Part One established the defence-regeneration as the defining character of the current rearmament cycle, demonstrated by the conflicts in Ukraine and the Gulf, and developed the framework of layered sovereignty, asymmetric investment and long-term strategic policy continuity that should govern how states respond. Part Two applies that framework: it assesses the durability of the threat environments driving rearmament in each region, draws the specific capability and policy implications from each assessment, examines what the middle-power approach looks like in practice, and maps the cooperative models that are currently operational or within realistic reach.
Section 5 – Long-Term Threat Trajectories and Rearmament Implications
The case for sustained rearmament is proportional to the durability of the threats driving it. Each threat environment below carries a specific rearmament implication not only for scale, but for the character and composition of capability required.
Russia and Europe: A Conditional Assessment
Whether Russia will continue to threaten Europe after Ukraine is not answerable by asserting inherent Russian aggressiveness. It requires examining Russia’s own strategic compulsions and asking how much of the post-war threat is structural to Russia and how much depends on the security environment that both sides have contributed to creating. A Europe that rearms in a transparently defensive posture sized to the demonstrated threat, without forward dispositions that Russia reads as offensive, accompanied by a genuine effort to build a post-war European security architecture that addresses the structural grievances the conflict exposed, will face a different environment from one that rearms confrontationally and without political engagement. The pre-2022 error was excessive confidence in peace; the post-2022 risk is excessive confidence in permanent confrontation as a planning assumption. Europe needs its own independent threat assessment, not an imported one from partners whose strategic interests may not be identical to its own. The rearmament implication is specific: the character of Russia’s likely post-war pressure by way of cyber, information operations, energy leverage, hybrid coercion, requires investment in institutional resilience alongside conventional capability. Middle-power European states on the Baltic and Nordic flanks should focus asymmetric investment on deep reserves, land-based anti-armour, coastal and maritime denial, electronic warfare and hardened civil infrastructure. These are capabilities that impose costs on Russia’s most likely modes of pressure without requiring symmetric force structures they cannot sustain.
China and the Indo-Pacific: Competition Beyond Taiwan
China’s strategic behaviour – South China Sea coercion, Himalayan pressure, the Pakistan military relationship, expanding Indian Ocean naval presence and efforts to reshape international norms – is not contingent on the Taiwan question. A China that consolidated control over Taiwan would retain the same structural competition with the United States, Japan, Australia and India that currently drives its behaviour. The Indo-Pacific’s distributed strategic geometry which includes China’s A2/AD capabilities, expanding naval reach, territorial disputes with multiple littoral states and its partnerships with Russia and Pakistan, needs to be addressed through minilateralism rather than formal alliance. Most Indo-Pacific middle powers have significant economic exposure to China, which means deterrence must be constructed compatibly with economic relationships, rather than forcing binary choices that most regional states cannot sustain.
Vietnam’s serious investment in anti-ship missiles, submarines and coastal radar while maintaining formal non-alignment illustrates that meaningful asymmetric capability does not require formal alliance membership. The Philippines has moved closest to an explicit counter-China posture while Indonesia is building domestic industrial capacity, but needs procurement coherence to translate purchasing into genuine operational capability. Layered sovereignty for Southeast Asia means maritime surveillance, coast guard capacity, anti-ship capability and cyber resilience, achievable without formal bloc alignment. The specific asymmetric capabilities relevant across the region include long-range anti-ship missiles to complicate Chinese naval operations across the island chains; undersea systems such as submarines, mine warfare and seabed sensor networks; electronic warfare and cyber tools to degrade Chinese precision-strike networks; and hardened dispersed logistics that deny a rapid knock-out of regional military infrastructure.
South Asia: Two Nuclear-Armed Neighbours in Convergence
India faces a condition unique among major democracies: two nuclear-armed neighbours whose strategic convergence has deepened measurably. China is simultaneously India’s direct territorial adversary along the Line of Actual Control and the principal military patron of Pakistan supplying weapons, technology, satellite imagery and, as the 2025 Indo-Pakistani military confrontation confirmed, real-time operational intelligence. The Sino-Pakistani convergence transforms a historically bilateral deterrence problem into a qualitatively more complex one: India must maintain credible deterrence against Pakistan while managing a separate but linked military competition with China across the Himalayas and the Indian Ocean. No other major democracy faces this combination. The Sino-Pakistani integration has created a deterrence dynamic that bilateral confidence-building measures cannot address as India’s capability response must account for the combined system, not the two adversaries independently.
