France and the UK have nuclear capability sufficient for MAD, including I believe a full nuclear triad, certainly the sea-based and land-based parts. To reiter

France and the UK have nuclear capability sufficient for MAD, including I believe a full nuclear triad, certainly the sea-based and land-based parts. To reiterate, the EU is the largest GDP bloc and a half a billion people, and they have theater dominance over Africa and the Middle East, and possibly Russia if Putin dies and Russia fades further. If you force a country to arm, it looks for historical and geopolitically practical ways to benefit from that armament. That is geopolitical inevitability. The EU is dismissed as too fragmented to unite, but there are two very convenient boogeymen to unite the EU: Putin, an authoritarian ghoul of naked aggression with vast historical echoes in European history, and the openly nazi saluting US, with its own historical echoes and the simmering resentment of soft dominance.