Eight concepts and one operational vehicle — how reciprocity can be built rather than merely threatened
This paper is a sketch, not a worked-out doctrine. The eight concepts presented here emerged between February and May 2026 in a series of brainstorming sessions and are documented in individual essays on beyond-decay.org. We have brought them together here because they share a common principle and because their effect only becomes recognisable when they are seen together.
The paper complements the diagnostic series Man and Machine, which has been published on beyond-decay.org since February 2026. Where the diagnostic series describes Europe's structural situation, this paper attempts a constructive conclusion — what a different kind of security order could achieve when the usual answer of rearmament reaches its limits. It is addressed to everyone who is dissatisfied with the present situation and is looking for points of departure that lie beyond the well-worn reflexes.
The basic stance from which this paper is written can be summed up in a formula: pragmatic pacifism. We do not believe that non-violence is the right answer under all circumstances. We recognise the right to defence. But we draw a line — not between violence and non-violence, but between defence and attack. This stance is developed in more detail elsewhere, in an essay from February 2026 that is not part of this paper, but which may help readers who want to know from what position the following concepts are conceived (Der pragmatische Pazifist [The Pragmatic Pacifist]).
As far as the concepts themselves are concerned, the consequence of this stance is simple: a security architecture that takes the right to defence seriously without reproducing the escalation spirals of attack is possible — and today it is more necessary than any sharper threat.
The paper seeks resonance and criticism, not agreement.
The European security debate thinks in twentieth-century categories. More tanks, more brigades, higher defence spending, sharper threats. We consider these answers fundamentally wrong, because they lead into the familiar spirals of escalation whose endings we know from history. They also presuppose three conditions that structurally no longer obtain: first, the reliability of the US security guarantee; second, the willingness of democratic societies to escalate against an aggressor who systematically exploits the escalation asymmetry between democracy and autocracy; third, the rationality of actors who in fact calculate with the madman strategy.
The first of these preconditions — the reliability of the US security guarantee — deserves a closer look, because its erosion is still read in Europe as the mood swing of a single president. It is not. The American distancing has three layers that reinforce one another and that cannot be reversed by a change of president.
Economically, the old division of labour — America provides the security guarantee, Europe develops the civilian economy under this umbrella — is over. A serious European rearmament would cost sums that no European state budget can provide. The White House's National Security Strategy 2025 states the consequence without beating about the bush: energy dominance, Foreign Military Sales and cloud infrastructure under American law are instruments of power projection. Security guarantees are contracts with consideration clauses. What has changed is not the American character. What has changed is the openness with which the economic consideration clauses are spelt out.
Theologically, a political theology has moved institutionally into the Pentagon that is barely understood in Europe. It does not come from mainstream evangelicalism, nor from passive end-times thinking. It has its roots in Christian Reconstructionism — a small, intellectually radical current whose programme is the active establishment of a biblically grounded legal order. Pete Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense since January 2025 and since September 2025 bearing the title Secretary of War, attends a congregation of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a network of churches around the pastor Doug Wilson which, in the assessment of religious studies scholars, is strongly shaped by Christian Reconstructionism. This is not religious folklore. It is a selection of personnel in an apparatus that until now was optimised for Eichmann-style dutifulness and is now being optimised for a sense of mission. Whoever rises in such an apparatus is not Petrov, but the opposite of Petrov — not the hesitant one, but the certain one.
Ideologically, for the first time in American history, a class has gained institutional power in the Trump administration that understands liberal democracy not as a heritage to be defended but as an obstacle to be overcome. Its genealogy runs from Howard Scott (Technocracy Incorporated, 1932) via Ayn Rand to Curtis Yarvin and today's tech magnates. JD Vance is a protégé of Peter Thiel. Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto of 2023 names Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — co-author of the Fascist Manifesto of 1919 — as a patron saint. This is not rhetoric. It is a programme.
These three layers reinforce one another. Whoever is asked to pay up economically finds that the demand is made in the theological register as a sacred duty and in the ideological register as the fulfilment of a superior order. A European security architecture that relies on a predictable US policy is building on uncertain ground. It is building on the hope that one layer could be neutralised by an election date. That hope is unfounded.
