France and Germany announced this week that they are canceling a landmark project to jointly develop a sixth-generation fighter jet.
French President Emmanuel Macron confirmed on Monday that the plan would be scrapped. This is expected to be a major blow to efforts to strengthen defense cooperation between European Union countries and comes amid uncertainty raised by US President Donald Trump about US readiness to help defend NATO allies.
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President Trump’s disdain for Europe’s dependence on the United States has been growing for years.
Since 2019, the US president has been toying with the idea of acquiring Greenland.
His statements about his aspirations for the self-governing island, part of the Kingdom of Denmark, reached a climax earlier this year when European leaders expressed discomfort with the idea and Mr. Trump even threatened to impose additional trade tariffs on countries that stood in his way.
Both Denmark and Greenland have repeatedly said the island is not for sale.
After Trump agreed to a “future agreement framework” on Greenland during a January meeting with NATO’s Mark Rutte in Davos, before backing out, it appeared at one point that the United States might even try to seize the island by force, an idea unthinkable before the era of Donald Trump’s administration.
The threat of military action set off alarm bells in European capitals.
On top of all this, President Trump has withdrawn much of U.S. aid to Ukraine, consistently accused European NATO allies of not spending enough on their own defense for years, and openly urged them to reduce their reliance on the United States for military protection.
More recently, Europe’s refusal to join the U.S.-Israel war against Iran, which began with the Feb. 28 attack on Tehran, has further irritated the U.S. president and deepened concerns that a widening transatlantic rift could weaken the continent’s security and embolden Russia.
Until this week, countermeasures were in place to these growing concerns. It was the Future Combat Air Systems (FCAS) project, a landmark agreement involving France, Germany, and Spain to jointly develop next-generation fighter aircraft.
However, disagreements over whether France’s Dassault Aviation or Airbus, which also represents Germany and Spain, should lead the project ultimately led to its collapse.
But analysts say all hope is not lost. They say that despite the dissolution of leading projects, Europeans can indeed become strategically independent, but that the path is threaded through shared military integration rather than shared political aspirations.
Giuseppe Spatafora, a policy analyst at the European Union Institute for Security Studies, told Al Jazeera that the FCAS fuss “underscores the limitations of Europe’s defense industry, where national needs sometimes conflict with broader goals of defense integration.”
“But we also shouldn’t overestimate its impact.”
Regression rather than collapse
Jamie Shea, a former NATO official and associate fellow in the Chatham House International Security Program, said disbanding FCAS is certainly a setback, but it does not mean the whole of European defense integration will collapse.
“This was a high-tech, innovative and future-oriented program that European countries needed to successfully achieve if they were to become strategically independent and break their dependence on the United States for major weapons systems,” Xia told Al Jazeera.
He said FCAS was expected to move the needle forward, particularly in the areas of artificial intelligence (AI), space, data fusion, and the manned and autonomous systems interface space.
He added that other countries, like Spain, could join as the project gains momentum, creating a domino effect on next-generation defense technologies across the continent.
But importantly, Spatafora said the project dates back to 2017, a different era, before Russia’s all-out war against Ukraine and before President Trump’s return to the White House.
“Projects may now be designed differently to reflect the scenario,” he says.
“However, it does not impact Europe’s broader trend to reduce its dependence on U.S. military systems and strengthen its own defense capabilities.”
France and Germany will continue to use some components of FCAS, including its “combat cloud” capabilities, which strengthen Europe’s cyber command and control capabilities, Spatafora said.
Airbus and a number of other German companies are also looking to continue the program in other areas, particularly software architecture and drone technology, Scheer said.
“Therefore, even if no manned combat aircraft are built, there may be benefits for European national defense and its defense technology base,” Shea said.
He added that there are currently “many” other joint defense projects being launched in Europe, even if they are not as ambitious as FCAS.
Guntram Wolff, a senior researcher at the European think tank Bruegel, similarly urged people not to stir up fear.
“I don’t want to interpret this decision in an overly negative way,” Wolff told Al Jazeera.
“FCAS is a highly complex project, and its military relevance may be overstated at a time when inexpensive autonomous systems are becoming increasingly important. In part, this decision also reflects a reassessment of whether the high cost is truly justified.”
