The war in Iran is already reshaping strategic thinking far beyond the Middle East. Across the world, governments are realising that sovereignty ultimately rests on energy resilience and credible deterrence. 

The EU’s fossil fuel import costs have soared over €27bn since the Middle East war began.

Speaking at a plenary debate on the energy crisis in the European Parliament, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said, “This is the second major energy crisis in the short span of four years. We cannot be overdependent on imported energy. Our bill for fossil fuel imports has increased by over €27bn, without a single molecule of additional energy.”

OP-ED

Since January 2025 it was clear that US disengagement could eventually leave Europe’s vital sea lanes less safe. Iran has transformed the Strait of Hormuz into a wartime toll road, charging vessels up to $2 million per passage while the US Navy is executing something more akin to a maritime quarantine in the Arabian Sea.

"What we're seeing is not just a spike in deepfakes but a shift in how influence is produced," said Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a defence and security analyst at the European Policy Centre think-tank.

"We face systems that can generate... persuasion at scale, for pennies. To me this is a revolution in political influence and none of our current governance schemes are ready to address it".

For Chris Kremidas-Courtney, an analyst at the European Policy Center and the Geneva Center for Security Policy and Strategic Affairs and an EU-NATO strategic advisor on defense and hybrid threats, unmanned systems in Ukraine have brought a “revolution” in targeting accuracy that, as he says, eliminates inequalities on the battlefield: “It’s about massive accuracy. With a drone that cost a few tens of thousands of euros, a warship that cost millions of euros can be destroyed. On the contrary, a missile costing one million euros is not required to shoot down a drone worth 30,000 euros, and deterring drones can also cost much cheaper. Targeting accuracy is no longer expensive, which means that smaller states can face larger states in wars. This is how Ukraine is able to keep the Russians at bay.”

As he points out in MIIR, on the battlefield with this strategy the Ukrainians forced the Russians to follow, while in the process they themselves were forced to change the way they fight: "Every month the Russians develop countermeasures, ways to thwart Ukrainian drones. And so every 30 to 60 days the Ukrainians redesign everything. So now we have an army that marches and fights and right behind it is a team of engineers and laboratories that manufacture new weapons, modernizing everything every 30-60 days. This is a completely different mentality and process."

Europe doesn’t have a lot of systems that can shoot beyond 500 kilometers, said Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a senior visiting fellow at the Brussels-based European Policy Center and NATO advisor. Central Moscow is around 585 kilometers from the eastern-most point of Latvia.

“If we can’t reach out and touch Moscow, then there’s not a lot to give Mr. Putin and his friends a lot of pause,” said Kremidas-Courtney, referring to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “In a multi-polar world, if you can’t touch the other poles, you’re not really a pole. The sooner we have our own deep strike capability, the better.”

Europe needs its own intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and has the know-how to produce them through French rocket maker ArianeGroup, according to Kremidas-Courtney. “There’s not a lot of people making this stuff, at least no one that is friendly to us,” the researcher said. “I’m pretty sure we could figure this out. It’s just a gigantic price tag.”

Europe doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas. It suffers from a refusal to recognise the scale of the moment we’re in

The strike may not even have cleared the clause’s own threshold. Article 42.7 requires “armed aggression” — a bar the drone incident likely did not meet. “Otherwise, Russian drone incursions in Poland, Romania and the Baltic states would have triggered it already,” said Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre.

In many ways, the new EU strategy builds on work already in progress. But it also signals a stronger focus on security policy, says Chris Kremidas-Courtney, senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre.   

"It's a serious plan. This is the European Union getting more involved in defence and security," they told DW, adding that the plan for a sovereign European command and control capacity to track and engage drones in Europe was a level of ambition they hadn’t seen before.  

The internet was never valuable because it was efficient. It mattered because it was a raucous, unpredictable global conversation where people could recognise one another. It now belongs more to machines.

Europe is spending billions upgrading its defences to deter Russia, but wavering public resolve risks leaving Russia undeterred by Europe’s growing military strength.

The EU’s recent hesitation over a reparations-backed loan for Ukraine reveals something deeper and more disquieting: a nagging gap between capability and will. This reluctance to use economic power echoes a deeper unease about using military force, again showing how the Union’s capabilities are growing but it remains slow to use the tools at its disposal.

