Dutch scholar Luuk van Middelaar emerges as Europe’s master strategist

Luuk van Middelaar has become one of the clearest voices pushing Europe to stop behaving like a market and start acting like a power. His argument lands now because the continent is facing hard tests at once: war in Ukraine, a rearmament push across the EU, deeper questions about industrial strength, and a frayed transatlantic relationship that no longer feels automatic.

From Dutch scholar to Brussels strategist

Born in Eindhoven on 9 May 1973, van Middelaar did not build his reputation as a traditional party operative or a day-to-day Brussels fixer. He came up through history and political philosophy, then moved inside the machinery of Europe itself. From 2010 to 2014, he served as chief speechwriter and close adviser to European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, shaping messages on the euro crisis, foreign affairs and institutional issues. He later briefly worked for Donald Tusk, adding another layer of insider experience at the top of the European Council.

That institutional background matters because it gives his writing and advocacy unusual weight. Van Middelaar knows how the European project sounds from a podium, how it behaves in a crisis room, and how cautious the institutions can be when the moment demands something bolder. He also taught at the Université catholique de Louvain and at Leiden University, where he has held a professorship in EU constitutional law, giving him the rare combination of scholar and operator that Brussels often says it wants but seldom actually produces.

His books track the same evolution. *The Passage to Europe* in 2013 reflected on Europe’s political order; later works such as *Alarums & Excursions* in 2019, *Pandemonium* in 2021 and *Le Réveil géopolitique de l’Europe* in 2022 show a thinker moving steadily toward the same conclusion: the EU can no longer afford to treat geopolitics as someone else’s problem.

The Brussels Institute for Geopolitics is his real platform

Van Middelaar’s current influence runs through the Brussels Institute for Geopolitics, which he co-founded with Hans Kribbe and Sébastien Lumet. The institute was launched on 7 October 2022 on the margins of an informal EU leaders’ summit in Prague, a setting that fits its mission: not academic distance, but direct engagement with the Europe of heads of government, crises and strategic choices.

Leiden University described the institute as a hub for high-quality research on Europe’s geopolitics, created to help the EU develop strategic capacities after the shocks of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s war against Ukraine. The institute itself says it exists to help Europe get in shape for the new era of great power politics, and it describes itself as the first and only think tank in Brussels wholly dedicated to geopolitics and strategy.

That niche is important. Brussels is crowded with groups that study regulation, law, trade and institutional procedure. Van Middelaar’s institute is trying to normalize something different: a vocabulary of power, territory and identity. In his view, Europe must shift culturally before it can shift strategically. That is not a small semantic argument. It is a challenge to the habits of a Union that often prefers compromise language to hard choices.

Why his ideas travel so well right now

Van Middelaar’s relevance has grown because Europe’s debates have become less abstract and more consequential. In a France 24 interview in April 2025, he discussed European defense, strategic autonomy, artificial intelligence policy and the frayed relationship with Donald Trump, while pointing to Germany as crucial in changing Europe’s course on defense. That mix tells you why he matters now: he is not speaking only about tanks and troops, but about the wider architecture of power in which technology, economics and alliances are now linked.

His institute has also published work on EU geoeconomics, the role of the euro and the ideological roots of MAGA’s anti-European offensive. Taken together, those themes show a strategist who sees the contest with Washington as bigger than one presidency and bigger than trade disputes. Europe’s vulnerability is not just military; it is financial, technological and political. That is the lens through which van Middelaar interprets the present.

The broader EU context supports his case. The European Council has already called for Europe to be better equipped to act autonomously, in a coordinated way and in full coherence with NATO. It has also urged member states to operationalize capability coalitions and launch concrete defense projects. Europe is no longer debating whether it needs more strategic capacity; it is debating how fast and how seriously to build it.

Defense spending has already shifted the ground

The scale of the change is visible in the numbers. According to European Parliament research, defense expenditure by the 27 EU member states reached about €343 billion in 2024, equal to 1.9% of GDP, with estimates for 2025 rising further. That is a dramatic shift for a bloc long defined by trade, regulation and cautious reliance on others for hard security.

For van Middelaar, this spending surge is meaningful only if it produces institutions, habits and political will that can survive the next crisis. More money alone will not solve Europe’s structural problem if governments keep treating defense as an emergency line item rather than a permanent strategic responsibility. His thinking pushes in the opposite direction: toward capability coalitions, industrial seriousness and a political culture that can absorb the fact that Europe now lives in a harsher world.

That is why Germany matters so much in his framework. If Europe is to move from rhetorical autonomy to practical autonomy, Berlin cannot remain hesitant. The continent’s military weight, industrial power and fiscal choices still run through German decisions, and van Middelaar understands that no strategic shift in Europe will be credible without German participation.

Roadmap or elegant theory?

This is where van Middelaar is most interesting. He is not offering a slogan, and he is not pretending Europe can become a superpower overnight. His value lies in making the case that strategy is not a luxury add-on to the European project. It is the condition for preserving the project at all.

The limitation is obvious too. A culture of power is easier to diagnose than to build. Europe still has fragmented defense procurement, uneven political will, and deep differences over how much sovereignty to pool, how fast to rearm and how to manage Washington. On enlargement, industrial policy and relations with the United States, van Middelaar’s framework is best read as a warning: the EU cannot expand, compete and protect itself through legal formality alone.

That is why he matters now. He gives Europe a language for the age it has entered, one shaped by war in Ukraine, the return of great power politics and the need to think beyond comfortable assumptions. Whether leaders can turn that language into durable policy is still the open question, but van Middelaar has already done something important: he has forced the argument onto ground that Brussels can no longer ignore.