Europe’s First Real Step Away from Washington’s Shadow

SHANKAR NARAYAN

NOV 11, 2025

Many months ago — feels like an eon now — I made two pointed recommendations for the European Union if it ever wanted strategic independence from Washington. They were simple then, simple now, and they’ll be simple five years from now:

1. Build a sovereign nuclear umbrella around the French and British arsenals and develop weapons that can operate end-to-end on European data.
2. Create a genuinely European intelligence unit.

Look closely: the first line almost writes the second. If you don’t control the data, your weapon is at best half-blind — and sometimes fully blind. 

To this very day — and I say this without any official confirmation — I firmly believe Commander-in-Chief Oleksandr Syrski’s decision to pull out of the hard-fought Kursk sector was heavily influenced by the Trump administration’s decision to suspend U.S. intelligence support.

People scoffed when Trump and Vance declared that Ukraine would lose without American help. Of course, this is the same army that stopped Russia’s tank parade to Kyiv with handheld weapons; they’ll fight on regardless. But the arrogance behind that statement came from a kernel of truth — one rooted not in America’s stockpile of missiles, but in the reach of its intelligence.

The precision-strike capability we talk about so often does not exist without data. ATACMS, Storm Shadow, and every modern precision munition rely on U.S. (or allied) intelligence for targeting data, coordinate validation, and battle-damage assessment.

• Target identification: U.S. satellites, SIGINT, and GEOINT confirm where high-value targets sit — command posts, radar systems, logistics nodes.
• Deconfliction and collateral control: U.S. data ensures Ukrainian strikes avoid friendly forces and civilian structures.
• Post-strike feedback: U.S. ISR assets measure impact so launchers can retarget within minutes. Battle-damage assessments guide the next wave.

Without that scaffolding, the weapons lose much of their edge. They still fire — but accuracy and confidence collapse. U.S. weapons come wrapped in invisible architecture: satellite eyes, signal ears, targeting brains. Remove that, and Ukraine — or any ally — is shooting blindfolded. The hardware is only half the system; the intelligence network is what turns it into a precision-strike ecosystem.

I remember watching that Trump-Zelensky-Vance fiasco on February 28th.When Trump sneered, “You don’t have the cards,” all I heard was this: you don’t have the data to stay in the fight — not the weapons. It was that meeting that led me to pen those two recommendations for the European Union. 

Today, I’m genuinely glad to report that Europe has taken the first, most logical, and most critical step toward real strategic independence. It’s a baby step — but the right one.

The European Commission is now exploring the creation of a new intelligence unit under President Ursula von der Leyen. Some reports suggest the process has already begun, moving from concept to execution. The unit would sit within the Commission’s Secretariat-General — the administrative core of Brussels — and draw personnel from national intelligence services through secondments or lateral hires. Its goal: to aggregate, coordinate, and manage intelligence collected across member states.

The initiative is still at a “very early, conceptual stage,” but the plan reflects a wider effort to bolster the EU executive’s security and intelligence functions, Commission spokespeople Balazs Ujvari and Paula Pinho told reporters.

I can already hear the complaints and the directions they’ll fly. First: duplication of resources. Second: you’ll never share intelligence safely with Putin’s friends inside the Union. Third: cost — America spends more on intelligence than France spends on defence.

None of that matters. Not a bit. A system capable of generating the data needed for Europe’s troops to fight at full effectiveness is worth every early imperfection. So a few leaks happen? Bits and pieces might slip through. The value of the system far outweighs the risk. Duplication? Of course it will happen at first — every new architecture overlaps before it stabilizes. 

And as for cost, why worry that America spends a hundred billion a year on intelligence? It didn’t start there. It started small, and they built it brick by brick until the structure became what it is today. Europe should do the same — start, build, refine, and own its data future.

Ursula von der Leyen is on the right track. She should bulldoze through every ounce of resistance that comes her way. This effort needs full-throttle support from every serious European leader — because strategic intelligence is not a luxury, it’s the foundation of sovereignty. 

This is non-negotiable.