Europe's hesitation on missile defense is the invitation Moscow is waiting for

Franz-Stefan Gady argues in Foreign Policy that Europe's air-defense posture is being undermined less by a shortage of interceptors than by a shortage of political will. He notes that President Trump has quietly stepped back from earlier hints that Washington might license Ukraine to build its own Patriot interceptors, and has separately declined Kyiv's request for 300 more of the systems outright. Even a fuller supply would not solve the underlying arithmetic, Gady writes, since the West's stockpiles simply do not hold enough interceptors to blunt Russia's ballistic-missile barrages at the rate Moscow can now launch them. His deeper argument is about deterrence rather than logistics: a NATO that visibly commits to shooting down incoming missiles and striking the launchers that fired them raises the cost of an attack, while a NATO that hesitates signals that a saturation strike could succeed without serious consequence. That signal, he warns, is precisely what a Kremlin testing the alliance's resolve would be looking for. The piece lands as Zelensky renews his own warnings that Ukraine's air defenses are being “overwhelmed,” and as Russian barrages continue to probe how far into NATO airspace stray munitions can travel before anyone treats it as an emergency.