The usual answer to this situation is the demand for European autonomy through rearmament. That is the language Friedrich Merz spoke in his government statement of 14 May 2025 and repeated at the Munich Security Conference in February 2026 — the Bundeswehr must become the strongest conventional army in Europe. What is remarkable about this is not only the announcement of rearmament itself, but the frame of reference. Merz does not think of the security question in European terms, but in German terms within a European context. The strongest army is to be the German one; Europe is the yardstick against which this strength is measured, not the body that builds it up. This is a categorical confusion with a long prehistory. A genuinely European answer would have to be formulated the other way round: how can Europe as a whole become capable of defending itself, and which German contributions would that require?
This answer also overlooks two things. First, genuine conventional rearmament takes decades, during which the structural weakness persists. Second, and more importantly, it changes nothing about the escalation asymmetry. A stronger German or European army remains at the mercy of nuclear blackmail as long as the blackmail can work as a threat.
The second layer of the diagnosis is the Russian one. In Europe it is usually reduced to two positions, both of them wrong: that Russia wants to conquer Europe (from the Baltic states via Poland to Berlin), or that Russia only wants its security zone and can otherwise be placated. Both readings miss what Russian strategy actually is. It does not count on a military leap into the West, nor does it count on renouncing the West. It counts on waiting.
With 17.1 million square kilometres, Russia is the largest country on earth — and still believes it needs more land. This paradox has two geographical and historical roots which together form the Russian disposition. The first root is the North European Plain — a continuous expanse from the Atlantic to the Urals across which armies can move as across a table. And they did move across it: the Poles in 1610, the Swedes in 1708, the French in 1812, the Germans in 1918 and 1941. Four or five Western invasions in four centuries. The Russian answer to this vulnerability has been the same for centuries: territorial depth as a substitute for defence. Catherine the Great is credited with the sentence: I have no way to defend my borders but to extend them. Whether she actually said it is not documented. That it describes Russian practice is. From the Russian point of view this was not aggression, but geometry.
The second root is eastern and earlier in time. For 240 years — from 1240 to 1480 — the Russian principalities were tributaries of the Golden Horde. That is a period spanning ten generations — generations that were born, lived and died without ever experiencing a single day free of tribute obligations to a foreign master. Many historians see this experience as one of the roots of the Russian structure of rule; how much weight it carried alongside the Byzantine heritage and Muscovy's own development is disputed. Before the Horde, Kievan Rus had a pluralistic princely order with veches — popular assemblies, a constitutional tradition not unlike that of its Western neighbours. After the Horde there was something else: a centralised, god-like autocracy that had taken over the Mongol model of administration. Russia emerged from Mongol tutelage as a different country — no longer a European principality, but a Eurasian despotism. This transformation, however one weighs its causes, has never been reversed.
In addition, there is a temporal asymmetry. While Mongol rule brought Russia to a standstill, Western Europe produced the Renaissance. When the Horde came to an end, Russia was three centuries behind. This lag has never been made up. Peter the Great tried to close it through decreed Westernisation and thereby introduced a split into Russian society that still has effects today: between an elite oriented towards the West and a population that experiences this orientation as cultural foreign domination.
Russia can use its given territory to create prosperity only to a very limited extent, because it lacks the institutional preconditions: the rule of law, security of property, free science, access to international capital markets, a middle class independent of the state. These gaps are not accidents. They are the structural consequence of the disposition described above. But to admit inner weakness would mean delegitimising the regime. So the weakness is reinterpreted — as the consequence of external enemies. If Russia does not prosper, it is not the system that is to blame but the West, which encircles it. In this narrative, expansion becomes a necessity: not because Russia needs more land, but because it must ward off the enemies who stand in the way of its inner rise.
From this follows what Ukraine really is in Russian strategy. It is not one piece of land among others. It is the place where the Russian disposition is confronted with its own failure. Geographically, it is the most important part of the North European Plain. Zbigniew Brzezinski put it soberly: Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Existentially, however, it is something else: it is the country that comes from the same Soviet inheritance as Russia and that is developing, with all its difficulties, in a different direction. A Western-oriented democracy. A society in which the veches are councils again and the boyars become citizens again. If Ukraine succeeds, it destroys the Russian self-narrative that the system is inevitable. A successful Ukraine is therefore the existential threat to the Russian regime, far more than any NATO enlargement.
