ANALYSIS: EUROPE AND CHINA — IS MILITARY DECOUPLING POSSIBLE?

Introduction: The enemy in the supply chain

The dependency that kills in silence

Europe is rearming. It increased its defense spending by more than $90 billion in 2025, according to data presented by Mark Rutte at his press conference on June 17, 2026. It is ordering fighter jets, tanks, and air defense systems. It is investing in its military industries with an urgency unseen since the Cold War. And all the while, silently, its guided missiles, its radars, its advanced propulsion systems are consuming rare earths, permanent magnets and gallium — materials the China controls more than 90% of worldwide production, according to a report by the South China Morning Post dated June 22, 2026. There is something almost comical about this situation, were it not so dangerous: Europe is building its defenses against Russia — a strategic ally of China — using materials that China can cut off at will.

The question of decoupling European military supply chains from China has become one of the most complex and least-discussed issues in Western rearmament. Complex because it simultaneously touches trade policy, national security, industrial policy and international relations. Little discussed because it is easier to talk about GDP percentages than to admit that European weapons systems depend on potentially hostile suppliers. This silence is a luxury Europe can no longer afford. This article attempts to break that silence.

The G7 at Évian: a partial response

At the G7 summit in Évian-les-Bains in June 2026, the seven nations — including France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, the United States, Canada and Japan — adopted a declaration on critical mineral supply chains. According to the South China Morning Post of June 22, 2026, the declaration commits to reducing below 60% the dependency on a "single non-G7 supplier" for rare earths and permanent magnets by 2030, with a target of 50% as quickly as possible. That unnamed single supplier is obviously China. The diplomatically cautious wording does not obscure the strategic reality.

This G7 commitment is a first response. But its limits are immediately visible. First: 60% by 2030 means China could still supply 60% of rare earths for Western military industries in four years. That is not decoupling — it is gradual dependency reduction. Second: the G7 can declare intentions, but supply chains are managed by private companies following their own commercial logic. Turning government intentions into industrial realities takes massive investment and decisions spanning decades. Neither the timeline nor the funding has been clearly established.

The geography of dependencies: what, how much, from where

The critical materials of defense

To understand European dependency on China in the military domain, we need to identify precisely which materials are involved. The most critical are rare earths — a group of 17 elements essential for manufacturing electric motors, missile guidance components, radar systems, lasers and many advanced defense technologies. China produces around 60% of world rare earths and processes an even larger share — roughly 85 to 90% — owing to its dominance in refining processes, according to an ECFR report from June 2026.

Then there is gallium — specifically mentioned in the SCMP report of June 22, 2026. China controls more than 90% of global gallium production. This metal is essential for manufacturing compound semiconductors used in air defense radars, military communications systems and precision guidance components. In 2023, China imposed restrictions on gallium exports — officially described as control measures, but interpreted by analysts as a signal of its willingness to use this dominance as a tool of economic coercion. Permanent magnets — neodymium-iron-boron-based — are used in the electric motors of missiles, drones and guidance systems. China produces more than 90% of the permanent magnets used in these applications.

The weapons systems affected

These dependencies are not abstract. They touch specific weapons systems. Guided missiles — from the French and British SCALP/Storm Shadow to the Javelin anti-tank missile — use rare-earth-based components in their guidance systems. Air defense systems like the Patriot and NASAMS require gallium-based radars for their advanced detection systems. The F-35s purchased by numerous NATO allies incorporate hundreds of components requiring rare earths in their avionics. And drones — which are at the heart of the military revolution illustrated by Ukraine — depend on permanent-magnet electric motors whose supply chain frequently runs through China.

The dimension of electronic components must also be added. Cooperation between China and Russia in this area has been documented since 2022. The ECFR noted in June 2026 that since 2025, the Sino-Russian relationship had expanded to include military industrial cooperation in areas such as drones and electronic warfare. This means Chinese-sourced components may not only reach Western armies, but also feed technologies that Russia uses against Ukraine. Commercial dependency thus creates a bidirectional vulnerability: the West needs Chinese materials for its weapons, and China supplies the same types of technologies to the enemy those weapons are fighting.

