Firstpost ·
Europe rearms: Is the war economy back?
The return of Europe’s war economy is a warning about what peace was worth — and how much it costs to buy it back
On the first day of September 2026, amid the manicured calm of the Druids Glen resort in County Wicklow, Ireland, the defence ministers of the European Union met to solve a problem that money alone could not fix. Ukraine’s cities were burning under Russian missile and drone salvoes — July’s strikes had killed some 400 civilians — and Kyiv needed Patriot air-defence missiles now, not in a procurement cycle two years hence. The interceptors existed. Greece and Spain held stocks of them. And yet, by the end of the day, none was on its way east. Athens, through its defence minister, Nikos Dendias, pleaded its own exposure to ‘revisionism in the Eastern Mediterranean’ — a coded reference to Turkey. Madrid demurred.
The EU’s foreign-policy chief, Kaja Kallas, summed up the meeting with rare bluntness: there had been, ‘unfortunately, no concrete success today’.
