In front of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen said out loud what national security officials in Europe have been muttering for months behind closed doors: Europe just doesn't have a mechanism to decide on a timely and coordinated response to an explosion, jam, or flight over a military base without a flag. Her reply, in a State of the Union speech she gave each year, was to suggest a European Article 4 an Emergency Security Protocol based on the NATO clause that gives any member country the right to invoke the alliance whenever it deems its territory is threatened for consultation.

It was not an understated time. A drone has been shot down by Italian fighter planes under the command of NATO forces in Lithuanian airspace for the first time days earlier. In recent weeks, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Poland, Romania and Estonia have all reported drone incursions or sabotage attempts and German investigators formally charged an explosive-laden drone that they discovered near Leipzig airport in August to Russian state actors, which Moscow denies. Then there are the summer of GPS jamming attacks on commercial and even official planes, such as von der Leyen's own plane over Bulgaria, which Brussels is not describing as a bit of a coincidence but rather a carefully planned campaign just short of a NATO military strike.

This is the threshold issue that von der Leyen's proposal is attempting to address. The mutual defence guarantee, Article 5, of NATO is in place for an actual attack with arms. The lower tier, Article 4, is a mode of consultation not combat, and it is this softer tool the Commission would like to see at the EU level — many of the situations now happening are in a grey zone waiting to be filled by NATO's collective-defence machinery and national police forces.

However, her response to the MEPs was that their doctrine, institutions and decision-making had not kept pace with this new reality, and once a member state activates the mechanism, all would meet to coordinate a common response, discourage further escalation, and deal with the consequences. Doing this, she floated a European Security Council, which was only just beginning to be fleshed out, but which was designed to involve non-EU countries like Britain, Norway, Canada and Ukraine, recognising that a hybrid threat would not necessarily respect the bloc's borders and that Europe's defence architecture would need to be broader than the membership.

This does not come without context. The political rhetoric is hiding a real restructuring of European public finance. According to figures von der Leyen has quoted, spending on combined defence has risen from an estimated €240 billion in 2022 to €460 billion this year up by nearly eighty percent in the past five years. That surge is supported by the Commission's ReArm Europe program, which seeks to unlock up to €800 billion in financing, via joint borrowing, flexibility in fiscal rules and private sources, and of which an estimated €150 billion will be allocated for air and missile defense, ammunition and counter-drone systems.

The Poles spend almost four per cent of their GDP on defence, and the next four countries in NATO's spending league are Estonia, Lithuania, Greece and Finland. It's the fiscal engine for the idea of a body like a European Security Council to be conceivable in the first place, and this year, there are real winners on European stock markets, with defence contractors like those that supply radar and electronic-warfare and interceptor systems among the continent's best performers.

The most tangible result of that spending has been the European Drone Defence Initiative, a new name for the former, more poetic-sounding "Drone Wall" after opponents objected that the title was misleading as it downplayed the scope of the issue, which is far from the eastern border. Officials say it's a multi-layered system of radar, sensors and electronic mitigation stretching over 4,000 kilometres from Finland to Romania that can be completed in an early form by the end of this year and several years away in reality, considering the volume of procurement and the requirement for 24 governments to agree on common standards. The figures for the programme are still to be confirmed but they are in the tens of billions of euros with the addition of radar networks, jamming equipment, software integration and mitigation hardware.

Where this moment differs from past European hand-wrinkings about Russian hybrid activity is that instead of denial, it has evolved to acceptance. The string of incidents is "the new normal", von der Leyen said, a statement that would have been unimaginable from an EU leader just two years ago, and that reflects Brussels' new normal of perceiving grey-zone aggression as a malady to be lived with rather than a blip to wait out.

But analysts, including those at policy think tanks monitoring hybrid warfare, have singled out a weakness under the rhetoric: European decisionmaking is still very much consensus-based, and that is the very thing that's being rewarded by the very time when it is most often needed. The test this proposal will undergo after it moves out of the chamber in Strasbourg and onto the desks of the 27 governments of European states that are not all in accord on what constitutes an adequate provocation to warrant a joint response is whether a European Article 4 can provide the same degree of compression as the EU's decision-making process.