Why complete decoupling is an illusion

The economic reasons for maintaining the dependency

The SCMP of June 22, 2026 stated it clearly: Europe will proceed with selective risk reduction in certain areas because "the cost of completely excluding China would be too high." This assessment is realistic. China is not only the primary supplier of critical materials — it is also a major consumer market for European companies. A total decoupling policy would affect the entire economic — and thus political — Sino-European relationship well beyond the military supply chain.

One must also acknowledge the technical difficulty of replacing Chinese suppliers. Rare earths exist in other countries — Australia, Canada, Brazil, several African countries. But extraction and refining are complex industrial processes that China has developed over decades. Building equivalent capabilities outside China requires massive investment — we are talking tens of billions of dollars — and commissioning timelines of at least 5 to 10 years for new mines and refining facilities. This is not a transformation that can be decreed — it is a long and costly industrial transformation.

The logic of selective risk reduction

The realistic strategy is therefore not total decoupling but selective risk reduction (de-risking in the politico-commercial jargon). It consists of identifying the most critical dependencies — those where a supply interruption would have the most immediate consequences on military capability — and diversifying them first. Permanent magnets for critical missile guidance systems would be treated as the absolute priority. Less essential components could temporarily remain in Chinese supply chains while alternatives are built.

This sequential approach is pragmatic. It has the advantage of enabling short-term rearmament while building long-term alternatives. But it carries an inherent risk: the vulnerability window during which alternatives are not yet operational but dependency on China is already politically contested. During that window — which could last 5 to 8 years — China theoretically has the leverage to exercise economic coercion on Europe by threatening to cut supplies. Europe must reduce this temporal vulnerability by building strategic stockpiles and accelerating alternatives.

Ongoing initiatives: what is actually being done

The European Critical Raw Materials Act and its limits

The European Union adopted in 2024 the Critical Raw Materials Act, which sets diversification targets for critical minerals used in green and defense technologies. Among the objectives: no dependency on a single third country for more than 65% of needs for a given critical mineral by 2030. These targets are close to those announced by the G7 in June 2026. But the funding mechanisms and enforcement remain insufficient according to analysts. The EU has not yet spent the amounts necessary to create credible industrial alternatives to Chinese dominance.

Concrete projects exist but struggle to materialize at the necessary scale. In Sweden, the company LKAB announced plans for rare earth extraction from its existing iron mines — potentially enough to supply a fraction of European needs. In Australia, with which Europe is seeking to develop mining partnerships, rare earth production projects are underway. Canada is exploring its own resources. But the transition from plan to large-scale commercial production takes time — too much time if measured against the geopolitical urgency of 2026.

Strategic stockpiles: an emergency response

While industrial alternatives become operational, several European countries have begun building strategic stockpiles of critical materials. The principle is simple: buy now at normal prices and build reserves that would allow defense production to be maintained for a given period, even if Chinese supplies are interrupted. The United States has long experience with this policy via its National Defense Stockpile. Europe, lagging behind, is beginning to build similar mechanisms.

But strategic stockpiles have their limits. They are costly to build and maintain. They have a limited shelf life (some materials degrade or become technologically obsolete). And they do not resolve the underlying structural problem: as long as refining processes remain dominated by China, even materials extracted elsewhere will eventually have to pass through processes that Beijing partially controls. True sovereignty over critical materials requires not only alternative mines, but also alternative refining and processing capabilities. This is an investment on the order of several tens of billions of euros over a decade.

China in the Russian army's supply chain

The documented double game

The question of European dependency on Chinese materials takes on an additional dimension when one examines China's role in supporting the Russian war effort. The ECFR (European Council on Foreign Relations) noted in June 2026 that Chinese support for Russia had primarily involved dual-use goods, components, machine tools, microelectronics and industrial inputs that allowed Russia to maintain military production under sanctions. Since 2025, this relationship had deepened to include military industrial cooperation in areas such as drones and electronic warfare.

This means European companies that purchase Chinese components are indirectly feeding an economy that supports the Russian war machine. This is not bad faith — it is the logic of global markets where financial and material flows intermingle. But it is a reality that European decision-makers must keep in mind when deciding how quickly to reduce their Chinese dependencies. Every euro spent on Chinese-sourced components for European weapons systems feeds an economy that partly finances the adversary those systems are supposed to deter.