This reading has strategic consequences. First, the threat is real, but it is not expansive in the classical imperial sense. Russia does not want to conquer Poland because it wants Poland. It wants a buffer zone whose depth conceals its weakness. This makes the direction of Russian policy more predictable than it appears. What is not predictable, on the other hand, is the price the regime is prepared to pay for this direction; we return to this under the weak points. Second, the architecture Russia must be confronted with is not one that removes its disposition through moral condemnation — that does not work — but one that respects this disposition and pulls the ground from under it through geometric consequence. That is precisely the logic of the concepts presented here.
Europe's structural situation at present is this: it stands between two madman powers. Russia escalates in the hybrid layer — shadow fleet, cable sabotage, drones over military installations, arson at logistics centres — and keeps the nuclear card as an escalation reserve. The United States under its present leadership is in a complex phase. In May 2026 President Trump is betting on economic understanding with China — the visit to Beijing with seventeen business leaders is the latest image. But the structural unpredictability remains. After the midterms and after the conclusion of the current military engagements, the line may change again.
The eight concepts presented here follow a principle we call precisely defined tit-for-tat strategies. The logic is not to renounce threats. It is to take threats out of the hands of the politician, who might be weak in the moment of crisis, and to place them in a structure that can be less weak than a single human being under pressure.
Whoever, in the classic game of reciprocity, responds to an action with a counter-action depends on his own willingness to escalate — and it is precisely this willingness that democratic societies lack towards actors who calculate with the madman strategy. Whoever, by contrast, builds tit-for-tat into the architecture itself shifts reciprocity from the moment of crisis into the preparation phase. The counter-action is then no longer a political decision but a technical, legal or physical consequence that every actor knows in advance.
What connects all eight concepts is the shifting of the security function from the moment of political decision into the architecture built in advance. This makes them independent of the willingness to escalate, which may be lacking in the moment of crisis. It also makes them independent of the unity of all actors, which is structurally difficult to achieve within the EU or NATO in the consensus corridor.
Here one must distinguish honestly how far this shift reaches in each case. There are three degrees. The strongest is physical self-enforcement: with COSMOS, the debris cloud in orbit punishes the attacker without anyone having to decide anything. The middle one is documentary: with SHADOW and GRADUS, the entry in the register comes about by itself, but the consequences have to be carried out by ports, banks and authorities. The weakest is contractual: with NUET and RIEGEL, there is still a state standing between trigger and consequence, which must act when it comes to the crunch. A treaty is not a saw with a finger guard. What it can do is prepare the decision for the moment of crisis so thoroughly that failing to take it becomes itself the breach of a public promise, and thus more costly than carrying it out.
In iterated game theory, however, tit-for-tat logic has a well-known weakness. Misunderstandings can lead it into vicious circles in which both sides believe they are responding to a defection by the other, without a first defection having occurred in a sense binding on both. The classic case is the mutual reduction of diplomats between the USA and the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1986: both sides thought they were reacting — neither wanted to escalate; the result was an escalation that harmed both. This weakness is the reason why, since the late 1980s, research has developed refinements such as Generous Tit-for-Tat or Win-Stay, Lose-Shift.
We get round the weakness with a design principle: the triggers of our architecture are not open to interpretation, but physically or documentarily unambiguous. A nuclear weapons use (NUET) can be detected seismically, electromagnetically and radiologically — no doubtful cases, no conflicting readings. An operation against the Suwalki Corridor (RIEGEL) is visible as a troop movement, with time, place and actor. The two central concepts of the architecture are thus immune to the classic tit-for-tat trap. With the softer concepts — GRADUS, SHADOW — we build in additional safeguards: cumulative thresholds instead of single-incident triggers, documentary registers instead of automatic sanctions, objection procedures, waiting periods. Architectures can never completely eliminate the human risk of misinterpretation. But they can reduce the risk to the point where the remaining uncertainty is smaller than that of the present situation, in which no architecture at all carries the political moment of crisis.
