EU plans to develop a so-called “drone wall” across NATO’s eastern flank were recently thrown into doubt due to an on-going power struggle between national governments, the NATO alliance and the European Commission. Though such efforts can only be lauded, they must not be advanced so much as to ignore the development of offensive capabilities.
With Russian sabre-rattling continuing along NATO’s eastern flank, the European Union had begun developing a “drone wall” along the borders of members facing Russia (Finland, Estonia and Latvia).
Part of the Eastern Flank Coalition (which includes Baltic States and Poland), the Drone Defence Initiative has been conceived to provide defensive weapons to destroy drones as well as a new command-and-control network. “We do not have the capability to detect [drones], or it is very limited. Our radars see aircraft, they see missiles, but they do not see very precisely drones that fly very, very low,” explained Andrius Kubilius, commissioner of defence and space for the European Commission. Indeed, the EU appeared ready to commit significant communication and financial resources to these efforts.
But the initiative has exposed tensions over who should lead, fund and control Europe’s next line of defence. The strategic question raised by this renewed focus is not whether such defensive systems are useful—they are—but whether Europe is again at risk of mistaking visible fortifications for a comprehensive military posture. The debate echoes a familiar historical warning: the Maginot Line was not a failure because it was poorly designed, but because it became a substitute for a balanced strategy.
A politically attractive shield
The appeal of the drone wall is easy to understand. Persistent surveillance drones, low-cost interceptors and layered air defence systems respond directly to lessons drawn from Ukraine, where cheap drones and missiles have transformed the battlefield. They are comparatively affordable, highly visible to voters, and politically easier to justify as “defensive” investments. According to the European Commission’s own overview of future defence initiatives, “air and missile defence, drones, and space systems” are at the forefront of Europe’s industrial push in the framework of the Readiness 2030 programme.
In this regard, a joint declaration issued at the Eastern Flank Summit in Helsinki in December 2025 called for accelerated work on shared surveillance, early warning and drone defence capabilities, framing them as urgent responses to an increasingly hostile security environment, and calls for “immediate prioritisation of the EU’s Eastern Flank through a coordinated and multi-domain operational approach.”
It is also, in political terms, a “good” kind of spending. It promises protection of territory and critical infrastructure, it is easier to present as a European public good, and it is comparatively legible to voters. Kubilius even emphasised the manageable headline cost, with preliminary estimates indicating that it would cost one billion euros for a drone wall covering Poland and the Baltic states—“It’s not tens of billions or hundreds of billions.”
A modern Maginot Line?
Historical analogies are often misused in defence debates, but the Maginot Line remains instructive when treated with nuance. France’s interwar fortifications performed their intended task: German forces largely avoided frontal assaults in the sectors they covered. The strategic failure lay elsewhere, notably in the lack of sufficient investment in mobile armoured forces, air power and operational concepts capable of taking the fight to the enemy.
A recent War on the Rocks analysis explicitly warned against drawing simplistic conclusions, arguing that Europe’s emerging lines of defence are not “Maginot 2.0” in technical terms, but could become strategically equivalent if they crowd out investment in offensive capabilities. It describes the Eastern Flank initiative at looking to create a “digital shield” designed to limit the human cost, but outlines how some critics see this as “technological fantasy”.
The risk is increasingly visible in current budgetary choices. Germany’s decision to invest heavily in US-made Patriot systems and Israeli Arrow 3 interceptors—alongside IRIS-T—strengthens short-term protection but does little to advance Europe’s defensive base. These purchases amount to billions of euros flowing outside the EU while European manufacturers struggle to secure comparable political backing.
Does Europe have a DPS blind spot?
The imbalance becomes most visible in the field of deep precision strike (DPS). Long-range conventional strike capabilities are a central component of modern deterrence, allowing states to hold adversary logistics, command centres and critical infrastructure at risk well beyond the frontline. They complicate adversary planning, provide escalation control options, and reduce reliance on allies by offering sovereign response capabilities. Yet compared with the political momentum behind drone defence and air shields, DPS remains largely absent from EU-level narratives.