The response to circumvented sanctions

Another aspect of the problem is the circumvention of Western sanctions against Russia via China. High-technology components manufactured in the West or in South Korea have been found in Russian weapons systems captured in Ukraine — often after transiting through Chinese companies or third-party countries. This circumvention undermines the effectiveness of sanctions and raises the question of supplier responsibility in global supply chains. The Pentagon placed 188 Chinese companies on its military list in June 2026, according to Reuters of June 23, 2026 — a measure aimed precisely at limiting these technology transfer circuits.

For Europe, the response involves strengthened export controls, closer cooperation with the United States on sensitive technology lists, and more rigorous verification of supply chains in its own defense industries. These measures are underway — the European Union has adopted foreign investment screening mechanisms and export controls. But their implementation remains fragmented and insufficient against the sophistication of circumvention networks.

The debate between European strategic autonomy and interdependence

France and strategic autonomy

France has long been the champion of European strategic autonomy — Europe's capacity to make its security and defense decisions independently, including from the United States. This vision, carried since de Gaulle, implies that Europe maintains sovereign industrial defense capabilities and reduces its dependencies on any external supplier. On paper, it is consistent with the logic of decoupling military chains from China. In practice, France itself has foreign-sourced components in its weapons systems — including, at times, of Asian origin.

The French vision of strategic autonomy runs into economic reality: building the entire defense value chain in Europe — from raw materials to finished systems — is not realistic for a single country, or even for the European whole. What France can claim is decision sovereignty — the capacity to choose whether to use its forces without depending on American authorization. Total industrial sovereignty is harder to achieve. And current rearmament, by multiplying American purchases (F-35s, Patriot systems), is moving against this industrial ambition.

The transatlantic partnership as reality

In practice, the European rearmament of 2025-2026 is deeply transatlantic. The PURL mechanism buys American weapons for Ukraine. F-35 orders multiply dependency relationships with the American defense industry. Air defense systems are often of American origin or co-developed with the United States. This reality is pragmatic — the Americans produce some of the best systems available — but it creates political and industrial dependencies that the ideal of strategic autonomy sought precisely to avoid.

There is no absolute contradiction between the transatlantic partnership and a degree of European autonomy. Both can coexist if Europe maintains its own capabilities in the most essential domains while buying American where it is more efficient. But this balance is difficult to manage politically — American orders create lobbies in favor of maintaining dependencies, national industries defend their market share, and governments navigate between strategic logic and domestic industrial pressure. The result is often an imperfect compromise between autonomy and dependency.

The impact of European rearmament on material needs

Increased demand aggravates the dependency

Here lies the cruel paradox of European rearmament: the more Europe spends on defense, the more its demand for potentially Chinese-origin critical materials increases. Every new air defense system ordered, every precision missile produced, every drone assembled creates additional demand for rare earths, gallium and permanent magnets. If alternative supply chains are not developed in parallel — and at the same pace — rearmament worsens the very geopolitical vulnerability it is supposed to correct.

This paradox is known to defense industrial planners. The response is to synchronize rearmament and supply chain diversification. In practice, this is difficult because the two processes have different time cycles. A new weapons system can be ordered in a matter of months. A new rare earth mine in Australia takes 5 to 10 years to become operational. A refining plant in Europe takes 3 to 7 years. The vulnerability window is therefore inevitable. The only question is whether we minimize it through determined preventive action.

Technological substitutes: a partial path

A less-discussed avenue is the development of technological substitutes that reduce dependency on critical materials without requiring their replacement in supply chains. Research is underway on rare-earth-free permanent magnets, on gallium-alternative semiconductor components, and on innovative composite materials for military applications. This work is being driven by laboratories in Europe, the United States and South Korea. But the transition from research to large-scale production is long and uncertain.

In the short term, the most promising avenue may be recycling critical materials. Rare earths contained in end-of-life civilian and military electronic equipment can be recovered and reused. Europe generates significant quantities of electronic waste containing rare earths. Developing a robust recycling industry would allow recovery of a significant fraction of materials without depending on mines. This is not a complete solution — losses in recycling are substantial — but it is a useful complement to mining diversification.

Ukraine as a model of industrial resourcefulness

Innovating under constraint: the Ukrainian lesson

Ukraine offers a valuable lesson here as well. Confronted with Russian sanctions, the disorganization of its supply chains and the necessity of producing weapons systems in wartime, it has developed a capacity for industrial improvisation that few peacetime countries can match. Ukrainian drones use components available on the global market — sometimes civilian components adapted to military use. Ukrainian engineers have developed alternative solutions when standard components were unavailable.

