A meter-tall kamikaze drone stood on display like jewelry. Nobody stared at it too long, yet everyone stared long enough. A distinctly new, European security-era ambiance surrounded the event, one of many in town during the 2026 Munich Security Conference.

The host was Stark Defence, a German drone manufacturer that only a few years ago would have struggled to secure a bank meeting and would have lived on the margins of policy conferences, a curiosity for engineers. Now it’s hosting government ministers, investors, and senior military officers.

That was the atmosphere that framed much of the 2026 Munich conference. The MSC’s formal program still spoke the language of alliances and reassurance, yet the conversations around it had changed. A year earlier, participants tried to interpret signals from the Trump administration, including controversial remarks by Vice President JD Vance.

This year, there were far fewer comments on Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s more mildly worded explanation of Trump administration policy. The prevailing view, rarely stated on stage but common in private, was that the US has abandoned its post-Cold War role as continental security guarantor.

Whether reality follows the rhetoric is a separate matter. The adjustment needed for Europe to act alone is uncomfortable for Europeans, because it collides with another reality. At the operational level, they cannot separate from the United States even if they wanted to.

Military capabilities still depend on American enablers, and quick replacements are unfeasible. Cybersecurity systems and hyperscalers largely rely on American firms. Energy markets are being quietly rewired with US oil and liquefied natural gas (LNG) replacing Russian pipeline supplies. Financial and technologicalinfrastructure connect daily governance to systems developed and maintained across the Atlantic. These cannot be rapidly changed.

What is happening is thus less a withdrawal and more a rebalancing. The US is reducing guarantees while expanding influence in domains that matter more each year; areas like technology, finance, and energy. At the same time, individual European states are encouraged to manage key relationships bilaterally.

Every capital has reasons to do so. Each deal promises efficiency. And yet, taken together, they erode the collective leverage the EU has painstakingly tried to build, for example, through joint gas procurement.

The resulting risk is not a dramatic rupture but slow fragmentation. Rational national decisions accumulate into continental weakness. And European institutions are unprepared for this.

Take the EU, which has built an extraordinary capacity to regulate markets and coordinate policy. It has much less experience of a world organized around hard power competition, notwithstanding its efforts to become “geopolitical”.

That was clear at the inaugural meeting of President Trump’s “Board of Peace”, where the presence of a European commissioner started a firefight between the EU’s executive and several member states and political parties. Agreement on how to navigate this new world is proving difficult to find.

What makes the moment more complex is that change is occurring on several levels simultaneously.

At the technological level, influence flows through infrastructure, not declarations. Cloud systems, satellite networks, artificial intelligence platforms, and cybersecurity architecture shape sovereignty in ways treaties cannot easily capture. Dependence becomes technical before it becomes political.

At the environmental level, weather extremes intensify every vulnerability. Energy stability, migration, infrastructure resilience, and disaster response increasingly overlap with security policy. As one senior German energy industry representative told me, climate pressures have become his foremost operational concern, precisely because their unpredictability makes them difficult to quantify, even more so than the investments required to harden the German grid against wartime risk. Crises interact rather than follow one another.

Because these layers reinforce each other, the challenge facing Europe is not layered. It is systemic. Fragmented procurement weakens industrial capacity. Technological dependence narrows political choice. Environmental shocks test both simultaneously.

At the national level, governments are relearning the practice of hedging. Alliances remain essential but are no longer treated as permanent conditions. Planning increasingly includes scenarios once considered implausible. Think of Poland, which is simultaneously seeking a connection to NATO’s western pipeline system while rallying others in its region who often share a stronger interest in countering Russia than many in Western or Southern Europe.

The essential question now is whether Europe can avoid drifting into a pattern where each state seeks its own accommodation with the big powers, or even Russia, while the collective position dissolves. Preventing that requires unity to operate in practice, shared procurement, coordinated infrastructure, integrated defense planning and intelligence sharing, and common industrial priorities that make cooperation the default rather than the exception.

The harder adjustment is mental.

Recognition of a problem is not a plan to fix it. For decades, the end-of-history mindset in Warsaw, Berlin, and even Paris treated geopolitics as an occasional interruption to an order shaped by law and interdependence. The surrounding world now treats interdependence as leverage.

And there I was on a Munich terrace, staring at a European-made drone carrying a 5kg (11 lb.) explosive warhead, surrounded by a new generation of arms sellers only recently derided as merchants of death. A sector once considered morally ambiguous and politically peripheral has become a necessary commonplace.

Munich did not reveal a Europe in denial. It revealed a continent facing a dilemma that it understands but cannot yet resolve.

Maciej Filip Bukowski* is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw, and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.** *

Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.

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