While NATO presents the “Russian threat” as the strategic foundation for German rearmament and its preparation for an eventual war, the real transformation is occurring on another plane: a narrative of future war that is driving the largest cycle of Western militarization since the Cold War and redefining Europe’s political, economic and industrial priorities.
Germany is accelerating its rearmament process with the declared objective of being prepared for an eventual high-intensity conflict by the end of the decade. Although various German military authorities have placed that horizon between 2027 and 2029, the planning responds to NATO’s strategic assessment, which holds that Russia could by then recover sufficient capabilities to threaten one or more member states of the Alliance.
One of the pillars of this strategy is the Suwałki corridor, a narrow strip of approximately 65 kilometers between Poland and Lithuania that separates the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad from Belarus. If that corridor were to fall under Russian control, the three Baltic states could be cut off by land from the rest of NATO. That is the reason why Germany will deploy a permanent brigade in Lithuania, the largest stationing of German troops abroad since the Second World War.
However, the real question is not whether Germany is preparing for war, but on what political premise that preparation is being built.
My analysis is that the hypothesis of a Russian attack against NATO functions today, above all, as the principal discursive support for the largest Western arms race since the end of the Cold War. I am not claiming that a war is impossible per se, but that the scenario of a future confrontation has become the political argument that allows for justifying an unprecedented increase in military spending, the expansion of the defense industry, and the approval of multi-billion-dollar weapons acquisition programs that will extend until the end of this decade, and that this is the central crux of the whole matter.
To date, there is no public evidence that Russia has announced a plan to invade a NATO country. What exists is a strategic assessment produced by the Alliance itself, which projects a possible threat scenario for the coming years. That difference is not minor. A risk assessment does not constitute proof of intent, but it can become a powerful instrument for steering political, economic and military decisions.
From this perspective, the narrative of an imminent threat serves a double function. On the strategic plane, it strengthens NATO’s internal cohesion and accelerates the European rearmament process. On the economic plane, it guarantees, for years, extraordinary demand for the Western military-industrial complex, one of the sectors that will mobilize the most public resources toward the end of the decade.
Russia, for its part, maintains exactly the inverse thesis: that it is NATO’s military expansion toward its borders that is fueling the escalation and increasing the risk of confrontation — and of this there is indeed solid and obvious evidence. As frequently happens in geopolitics, both sides construct their legitimacy on the basis of threats attributed to the other.
In my view, what is relevant is not solely German rearmament. The news is that Europe is reorganizing its entire political, economic and industrial architecture around a scenario of future war whose probability remains a matter of dispute. And when a strategic hypothesis begins to move hundreds of billions of euros, modify military doctrines, transform national economies and reconfigure international alliances, it ceases to be merely a military forecast and becomes a political fact of the first order. That is the phenomenon that deserves to be observed with greater attention.