This model of industrial flexibility contains a lesson for the question of critical materials. If a critical component depends 90% on China, the response can be both to diversify the supply AND to develop technological alternatives that reduce dependency on that specific component. Ukraine has demonstrated that a pragmatic, flexible approach to procurement can maintain combat capability even in the face of major supply chain disruptions. European defense industries, more bureaucratized and tied to slow acquisition processes, have much to learn from this flexibility.

European-Ukrainian industrial partnerships

Industrial partnerships between Europe and Ukraine in the drone sector — such as the LEAP project launched in February 2026 and the German-Ukrainian bilateral agreements of April 2026 — offer an opportunity to develop production capabilities that partially reduce dependency on single-origin components. If drones co-produced in Europe and Ukraine use components sourced in Europe, North America or Southeast Asia rather than in China, each co-production program contributes to reducing dependency. This is not an overnight structural transformation. But multiplied across dozens of programs, the effect accumulates.

The condition is that the governments and companies developing these partnerships explicitly include sourcing criteria in their specifications — not only military performance and cost criteria, but also criteria on the origin of critical components. These criteria increase short-term costs. But they build long-term industrial resilience that is less measurable but fundamentally more important for the security of democracies.

China's position: coercion strategy or commercial logic?

Beijing is not hiding its hand

China is perfectly aware of its market power over critical materials. It demonstrated this in 2023 with its restrictions on exports of gallium and germanium — two metals essential to advanced electronics. These restrictions officially aimed to protect Chinese national security, but they were interpreted everywhere as a clear signal: China can and will use its market positions as a foreign policy tool. In 2026, the Pentagon placed 188 Chinese companies on its list of companies supporting the Chinese military program — including companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and BYD according to Reuters of June 23, 2026. This escalation of Sino-American techno-military confrontation creates a context in which the question of European dependency on Chinese materials is increasingly urgent.

China has not yet used rare earths as an open weapon. It knows that cutting supplies would accelerate Western diversification — which it does not want to see. Its strategy is more subtle: maintain the dependency while its own military capabilities develop, and brandish the threat of supply cuts only if tensions reach a critical point. This is a latent coercion strategy — the threat is there, known, but not executed, which maintains the deterrent effect without creating the rupture that would push the West to act really fast.

The timing of vulnerability

The real strategic question is therefore one of timing. How long will Europe remain vulnerable to a potential cutoff of Chinese supplies? If industrial alternatives take 10 years to develop, and if Sino-Western tensions intensify in the next five years — which is possible given the situation in Taiwan and mutual sanctions — the maximum vulnerability window coincides precisely with the period of greatest tension. That is the worst possible scenario. And it is the one that the current policy of selective risk reduction aims to avoid by accelerating diversification.

If China were to cut supplies during this window, the effects would be gradual but serious. Strategic stockpiles would cushion the immediate shock. But after 6 to 12 months, production lines for certain critical weapons systems would begin to run short of components. This is not an immediate catastrophe — but it is a gradual degradation of industrial defense capability that, over 18 to 24 months, could genuinely affect military capabilities. This is precisely the kind of vulnerability a strategic adversary would seek to exploit in the context of a conflict or crisis.

The lessons of COVID for defense

A general rehearsal forgotten too quickly

The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 offered a brutal lesson on the risks of concentrated supply dependencies. Europe discovered it was massively dependent on China for personal protective equipment, active pharmaceutical ingredients and medical equipment. Many countries found themselves competing for surgical masks or ventilators while China controlled the production chains. This experience led to plans for industrial reshoring, strategic stockpiling and supplier diversification in the medical sector.

Four years later, what lesson has been drawn for defense? The honest answer is: not enough. The same dynamics — dependency on a dominant supplier, insufficient stockpiles, slow alternatives — characterize military supply chains today. And the consequences of a supply cutoff in the defense sector would be potentially more serious than in the medical sector, because they would directly affect a country's ability to defend itself in the event of a conflict. The COVID lesson is there, available, documented. Applying it systematically to the military domain is a first-order priority.

