International systemic factors – including risks för collapse on a global level – condition both Russia’s capacity for westward aggression and Europe’s ability to develop credible deterrence and resilience. This dual analytical framework, including two vectors, looking both at the impact of the global level on Russia and the impact on Europe and Sweden is key. In addition, there is a need to identify not only threats but also opportunities. Thus, it is not enough to apply a regional perspective but also how to consider how international factors may influence both perceptions and objective conditions for European defence.
External Constraints on Russian Power Projection
The first vector concerns external impact on Russian future power projection. Russia’s ability to sustain military operations beyond Ukraine will obviously depend on relationships and dynamics beyond European borders. This includes the issue of potential future Russian aggression against NATO’s northeastern flank after an eventual cease fire in Ukraine.
China’s economic and technological support has become vital to Moscow’s war economy. Bilateral trade reached hundreds of billion dollars in 2024 – more than double pre-war levels. Beijing is reported to supply nearly 80 percent of sanctioned dual-use items required to sustain Russian military operations. These items include drone components, satellite imagery for targeting Ukrainian infrastructure, and critical electronics embedded in cruise missiles.
This partnership affects Russia in ways both enabling and limiting its freedom of action. Chinese support extends Russia’s operational endurance in Ukraine. It partially offsets Western sanctions. However, it also deepens Moscow’s strategic dependence of Beijing. This creates a Chinese leverage that could moderate Russian adventurism. Such moderation is most likely to occur if Beijing judged major escalation against NATO contrary to its own interests. This scenario becomes plausible if for instance Sino-American competition over Taiwan and/or AI would demand Beijing’s undivided focus.
India’s role introduces further complexity. Despite Western pressure and the mounting threat of sanctions under the US “Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act” from 2017, New Delhi has deepened defense cooperation with Moscow. India has taken delivery of advanced Russian S-400 air defense systems. It continues to negotiate arms transfers even as Russia’s war in Ukraine grinds forward. Yet this partnership also reflects India’s strategic autonomy doctrine on a higher level. It represents India’s effort to balance against Chinese power in Asia and the Indian Ocean, rather than to be seen as an alignment with Russia. The Indian leadership also clearly reacts against a lack of Western respect for its long struggle to gain independence and become a world power.
The resulting Russia-India-China strategic triangle is characterized by competing regional ambitions. Russia struggles to preserve influence in Central Asia. India guards against Chinese growth along the Sino-Indian Line of Actual Control while China pursues Belt and Road expansion. These competing interests limit the potential for coherence of a coordinated Eastern challenge to the transatlantic order. For Europe and NATO, this triangular geometry suggests important constraints on Russia’s capacity. Russia’s ability to pursue simultaneous or sustained multi-front aggression is limited not only by military losses in Ukraine. It is also constrained by the need to manage complex relationships with partners whose interests diverge sharply on critical issues. Russia also harbours threat perceptions to the East. This reduces the likelihood, though does not eliminate the possibility, of coordinated global actions against European and transatlantic security.
Systemic Effects on European Deterrence and Resilience
The second vector addresses systemic effects—both constraining and enabling—on Europe’s deterrence and resilience posture. Here – as also in the case of Russia – the analytical lens needs to be widened to include megatrends and structural factors. These factors to a large extent operate independently of any single actor’s intent yet shape the strategic landscape profoundly. Climate change emerges as a threat multiplier. It amplifies resource scarcity, triggers large-scale migration flows, and destabilizes fragile regions in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Sahel and even in Southern Europe. These disruptions create indirect ways through which adversaries can project instability toward Europe without large scale and direct military confrontation, using state and non-state proxies wherever possible.
Russia has demonstrated willingness to use migration and energy dependence as hybrid tools. Climate-driven disruptions to global supply chains, agricultural production, and critical infrastructure impose planning and economic constraints. These constraints affect defense build-up timelines and societal resilience investments. Policymakers are forced to allocate finite resources across competing priorities. The impact on the domestic political landscape in many European countries is profound leading to more confusion and populism.