The rearmament implication is a strong and largely self-reliant sovereign national core: domestic precision missiles, indigenous air defence capable of managing advanced adversary platforms from both directions, multi-domain surveillance, Indian Ocean naval presence, cyber capability and the ammunition depth to sustain operations on two fronts without external resupply for an extended period. External partnerships with Europe, Japan, Australia and the United States provide value in high-end technology layers, but must be managed within strategic autonomy constraints as the threat environment is too immediate and too complex to permit operational dependence on external supply in a crisis.
The Gulf: After the 2026 Conflict
The 2026 Iran-Gulf war has fundamentally changed what Gulf rearmament must achieve. For decades, Gulf states assumed that their security posture based on imported sophisticated platforms backed by US operational support was sufficient. The simultaneous striking of all six GCC states, the targeting of civilian and energy infrastructure including oil refineries, desalination plants and airports, and the temporary closure of the Strait of Hormuz demonstrated that this assumption was wrong in two directions: the threat was larger than anticipated, and the reliance on external operational support was more fragile than the procurement investment implied. Saudi Arabia’s and the UAE’s reported counter-strikes represent a recognition that passive defence alone, against an adversary willing to sustain saturation, is structurally insufficient.
The rearmament implication is a shift from prestige platform acquisition toward: hardened and dispersed energy infrastructure that removes concentrated high-value targets; active drone suppression combining electronic warfare, directed-energy and close-in hard-kill capability; maritime domain awareness across the Gulf and Red Sea; offensive suppression capacity against launch sites; and an indigenous maintenance and repair base that does not depend on contractors who cannot deploy into an active conflict. The cost-exchange problem of cheap projectiles exhausting expensive interceptors is only resolvable through cost-effective countermeasures combined with suppression of the source.
Section 6 – The Middle-Power Approach and Cooperative Models
The question is not how middle powers compete monetarily with great powers but how they build the most effective deterrence within democratic fiscal and political constraints. The following approaches are most effective in combination rather than pursued individually.
Asymmetric Capability Investment
Capabilities must be calibrated to the specific geographic and domain contexts where disproportionate costs can be imposed on a stronger adversary as established in the regional assessments above. The investment logic is local knowledge, denial and affordability, not symmetric competition.
Niche Specialisation and Defence Exports
South Korea’s artillery and shipbuilding, Israel’s loitering munitions and sensor integration, Sweden and Finland’s electronic warfare, France’s independent high-end aerospace each represents a competitive position that generates export revenues, diplomatic influence and industrial economies of scale that nationally customised systems cannot achieve. Systems designed for export from the outset – modular and technology-compartmentalised – spread fixed development costs and make the capability economically self-sustaining.
Minilateral Networks
Networks that can be assembled, adjusted and focused faster than formal alliances, allow middle powers to specialise, share costs and build interoperability for specific capability gaps, without committing to the comprehensive institutional obligations that formal alliances require.
Geography as Strategic Leverage
Japan’s island chain position, Australia’s maritime approaches, the Nordic states’ Baltic and Arctic transit routes, Greece’s Eastern Mediterranean access and the Malacca Strait and other choke points, each offers strategic value to middle powers and are convertible into defence and diplomatic leverage through deliberate infrastructure investment: dual-use ports, hardened airfields, dispersed fuel storage and repair facilities.
Civilian-Technology Integration
Commercial technology is advancing faster than government procurement in every domain relevant to modern warfare. Middle powers with competitive technology sectors and flexible procurement can integrate innovation faster than larger militaries constrained by institutional inertia. Ukraine demonstrated that adaptation speed is a decisive military variable and an advantage more accessible to middle powers than to great powers, precisely because they carry less institutional weight.
Cooperative Models: Europe and the EU-India Dimension
Europe’s cooperative structures such as EDIP, PESCO, the E5 joint drone initiative of February 2026, NORDEFCO and bilateral Anglo-French arrangements, are the most developed outside formal NATO command. The EU-India Security and Defence Partnership of January 2026 adds an important extra-regional layer. France is a major source of India’s defence imports; Germany deepened its bilateral defence partnership with India in January 2026 around co-development and niche technology; Italy, Spain, Sweden and Israel are each active suppliers or technology partners. The realistic near-term scope is maritime security in the Indian Ocean, co-development in space, cyber and drones, and European component supply to Indian domestic production and reverse cost-effective outsourcing of manufacture. India’s reducing Russian platform dependence, the pace of Make in India and India’s strategic autonomy all enable deeper integration with these defence structures.