The necessary institutional response

What the COVID crisis produced — industrial reshoring plans, strategic stockpiles, dependency audits — must now be replicated for military supply chains. The European Union has the institutional instruments to do so: the European Defence Fund, the EDIP (European Defence Industry Programme), the mechanisms of the Critical Raw Materials Act. What is missing is execution speed and funding scale. The geopolitical stakes of 2026 justify financial mobilization comparable to the post-COVID recovery plan of 750 billion euros. This is not hyperbole. It is a comparison of systemic risks.

The Ankara summit of July 2026 would be an opportunity to make commitments on this issue. Not only on GDP percentages for defense, but on the transformation of military supply chains. Allies that arrive at Ankara with concrete critical material diversification plans — with funding, timelines, verification mechanisms — will demonstrate a strategic vision that goes beyond budgetary commitments. This is the dimension that NATO must integrate into its conception of NATO 3.0.

The EU Critical Raw Materials Act: an institutional response to a structural threat

The regulatory framework facing rare earth dependency

Adopted in 2024 and progressively entering into force since 2025, the European regulation on critical raw materials (EU Critical Raw Materials Act) represents the most ambitious institutional response of the European Union to strategic dependency on China. The text sets binding targets: by 2030, at least 10% of the EU's annual needs in critical raw materials must be extracted on European territory, at least 40% must be processed in Europe, and dependency on a single third country must not exceed 65% for any critical raw material. These targets are ambitious against current reality — China currently supplies more than 90% of the world's processed gallium and germanium, two elements essential for semiconductors and military electronic equipment.

The implementation of this regulation faces considerable obstacles. Opening new mines in Europe takes between 10 and 16 years from the initial decision to commercial production, due to environmental procedures, local opposition and geological complexity. Building new processing and refining capacities takes equally long. To reduce dependency within the deadlines set by the regulation, the EU will therefore need to combine three simultaneous approaches: accelerating European mining projects with streamlined authorization procedures, geographic diversification of supplies outside China (Australia, Canada, South Africa, Brazil), and massive development of recycling and raw material recovery from electronic waste. None of these approaches will be sufficient alone. The three together, perhaps.

Gallium and germanium: the hidden vulnerability

In July 2023, China announced export restrictions on gallium and germanium — a decision that triggered an alarm in Western defense and semiconductor industries. These two metals are essential for manufacturing high-performance semiconductors used in military radars, guided missiles, reconnaissance satellites and secure communications systems. China controls approximately 80% of world gallium production and 60% of germanium. Even if deposits exist elsewhere in the world, developing alternative extraction and refining capabilities takes time — years, not months.

The impact on the European defense industry is direct. Rheinmetall, Thales, Leonardo and the other major defense contractors depend on semiconductors that incorporate these raw materials. If China decided to extend its export restrictions to all rare earths in the event of a major geopolitical crisis — a confrontation in the Taiwan Strait, for example — European defense equipment production lines could find themselves paralyzed within a few months. This is the vulnerability that the EU Critical Raw Materials Act attempts to address. But the urgency of the political response does not yet match the urgency of the real threat.

Rare earth recycling: a silent revolution with real limits

The circular economy as a partial response to dependency

Recycling rare earths from end-of-life products — wind turbines, electric vehicles, electronic equipment — represents a promising path for reducing dependency on primary supplies. In theory, permanent magnets based on neodymium and dysprosium used in electric motors can be recovered and recycled to produce new magnets. Companies such as REEtec in Norway, Cyclic Materials in the United Kingdom and Urban Mining Company in the United States have developed industrial recycling processes. The EU estimates that by 2030, recycling could supply up to 15 to 20% of European needs in certain critical rare earths. This is a significant contribution, but far from resolving the fundamental problem.

The limits of recycling are structural. First, volumes of recyclable materials depend on volumes of products reaching end-of-life — and the transition to electric vehicles is still in its early stages, meaning volumes of batteries and motors to recycle will not reach their full potential until after 2030-2035. Second, current recycling processes do not allow recovery of all rare earths present in a product — recovery rates vary between 60 and 85% depending on materials and technologies used. Third, recycling produces materials of slightly lower purity that are not always suitable for the high-performance applications required by military equipment. Recycling is therefore one piece of the puzzle — an important piece, but not the complete solution.

