ECFR:
European Council on Foreign Relations

As of 18 October 2026. ECFR enters the autumn with what DURCHD8's study calls the most fully developed proposal for defending Europe with less America, and with one of its own writers pressing the plan on one point: whose software will run Europe's weapons. From its head office at Unter den Linden 17 in Berlin it runs offices in seven capitals and an outpost in Washington, with more than 90 staff. For 2024 it declared a budget of €14.4 million in the EU Transparency Register, €5.6 million of it from the Open Society Foundations, its largest single donor that year.

In June it published two papers on European defence: the plan “Making defence European again” on 4 June and, on 10 June, “Home alone”, a poll of 19,481 people in 15 countries in which 11 per cent still called the United States an ally, half the share of November 2024. The plan judged that “a weapon that depends on American software is preferable to no weapon at all”. On 29 July Gustav Gressel, writing for ECFR, warned that common standards resting on American software would buy interoperability “at the price of dependence”.

ECFR’s founders set out in 2007 to combine “establishment credibility with intellectual insurgency”, and the design works through people. Serving foreign ministers, former prime ministers, parliamentarians, journalists and business leaders sit on its council, and ECFR counts on them, in its own words, as “goodwill ambassadors for ECFR’s ideas”. When Emma Bonino became Italy’s foreign minister in 2013 she stayed a member and, as ECFR recalled after her death this year, “constantly drew on ECFR’s ideas, expertise and pan-European networks to shape the Italian and European agenda”.

In a ministry a paper from the institute arrives with ECFR’s name and the weight of the people around it. The institute itself takes no collective positions, and each paper says it speaks for its authors. Both hold at once, which is how the June plan’s acceptance of American software and a July warning about it can both come from ECFR.

The money comes from inside the field ECFR studies. Its donor list names thirteen foreign ministries, France’s Ministry of Armed Forces, the Dutch Ministry of Defence and the European Commission, beside foundations and companies from banking to energy. The defence plan thanks the Estonian foreign ministry for its support. ECFR holds that the breadth of its sources secures its independence.

For governments an ECFR paper comes with weight: the institute's name and the ministers on its council. DURCHD8's reading of the June plan shows what that weight can carry, a sound diagnosis joined to a remedy on the wrong layer. A government that took the plan for a way out of American dependence would rest its decision on a premise the plan's own evidence contradicts. The polls travel the same road. “Home alone” told leaders they “have the public's backing to pursue strategic autonomy without posturing”, while majorities in Germany, France and Poland opposed sending troops to Ukraine after a peace. A poll that measures opinion can be read in a capital as a mandate.

Will the defence budgets of 2027 treat the plan as a way out of American dependence, or as a way to manage it?

ECFR stands between governments and the public, and much of its weight is personal. Its three co-chairs come from different political worlds. Carl Bildt served as prime minister and foreign minister of Sweden. Lykke Friis directs Denmark’s Think Tank Europa and was a Danish minister. Norbert Röttgen has sat in the Bundestag since 1994 and chaired its foreign affairs committee from 2014 to 2021. Mark Leonard, a co-founder, directs the institute.

Governments are donors and audience at once, and so is the European Commission, which also funds research projects through Horizon Europe. Foundations carry a large share, the Open Society Foundations the largest.

ECFR has neighbours in its field, and DURCHD8 has read several of them: RUSI’s forecast of hybrid warfare, a study by Germany’s SWP and the roadmap Christian Mölling and Torben Schütz of the think tank EDINA wrote for the European Policy Centre in March 2025.

DURCHD8’s work on ECFR so far concerns one paper, read closely. A day after “Making defence European again” appeared, DURCHD8 published four documents. European Defence Autonomy: A Capable Answer, Wrong Layer reads the brief first on its own premises, quoting it verbatim, and treats it as a policy paper of its kind that claims no peer review. It finds the diagnosis sound, since the brief and DURCHD8’s own analysis reached it by separate routes, and the capability it asks for necessary. The disagreement sits in one place, the structure the plan would build. ECFR’s European Way of Defence: Structural Assessment checks that verdict against Europe’s five strategic cultures, the briefing Europe’s Defence Plan: Managing the Readiness Gap, Not Closing It addresses decision-makers, and the public note Europe’s Defence Plan, 2026: The Wrong Layer states that “the authors of the plan are serious”. ECFR’s research also serves DURCHD8 as a source: the Poland study cites it on Chinese economic exposure.

ECFR opens its polling data to the public, so the consent its plan counts on can be checked against its own numbers.