France and Germany have announced this week that they are ditching a landmark project to jointly develop a sixth-generation fighter jet.
French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed on Monday that the project is being terminated, in what is being seen as a major blow to efforts to boost defence cooperation between European Union states, a key issue amid uncertainty cast by United States President Donald Trump over the readiness of the US to help defend its NATO allies.
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Trump’s disdain for Europe’s reliance on the US has been building for years.
Since 2019, the US president has been flirting with the idea of obtaining Greenland.
His remarks about his desire for the island, a self-governing territory which is part of the Kingdom of Denmark, built to a crescendo at the start of this year, with European leaders signalling their displeasure with the idea and Trump even threatening additional trade tariffs on those countries standing in his way.
Both Denmark and Greenland have repeatedly stated that the island is not for sale.
At one point, before Trump backed down after agreeing to a “framework of a future deal” on Greenland during a January meeting with NATO’s Mark Rutte in Davos, it seemed as if the US might even try to take the island by force – a notion that would have been inconceivable before the era of Donald Trump.
The threat of military action set off alarm bells in European capitals.
In addition to all this, Trump has withdrawn much of the US’s support for Ukraine and has consistently berated his European NATO partners for not spending enough on their own defence for years, outright urging them to reduce their reliance on the US for military protection.
More recently, Europe’s refusal to join the US-Israeli war on Iran, which began with strikes on Tehran on February 28, has further irked the US president and deepened concerns that a widening transatlantic rift could weaken the continent’s security and embolden Russia.
Until this week, a counterweight to these burgeoning concerns was in hand – the Future Combat Air System (FCAS) project, a landmark pact to jointly develop a next-generation fighter jet involving France, Germany and Spain.
But disagreements over whether France’s Dassault Aviation, or Airbus, which also represents Germany and Spain, should take the lead on the project have ultimately led to its collapse.
Analysts, however, say all hope is not lost: despite the dissolution of the bellwether venture, Europeans can indeed become strategically autonomous, they say – but the road there runs through shared military integration, rather than shared political aspiration.
The FCAS hoopla does “highlight the limitation of Europe’s defence industrial landscape, where national needs sometimes clash with the broader goal of defence integration”, Giuseppe Spatafora, a policy analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, told Al Jazeera.
“But we also shouldn’t overestimate its impact.”
Setback, not collapse
According to Jamie Shea, a retired NATO official and associate fellow with the International Security Programme at Chatham House, FCAS’s dissolution is certainly a setback – but does not spell the collapse of European defence integration in its entirety.
“It was the type of high-tech, innovative and future-oriented programme that Europeans need to be able to achieve successfully if they are to become strategically autonomous and break their dependence on the US for major weapons systems,” Shea told Al Jazeera.
It had been hoped that FCAS would move the needle forward, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), space, data fusion, and the manned and autonomous systems interface space, he said.
Others would have additionally joined the project as it gained momentum, as Spain did, he added, potentially creating a domino effect in next-generation defence technologies across the continent.
But, crucially, Spatafora said, the project dates back to 2017 – a different era, before Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine and before Trump’s return to the White House.
“Nowadays, the project might be designed differently to reflect the scenario,” he said.
“But it doesn’t affect the broader trend in Europe towards reducing dependencies on US military systems and strengthening its own defence capabilities.”
France and Germany will continue with some components of FCAS, such as its “combat cloud” feature, which will increase Europe’s cyber command-and-control capabilities, said Spatafora.
Airbus and a number of other German companies are also seeking to continue the programme in other areas, particularly software architecture and drone technology, Shea said.
“So there may be benefits for European defence and its defence technology base even if a manned fighter aircraft is not built,” said Shea.
Furthermore, there are “scores” of other joint defence projects being launched in Europe at the moment, even if they are not quite as ambitious as FCAS, he added.
Guntram Wolff, a senior fellow at the European think tank Bruegel, similarly urged against alarmism.
“I would not interpret this decision overly negatively,” Wolff told Al Jazeera.
“FCAS was a very complicated project and its military relevance may well be overstated at a moment of increasing importance of cheap autonomous systems. In part, the decision also reflects a reassessment of whether the high cost was really warranted.”
