Defence Up, Aid Down: Europe’s New Security Blind Spot

(Joana de Deus Pereira and Michael Jones – RUSI) In the wake of Russia’s war in Ukraine and a more volatile global environment, European leaders have moved to strengthen Europe’s security posture, expanding defence budgets and launching new instruments. At the same time, aid, humanitarian and peacebuilding budgets are being quietly pared back, folded into more flexible external spending pots and redeployed towards politically salient priorities such as infrastructure and migration management. The result is a security approach that appears more robust on paper, but risks leaving Europe more exposed in the fragile regions where many of its long-term risks are actually brewing. The latest cuts to USAID, combined with the fiscal and political pressures generated by the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, have triggered a chain reaction that reaches far beyond Washington. As budgets tighten, European and multilateral donors are not simply doing less of the same; they are rerouting funds away from the slower, less visible work of peace, governance and conflict prevention towards regional envelopes, high profile infrastructure and politically salient partnerships. Country specific support in some of the most fragile contexts has collapsed, while migration deals and initiatives such as Global Gateway absorb a growing share of what used to be classic development and peacebuilding budgets. Taken together, these shifts are quietly chipping away at Europe’s presence and leverage in poor, conflict-affected states just as the global security environment becomes more volatile. If we observe the latest 20 years’ timeline, we will easily conclude that conflicts and fragility do not pause when budgets are redrawn: they evolve. Shocks such as deep USAID cuts and the intensification of the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have set off a cascade in which donors are pushed to invest more in defence and crisis response, and, by consequence, less in slower prevention work. That trade-off may look manageable on paper, but it creates security gaps we have not yet fully understood or measured, particularly in ecosystems where everything is interconnected, and small shifts in funding can have large downstream effects. The abrupt suspension of USAID funding alone precipitated a surge in riots, protests and conflict-related deaths within weeks, while studies estimate ODA reductions by major donors including the UK, France and Germany could lead to over 9 million fatalities by 2030. Upper estimates suggest 22.6 million. – Defence Up, Aid Down: Europe’s New Security Blind Spot | Royal United Services Institute