Norway, Australia and Canada: the new strategic suppliers

The strategy of geographic diversification of rare earth supply inevitably leads toward a few countries that combine significant deposits, sufficient political stability and compatibility with Western democratic values. Norway holds some of the largest neodymium and praseodymium deposits outside China, and the company REEtec has developed an acid-free rare earth separation technology that could revolutionize the sector's economics. Australia is the world's second largest rare earth producer, and Lynas Rare Earths is the only military-grade rare earth producer operating outside China at large scale. Canada holds significant deposits and has recently accelerated its authorization procedures for mining projects linked to critical raw materials.

Building solid partnerships with these alternative suppliers is a strategic priority that the EU and NATO members are beginning to take seriously. The critical raw material partnership agreements signed between the EU and Australia, Canada and the United States in 2023-2024 are steps in the right direction. But they must be accompanied by concrete investments in extraction, processing and transport infrastructure — not merely political statements of intent. The risk is that these partnerships remain empty frameworks, announced with fanfare at summits but never truly operationalized. The geopolitical urgency of 2026 should serve as an accelerator — but only if accompanied by concrete investment decisions in the next 18 to 24 months.

Semiconductor dependency on China: the missing link in the defense debate

Chips as a strategic component of modern weapons systems

The discussion on decoupling defense supply chains often focuses on final equipment — tanks, aircraft, missiles — but overlooks a fundamental component: semiconductors. Every modern weapons system — from guided missiles to reconnaissance drones to encrypted communications systems — depends on specialized electronic chips. And China, despite American restrictions on exports of advanced semiconductor technologies (Export Control Rule of 2022), remains an important supplier of mid- and low-range electronic components used in less critical but very numerous military systems. This partial dependency creates a vulnerability that sanctions and export restrictions do not entirely resolve.

The European EU Chips Act, adopted in 2023, aims to double Europe's share of global semiconductor production, raising it from 10% to 20% by 2030. TSMC announced construction of a plant in Dresden, and Intel has expansion projects in Germany and Poland. These investments are real and substantial. But they take time to materialize, and they focus on the most advanced segments of the market — the 2nm and 3nm nodes — while many defense systems use less advanced nodes produced in large series. The European semiconductor strategy must therefore address the entire spectrum, not only the technological summit.

The example of the LEAP program and industrial coordination

The LEAP project, launched in February 2026, explicitly includes the question of electronic components and semiconductors in its scope. By recognizing that industrial defense sovereignty cannot exist without a secure electronic component supply chain, LEAP attempts to establish formal links between defense industries, semiconductor industries and critical raw material policies. This coordination is precisely what had been missing until now. The three domains were managed by different ministries, with different institutional logics and different time horizons. LEAP attempts to align them. The difficulty is that inter-ministerial and international coordination is always easier to announce than to genuinely implement.

A concrete example illustrates the challenge. The Ukrainian drone Ruta Block 1, capable of striking targets at more than 300 km, uses electronic components from seven different countries. Its supply chain is partly dependent on components whose production runs through China — even indirectly, via second- or third-tier subcontractors. Securing this chain for Ukrainian systems, and even more so for European defense systems, requires an audit and mapping work that few companies have the resources to accomplish alone. This is where governments and mechanisms like LEAP must play an active role — not by replacing industry, but by creating conditions for it to secure its own supplies without losing international competitiveness.

The LEAP project of February 2026: ambition and limits of a European response

What LEAP concretely proposes

Officially presented at a conference in Brussels in February 2026, the LEAP project (Long-term European Armaments Programme) is the result of two years of intense negotiations between the defense ministries of the main EU member states and the European Commission. Its central ambition is to create a framework for coordinating defense investments that goes beyond simple pooling of purchases to tackle the deep sources of European industrial fragmentation. Concretely, LEAP proposes three main mechanisms: a joint investment fund of 5 billion euros for pre-competitive defense R&D projects, a harmonized defense equipment certification system between member states (to eliminate the cost of national re-certification), and a mandatory collective acquisition mechanism for equipment categories designated as priorities by the EU Council.

