The world is being led to the edge – not by accident, but by choice.
The war that the US and Israel launched on Iran in February – an attack in violation of rules set by international law – has sent shockwaves not only through energy markets but has intensified suffering across the Middle East and beyond. According to UNHCR, around 3.2 million Iranians have been displaced by the attacks. Millions of people are affected by the destruction of infrastructure, for instance, when the US shot an oil rig in central Tehran, leading to a toxic cloud and acid rain for days. President Trump even threatened that “a whole civilisation will die”. Meanwhile, the regime in Iran has blocked internet access and seems to misuse the situation with severe human rights violations against dissidents further increasing.
For decades, the region has been under the spell of foreign powers, predominantly the US, meddling with regional conflicts and inflaming new ones to secure control over land, oil supplies and energy routes. They have done so by sacrificing potential non-violent solutions and civilian lives to geopolitical and corporate interests.
This is what militarised “security” looks like in practice: instability, fear and a bill that is paid first and foremost by civilians, especially the most vulnerable. It is a form of “security” that destroyed fertile lands, polluted water and healthy ecosystems, and that compromises life-support systems and the communities that depend on them – now and for future generations.
At the EEB, we are clear: political strongmen and military aggression are pushing humankind and the planet to the brink. Our network’s recent position paper on defence, security and militarisation starts from a simple truth: human security cannot be built on aggression and an eternal arms race, and it cannot be built against planetary boundaries, against social justice or against international law.
Authoritarian security: domination over cooperation
Across the globe, international relations are increasingly dominated by some strongman leaders who equate strength with domination, threats, military escalation and even aggression. In a context of low economic growth, geopolitical upheaval and competition for critical resources, they use militarisation as a path to safeguard their own power and economic interests. This brand of strongman politics thrives on fear, scapegoating and the normalisation of violence. It benefits from a lack of accountability for breaches of the most basic rules of the international legal order. It pushes us towards a world where diplomacy is dismissed as useless, restraint as naïveté and cooperation as weakness.
Peak war
The consequences are visible everywhere. Armed conflicts have reached their highest level since the Second World War. Global military spending has hit record levels, while international institutions meant to prevent war are paralysed. At the same time, the climate crisis accelerates, nature is destroyed, and inequalities deepen – all factors that fuel further instability and conflict.
The wars in the Middle East are a textbook example. The US-Israel attacks on Iran, as well as Israel’s airstrikes and ground operations in Lebanon, have devastating humanitarian and environmental consequences. Legal scholars have made it clear that the attacks on Iran are illegal. EU member states do not support the attacks and have called on the US to respect the UN Charter, with only a few explicitly condemning the strikes or taking more concrete action, such as closing their airspace for the attacks.
Beyond Iran, UN organisations have warned that the intensive airstrikes on Lebanon are breaching international law. These attacks have resulted in thousands of people killed with tens of thousands injured. Close to a million people have been displaced in Lebanon, a humanitarian crisis following Israel’s bombing and effective control over parts of southern Lebanese territory. Already before, Gaza has been rendered largely unliveable, scarred for generations by Israel’s genocide and ecocide. More than an estimated 75.000 people were killed, with thousands more having died due to the abhorrent living conditions. We have called on European leaders to act. In light of their failure to act on the crimes committed by the Israeli government, a group of European lawyers, including advisers to the International Criminal Court and university professors, have filed an action with the EU Court of Justice against the EU Commission and Council.
What remains is that civilians are paying the price for geopolitical power games that they have no say in.
Europe’s vulnerabilities
The strongman approach is exemplified, in Europe, by Russia’s illegal war of aggression against Ukraine, an attempt to dominate and control the country and its resources by force. It represents the most direct security threat to the region in decades – as the largest interstate war in Europe since the end of World War II. It has had profound consequences far beyond Ukraine’s borders. It has shattered the idea of lasting peace across Europe and the respect of sovereign states, violated fundamental principles of international law, and demonstrated how militarised authoritarianism fuels instability, displacement and environmental destruction. Millions have been forced to flee – with currently 10 million Ukrainians out of their homes and hundreds of thousands dead. Critical civilian infrastructure has been systematically targeted, and ecosystems, land and water have been polluted and degraded by warfare with emissions spiking.
The invasion has also exposed Europe’s vulnerability created by energy and material dependence, with fossil fuel revenues continuing to finance Russia’s war machine. It has exposed the EU’s unhealthy security and energy dependence on the US, denying itself the agency to act for itself. Meanwhile, NATO’s priorities are arguably more shaped by US foreign policy than by European interests. The EU has allowed itself to be manoeuvred into a paradoxical position where it has agreed with the US to increase defence spending and in practice boost US arms manufacturers’ profits, further entrenching economic austerity for EU countries, while the US threatened to invade Greenland and has thrown Europe, and the world, into a severe energy crisis following its attack on Iran.
Energy insecurity hurts those least responsible
Militarisation and war are not only humanitarian disasters, but they are also economic and social ones. The US attack, Iran’s retaliatory attacks on oil infrastructure in the gulf and the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz are disrupting global energy routes which has already translated into volatility and rising costs. Leading energy experts and economists are warning of an unprecedented global economic shock – akin to two major oil shocks (1973 and 1979) and the gas crisis following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (2022). As always, it is low‑income households who suffer first: families forced to choose between heating and food, people pushed deeper into energy poverty, and governments pressured to divert public money away from social and environmental priorities just to keep the lights on.
This is not a coincidence. A security model dependent on fossil fuels, fragile supply chains and authoritarian regimes is a recipe for permanent crisis. Europe learned this lesson painfully through its reliance on Russian energy and is now repeating it with the US, and elsewhere, if it continues to treat energy, climate and human security as separate.