At the political level, awareness is nevertheless clearly present. Andrius Kubilius draws on the “Ukrainian experience” to argue that any Eastern European defence initiative must include deep-strike capabilities “in order to be ready to carry out deep-strikes into enemy territory in the case of enemy invasion.” In other words, even within the “wall” narrative, the logic is not purely defensive: it assumes that denying and neutralising drones is only one layer of a wider posture that must also include the capacity to impose costs at distance.
A collective response to this concern has moreover been sought through the European Long-Range Strike Approach (ELSA), but progress has been slow and timelines extend well into the 2030s. Political ownership remains diffuse, and the project has not been elevated to flagship status, with the unexpected exception of President Macron’s address to the French armed forces on January 15.
The Land Cruise Missile (LCM) is one of the projects identified under ELSA, carried by a European manufacturer, MBDA, and technologically mature, which could offer Europe a sovereign alternative to US-supplied cruise missiles. In capability terms, it directly addresses the gap Kubilius identifies. Politically, however, it remains discreet, lacking any sort of prioritization. The same goes for other, less advanced, ELSA initiatives, such as hypersonic missile being developed by the UK and Germany. Similarly, while competing systems such as the US ERAM might be acquired by European states for Ukraine, promising European initiatives like the Franco-Italian-British Stratus programme seem absent from ELSA, without clear support from its sponsoring governments, despite the urgency of the needs. This raises questions about the coherence of the policies pursued by the participating countries.
The imbalance of having a shield without a sword
However, Eastern European member states have become more and more vocal as they urge Brussels to increase defence spending. Back on December 16, 2025, heads of state and governments from the Eastern flank called for what Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo described as “concrete measures”, with the group announcing a “coordinated operational approach” in areas such as “ground combat capabilities, drone defence, air and missile defence, border and critical infrastructure protection, military mobility and counter mobility as well as strategic enablers.”
The persistent problem is that debates over EU defence funding are unfolding under ever tightening fiscal constraints. Defensive systems, with their visible protective logic, fit that profile. Analytical commentary from the European Leadership Network reflects the same logic. In arguing for scaling low-cost defensive technologies such as counter-drone systems, the piece frames them as a rational response to lessons from Ukraine; effective, affordable and rapidly deployable.
Indeed, deterrence rests on the adversary’s belief that aggression will impose unacceptable costs. Europe faces a problem of balance. Today, offensive strike capabilities remain fragmented and politically uneasy. History’s lesson is clear: defence alone is never enough. Europe’s security depends on convincing adversaries that aggression will cost more than they can bear.
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky
Will Africa Test Check or Speed Beijing’s Plans to Globalise the Yuan?
By Barbara Kelemen
China is utilising Africa as a strategic testing ground for yuan internationalisation to challenge US dollar dominance and potentially bypass Western sanctions. While lower transaction costs benefit African debt management and international trade, the strategy faces risks from the yuan’s limited convertibility, domestic Chinese economic imbalances, and escalating US-Sino geopolitical tensions.
As part of efforts to expand its economic influence worldwide and strengthen its financial resilience, China is seeking to internationalise the yuan, increasingly using Africa as a testing ground for the ambitious strategy.
Attempting to vie globally with the US dollar is risky for Beijing as it could undermine its own economic model and restructure power dynamics in the country. Broader adoption of the yuan as a settlement currency might also leave China’s African partners – governments and companies alike – facing economic headaches.
China has long-standing, substantial economic ties with Africa, which, for Beijing, makes the region an optimal testing ground for its currency strategy. China is a significant lender and major trading partner for several countries on the continent. Its engagement is in part driven by a desire to source African commodities, such as critical minerals and agricultural products, but it is also credited with overseeing massive infrastructure development. The latter is linked to China’s ‘Belt and Road’ strategy to establish interconnecting business and transport corridors around the world.