Europe, meanwhile, has other strengths it can build on, the analysts said.
The continent is strong in shipbuilding, submarines, short-range missiles and air defence – with systems like the German IRIS-T and the French-Italian SAMP/T – and has demonstrated it can build capable fighter jets, such as the Eurofighter Typhoon, Tornado and Gripen programmes have shown, Shea said.
Lessons and challenges
Europe’s main problem is underinvestment and the difficulty it has in scaling up to the level of mass production that modern warfare demands, said Shea.
This issue was brought into sharp focus this week when the UK’s secretary of state for defence dramatically resigned from government over defence funding.
He simply cannot keep the country safe on what he has been given to spend, he said. In his resignation letter to the prime minister, he wrote: “You have been unable and the Treasury has been unwilling to commit the resources that the nation needs to defend the country at this time of rising threats,” he wrote.
Ultimately, European nations are going to have to come together if they have any hope of matching US military might in the future, analysts say.
“It is the challenge of integrating all systems and all domains into a single battlefield management space where the US is in advance of the Europeans,” Shea said.
“Drones, which Russia and Ukraine are producing in the millions, are a case in point. Even the US suffers from weapons shortages as we have seen in the Iran war,” the former NATO official added.
Spatafora echoed the idea that the Russia-Ukraine war has lessons to offer the rest of Europe.
“The lesson of the war in Ukraine is that, in order to deter and defend itself properly, Europe needs cheap, mass-produced capabilities,” he said.
FCAS was about a very expensive capability, “so it was not really the key need for Europe’s deterrence today”, the analyst said.
The more pressing question that FCAS raises is how European nations will coordinate large projects which single countries cannot produce on their own and which could clash with the interests of numerous national industries. This is the conundrum which will likely shape the design of future EU instruments to support cooperative defence projects, said Spatafora.
Another challenge facing the continent is that major platforms like aircraft, ships or land warfare vehicles can take decades to develop, and contracts signed today will yield equipment that will not be on the battlefield before 2040, Shea said.
Europe will need to upgrade its current capabilities – recent upgrades to the Eurofighter jet and the Leopard tank are examples he cited – and look for gap-fillers elsewhere.
Spatafora argues that the FCAS collapse should not push European countries back towards reliance on American systems – or at least not more than they already have.
“The Trump administration’s approach and the depletion of stock after the Iran war have significantly reduced the reliability of US supplies,” he said.
The reliability of US guarantees, he added, depends on other assets – long-range missiles, forward-deployed troops, command-and-control infrastructure – “rather than on a next-generation fighter jet”, the analyst added.
‘Military requirements’ over ‘political ambition’
The FCAS failure is certainly good news for Russia, Shea said, “and also for the US, which will hope to sell Europe even more F-35s and maintain Europe’s traditional dependency on US military equipment”.
A rebound from the collapsed project, therefore, he argued, is necessary. But that is already in the works, analysts say, as Europe is already turning away from US dependability.
They point to the high likelihood of renewed interest in the UK-Italy-Japan Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP) for a sixth-generation stealth fighter jet, in European Space Agency military space capabilities, and in EU defence financing mechanisms like the Security Action for Europe (SAFE).
Joint ventures with Ukraine, which, under fire from Russia for four years, has mastered mass production of drone technology and AI, should also help keep Europe up to speed in key areas, Shea added.
“The US has proven to be unreliable, or simply unable to remain committed to Europe, and the defence budgets are growing,” Spatfora said.
Washington will continue to remain relevant for certain capabilities – nuclear deterrence above all – but over time, European countries will seek to develop more and more on their own.
The ultimate lesson of FCAS, however, Shea argued, is that defence integration “has to be driven by military requirements rather than political ambition”.
Cooperation between France and Germany has always been difficult, he said – they have large defence companies “that do not want to play second fiddle to the other”, he said.
A more promising model, he said, is the joint UK-Norway agreement to produce a new destroyer-class warship, with BAE Systems as the main contractor and smaller Norwegian companies participating.
“Both countries operate in the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea and share exactly the same concept of what the ship should be,” explained Shea.
“So it is this model of bottom-up, natural cooperation rather than top-down political cooperation that Europe needs to pursue.”
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