True security means ending dependence on fossil fuels altogether through a full fossil fuel phase out, accelerating the transition to renewable energy, battery storage and smart grids, reducing material consumption, restoring ecosystem health and functions, and building resilient, democratic societies that can withstand shocks without turning on their most vulnerable.
The EU at a crossroads
The EU cannot deny the existence of very real and concrete security threats facing Europe today. Russia’s war of aggression has fundamentally altered Europe’s security landscape and requires a firm, credible and unified response rooted in international law and collective resolve. Europe cannot afford to appease a regime that is ready to sacrifice a generation to war, it cannot afford fragmentation or strategic ambiguity, nor can it allow authoritarian leaders to conclude that aggression is simply accepted and part of the new normal.
A Europe that speaks clearly against war and militarisation must be capable of defending itself, protecting civilians, critical infrastructure, including from cyberattacks and hybrid warfare and democratic institutions. It cannot do so by an open-ended arms race with Russia. It needs to do so in a way that upholds its founding values, demonstrating that it is neither naïve nor militarily, economically, or politically defenceless, but principled, united and committed to peace, while resolute in its defence and territorial integrity. It can do so by standing together strong and clear, prioritising containment, resilience and diplomatic pressure, making full use of all economic and legal measures and extending unwavering support for Ukraine’s right to self‑determination and self-defence.
ReArm Europe and the security dilemma
In the face of deep geopolitical and economic instability, Europe is choosing to revive and expand its military capacity on a scale not seen since the late 1980s. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has marked a turning point in both public perception and security policy. It has triggered a widespread sense of fear and vulnerability that cannot be dismissed. These concerns are real. The question is how to avoid falling into the trap of the security dilemma.
Globally, we are experiencing ballooning defence budgets. SIPRI released its 2025 assessment last week showing that world military expenditure rose to reach $2887 billion in 2025, which was the 11th consecutive year of growth. Global spending has gone up by 41 per cent over the past decade. In Europe, expenditure reached $864 billion in 2025, the highest level of spending ever recorded by SIPRI. Over the last decade, military spending in the region doubled. Next to ever-growing military expenditure, environmental and social safeguards are being quietly weakened in the name of “security” and “competitiveness”. This is a profound mistake.
Security policies that undermine democracy, sideline public debate and empower the weapons industry to define defence budgets ultimately serve private profits, not public safety. Fixating on arbitrary military spending targets of x % of GDP while underfunding climate action, healthcare, housing and social protection does not make Europe safer: it makes it more fragile.
Europe’s current answer, embodied in initiatives, which as ReArm Europe, now rebranded as Readiness 2030, however, risks falling into the classic security dilemma. Measures taken to increase one actor’s security can be perceived as threats by others, potentially triggering cycles of escalation that may ultimately leave all sides less secure – or in any case locking us into an eternal arms race.
What we are missing instead is an independent and democratic assessment of what Europe’s actual defence needs are, or where the line should be drawn between necessary, efficient defence spending to protect European sovereignty and security on the one hand, and permanent militarisation, increased power of the weapons industry and excessive spending on the other.
Who pays for militarisation?
Military budgets do not emerge from nowhere. They are paid for through political choices, often at the expense of environmental protection, public services and social investment. Even with loosened EU fiscal rules, extraordinary increases in defence spending imply real trade-offs, especially as households across Europe already face rising living costs, housing shortages and strained public services.
Today’s world is mired in overlapping social and ecological crises. Simply rerouting public money into arms production will not protect European societies from the deep drivers of insecurity: climate breakdown, ecosystem and food chain collapse, energy dependence, inequality and fragile supply chains. A security strategy that sidelines these realities risks eroding the very foundations it claims to defend.
What environmental citizens organisations demand instead
In its position on security and militarisation, the EEB calls for a radical shift in how we understand and pursue security, grounded in human wellbeing, ecological limits and justice. That means:
- Redefining security around all human needs: access to food, water, energy, healthcare, a stable climate, healthy ecosystems, democracy and the rule of law.
- Prioritising conflict prevention and de-escalation, diplomacy and peacebuilding and exhausting all non-violent political, economic and legal tools before reaching for weapons.
- Banning arms exports to regimes that use weapons against civilians, repress their own populations or violate international law without double standards.
- A complete fossil fuels phase-out and fast track shift to local renewables capacity, battery storage and smart grids, to end fossil fuel dependence and to cut the financial lifelines of war while protecting people and industries from energy shocks and reducing the risks and scale of climate crisis impacts.
- A democratic and open assessment and public debate about the line between necessary public spending on defence and security, and militarisation of politics and undue influence of the weapons industry.
- Keeping defence spending lean and cost-effective, transparent and democratically controlled, and ensuring it never comes at the expense of climate action, social justice or environmental protection.
- Upholding environmental and human rights laws, rejecting fast-track exemptions for military projects, and recognising large-scale environmental destruction – ecocide – as an international crime.
Choosing a different future
It is worth remembering that the environmental movement was born in close alliance with peace and anti‑war movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalists and peace activists marched side by side against nuclear weapons, recognising that the destruction of people and the destruction of the planet are inseparable. War makes life itself impossible.
That legacy matters today. Environmental organisations cannot stay silent in the face of new militarisation and strongmen politics, nor can they ignore the fear and insecurity many people genuinely experience. We need to have a clear answer to threats, based on a broader, more credible vision of security. One that offers protection without permanent escalation, and safety without sacrificing democracy or the planet.
The belief that escalation is unavoidable risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that benefits authoritarian leaders while leaving societies poorer, more divided and less safe. At a time of converging crises – climate breakdown, geopolitical tensions, widening inequality – all of which create grounds for strife and reasons for conflict, Europe still has a choice to reclaim and promote a vision of security rooted in the respect of peace, justice and planetary boundaries.