A global treaty outlawing the use of nuclear weapons. Whoever uses a nuclear weapon against another country is automatically and irrevocably excluded from the world economy for at least fifty years — without a new vote, without a right of veto, without a committee. The exclusion must be carried out by the states party to the treaty themselves; this is the point at which the architecture remains most vulnerable. Secondary isolation for helpers. The architecture works with a critical mass of around sixty-five per cent of world GDP. The natural bearers are not the USA, but the EU, China, India, Japan, Brazil and the rest of Asia, as well as the Global South. The logic works symmetrically — it neutralises the blackmail potential of every nuclear power.
Neutralising the Suwalki threat through geographical reciprocity. Since Finland and Sweden joined NATO, the Baltic Sea has been a NATO inland sea. A Russian operation against the Suwalki Corridor would — if appropriate mechanisms are set up in advance — automatically trigger the maritime blockade of Kaliningrad and the closure of the Gulf of Finland. The Russian exclave, with around one million inhabitants, would be cut off from its supplies, and St Petersburg shut in at the end of the funnel. The geographical inversion makes the attack itself unattractive. The precondition, however, remains the political unity of the eight littoral states — that is the open weak point.
Protecting critical infrastructure not through central defence but through decentralised architecture. If every neighbourhood has its own energy cell, every communication system a redundant network, every supply system local reserves, then no single act of sabotage is catastrophic any longer. The Berlin power outage of January 2026 showed how vulnerable today's central structure is. MESH solves the problem not with more police at more cables, but with an architecture in which destroying one node destroys only one node. The models are the resilience cultures of Finland and Switzerland.
Reversal of the burden of proof for ships navigating in cable protection zones without a transponder. Instead of proving sabotage in each individual case — which almost never succeeds with cable breaks in international waters — the switched-off transponder obligation itself becomes the offence. Whoever sails in a protection zone without identification is documented in a public database. Ports of the coalition states refuse service. This hits the Russian shadow fleet (six hundred to seven hundred tankers) directly, without military confrontation on the high seas. The legal basis already exists in sanctions, banking and arms-trade law.
An architectural answer to hybrid aggression below the Article 5 threshold. Instead of deciding politically in each individual case whether a reaction follows, a public register of all documented hybrid acts is kept. Three predefined cumulative thresholds automatically trigger predefined response packages. Russia's present strategy — to stay below the threshold of political reaction by repeating sub-critical acts — is thereby reversed: every act counts, every threshold is known, the reaction is no longer negotiable in the moment of crisis. The strongest element is the lifting of the consensus requirement at the moment of activation.
Ratification, through an instrument of international law, of the physical self-punishment that already exists in space. The Kessler syndrome — the fact that every kinetic anti-satellite action creates debris that also endangers one's own satellites — is the strongest architectural logic of the entire series, because it does not have to be constructed but is already physically installed. COSMOS adds to the physical self-punishment a Kessler liability convention, similar to the oil liability conventions in maritime law. At the same time it regulates strategic private infrastructure (the Starlink problem) and European satellite sovereignty (Galileo, IRIS²).
Defending democratic decision-making processes against algorithmic manipulation through transparency instead of censorship. The problem of the Romanian presidential election of November 2024 (annulment of the first round by the Constitutional Court) was not a deepfake problem but an algorithm problem. DEMOS relies on provenance labelling of AI-generated political content (the C2PA standard), algorithmic transparency during election periods, real-time exposure of ongoing operations, and transparency of funding. It is the only one of the eight concepts in which the self-punishment structure is weaker — it relies more on immunisation than on reciprocity.
The previous seven concepts address external or digital cross-border threats. A security architecture that leaves out the inner pillar is incomplete — for at the present moment the gravest threat to democratic societies comes not from outside but from within. It comes from a waiting structure that builds its capillaries in every constituency and waits for the moment when the external situation escalates to the point where the established structures fail.
POLIS — Political Operations through Layered Institutional Subsidiarity — is the architectural answer to this waiting structure. The concept rests on four elements. First, liquid delegation — the possibility of delegating individual decisions on specific matters to competent representatives, without handing over a blanket mandate. Second, subject-specific competence registers — publicly verifiable qualifications for particular policy fields, which make appointments to office transparent. Third, algorithmic subsidiarity — decisions are taken at the level at which their consequences actually arise, with clearly defined escalation routes. Fourth, automatic term limits — no person holds the same office for longer than two legislative terms, and no person holds more than three consecutive public offices.
