NATO's eastern flank. That is why Poland and the three Baltic states have hosted US rotational forces and NATO battlegroups for years, and why their leaders have repeatedly warned that if Putin succeeds in Ukraine, "they are next."

Industrial conversion: Germany leads, CEE follows

The response is taking shape on factory floors. Germany has approved a sweeping defence procurement law that simplifies contracting, raises tender thresholds and fast-tracks construction for military infrastructure. Idle automotive plants in Berlin and Neuss, and rail facilities in Görlitz, are being repurposed to produce Leopard 2 tanks, Puma infantry fighting vehicles and artillery systems. The shift is deliberate: civilian manufacturing competitiveness, especially in cars, is faltering under Chinese competition and now faces additional US tariffs threatened by the Trump administration.

Central and eastern European industry is integrating into this chain. Poland and Slovakia have expanded joint production of artillery and armoured vehicles. Czechia's Czechoslovak Group has surged to the forefront of Europe's munitions supply chain, reporting a €4bn revenue increase and an €11bn order book anchored in exports to Ukraine. The company's trajectory illustrates the new logic: defence is no longer a niche sector but the primary growth engine for heavy industry in the region.

Brussels has backed the mobilisation with money. On 6 March 2025, the European Commission approved an €800bn defence mobilisation plan coupled with a proposal for €150bn in EU-backed loans. The funds are conditional on joint procurement and cross-border industrial cooperation, a lever to prevent fragmentation and ensure that Polish, Slovak and Czech factories plug into common European programmes rather than national silos.

Leverage through transactional diplomacy

Industrial effort alone cannot replace the US nuclear umbrella or the enablers, strategic lift, intelligence, surveillance, targeting, that only Washington provides at scale. Eastern European capitals therefore pursue a second track: persistent diplomatic engagement with an administration that prizes transactional exchanges. The assets they bring to the table are concrete. Poland is the largest European buyer of US-made artillery (HIMARS, M142), tanks (M1A2 Abrams) and attack helicopters (AH-64E Apache). Romania hosts the Aegis Ashore missile defence site at Deveselu and controls the strategic Danube-Black Sea corridor. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have developed sophisticated cyber defence capabilities that NATO now treats as a benchmark.

These are not gifts; they are bargaining chips. The calculation in Warsaw and Tallinn is that a White House focused on burden-sharing and industrial return will respect partners who pay in hard currency and strategic infrastructure. The risk is that transactionalism cuts both ways: if the price of a Patriot battery is a bilateral side-deal on energy or migration, the EU's common foreign policy frays further.

The economic-security nexus

The defence pivot doubles as an industrial policy. The region's automotive sector, Slovakia produces more cars per capita than any country; Hungary and Czechia host major German OEM supply chains, faces a structural demand shock from electrification and Chinese overcapacity. Trump's threatened 25% tariffs on EU vehicles would deepen the crisis. Converting metal-stamping lines, welding robots and precision machining to military contracts preserves employment and tax base while serving the security imperative. It is a rare alignment of geopolitical necessity and domestic economic interest.

Yet the numbers reveal the gap. NATO's 2024 annual report shows European allies collectively spent 2.01% of GDP on defence, barely above the old 2% floor. Reaching 3.5% core spending implies roughly a 75% real increase sustained for a decade. Germany's €100bn Sondervermögen is largely committed; the Bundestag has not yet legislated the recurring budget uplift. France, Italy and Spain face debt-to-GDP ratios above 100%, limiting fiscal space without EU-level borrowing, which the €150bn loan facility only partially addresses.

What the next twelve months will test

The immediate test is not the 2035 target but the 2029 review. By then, the first tranche of EU loans must be disbursed, German production lines must be delivering at scale, and the US Congress must have appropriated funding for the European Deterrence Initiative at levels that match rhetoric. A Trump-brokered Ukraine ceasefire before the 2026 US midterms would force the issue earlier: eastern Europe would need to demonstrate credible conventional deterrence without the assumption of rapid US reinforcement.