Meanwhile, Europe has strengths that it can build on further, analysts said.
The continent has strengths in shipbuilding, submarines, short-range missiles and air defense with systems such as Germany’s IRIS-T and France-Italy’s SAMP/T, and has proven capable of producing capable fighter jets such as the Eurofighter Typhoon, Tornado and Gripen programs, Shea said.
Lessons learned and challenges
Europe’s main problem is a lack of investment and difficulty scaling up to the mass production levels required by modern warfare, Shea said.
The issue was thrust into sharp focus this week when Britain’s defense secretary dramatically resigned from the government over defense funding.
He said the given spending alone cannot keep the country safe. In his resignation letter to the Prime Minister, he wrote: “The Treasury has been unable and unwilling to commit the necessary resources to protect our country at a time of heightened threat.”
Analysts say European nations will ultimately need to come together if they have any hope of matching U.S. military power in the future.
“This is a challenge for the United States to get ahead of Europeans and integrate all systems and all domains into a single battlefield management space,” Hsieh said.
“The drones that Russia and Ukraine are producing in their millions are a good example. Even the United States is suffering from arms shortages, as we saw with the Iran war,” the former NATO official added.
Spatafora echoed the idea that the Russo-Ukrainian war holds lessons for other European countries.
“The lesson of the Ukraine war is that Europe needs cheap, mass-produced capacity to deter and adequately defend itself,” he said.
FCAS is about a very expensive capability, “so it wasn’t really a critical need for European deterrence today,” the analyst said.
A more pressing question raised by FCAS is how European countries coordinate large-scale projects that cannot be accomplished by any one country alone and that may conflict with the interests of many national industries. This is a challenge that is likely to shape the design of future EU instruments to support joint defense projects, Spatafora said.
Another challenge facing the continent is that developing major platforms such as aircraft, ships and land combat vehicles can take decades, and the contract signed today will produce equipment that will not be on the battlefield by 2040, Shea said.
Europe needs to upgrade its current capabilities – recent upgrades to Eurofighter jets and Leopard tanks are examples – and look elsewhere to fill gaps.
Spatafora argues that the collapse of FCAS should not force European countries back into relying on the US system, or at least no more than they already do.
“The Trump administration’s approach and the depletion of inventories following the Iran war have significantly reduced U.S. supply reliability,” he said.
The credibility of U.S. guarantees will depend on other assets such as long-range missiles, forward-deployed forces, and command and control infrastructure “rather than next-generation fighter jets,” the analyst added.
“Military requirements” rather than “political ambitions”
The FCAS failure is certainly good news for Russia, Shea said, “and also for the United States, which wants to sell more F-35s to Europe and maintain its dependence on traditional U.S. military equipment in Europe.”
Therefore, he argued, there was a need to recover from the failed project. But analysts say Europe has already begun to move away from American trust, and that realization is already underway.
They point to the likely renewed interest in the UK-Italy-Japan Global Combat Air Program (GCAP) for sixth-generation stealth fighters, the European Space Agency’s military space capabilities, and EU defense funding mechanisms such as Security Operations in Europe (SAFE).
A joint venture with Ukraine, which mastered drone technology and mass production of AI despite four years of Russian attack, should also help keep Europe behind in key areas, Xia added.
“The defense budget is growing as the United States has proven itself to be unreliable or simply unable to continue contributing to Europe,” Spatfora said.
The US government will continue to play an important role in certain capabilities, particularly nuclear deterrence, but over time European countries will seek to further develop their own capabilities.
But the ultimate lesson from FCAS is that defense integration “must be driven by military requirements, not political ambitions,” Shea argued.
Cooperation between France and Germany has always been difficult, he said, adding that both countries have large defense companies that “don’t want to become second fiddle to the other.”
A more promising model, he said, is a joint British-Norwegian agreement to build a new destroyer-class warship, with BAE Systems as the prime contractor and a small Norwegian company involved.
“Both countries operate in the North Atlantic and the Baltic Sea and share exactly the same concept of what ships should be,” Shea explained.
“What Europe therefore needs to pursue is a bottom-up natural model of cooperation, rather than top-down political cooperation.”
