EU strategic autonomy after Ukraine — Mark Leonard on what changed
Mark Leonard at the European Council on Foreign Relations has argued that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine forced the EU's strategic-autonomy debate out of theory and into operational policy. What the union does on defense industry and energy since 2022 is the only honest measure of the concept.
Key fact
EU joint defense procurement as a share of total EU defense spending: about 18% in 2022, target of 35% by 2030 (European Defence Agency; EDIRPA program).
Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of *The Age of Unpeace* (Bantam, 2021), has been the most consistent public analyst of EU foreign-policy doctrine since the early 2000s. His 2022-2024 writing on EU strategic autonomy is the cleanest summary of why the concept moved from rhetorical to operational after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Strategic autonomy as an EU phrase dates to French president Jacques Chirac's late-1990s speeches and was revived by Emmanuel Macron in his 2017 Sorbonne address. For most of the intervening period the concept was a Paris-led debate that Berlin, Warsaw, and the Hague resisted on grounds it implied distancing from Washington. The invasion changed the political geometry without changing the rhetoric.
Leonard's analytical move is to track what the EU has actually done since 2022 rather than what it has said. The European Defence Industry Reinforcement through Common Procurement Act (EDIRPA) created a $500 million fund for joint procurement of defense materiel. The 2024 European Defence Industry Strategy set a target of 35 percent joint procurement by 2030, up from about 18 percent in 2022. The European Peace Facility, originally a small off-budget instrument, has channeled more than €11 billion in lethal-aid reimbursements to member states supplying Ukraine.
On energy, the 2022 REPowerEU plan, the 2023 LNG terminal buildout, and the 2024 Net-Zero Industry Act constitute the largest energy-policy realignment in EU history. Russian pipeline gas as a share of EU gas imports fell from 41 percent in 2021 to under 8 percent by 2024. The replacement mix is majority US LNG, which Leonard reads as a substitution of dependencies rather than autonomy in any deep sense.
The harder test, in Leonard's reading, is what the union does if a second Trump administration weakens US security guarantees to Europe. The post-2022 industrial and procurement architecture is partially in place. The shared political will to use it without a US backstop has not yet been tested. Strategic autonomy as operational doctrine — not as French slogan — is what the 2025-2028 political cycle is going to clarify.
Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of *The Age of Unpeace* (Bantam Press, 2021), has tracked the European Union's strategic-autonomy debate since the 2003 founding of ECFR. His central analytical move is to distinguish three competing meanings of strategic autonomy that have circulated in European policy discourse — military-strategic autonomy (the ability to act militarily without dependence on the United States), economic-statecraft autonomy (the ability to use trade, finance, and regulatory instruments for strategic ends without coordination with Washington), and regulatory-sovereignty autonomy (the ability to set standards for technology, data, and markets that other jurisdictions adopt or accommodate). The post-2022 environment has stressed each of the three meanings differently and has produced uneven adaptation across them.
The military-strategic dimension has, somewhat paradoxically, moved in the direction of deeper Atlantic integration rather than autonomy. The Russian invasion of Ukraine produced Sweden and Finland's NATO accessions in 2023 and 2024 respectively, strengthened the alliance's eastern frontier with the Enhanced Forward Presence deployments and their post-2022 expansion, and increased member-state defense spending across most of the continent. The autonomous-defense agenda that Emmanuel Macron's diplomacy had pushed across his first presidential term has been operationally subordinated to the NATO architecture in the post-2022 environment, even as the rhetoric of strategic autonomy has remained in official documents.
The economic-statecraft dimension has moved decisively in the autonomy direction. The 2023 Economic Security Strategy and the subsequent build-out of EU instruments — anti-coercion regulation, outbound investment screening, foreign-subsidies regulation, dual-use export controls, the Critical Raw Materials Act, the Net-Zero Industry Act — represent the most extensive package of strategic-economic instruments the EU has ever assembled. The institutional operationalisation is uneven across member states, but the Commission-level architecture now exists in a form that did not exist a decade ago.
The regulatory-sovereignty dimension is where the EU's autonomy is most clearly established. The General Data Protection Regulation, the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, the Artificial Intelligence Act, and the broader Brussels-effect regulatory architecture have established the EU as a standards-setter that other jurisdictions accommodate. Anu Bradford's work at Columbia Law School has documented the mechanics of this regulatory extraterritoriality. The post-2022 environment has consolidated rather than disrupted this dimension of European strategic autonomy.
The Ukraine financing dimension has tested the EU's capacity for coherent strategic action under sustained external pressure. The European Peace Facility's lethal-aid mechanism, the Ukraine Facility's macro-financial support architecture, and the use of immobilised Russian central-bank reserve windfall profits to finance G7-coordinated lending to Kyiv all represent institutional innovations that did not exist pre-2022. The institutional creativity has come at the cost of negotiating frictions (Hungarian leverage on funding decisions, varying member-state appetites for military commitment) that have not disappeared but have been managed through specific procedural workarounds.
The Leonard framework's forward-looking question is whether the post-2022 institutional adaptations consolidate or revert as the political environment in member-state capitals shifts. The 2024 European Parliament elections produced a centre-right shift but did not displace the broad strategic-autonomy consensus across the major political families. The political conditions of the late 2020s — particularly the trajectory of the US-Europe transatlantic relationship under successive American administrations — will determine whether the strategic-autonomy architecture continues to deepen or retrenches back toward the pre-2022 baseline. The institutional infrastructure now exists for either trajectory; the political choices in major capitals will determine which one consolidates.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.