The logic is the same as with the other concepts: the security function is shifted from the moment of political decision into the architecture. A democratic order with a POLIS architecture cannot be hollowed out by the slow infiltration of a waiting structure, because its structures themselves offer speed, clarity and accountability — and thereby serve the need for clarity and speed democratically, instead of leaving it to a movement that would serve these needs in an authoritarian way. POLIS is not the last word on democratic renewal. It is the minimum architectural condition for the other seven concepts to hold over the next ten or twenty years.
A principle that places threats in structures has a sister: the principle of placing leniency in structures. In “The Construction of Mercy” we showed how mercy entered the machine, not as a disposition but as calculation and rule. The same movement, from the moment of human decision into the construction built beforehand, also carries this architecture. It would be incomplete if it constructed only severity and not also the limit of severity.
Game theory knows this limit under the name Generous Tit-for-Tat: whoever responds to every defection but occasionally forgives one breaks the spiral of misunderstandings without becoming exploitable. For the architecture, this implies a distinction. Where the trigger is unambiguous — the use of nuclear weapons or an attack on the Suwalki Corridor — there is no leniency; every exception would hollow out deterrence. Where the trigger is ambiguous — hybrid acts and shadow ships — leniency belongs in the construction. Entries in the GRADUS register expire after a fixed period if no new ones are added. Whoever demonstrably cooperates moves down a level. A ship that switches its transponder back on and allows an inspection is struck off the SHADOW list. Severity remains predictable, and so does the way back.
The eight concepts are architectures — rules, mechanisms, self-punishment structures. They only work when someone enforces them. And this is exactly where Europe has a structural problem. The national armed forces are not coordinated. The NATO structures are dominated by a power whose reliability is eroding. Since 1954, when the European Defence Community (EDC) failed, an EU army has been a project that is repeatedly considered and repeatedly dropped. In Munich in February 2026, Friedrich Merz too spoke out not for a European army but for a “self-supporting European pillar” within NATO, and for a Bundeswehr as Europe's strongest conventional army.
We propose a different point of entry: a European Defence Union (EDU) that begins with a single branch of the armed forces — the navy — and with a single headquarters — in Gdańsk. Four anchor points support the proposal.
Geographical. Gdańsk lies at the operational focal point of the present threat situation. The Gulf of Finland can be reached directly by sea, Kaliningrad is a few hundred kilometres away, the Suwalki Corridor is within operational range. Brest, Toulon or La Spezia are too far from today's escalation zones. A naval headquarters in Gdańsk would be at the place where the maritime concepts RIEGEL, SHADOW, MESH and GRADUS would actually have to be put into operation.
Political. Poland is the EU member state with the most consistent stance towards Russian aggression. Poland has the highest defence share of GDP within NATO. Poland is building the East Shield and investing consistently in its own security structure. A naval headquarters in Gdańsk would lift Poland out of the role of frontline state into the role of bearer of the architecture.
Historical and symbolic. Gdańsk is a city of double layering — the Second World War began here with the German attack on the Westerplatte on 1 September 1939, and Solidarność began here in 1980 in the Lenin Shipyard as an uprising against the Soviet bloc. A European naval headquarters in Gdańsk would not be a mere choice of location — it would be a gesture of historical layering. Moreover, the location would not be in Berlin, not in Paris, not in Brussels. This would sidestep the EDC trap of 1954: no major power would have the headquarters on its territory, nobody could interpret the initiative as a hegemonic attempt. Gdańsk is neutral in the sense that it belongs neither to Germany nor to France, and at the same time central in the sense that it lies at the operational focal point.
Why the navy in particular. The navy is the branch of the armed forces with the weakest ties to national identity. The army is national, the air force is national. Navies have worked in allied formations for centuries. There is a permanent NATO naval presence in the Baltic, one in the North Sea, one in the Mediterranean. A joint European naval high command would not be a revolutionary break but the formalisation of what has long been practised operationally. With the army, France and Germany argue about doctrine, nuclear-weapons participation and out-of-area deployments. With the navy there is a common task: protecting sea lanes, protecting underwater infrastructure, monitoring EU territorial waters and economic zones.
