It’s easy and popular to deride the European Union for everything from excessive bureaucracy to diplomatic dithering. And to be fair, the EU doesn’t always help its own case. Its decision-making can be slow, its communications opaque, and its grand strategies prone to stall thanks to political infighting. But while criticism is both necessary and healthy, it also tends to overshadow the fact that the EU does work on important issues, and even gets some of them right.
In the midst of a turbulent geopolitical and technological era, Brussels has in fact been moving decisively on multiple fronts, ranging from security, support for Ukraine to AI regulation, and consumer policy. These advances might not grab headlines, but they deserve recognition.
Growing teeth on defence and Ukraine
When it comes to defence, it’s no secret that Europe’s underinvestment in that sector has been a sore point for decades, leading to periodic disquiet from transatlantic partners. But Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has triggered something of a paradigm shift. On 27 May 2025, the EU formally adopted the Security Action for Europe (SAFE), a major defence financing initiative that is now operational.
SAFE unlocks up to €150 billion in long-term loans to EU Member States for joint procurement and strategic defence investments. It marks a core pillar of the EU’s broader ReArm Europe strategy, aimed at bolstering the continent’s defence industrial base, accelerating military readiness, and fostering interoperability across Member States by 2030. Of course, it’s too early to say whether SAFE will be crowned a success, but at the very least Europe now has a dedicated defence fund to kick rearmament and preparedness into gear.
While SAFE itself is not yet a sign that that Brussels has grown teeth, it is an admission on Brussels’s part that the EU27 need to start to bite where it matters. While implementation and uptake will be the true test, the direction of travel is finally aligned with Europe’s security needs.
Closely related is the fact that the EU has taken a surprisingly coherent and reliable lead on supporting Ukraine. For much of the war, the United States played the lead role in military support. But a shift occurred in the spring of 2025, when Washington politically gridlocked under Trump, causing fresh funds to dry up. This is when Europe stepped into the breach.
According to the Ukraine Support Tracker from the Kiel Institute, European countries surpassed the U.S. in total military aid for the first time since mid-2022, with €72 billion committed compared to €65 billion from the U.S. This wasn’t just a symbolic milestone but a calculated signal to both allies and adversaries that Europe can, when it chooses to, act with unity and resolve.
That said, intra-European differences persist. Nordic countries and the UK have significantly increased their contributions, while others have opted for a more cautious approach. Still, the broader trend is unmistakable: Europe is no longer a passive actor in its own security environment.
Nutri-Score, or: when Brussels realised it had things wrong
Beyond the war in Ukraine, though, Brussels has also displayed astute decision-making, especially in the realm of consumer policy. This policy area rarely makes for juicy headlines, but it’s another area where the EU deserves credit for course correction. In April 2025, the European Commission quietly shelved the issue of adopting Nutri-Score as a mandatory front-of-pack label across the bloc. First introduced as a way to help consumers make healthier food choices, Nutri-Score quickly drew criticism for oversimplifying nutrition, penalising traditional foods, and creating confusion rather than clarity.
Even major retailers and food manufacturers began pulling back, with Danone being one of the most prominent to abandon the label. The EU’s decision to let it quietly die shows a rare willingness to admit when a regulatory experiment has failed. In a system often accused of dogmatic rigidity, this kind of pragmatic retreat is a sign of institutional maturity in the face of other, much more pressing priorities.
Pioneering AI regulation
When it comes to Artificial Intelligence transforming everything from policing to healthcare to warfare, the risks are becoming clearer by the day. The EU’s response is the Artificial Intelligence Act, a landmark regulation aimed at ensuring AI systems developed or deployed in Europe are safe, transparent, and accountable.
By introducing a tiered risk-based framework, the Act bans certain applications (such as social scoring or indiscriminate biometric surveillance) while strictly regulating high-risk uses. Crucially, it mandates robust safeguards, including risk assessments, red-teaming exercises, whistleblower protections, and security testing mechanisms.
While critics argue that the Act may be overly cautious or stifle innovation, others, including AI experts like Martin Davies and Ilona Cohen, have praised its focus on safety and accountability. It may not be perfect, but it’s a serious attempt to regulate one of the most consequential technologies of our time. Major AI powers like the US have recently taken a radical step towards complete deregulation, at a time when “better safe than sorry” about a technology as epoch altering as AI should be the prevailing attitude.
Of course, none of this means the EU is above criticism. From migration policy to agricultural reform to enlargement fatigue, the bloc still faces profound structural and political challenges. But it is too often judged only by its worst instincts, cases in point being its bureaucracy, its hesitations, its turf wars, while the areas where it shows competence or even leadership are met with silence.
The SAFE defence initiative, the quiet pivot on Nutri-Score, the assumption of leadership in Ukraine aid, and the attempt to govern AI are not minor achievements. They are tangible signs that the EU is capable of adapting to a rapidly changing world.
In a media environment dominated by crises and dysfunction, it’s easy to overlook progress. But we shouldn’t. Europe may still be a work in progress, and in several key areas, it’s working better than it gets credit for.
