Beyond Consensus: National Security Initiative and Europe’s Strategic Autonomy
Beyond Consensus: National Security Initiative and Europe’s Strategic Autonomy
Beyond Consensus: National Security Initiative and Europe’s Strategic Autonomy
Commentary by Conor Edward Mullin
November 2026
The views expressed in this paper are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the oiip.
About the author:
Conor Edward Mullin is a doctoral researcher at the University of Innsbruck, where his research examines strategic culture and threat perception across Germany, Estonia, and Austria within NATO’s security framework. He is an editor and contributor at The Defence Horizon Journal and has previously worked in Knowledge Management with the United Nations Development Programme. His research focuses on European security, strategic culture, and the politics of collective defense.
Abstract:
EU leaders must decide whether they can continue to treat national security initiative as optional. The EU rewards initiative in coalition building, compromise, regulatory entrepreneurship, and industrial cooperation, but the EU’s quest for strategic autonomy lacks security entrepreneurship. EU leaders can find the model for this in NATO, specifically member states Turkey and Estonia. Despite being very different nations, their common ground exists in the shared instinct that collective consensus is a floor, not a ceiling – it is that instinct, not either model specifically, that the EU’s security culture must develop.
European Security in 2026
Despite Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the onset of a second Trump Administration, Europe has struggled to break away from a security dependency habit on the United States. Though notable steps towards strategic autonomy have been taken – such as significant increases in defense spending and renewed political attention – European security leadership is stubbornly diffuse, with different states leading in different realms, and none yet translating military investment into political direction (Weber, 2026). Unanimity in foreign policy is often paralysis-inducing, and the need for regulatory approval constrains the responsiveness that the changing security environment demands. As volatile domestic politics in the United States has a growing impact on its reliability abroad, the EU must complement unanimity with mechanisms that reward national security initiative.
Strategic autonomy is crucial, however no framework yet exists that treats national security initiative itself as a driver of it. National security initiative – expressed through what this article terms security entrepreneurship – is the willingness of states to elevate emerging threats, develop capabilities, and advance solutions ahead of collective institutional authorization rather than waiting for it. It does not require uniformity of threat perception nor consensus as a precondition to national action, but rather promotes a shared architecture wherein differentiated national initiative is both possible and productive. This is the strategic model that can allow Europe to harness its strengths to develop independent security capacity in the post-2022 geopolitical context.
Crucially, existing multilateral frameworks, NATO in particular, already demonstrate the flexibility to host divergent national security postures without fracturing collective cohesion. The challenge lies not within institutional capacity, but in political willingness at the national level.
NATO as the Model, Not the Solution
European strategic autonomy, a fractious concept loosely defined in the EU’s 2022 Strategic Compass, describes Europe’s collective capacity to act militarily, economically, and diplomatically without requiring external authorization (Bell, 2022). It is an institutional aspiration, yet one which depends on something the Strategic Compass does not provide: a framework for national-level action that does not wait for collective institutional authorization before it begins. That is the entrypoint for security entrepreneurship, the proactive development of national security capacity ahead of collective institutional mandates. The capability for this already exists in NATO’s European pillar, characterized by sharper threat consensus, command structure, and the capacity to accommodate divergent national security postures while retaining Alliance cohesion.
The American security umbrella is no longer assumed, meaning the foundation of Europe’s defense is truly in question. The second Trump Administration has shifted to a transactional dynamic: NATO’s Article 5 commitments may be conditional and Alliance cohesion depends on European nations carrying more of their own weight – the era of comfortable dependency has closed. Trump’s return has accelerated the urgency of Europe’s push for strategic autonomy, surfacing real questions of defense capability and reliance on Europe’s own military to defend its territory. Yet as of the Le Grand Continent polling in late 2025, nearly 70% of respondents doubt their respective country is prepared for war. The gap between real strategic urgency and Europe’s ability to meet it is precisely where national security initiative becomes not a strategic preference but a necessity.
NATO as an institution has proven capable of accommodating divergent national threat perceptions without fracturing alliance cohesion. When Russia emerged once again as a threat following the Crimean annexation, simultaneous threats in the Southern Flank, such as the emergence of ISIS, became security priorities for most member states there. This divergence was absorbed through NATO’s “360-degree” policy for threat awareness, maintaining overall focus on Russia while accommodating regional security needs (Larsen, 2024, 96). The Turkish exception – prioritizing Kurdish forces over ISIS, outside alliance consensus – tested this capacity without breaking it. NATO’s architecture, more than the EU’s, is able to host this differentiated national initiative that European security now requires. In 2026 the Alliance may not provide the sense of real security as it had in the past, but still provides a crucial model for Europe to structure its own strategic autonomy around.