Europe's naval substance is considerable. The combined navies of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland — together with the United Kingdom — comprise some two hundred thousand seagoing personnel, several aircraft carriers, dozens of major surface combatants, and bases spread around the world from Brest to Faslane, from La Spezia to Piraeus. What is missing is not the substance. What is missing is coordination. A European naval high command in Gdańsk would bundle this substance in one hand.
This would take the first step towards a European Defence Union — not through the grand design that has been failing for seventy years, but through the step-by-step integration of one branch of the armed forces at a non-hegemonic location. The other branches could follow once naval integration has proved itself. Or they could remain national if the situation does not require otherwise. Both would be possible. What is proposed here is a point of entry, not a final state.
The naval question is an example of a larger problem. Taken together, Europe has a considerable defence arsenal — over two hundred thousand naval personnel in the EU and UK combined, several aircraft carriers, thousands of combat aircraft, hundreds of major surface combatants, one of the largest land-force arsenals west of the Russian border. What Europe does not have is a coordinated overview of what actually exists, what is redundant, where gaps exist and which gaps the coming threat situations would require to be closed. Instead, each member state arms according to its own doctrine, with its own standards, its own supply chains, its own procurement cycles — and with a defence budget that in total is more than twice Russia's, but in operational effect amounts to a fraction of it.
Intelligent rearmament would start differently. It would begin with an honest inventory — what do we have, where are we strong, where are we weak. It would begin with a realistic analysis of threat scenarios — against which situations must we be prepared, over what time horizons. And from this it would derive a prioritised list of gaps, instead of guaranteeing every arms company its preferred major contract. The point is not to spend less. The point is to steer the money spent into what actually produces security.
Four fields are recognisably underfunded or structurally lopsided today. Drone defence and unmanned systems — for three years the war in Ukraine has shown that cheap drones neutralise expensive combat systems. Europe continues to invest mainly in the expensive systems, not in defence against the cheap ones. Space sovereignty — IRIS² has been ordered, Galileo is running, but no European alternative to Starlink exists; US private infrastructure dominates strategic communication in a way that leaves Europe open to blackmail. Mass production of munitions — the specialist press estimates the annual capacity for the Taurus cruise missile at forty to sixty units, that is, a few per month. This is concrete evidence of the structural inability to mass-produce. Hybrid defence and cable infrastructure — the maritime concepts SHADOW and MESH outlined above need an industrial base that today exists neither nationally nor at European level.
This list is not exhaustive. It is an indication that intelligent rearmament is more than a new order for Rheinmetall, KNDS Deutschland or Airbus Defence. It is a question of constellation. In a forthcoming paper we will address this question more systematically — with a scenario analysis of possible threat situations over different time horizons and the consequences for rearmament that follow from them. The present paper names the problem; the next will outline a path towards a solution.
If the concepts sketched here are ever to be realised, the order of realisation is decisive. A Western initiative that then seeks Chinese participation will probably fail because it is perceived as a Western instrument of containment. A Chinese initiative that Europe, India, Japan and Brazil join has structurally different prospects. In this logic China comes not last, but first.
Three observations on this. First, several of the concepts — NUET in particular — have a logic that is not tied to any country. They work against every nuclear power that uses blackmail as policy. That includes the United States. A Chinese leadership that has experienced under two Trump administrations what the madman strategy means as an instrument of foreign policy has a structural interest in an architecture that renders this strategy ineffective.
Second, the conceptual ground of the architecture does not come from Western thought alone. The aikido principle — turning the attacker's energy against himself — belongs to the East Asian tradition. Sun Tzu, from whose Art of War comes the point that the supreme victory is the one won without battle, formulated the same principle two and a half thousand years ago. A security architecture with precisely defined tit-for-tat strategies is not Western strategic doctrine, but rather a re-reading of old holdings from today's perspective.
Third — China's situation. At the present moment China has an objective interest in a more stable world order than the one that has taken shape since 2022. It has no interest in nuclear escalation in Asia, because its economic position would depend on it. It has an interest in clear rules in space, because its own satellite infrastructure is growing. It has an interest in an architecture in which no single actor — be it American or Russian — can shake the system through blackmail.
The concepts in the series are not made for China. They arose in a situation in which China's participation is the precondition for their working.