The Indo-Pacific: Minilateral Depth
AUKUS, the Quad, bilateral US alliances with Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and growing non-US bilateral arrangements constitute the most active cooperative architecture in the Indo-Pacific. The Global Combat Air Programme between Japan, the UK and Italy represents a capability co-development level rare outside the US alliance system. South Korea’s defence exports such as artillery to Poland, armoured vehicles to Australia and missiles across the region, have made it an industrial partner simultaneously for Indo-Pacific and European states, with leverage that exceeds its formal alliance profile. Vietnam is a realistic partner for maritime domain awareness and logistics access without formal alliance membership.
The Gulf and Indian Ocean
The 2026 conflict has converted Gulf and Indian Ocean cooperative security from a prospective to an urgent concern. The components of a practical network are present: Gulf states have experienced the threat directly and now have the political motivation to build genuine independent capacity; India has Indian Ocean geography and naval reach; France has permanent Indian Ocean presence and Gulf defence relationships; Japan and South Korea have deep energy dependence on Gulf supply lines. The requirement is deliberate operational coordination of these existing bilateral relationships and a shared framework for maritime chokepoint security, energy infrastructure protection and drone suppression.
States That Occupy a Structural Node
The more useful analytical question is not which state anchors a security architecture but what structural characteristics make any state a valuable node: geographic position near contested sea lanes or alliance fault lines; sufficient economic and industrial scale to sustain defence production without total patron dependence; a threat environment that motivates sustained investment; strategic autonomy that makes the state useful to multiple partners; and institutional capacity to execute complex co-production and export arrangements.
Japan combines advanced industry, critical island-chain geography, a robust US alliance and growing bilateral cooperation with Australia, the UK and India. Australia’s southern Indo-Pacific position is valuable for logistics, undersea surveillance and air operations across a vast maritime zone. South Korea’s industrial depth – shipbuilding, artillery, armoured vehicles and semiconductors – combined with the alignment of its own security requirements with both the US alliance system and European partners, gives it leverage that exceeds its alliance profile. France is the only European state with genuine extra-European military reach: Indian Ocean presence, Gulf relationships, Pacific territories, nuclear capability and a defence industry that operates without US dependency.
India’s structural position is simultaneously that of a potential security provider with a large and capable military deploying operationally proven domestic systems, growing defence exports, Indian Ocean geography and Global South credibility. It is also a significant capability seeker, with a two-front threat environment it cannot yet fully address domestically. It appears in many cooperative frameworks not because it is the most capable middle power available but because its geography, scale and strategic autonomy make it structurally difficult to design an Indian Ocean and Indo-Pacific security architecture without it. Indonesia, astride the Malacca and Lombok straits with the world’s fourth-largest population, has geographic weight that makes it strategically relevant regardless of current military capability; its deliberate multi-directional procurement reflects strategic autonomy but requires procurement coherence to translate purchasing into genuine operational depth.
Conclusion
The strongest states in the coming decades will not necessarily be those that militarise most aggressively. They will be those that rearm with discipline by connecting defence to industry, preserving diplomatic channels, building regional partnerships and maintaining political legitimacy. Rearmament without reform will produce expensive vulnerability. Rearmament without escalation control will increase danger. Rearmament without industrial absorption will deepen dependence. Rearmament linked to resilience, however, can make a state harder to coerce and more useful to partners.
The current re-armament cycle is best understood as a reinstatement – at industrial and economic scale – of deterrence-by-denial priorities deliberately deprioritised under the peace-dividend assumption, at a cost that two active conflicts have now made operationally visible. Its defining risk is that the cycle, once underway, generates institutional momentum that outruns genuine strategic need, driven by the interlocking interests of defence industry, military establishments and policy institutions rather than by independent, state-conducted threat assessment. The distinction between rearmament grounded in authentic analysis and rearmament driven by vested interest, determines whether the investment builds deterrence or wastes resources while generating the insecurity it claims to prevent.
For middle powers, the characteristics most valuable in a defence-regeneration race are asymmetric capability, niche specialisation, geographic leverage, minilateral cooperation, civilian-technology integration, procurement discipline and democratic legitimacy. These are achievable without war-economy mobilisation. They require, above all, long-term strategic policy continuity: the institutional commitment to plan, invest and sustain over the timescales that capability development demands, insulated from the electoral and budgetary cycles that have repeatedly dismantled what strategic patience had built.
