TOMASZ SZATKOWSKI, OCTAVIAN MANEA, LUIS SIMÓN AND GIULIA TERCOVICH
This trajectory produced the exercise’s central strategic insight: Europe’s main contribution to a Taiwan war is not expeditionary combat power, but industrial sustainment and logistical depth. Europe increasingly functions as the “arsenal and artery” of a US-led coalition fighting in the decisive theatre, while shouldering primary responsibility for deterrence in its own theatre. This logic crystallised in the “Atlantic Corridor” concept: a two-way transatlantic logistics and industrial lifeline enabling Europe to supply US and Indo-Pacific forces while ensuring that Europe itself remains defensible if Russia escalates.
Over time, the corridor becomes more than a supply route – it becomes a mechanism of progressive economic and strategic entanglement, binding the Euro-Atlantic and Indo-Pacific theatres into an interdependent industrial and operational ecosystem. In this respect, the exercise revealed a historical parallel with the Lend-Lease relationship of 1941/42: indirect support, followed by deep industrial integration and, ultimately, unavoidable strategic involvement. As in that earlier period, Europe initially seeks insulation from direct belligerence but is gradually drawn into the systemic logic of great power war by the very act of sustaining the frontline.
The TTX therefore demonstrates that Europe cannot remain a distant observer in a Taiwan conflict. Even without deploying major combat forces to East Asia, Europe becomes a central strategic actor through production, logistics, economic warfare and the defence of the Atlantic lifeline. The exercise shows that indirect involvement is not a form of neutrality – it is a pathway to structured belligerence.
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