Is Europe Too Soft to Fight?
Florence Gaub and Roderick Parkes
October 28, 2025
Is Europe Too Soft to Fight?
Europe’s populations are readier to fight than they are often credited. The problem isn’t their lack of will, but elite pessimism about it.
The belief that Europeans are too soft to fight — too coddled, too individualistic, too “post-heroic” — is quietly shaping policy decisions about mobilization, recruitment, and spending. Military veterans, academics, and arguably even European leaders appear more worried with divisions in their own societies than with the adversary itself. And even where self-confidence is growing — in Finland or Poland — it is often tempered by doubts about the crucial question of whether other allies would defend them if attacked.
This skepticism feels plausible — but it risks becoming self-fulfilling. “Will to fight” is not a fixed category. Instead, it is a social potential: something that can be cultivated or suppressed. Across issues as varied as tax compliance, welfare take-up, or financial bailouts, we know that trust or mistrust in society can shape outcomes. Defense is no different. If planners assume society won’t step up and design policies around that belief, they make it more likely that society will live down to expectations.
It is easy to show how leaders’ pessimism about society can become self-fulfilling. People are unlikely to meet the moment when political leaders use conscription to discipline youth rather than to build trained mass. The same holds when leaders oppose pragmatic fixes to recruitment or retention problems, such as allowing soldiers to sleep longer, because they feel it looks “soft.” And when armies place conscripts and reservists in static or dull and dangerous roles out of mistrust in their ability to master complex skills, they squander their potential.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/10/is-europe-too-soft-to-fight/
