Deterrence works only if it is believed. The disagreement runs from force posture on the eastern flank to whether Article 5 would be invoked at all, and institutions reach different conclusions from much the same evidence.
De-risking, friendshoring and decoupling describe different ambitions and get used interchangeably. Institutions disagree on which parts of the relationship can actually be unwound, and what it would cost to try.
Tariffs returned to mainstream economic policy faster than the literature defending them. The argument is whether they build domestic capacity or simply tax the people they are meant to protect.
European defence has rested on American capability for seventy years. The argument now is about how much of it Europe could replace, how quickly, and at what cost. Institutions differ on whether the gap is money, industrial capacity, or command and control.
Taiwan, the South China Sea and the first island chain dominate defence planning in three capitals. Institutions disagree about how imminent the risk is and what deters it.
The CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are the largest deliberate industrial interventions in forty years. Enough time has passed for evidence, and institutions read the same evidence very differently.
Generation is being built faster than the wires to carry it. Whether transmission is the binding constraint, or a symptom of planning and market design, shapes where the next decade's money should go.
Solar is lost, batteries are going, and wind is contested. Whether Europe should subsidise, protect, or buy cheap and decarbonise faster is the sharpest industrial policy argument in the field.
Semiconductor and equipment controls are the sharpest instrument Western governments have used in a decade. Whether they buy years or merely accelerate domestic substitution is genuinely contested.
The gap has widened for two decades and the diagnoses do not agree: capital markets, energy costs, regulation, scale, or research that never reaches a market.
Sanctions are now the default response to almost everything. The evidence on whether they alter decisions, as opposed to imposing costs, is thinner than the policy consensus suggests.
Border carbon adjustment is defended as the only way to price emissions without exporting them, and attacked as a tariff with a green label. The trade institutions and the climate institutions do not read it the same way.
Europe replaced Russian pipeline gas faster than almost anyone forecast. What it should build instead is still open: LNG terminals, renewables and storage, demand reduction, or nuclear, each with a different lock-in.
Autonomy in targeting and command is moving faster than the doctrine governing it. The split is between those treating it as a capability race and those treating it as an arms-control problem.
Steel, cement and chemicals have no easy electrification path. Hydrogen is the leading candidate and the most expensive one, and institutions disagree about how much of the economy it can realistically reach.
Firm low-carbon power is the part of a decarbonised grid nobody has cheaply solved. Some institutions treat new nuclear as unavoidable, others as the most expensive way to buy capacity that storage will provide sooner.
Cheap attritable systems have made movement expensive and concealment hard. Whether that favours the defender permanently, or only until counter-drone systems mature, is an open question with large procurement consequences.
Loss and damage moved from taboo to fund in two years, and almost nothing has been paid. The argument is now about who qualifies, who contributes, and whether it displaces adaptation finance.
Debt service now exceeds health spending in dozens of countries. Whether this is a liquidity problem that restructuring can solve, or a solvency problem that cannot be, splits the development institutions from the creditors.
The appellate body has been dead for years and the largest traders increasingly act outside the rules. Institutions divide between reform, replacement, and accepting a managed-trade world.
Every credible net-zero pathway includes capture, and almost every project has underperformed. Institutions split between treating it as indispensable and treating it as a subsidy for continued extraction.
French and British arsenals exist; a European one does not. Whether extended deterrence can be Europeanised, and what it would mean for non-proliferation, divides institutions that otherwise agree about the threat.
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