While China’s economic ties with Africa have benefited a good number of African countries, many are paying back expensive dollar-denominated loans and local companies are using often-scarce dollars to import Chinese goods. So, for African governments and local commercial entities, it makes financial sense to step up use of the yuan, as its trading and interest costs are lower.
Challenging the dollar
Internationalisation of the yuan is a direct challenge to the primacy of the dollar and, by extension, US economic dominance. For a long time, the idea that the yuan could compete with the dollar as part of an alternative financial system has been dismissed by economists, and it continues to be so as we are nowhere near a point where the yuan could displace the dollar as the world’s primary reserve currency.
Greater adoption of yuan would lead to increased demand and therefore appreciation pressures. But China has traditionally kept the value of its currency low for two principal reasons, one financial and the other socio-political. Strong currency could undermine China’s manufacturing-based economic model that depends heavily on producing relatively cheap goods for developed and developing markets. At the same time, a stronger yuan would tilt domestic economic power away from exporters and manufacturers to importers and consumers. That might upset a carefully-managed balance between sectors of the economy – disruption which, in turn, could lead to domestic tensions.
Cautious approach to yuan globalisation
While a transfer of financial muscle from certain economic groups to others might be inevitable, there are limits to the pace at which it can proceed, as there is an entrenched belief in China that any kind of change is bad if it happens too quickly and threatens the functioning of the state.
China, however, seems prepared to manage such risks in order to achieve its broader strategic goals. Internationalisation of the yuan would enable it to wield substantially more economic influence worldwide. At the same time it would also make China more resilient by creating an alternative system to circumvent potential Western sanctions. And what we have been seeing over the last year or so is that China has taken steps, albeit gradual, to begin this process.
African testing ground
With its moves to promote yuan adoption in Africa, an attempt is now underway to see how direct yuan competition with the dollar might play out, not least in China. Over the past year, a number of countries, notably Kenya, have been considering or have recently converted their dollar-denominated debt to China into yuan. And the Bank of Zambia confirmed this year that it now allows mining companies to settle mining royalties in yuan.
But there is a downside to all of this. While debt-for-currency swaps could enable countries to manage their debt burden more effectively, the yuan’s limited convertibility is an issue and the IMF has warned about risks around fluctuations in the yuan’s exchange rate.
At the moment, Beijing has zero-tariff deals with dozens of African countries (which come into effect in May 2026). With some domestic industries already concerned that they will be squeezed out of their own home markets by a flood of cheap Chinese goods, yuan adoption would probably exacerbate this effect by reducing transaction costs. There is also a risk that states focused on yuan-denominated trade with China will find it harder to pursue stuttering African economic integration, especially since central to the process is the use of local African currencies via cross-border payments systems.
Prospects for western investors
For multi-nationals with commercial interests in Africa, the gradual adoption of the yuan also has costs and benefits, but decision-makers should be able to adjust their business strategies to mitigate the former.
On the plus side, multi-national subsidiaries in Africa importing Chinese components might see lower transaction costs, as they will not have to convert local currency into dollars and then into yuan. These subsidiaries may also be able to access more convenient yuan-denominated loans to expand domestically and regionally, and would also gain from any Chinese financing of local logistical infrastructure.
Yet while there are opportunities, there is significant risk for multi-nationals operating in Africa. With the increasingly adversarial nature of US-Sino relations, corporates exporting to America from countries deemed by Washington to be too closely engaged with China might find themselves subject to higher US tariffs and other economic restrictions. So business strategies need to take particular heed of the elevated political risks of commercial ties with African countries deep within the Chinese economic sphere of influence.
It’s too early to say whether China’s efforts to expand yuan usage in Africa will persuade it to accelerate the process on the continent and extend it to other regions. In the relatively short time the African test has been underway, the signs are that it is proceeding well. But associated problems, for Beijing and its partners, are more likely to be felt over a longer period of time, as yuan adoption in Africa works through local economies and China itself. Chinese officials will be closely monitoring this, very much aware that while they are eager to expedite the experiment, they must be alert to unintended consequences.
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