Türkiye as a Multi-Theater Actor
Türkiye has regularly diverged from the societal and security norms of NATO’s European members in the post-Cold War era while remaining a strategically crucial partner to the alliance. Systemic changes in the global order have increased the opportunities for reduced reliance on foreign military and technology (Haugom, 2019 in Aydin-Düzgit et al., 2025, 86) as well as expansion of regional influence. Turkey’s head start in adapting to the emerging multipolar era is hedged on the belief that Western hegemony has already ended (2025, 89). The 2019 purchase of Russian S-400 air defense missiles (at the cost of expulsion from the U.S.-led F-35 program) is the clearest expression of this posture: prioritizing capability and autonomy over political alignment, while remaining too militarily significant for the alliance to expel.
Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine allowed Türkiye to harness initiative for the sake of leverage in the crucial role of brokering talks between the warring parties, and in manipulation of NATO’s consensus-based decision making. Amidst Finland and Sweden’s accession into NATO, Türkiye met Sweden’s bid with stringent conditions. In addition to concessions related to the Kurdish independence movement in Sweden, Türkiye secured American F-16 jets as well as a ‘special coordinator for counterterrorism’ through NATO. Effectively, Ankara was able to leverage its alliance membership to secure gains in both internal and regional security – strengthening NATO’s Nordic bloc and its own security preferences. The lesson for Europe is not the method but the mechanism: divergence from full embeddedness created options that deeper integration forecloses.
Türkiye is simultaneously able to occupy roles of deterrence and diplomacy, supplying crucial drone capability to Ukraine, yet diplomatically aligning closer to European counterparts than the United States and United Kingdom (Dalay and Isachenko, 2024, 3). Türkiye’s indigenous drone capability, developed to reduce dependence on Western arms suppliers, is both the material precondition for its strategic flexibility and the clearest lesson for European defense planners. That logic characterizes Türkiye’s bilateral relationship with the United States. While twelve EU member states host U.S. military elements, Türkiye has managed this dependency to run both ways: Incirlik serves American power projection into the Middle East as much as Turkish security, making withdrawal costly for both. Europe can draw from the principle of building dependencies that can make it a security partner rather than a client, without replicating Türkiye’s specific political conditions.
Türkiye’s model for national security entrepreneurship is not an argument for European emulation – it is a diagnostic prompt. Türkiye’s success there is, to a significant extent, a product of authoritarian populism as much as geography and institutional positioning which European states cannot replicate by acts of policy; Türkiye’s internal politics is not compatible with the EU. Centralized presidential power facilitates the kind of rapid pivots and hedging that EU nations cannot achieve – lack of democratic process, parliamentary oversight, and judicial independence removes the internal friction and working time in such foreign policy maneuvers (Uzgel, 2022). European institutions are rightly structured to prevent this kind of unilateral maneuvering. Europe can learn from Türkiye not by eliminating such structural constraints, but by working within them with greater initiative.
Developing independent security strategies at the national level, accepting greater variance in how states handle regional security, and building capacity to hedge within reason but without consensus can serve to strengthen overall European security. The latter represents how Türkiye is able to balance NATO’s priorities with localized concerns – managing its border with Iran and relationship with Tehran largely outside consensus, yet continuing to operate within the alliance’s broader security frameworks. The model already exists within EU borders – and it looks nothing like Türkiye.
Strategic Initiative at the EU Frontier
For security communities, Türkiye is proof that norm divergence and even contestation are manageable phenomena within multilateral structures. However, divergence is not the only form of national security entrepreneurship available. Giving equal priority to localized security concerns and exercising initiative in strategic decision making is a return-yielding endeavor within NATO frameworks – Estonia illustrates how.
Where Türkiye has seen both success and consequences in its efforts at distinct regional security autonomy, Estonia demonstrates the benefit of taking initiative within multilateral structures, showing that strategic initiative does not require strategic independence. Since the break up of the USSR, the small nation on the EU/NATO frontier has pursued an independent security capacity while advancing institutional integrity. This is not strategic autonomy in the Turkish sense, but rather something more immediately available to the EU: the political willingness to act, allowing the exercise of national security initiative within Alliance frameworks, without waiting for collective consensus to mandate action.
Estonian prowess here, established independently of the overall NATO security architecture, is a product of caution – the nation has hedged against the perceived unreliability of security guarantees, not its allies. Proximity to Russia led Estonia to engage in the comprehensive defense concept – a whole of society approach to security in the civilian and military domains – driven by national initiative ahead of NATO and CSDP requirements. NATO’s commitments on national resilience and the seven baseline requirements following the 2016 Warsaw Summit drew explicitly on this Baltic model.