These three mechanisms, if they function as intended, could produce significant effects. The R&D fund would allow financing of projects that each member state cannot afford alone, particularly in the areas of autonomous systems, electronic warfare and cyberdefense. Harmonized certification would eliminate a costly bureaucratic burden that currently penalizes defense SMEs wishing to sell in several European markets. Mandatory collective acquisition would create real economies of scale and force a degree of standardization that improves interoperability. The obstacles to implementation are nevertheless considerable, particularly the resistance of national industries that benefit from the protection of closed public markets.

National resistance and political reality

France, traditionally a defender of its strategic autonomy, accepted the principle of LEAP on condition that projects funded by the joint fund include a substantial French participation share — notably through Thales, Safran and KNDS. Germany supports LEAP in principle but insists on transparency in project selection processes, fearing the fund might be used to favor other member states' industries. Poland and the Baltic states, whose defense priorities are most urgent, are pushing for rapid implementation and are ready to make governance concessions to obtain accelerated deliveries. These tensions are not insurmountable — they are the normal reflection of multilateral politics. But they mean that LEAP will not produce the expected results without strong and sustained political leadership at the European level.

Dependency on Chinese technologies in the defense supply chain will not be eliminated by any single program, however well designed. It will be progressively reduced over a period of ten to fifteen years, through a coherent combination of industrial policies, R&D investments, geographic diversification of supplies and strengthened recycling capabilities. LEAP is an important piece of this puzzle. But it can only function in synergy with the EU Critical Raw Materials Act, the EU Chips Act, trade policies and member states' defense spending commitments. Coherence between these different instruments is more difficult to achieve than any individual instrument — and that is where the real challenge of Europe's strategic decoupling from China is played out.

Conclusion: A decade-long challenge, an immediate urgency

The action window

Complete decoupling of European military chains from China is neither possible nor desirable within a ten-year horizon. What is possible — and urgent — is a targeted reduction of the most critical dependencies: the base materials for missile guidance systems, radars and advanced propulsion systems. This reduction requires mining investments in reliable partner countries, development of alternative refining capabilities, building of strategic stockpiles, and integration of origin criteria in defense procurement contracts.

These actions are not impossible. They are difficult, costly, and require sustained political will over several years. They compete with other investment priorities. But they are the basic condition for credible military sovereignty. Without them, European rearmament — however impressive in its budgetary figures — remains built on fragile foundations. Europe can spend 5% of its GDP on defense and remain vulnerable if a fraction of that investment depends on supply chains that its adversaries can interrupt.

The question that cannot wait

Here is the question I pose to European decision-makers who will read this article, or to those who will travel to Ankara in July: do you know, precisely, what share of your increased defense budget ends up in systems depending more than 50% on Chinese-origin materials? If the answer is no — and I believe for many the honest answer is no — then the problem of supply chain transparency is as urgent as the budget problem. You cannot manage what you do not measure. And you cannot secure what you have not mapped. Systematic auditing of Chinese dependencies in European military chains is not an option. It is a first-order strategic necessity.

Signed Maxime Marquette, columnist

Columnist's transparency box

Editorial positioning

This analysis adopts a pro-Western, critical posture toward Europe's strategic dependency on China. The author views China as a systemic threat to the West — not because it is attacking militarily, but because it has built positions of dominance in critical supply chains. This position is assumed and documented. This text is an analysis, not a neutral account.

Methodology and sources

This analysis rests on dated primary sources: the SCMP report on decoupling military chains (June 22, 2026), G7 declaration cited in the SCMP (June 2026), Pentagon data on Chinese companies (Reuters June 23, 2026), ECFR report (June 2026). Secondary sources verified for context. No floating figures.

Nature of the analysis

Strategic and political analysis. The author takes positions and defends them with verifiable arguments. The reader is invited to consult the primary sources and form their own judgment.

Sources

Primary sources

SCMP — As Europe rearms, can it decouple its military supply chains from China? — June 22, 2026

Mark Rutte pre-ministerial press conference, nato.int — June 17, 2026

Simon Gros — NATO 3.0 and the Rebalancing of Transatlantic Defence, simongros.org — June 21, 2026

Secondary sources

Nikkei Asia — China minerals control threatens EU rearmament — June 23, 2026

Carnegie Endowment — The EU in an Era of Weaponized Interdependence — June 2026

Modern Diplomacy — How Ukraine Became Europe's Most Important Defense Partner in 2026 — June 2, 2026

Euronews — EU vs China: Can Europe break its supply chain dependence? — June 3, 2026