The Summit Europe Does Not Know It Is Having

The five largest European military powers are meeting in Berlin today. Rutte is joining by video from Washington, where he is with Trump. Europe is trying to find a common voice while the Atlantic Alliance shows its cracks

This afternoon in Berlin, the five largest European military powers are gathering around a table. France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Poland, the grouping known as the E5, are meeting to co-ordinate their position ahead of the NATO summit in Ankara at the start of July. Mark Rutte is joining by videoconference from Washington, where he is meeting Donald Trump. It is an image worth more than any communiqué: the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance participating in a European co-ordination meeting while physically sitting with the American president. Europe trying to find a voice, and Washington watching.

This is not a routine summit. It is the first time the E5 format has convened in this context, with this degree of urgency, and this level of uncertainty about the Alliance's future. The fact that Merz chose to host the leaders in Berlin, rather than Brussels or NATO headquarters, says something about the role Germany intends to play.

What is on the table

The stated subject is NATO. But behind it lies a question that nobody is yet willing to state plainly: what happens if Trump decides that the American commitment to European security should be scaled back substantially, something that has been discussed at length within the Alliance? This is not an academic scenario. It is a concrete political variable that every European government is already factoring into its defence budgets and procurement decisions.

The Ankara summit will serve to take the Alliance's temperature. Today's Berlin meeting is about deciding what to say at Ankara with as unified a voice as possible. It is preventive diplomacy, and the fact that it is being conducted at head-of-government level rather than by defence ministers or officials signals that the stakes are considered high.

Meloni will be in Berlin today. The day after tomorrow she is in Antibes with Macron. This week's calendar speaks for itself.

Starmer: outgoing but present

One detail deserves attention. Keir Starmer announced his resignation as British Prime Minister on Monday. He is nonetheless expected in Berlin. The German government spokesman, Stefan Kornelius, took care to confirm that Berlin expects his attendance and regards him as a reliable and close partner, particularly on Ukraine.

It is a precise political signal: the E5 format is solid enough to absorb a British domestic political crisis without losing coherence. Starmer will remain in office for several more weeks, until a new Labour leader is elected and the succession completed. Long enough to sign whatever needs to be signed before Ankara.

Italy's difficult position

Italy arrives at this summit in a more complicated position than it might appear. On one side, Meloni has built her international profile on being Washington's most reliable European interlocutor, the privileged channel to Trump, at least in the version of events that had been current in Palazzo Chigi until very recently. On the other, the pressure to increase defence spending is generating industrial and political tensions that are becoming increasingly difficult to contain.

Lorenzo Mariani, chief executive of Leonardo, said today with unusual directness that if Italy breaks from its path of gradual defence spending increases, "we will emerge from this decade as complete vassals of the German and French defence industry." This is not an abstract warning. It is the assessment of the man running Italy's principal defence company, watching France and Germany invest at a pace that Italian industry is struggling, to put it mildly, to match.

Moving from 2 per cent to 3.5 per cent of GDP in a very short period, Mariani explained, would have shut out most Italian industry, which could not have sustained the pace of supply. Gradual is necessary. But so is consistent. And it is precisely that consistency that the next budget cycles will put to the test. Italy has one month to notify the European Commission whether it intends to access 15 billion euros from the SAFE defence fund. If it does not, those funds will be redistributed to other member states already in the queue.

The format that does not exist, but works

The E5 has no legal basis in the Treaties. It is not a European institution. It has no secretariat, no budget, no formal procedures. And yet it works, or at least it works better than many formal mechanisms.

It is precisely the kind of coalition of the willing that Draghi identified as the way out of Europe's institutional impasse: those who want to go further do so, without waiting for consensus from all twenty-seven. The difficulty is that an informal coalition can co-ordinate, issue joint statements and exercise diplomatic pressure. It cannot issue common debt, build a European army or substitute for the institutional architecture that does not yet exist.

It is a useful instrument in a moment of emergency. It is not a structural solution.

What to expect this evening

A joint press conference at six. Declarations of unity and resolve. In all likelihood a reference to a shared commitment on defence spending, whether at 2 per cent or 3 per cent of GDP. Perhaps a mention of European strategic autonomy, phrased carefully enough not to unsettle Washington.

What is unlikely is a concrete proposal on how to co-ordinate weapons procurement, how to build genuine interoperability between the five countries' armed forces, or how to prevent European rearmament from becoming simply the sum of five parallel national rearmaments.

Mariani is right that the risk is ending up as vassals of German and French industry. But the deeper risk is that Europe rearms without deciding how to do so together. Five countries buying different weapons, to different standards, for armies that cannot speak to each other, do not constitute a military power. They are five medium military powers that share a border and a worry.

Defence, consortia, budgets, financing, fiscal headroom: these words have rarely been discussed so frequently in the chancelleries of Europe as in recent months. What is still missing is someone willing to take the leap.