Simultaneously, Estonian investment in cyber warfare, asymmetric capability, and dual use technology has fed directly into NATO frameworks and supported overall European security posture. The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in Tallinn is the clearest example of this – a nationally-seeded capability developing into a cornerstone of NATO’s emergent cyber doctrine – also mirrored in the Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA), harnessing dual-use technology and connecting innovators to security practitioners. Estonia did not wait for NATO to identify the need – it developed the capability, and the institution followed suit.
While Estonia is not the only voice elevating its local threat perception to Alliance level – its Baltic partners as well as Poland have done the same – Estonia represents a trifecta of threat elevation, proportional spending and crucially, institutional contribution. Estonia’s proposal launched the Act in Support for Ammunition Procurement (ASAP), and among other small states, contributes to minilateral security initiatives through participating in the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF) (Weber, 2026). The direction of influence ran from Tallinn outward – and that is precisely the direction European security culture must learn to move.
So what? Implications for Europe
Estonia is not an exception to NATO’s strategic culture – it is an indication of what that culture is already capable of, proof that taking action as a result of national threat perception can be a driver of initiative across multilateral frameworks. Türkiye and Estonia represent two distinctive examples of behavior in multilateral organizations: one through strategic leverage, the other through initiative. EU leadership can draw from both – instinct from Türkiye, method from Estonia. The EU already hosts examples of national security initiative, but has not yet developed a strategic culture that systematically recognizes and harnesses such initiative as the engine of collective autonomy.
Strategic dependency is a habit, not an outcome of European collective security. Comparatively powerful states such as Germany are an instructive case – deeply ingrained in multilateralism, a historically pacifist-oriented foreign policy, and adherence to established protocols are among the limitations which delayed decisive action in support of Ukraine in the initial 2014-15 crisis and ensuing full-scale war in 2022. The maxim “never alone” defines contemporary Germany’s approach to security even amidst the Zeitenwende of 2022 (O’Neal, 2024), constraining its willingness to exercise national security initiative. However, Europe’s shift from American security client to peer cannot be achieved at the alliance level alone, and must accommodate and promote national-level security initiative.
While NATO expansion can be applauded in some circles, this growth is also a key indicator that the EU is still not taken seriously as a security guarantor. Mechanisms for national security entrepreneurship exist, which should serve to boost the EU’s defense credibility. The Security Action for Europe (SAFE) act enables this through EU-level financial support, yet leveraging the funds for procurement and capability development depends on political will at the national level. Looming national elections, risking further divergence of political orientations across member states, invites further disagreement and a difficult road to unanimity in the CFSP and defense (Weber, 2026). The EU must both encourage and reward national security entrepreneurship; treating Brussels as the only source for security policy implementation only invites further delay and disruption on Europe’s road to strategic autonomy.
Türkiye remains an outlier in NATO, geographically, politically, and institutionally. Its value lies in the strategic signal it conveys: treating collective security as the floor, not a limiting ceiling. NATO has already demonstrated that this instinct is compatible with alliance cohesion — Türkiye and Estonia, divergent in method and values, both operated within its frameworks on their own terms. The architecture enabling security initiative already exists on the continent, waiting to be activated not despite EU frameworks, but deliberately within them. Estonia continues to demonstrate that national initiative and Alliance integration are not in tension, but are mutually reinforcing. Europe’s habit of dependency is not an inevitable outcome of collective security architecture. It is a pattern that can be changed.
Works Cited
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Dalay, Galip, and Daria Isachenko. "Turkey’s stakes in the Russia-NATO rivalry: the Ukraine crisis and beyond." (2022): 4.
Larsen, Jeffrey A. "The United States and NATO: Is There a Western Strategic Culture?." In Routledge Handbook of Strategic Culture, pp. 91-105. Routledge, 2023.
O’Neal, Molly. “The Risks to Germany and Europe of a Prolonged War in Ukraine.” Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. October 7, 2024. https://quincyinst.org/research/the-risks-to-germany-and-europe-of-a-prolonged-war-in-ukraine/#
Uzgel, Ilhan. "Turkish Foreign Policy After Presidentialism." Middle East Institute 25 (2022).
Weber, Gesine. 2026. “European Security Since 2022: What Has Changed and What Hasn’t.” Center for Security Studies (CSS), ETH Zurich, September 30, 2026. https://css.ethz.ch/en/center/CSS-news/2026/09/european-security-since-2022-what-has-changed-and-what-hasnt.html