Strategic Industrial Scale-Up: Europe’s Cleantech Failure as a Warning for Defence Tech

In recent years, the European Union has positioned itself as a climate leader through ambitious political initiatives such as the European Green Deal. However, these ambitions have not translated into industrial power. While Europe crafted frameworks and targets, China built infrastructure, secured critical minerals, and deployed subsidies to scale its cleantech sectors. Today, China controls key value chains in solar panels, batteries, electric vehicles, and rare earths—domains explicitly identified by the EU as central to the green transition. Beijing is now advancing nuclear power and challenging Europe’s leadership in wind energy. Europe’s shortfall is not rooted in lack of innovation but in the inability to scale. This experience must be viewed not simply as a policy gap but as a structural failure—one with clear implications for the emerging defence tech sector.