On April 21 of this year, Japan removed eighty years of restrictions on the export of lethal weapons. Three weeks earlier, South Korea published its defense sales figures for 2025: 15.4 billion dollars, the world’s fourth-largest arms exporter. Europe, in the midst of a historic rearmament drive, is buying. Here the question isn’t whether Asian systems are good, because they are. The important thing is to know what Europe pays, in structural terms, for each contract it signs with Seoul or Tokyo instead of building its own capacity that has been promised for decades.
The South Korean defense industry is not an emergent phenomenon. It is the result of a two-decade strategy that has transformed a country with no export tradition into the fourth-largest global arms market power, ahead of Germany and the United Kingdom. In 2020, South Korea exported $2.0 billion in military equipment. In 2024, it surpassed $20 billion. Korea Eximbank’s projections for 2026 point to $24-27 billion, which would place Seoul as the second-largest non-U.S. arms exporter in the world, surpassing France.
The success of the model (already nicknamed in defense analysis circles as K-Defense) does not lie in the technological superiority of its systems, which is real but not extraordinary, but in the contractual architecture with which it sells them. When Poland signed in 2022 contracts for 980 K2 Black Panther tanks from Hyundai Rotem, 648 K9 Thunder howitzers from Hanwha and 48 FA-50 jets from Korea Aerospace Industries, it acquired both hardware and the capability to manufacture it on its own soil. In the latest batch of K2 tanks awarded, 61 of the 64 units will be produced in Polish plants under Korean license. In other words, the K-Defense does not export products; it exports value chains.
“While the European Commission debates for months the eligibility of a system for the SAFE program, Seoul seals the contract in a ministerial call.”
Financing makes it possible. The Korea Eximbank structures credits with terms and conditions that no European defense fund can replicate with the same agility: preferential rates, long grace periods, and direct linkage to the purchase commitment. While the European Commission debates for months the eligibility of a system for the SAFE program, Seoul closes the contract in a ministerial call. The result is that Romania (which signed in 2026 the installation of a Hanwha Aerospace plant in Dâmbovița with a committed investment of €1.3 billion and an expected economic impact of €14 billion) receives in years what Brussels promises in decades. Poland, Estonia, Norway and Spain (where the K9 is under evaluation for modernizing the Army’s artillery) already form the map of a penetration that a few years ago was merely anecdotal, but is on track to become structural.
The Trap Behind the ‘Hardware’
That the model is effective does not mean it is innocent. Europe is committing with East Asia the same error it once made with the United States: addressing the urgency of capabilities through external purchases, indefinitely postponing the construction of its own industrial base, and calling that postponement “pragmatism.”
“South Korea does not export weapons for pure commercial logic. Every contract signed with a European ally is a calculated political tie.”
The first problem is interoperability. NATO operates on the principle that the systems of its members must be able to communicate, coordinate, and supply one another in a real-conflict scenario. Each country that incorporates a K2, a K9 or a Chunmoo introduces into the allied ecosystem a platform whose combat management software, its maintenance logistics chain, and its precision ammunition are not native to the NATO industrial perimeter. With a Poland equipped with Korean artillery, a Romania with Hanwha vehicles and an Estonia with Chunmoo rocket launchers, the Alliance’s logistical fragmentation begins to erode in a quiet but cumulative way.
The second problem is geopolitical. South Korea does not export weapons for pure commercial logic. Each contract signed with a European ally is a calculated political link: the more NATO countries depend on Korean maintenance, modernization, and ammunition, the greater the implicit pressure on Europe to maintain a favorable position in the Indo-Pacific in any tension scenario in the Taiwan Strait. Armament dependence as an instrument of strategic alignment. Europe, which has been debating its strategic autonomy from Washington for months, is building a new dependency relative to Seoul for certain capabilities without having had that conversation in any relevant forum.
“Is a K9 howitzer manufactured in Romania with Korean technology, by a Korean company with Korean capital, an ‘European’ product for the purposes of European rearmament funds?”
The third problem is the one that most directly affects Spain. The EU’s SAFE program mobilizes up to €150 billion in preferential credits for countries that purchase solutions manufactured in Europe. Hanwha has already obtained eligibility for its Romanian plant under SAFE criteria. This raises the most relevant legal-strategic question in European defense industrial policy at this moment: is a K9 howitzer manufactured in Romania with Korean technology, by a Korean company with Korean capital, an ‘European’ product for the purposes of European rearmament funds? If the answer is yes, Seoul will have achieved something extraordinary: access to preferential European rearmament financing to sell Korean weapons.
Buying Korean, Ceding Europe
It is paradoxical that Europe is using urgent rearmament (justified, necessary, unavoidable) as an excuse not to take the hardest political decision: how much it is willing to pay to build its own defense industrial capacity. Europe has laid the money on the table (€150 billion in SAFE, €82 billion German, cascading national rearmaments), but mobilizing capital is not the same as having factories, engineers, and operational supply chains. Consequently, money arrives before capacity, and in that interval, South Korea sells.
In this context, Japan appears as another piece of the machinery. The April 21 reform frees Tokyo to sell fighters, missiles and destroyers to its seventeen allied countries. But more importantly, it makes Japan a direct competitor to Europe’s major exporters in high-tech segments where France, Germany and the United Kingdom have no Asian rivals. The GCAP program (the sixth-generation fighter co-developed by Japan with Italy and the United Kingdom) is in itself the first major vector of defense technological integration between Asia and Europe, though none of the European analyses have framed it as such. When GCAP enters service, Japan will be an integrated producer in the continent’s industrial ecosystem.
“Navantia, Indra and Santa Bárbara Sistemas compete directly with Korean systems in several of the segments that SAFE is financing”
In this landscape, Spain holds a particular position that it is not leveraging. Navantia, Indra, and Santa Bárbara Sistemas compete directly with Korean systems in several of the segments the SAFE is financing. The decision about the K9 for the Army is not just a matter of artillery; it is a decision about what kind of industrial relationship Spain wants with the Asian defense market and what industrial base it wants to preserve for when European funds require local manufacturing.
The global arms market is undergoing its greatest transformation since 1991. East Asia (with two players operating under different logics but convergent effects) is reshaping who makes, who sells, and, above all, who depends on whom. In this landscape, Europe finds itself caught between the urgency of rearmament and the pace of its industrial integration, and it is opting for the short-term, efficient solution without weighing the long-term strategic cost. Buying the Korean howitzer is not the problem. Buying it without first deciding which parts of the value chain you want to control and which you are willing to concede is the real problem.