From Silicon Valley to Strasbourg to Moscow, a loose alliance is rewriting the rules of power without asking for your vote

In a world awash in deepfakes, synthetic voices, and algorithmic echo chambers, it is tempting to blame technology alone for our descent into unreality. 

Russia and China are actively engaging in a new kind of conflict, one that targets infrastructure, information, and influence rather than just territory. Yet most democracies remain caught in outdated frameworks, still approaching security through the Cold War lens of deterrence, and tidy distinctions between war and peace. 

Voltaire Cousteau’s rules may have been written as parody in 1973, but their relevance today is deadly serious. The waters of geopolitics are infested

În faţa ameninţărilor venite dinspre Beijing şi Kremlin, Occidentul pierde teren deoarece reacţionează haotic, fără o strategie comună şi cu sisteme politice fragile, avertizează Chris Kremidas-Courtney, cercetător senior la European Policy Centre şi cercetător asociat la Geneva Centre for Security Policy, într-un articol publicat pe site-ul Euractiv.

Beijing and Moscow are playing the long game. They’re sanction-proofing their economies while weaponising our openness and indecision. They’re also betting on us being too slow, divided, or distracted to respond.

In an era defined by systemic shocks and collapsing certainties, we need to rethink who we empower. Divergent thinkers, who are often overlooked by conventional institutions, are the ones best equipped to navigate what comes

Kremlin-aligned AI networks are flooding Europe’s fact checkers with deepfakes, forged articles and bot-driven spin, putting the EU’s Digital Services Act to its toughest test yet.

A German surveillance aircraft patrolling the Red Sea as part of an EU mission was allegedly targeted by a Chinese warship using lasers last week.

We were warned that ignorance might one day triumph over knowledge. But no one told us it would come packaged in sleek interfaces and speaking fluently, affirming our every thought.

As conspiracy theorists fine-tune AI to echo their worldview, the danger isn’t hallucination but affirmation. When machines become soulmates for delusion, democracy suffers. 

As the daily attacks between Israel and Iran intensify and Tehran feels increasingly cornered, policymakers must address the unlikely yet potentially dangerous threat of a radiological dispersal device (RDD), or “dirty bomb.”

People don’t believe conspiracies because they are foolish, they believe them because they fill social and psychological needs.

The drill involving two counter-drone systems comes after China’s reported use of drones in the disputed South China Sea in recent months

Senior officials and intelligence agencies across Europe have been sounding the alarm that hybrid campaigns orchestrated by Russia and China have increasingly converged, posing an amplified threat to Western security.

Chris Kremidas-Courtney understryker att Europa inte längre kan förlita sig på amerikanskt stöd, på den politiska viljan till att engagera sig för Europa. Därför är det oundvikligt för de europeiska militärmakterna att ta på sig ledartröjan.

The so-called "stabilocracy," as Stefan Šipka, an expert at the European Policy Centre, calls it, doesn't work, especially in the long term, if the price is maintaining corrupt regimes that rule against their own people.

AI is rapidly transforming society, causing worker anxiety despite potential benefits, requiring a new social contract that ensures human control, just transitions, and inclusive development to prevent deepening inequality and create a future where technology enhances rather than diminishes human potential.

In the 21st century, natural disasters are no longer confined to physical destruction. Instead, they operate as flashpoints for another insidious threat: disaster disinformation.

Door zich als een bolwerk van digitale rechten, transparantie en eerlijke concurrentie te positioneren kan de EU tegengewicht bieden en de ondermijning van de democratie beperken.

As Chris Kremidas-Courtney, a senior fellow at the European Policy Centre, argued in November, the shadow fleet poses greater threats than its key role in economically sustaining Russia’s war effort in Ukraine.

Kremidas-Courtney said: “Recent incidents underscore this threat. Russia-linked vessels have been implicated in drone incursions, cable disruptions and reconnaissance of critical infrastructure. The Eagle S [a suspected shadow tanker] severed undersea cables after cycling through multiple flags, and Estonia’s attempted interdiction of the Jaguar crude oil tanker prompted the scrambling of Russian fighter jets – proof that Moscow sees this fleet as a strategic asset and is willing to protect it. Europe cannot afford to let these incidents pass unanswered.”