The EU and NATO have developed close cooperation in different areas, such as military mobility and strategic communication. Today, the current situation obliges the EU to improve its interconnection with NATO, particularly in the fields of the defence capacity building (DCB) and security force assistance (SFA) activities. To this end, the two organisations must urgently build an operational framework to enforce their joint interventions, avoiding overlaps, lack of communication, and other assistance issues.

Is China really a threat to NATO? With the EU economy struggling with inflation, and China heavily involved in the European economy, there is reason to be concerned. If China can exploit its position within the EU, it may be able to significantly impact unity among NATO members. Therefore, NATO must stay united in order to succeed against China’s hostile economic manoeuvring.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has shaken up the normative foundations of the post-Cold War order, so much so that it has prompted both NATO and the EU to update their strategic outlook on security and rethink priorities for the decade ahead, producing, respectively, a new Strategic Concept and a Strategic Compass. The aim of this article is to evaluate, in light of these two documents, the areas and directions in which a European defence system could develop while still seamlessly articulating NATO’s purpose, values, and initiatives.

Threats to the Euro-Atlantic security environment continue to increase due to Russian aggression towards Ukraine, supported by a handful of states on the international level, openly or not. Threats to the space systems of the EU and NATO member states are no exception. Both NATO and the EU seek to engage with their closest partners—in this case, with one another—to avoid mirroring potential missions and operations. Although both institutions declare close cooperation in the matter of outer space, neither has pointed to areas where they might work together. Once these areas are identified, they would add value to the already existing basis for cooperation and could strengthen Euro-Atlantic security.

The Russian military invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 marked a watershed moment in European defence. The unprecedented flurry of this activity illustrates the extent to which the European security and defence environment has been shaken by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. In order to meet the challenge of providing deterrence against Russia while enhancing the ability to tackle other threats on the global scale, cooperation between the EU and NATO will be decisive. In facing the crisis in Ukraine, NATO and the EU have shown the political will to develop this, with elements of progress already made. While the initial signs are promising for the future shape of NATO-EU cooperation, it is ultimately down to policymakers in NATO and EU member states to take full advantage of this window of opportunity.

The challenges coming from the South are multiple and unconventional: security (especially regarding terrorism), policy and states’ stabilization, demography, economy, and migration. The impact of climate change is also a significant issue for this region. This paper shows that the challenges posed by NATO’s two major competitors—Russia and China—also encompass the MENA region. Alongside such state actors, NATO must face multiple non-state actors in the region, endangering the stability of its Southern partners.

During the Madrid Summit on 29–30 June 2022, NATO’s New Strategic Concept was adopted, emphasizing NATO’s core tasks: deterrence and defence, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. The concept assesses the current threat environment: it points out that Moscow has built up its military capacities, Iran and North Korea have improved their nuclear and missile programmes, and the People’s Republic of China has expanded its nuclear arsenal. In response to these conditions, the current global order requires a stronger alliance between the Euro-Atlantic region, including on matters of arms control and nuclear deterrence in the Euro-Atlantic region.