Equally significant are the unpredictable postures of major powers whose strategic choices influence NATO and the EU. The United States under the second Trump administration has signaled a changed military footprint in Europe. The approach shifts from forward-stationed presence to a flexible, readiness-based posture capable of rapid force projection when required. Discussions at the 2025 NATO Summit in The Hague confirmed this direction. Each NATO flank must maintain first-response readiness. U.S. forces provide second-wave strategic reinforcement on a level and with a timing which is open to question.
This shift is rooted in demands for greater allied burden-sharing. Some projections suggest a potential reduction of the U.S. military footprint in Europe by as much as 30 percent. This introduces strategic uncertainty precisely when coherent transatlantic deterrence is most needed. For Sweden, this necessitates accelerated national readiness. It requires deeper integration with regional partners. Sweden must invest in capabilities that do not depend on automatic or immediate American reinforcement. This represents a demanding agenda given the constraints of defense-industrial capacity, workforce availability, and fiscal limits.
Global contradictions further complicate deterrence calculus. The intensifying Sino-American competition, particularly surrounding Taiwan, creates potential for coordinated or parallel aggression. China and Russia could exploit simultaneous crises related to megatrends to divide allied attention and resources. This would exploit the Alliance’s inability to project decisive force simultaneously in the Indo-Pacific and Europe.
This linkage between distant theaters transforms European security into a global equation. NATO must think beyond regional defense. It must develop integrated strategies that account for adversarial coordination across domains. The economic dependencies involved are substantial. Europe relies on Taiwanese semiconductor production. A Taiwan Strait conflict would cause global disruption. Defense-industrial bottlenecks would follow. These factors impose additional constraints on Sweden’s ability to surge production, sustain maintenance cycles, and field compatible systems at the speed strategy requires.
Emerging Threats and Indirect Vectors
Threats including issues relating to artificial intelligence introduce yet another systemic dimension. AI’s integration into military and cyber domains promises enhanced intelligence collection, real-time threat detection, and autonomous operational capabilities. However, it also enables adversaries to conduct disinformation campaigns, cyber-attacks, and hybrid operations at scale and speed that outpace traditional response mechanisms. The absence of unified international governance over military AI applications creates problems. Combined with the rapid spread of dual-use technologies, this creates gaps. These gaps favor actors willing to deploy AI without ethical or legal constraints.
For Europe, building resilience against AI-enabled threats requires multiple approaches. Technical countermeasures are necessary. These include hardened cyber defenses, secure communications infrastructure, and AI-driven threat detection. However, technical measures alone are insufficient. Whole-of-society preparedness is also essential. This integrates public awareness, legal frameworks, and cross-border cooperation with EU and NATO partners. The goal is to ensure that information integrity and democratic processes remain robust under sustained digital assault.
The Middle East constitutes a final vector of indirect threat transmission. Russia’s involvement in Syria and Libya, combined with its evolving relationship with Iran, creates opportunities for Moscow to project instability toward Europe. This occurs through proxy forces, migration pressures, and energy market manipulation. The Russia-Iran relationship is characterized by mutual dependence yet also by divergent regional goals.
Iran’s provision of drones and ballistic missiles to Russia shows how regional conflicts can feed directly into European security challenges. Iran also provides technical and military expertise. Meanwhile, Russia cultivates relationships with Gulf states. It seeks to balance Iranian ambitions against partnerships with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. This reflects a complex regional diplomacy designed to maintain leverage over European energy security and political positioning. For NATO and Sweden, this requires strategic thinking that goes beyond national or even European boundaries. Deterrence credibility and resilience depth must account for indirect threats coming from regions where adversaries possess advantages. These are regions where Western influence is contested or declining and sometimes described as containing double standards as regards respect for international values and commitments. Add to this current enhanced risks of nuclear proliferation.
Deterrence cannot be credible if it assumes static conditions. It cannot ignore feedback loops between distant crises and nearby threats. Resilience cannot be sustainable if it fails to anticipate cascading failures triggered by events beyond Europe’s borders. It will ensure that military capabilities, nuclear strategy, hybrid warfare responses, and defense-industrial planning are all informed by a clear understanding of the systemic forces at work. These forces frame—and at times, constrain—the choices available to policymakers.
Lars-Erik Lundin