We are neither sinologists nor diplomats. What we do not know is whether the Chinese interests assumed here are actually compatible with Beijing's concrete political constellation. Whether there would be ways of introducing individual concepts or the overall principle into the Chinese security-policy discourse. Which personalities, which think tanks, which university forums might come into question as sounding boards. Whether the Yan Xuetong school, Wang Jisi at Peking University, the Tsinghua school or other actors would see a point of connection.
We name these questions not in order to suppress them, but to make clear that the paper is a sketch seeking resonance and criticism. Whoever has an operational foothold in one of the spaces mentioned — sinological, diplomatic, military-strategic, legal, economic — and can formulate, after reading, an assessment of what in the sketch holds and what does not, where the concepts are strong and where they are naive, is invited to do so. A reply address is given at the foot of this page.
Four weak points of the architecture must be named openly before the conversation begins.
First — the problem of unlimited cost tolerance. All the concepts presented here presuppose an aggressor who weighs costs against benefits. Russia's direction, as shown above, is predictable. What is not predictable is the price the leadership is prepared to pay. Putin in Ukraine is the present example: he accepts losses that exceed every Western calculation. Against such an actor the concepts shift the calculation, but they do not decide it. The higher the cost tolerance, the weaker the lever. This is a real limit, not a rhetorical one.
Second — preparation and execution. Several concepts (RIEGEL, GRADUS, SHADOW) presuppose the unity of the EU or NATO at the moment of preparation. This unity is structurally difficult to achieve in the EU, and within the NATO framework it is made even harder by Hungary and Slovakia. And even where it succeeds, the moment of crisis returns at the point of execution: except with COSMOS, in the end a state must actually do what it has promised. The accident insurance of 1884 worked because the employers' liability associations (Berufsgenossenschaften) inspected the firms and a state stood behind them. There is no comparable authority between states. The architecture can make the failure to execute costly, but not impossible.
Third — humanitarian blackmail. The NUET architecture deliberately contains no humanitarian exceptions, because exceptions would hollow out the concept. That is legally consistent and morally harsh. In the political practice of democratic societies, however, susceptibility to humanitarian blackmail is a real factor. How a concept that from the outset places the humanitarian consequence with the aggressor can hold its ground is an open question.
Fourth — the early methodological stage. The concepts emerged within a few weeks. They have not gone through interdisciplinary expert panels, have not been examined legally, have not been validated in military-strategic terms. They have the status of first sketches that have played through their own logic, without the operational points of friction having been tested in reality. A second round of elaboration with expert reinforcement would be necessary if the sketch is to become a workable concept.
What happens next depends on the response. We are publishing the paper in the expectation that competent readers will take up, supplement, criticise or reject individual concepts. For us, resonance does not mean agreement, but the honest professional engagement that has become rare in the present German security debate. Voices that would like to get in touch are welcome at the reply address given.
What we envisage in the medium term is a second round of elaboration of the concepts with expert reinforcement. If the architecture passes the first resonance test, the next stage would be a systematic examination by sinologists, lawyers, military strategists, diplomats and economic historians. The aim would be to reach a state that can withstand a serious foreign-policy discussion — not in Berlin, where the consensus corridor prevents this, but in places where a different kind of conversation is still possible.
As for the order of things — we have learned in recent months that these concepts cannot be carried from a European capital. An initiative from Beijing, New Delhi, Brasília or Tokyo, with European participation, would have structurally different prospects. Whether a step in this direction is feasible would have to be judged by people who have a foothold in the relevant spaces.
The concepts presented here are not the result of an academic programme, but of a pragmatic question: what can an architecture achieve when threats no longer carry weight? The answers are incomplete, some perhaps naive. But the question is real. Asking it seems to us more urgent than the hundredth speech about defence spending in Munich.
We would be glad to hear assessments — even, and especially, if they are dismissive.
On Hegseth and the CREC church network: NBC; Religion News Service. On the renaming as “Department of War”: Executive Order 14347. On the expulsions of diplomats in 1986: RFE/RL. On Friedrich Merz's speech in Munich in 2026: full text (German). On Taurus production: hartpunkt (German). On the Berlin power outage in January 2026: Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) (German). On Trump's visit to Beijing in May 2026: CNBC.