Swiss Neutrality in a Bind: Protector Powers, Atlantic Alignment, and the Paradox of Self-Created Security

** **Neutrality Trapped: The Security Switzerland Built for Itself** Historical-political synthesis of the essay "Swiss Neutrality Trapped: Protecting Powers, Atlantic Alignment and the Paradox of Self-Made Security" (Niccolò Salvioni, 8 February 2026) On 27 January 2026, Federal Councillor Martin Pfister asked Swiss citizens for a permanent 0.8-point increase in VAT — 31 billion francs over ten years — because the Confederation "would no longer be able to defend itself alone." Read against the grain, the announcement reveals a historical paradox of the first order: much of the threat citizens are now being asked to pay for stems from political choices made by the Federal Council itself starting in 2022, when Bern decided to join the European Union's sanctions against Russia, effectively abandoning — though never formally declaring so — two centuries of armed neutrality. Moscow reacted by immediately placing Switzerland on its list of "hostile countries." The bill for that political shift, never put to a referendum, is now being presented to taxpayers as a consumption tax. **From Vienna 1815 to today: a neutrality constantly reinterpreted** Swiss neutrality was born as an institution of international law at the Congress of Vienna in May 1815 and was ratified by the Treaty of Paris of 20 November of that same year, when Russia, England, Prussia, Austria and France recognized the Confederation's "perpetual" neutrality, declaring that its inviolability was "in the interest of the whole of Europe." Since then, doctrine has distinguished five defining traits: voluntary, permanent, armed, internationally recognized, and active (oriented toward good offices and humanitarian aid). In practice, however, Swiss neutrality has never been a rigid bloc, but a principle constantly renegotiated with history: - **First World War (1914-1918):** integral neutrality, defended through mobilizations of up to 450,000 men, yet crossed by strong internal linguistic tensions between opposing sympathies for the Central Powers and the Entente. - **Second World War (1939-1945):** the peak of military credibility — the "Alpine Redoubt" strategy made invasion too costly for the Wehrmacht — but also the lowest point on moral and economic grounds, with Swiss arms manufacturers (Bührle chief among them) supplying the Reich and the National Bank purchasing German gold of uncertain origin, while Jewish refugees were turned back at the border. - **Cold War (1945-1989):** Federal Councillor Max Petitpierre's formula, "neutrality and solidarity" (1953), describes a Switzerland formally equidistant yet culturally and economically anchored to the West. - **From 1990 to today:** the Confederation accepts UN sanctions (Gulf War, 1991), joins NATO's Partnership for Peace (1996), and sends unarmed contingents to Kosovo (1999). But the turning point of 28 February 2022 — joining EU sanctions against Russia — is of a different nature: for the first time since 1815, Switzerland took sides in a conflict between great powers without a universal UN mandate, and did so by autonomous choice, not out of membership obligation as was the case for Ireland or Austria, which are bound by the EU's common foreign policy. **The silent collapse of the protecting powers** Less well known to the general public, but central to the essay, is the trajectory of the protecting-power institution: the neutral state that, on a belligerent's mandate, represents its interests before another state with which diplomatic relations have been severed — a function codified by the 1949 Geneva Conventions, of which Switzerland is the depositary. During the Second World War, Bern administered 219 such mandates, the absolute peak of its diplomatic influence. Today only eight remain. The best known — representing American interests in Iran since 1980, in the aftermath of the hostage crisis — is also the most emblematic of the current paradox: Switzerland represents Washington in Tehran while simultaneously applying sanctions against Iran under Western pressure, a structural conflict of interest that Tehran cannot help but perceive as taking sides rather than as equidistance. The same mechanism has reproduced itself, on a larger scale, with Switzerland's adoption of anti-Russian sanctions: a reciprocal protecting-power mandate between Bern and Moscow, on the model of the one activated after the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict, is today politically unthinkable. Sweden and Finland, which during the Second World War administered 114 and several mandates of their own respectively, closed the circle by formally joining NATO in 2023-2024, acknowledging the abandonment of neutrality. Switzerland, by contrast, remains in a hybrid position: too aligned to be believed impartial, too formally neutral to enjoy the guarantees of collective defense. **An army that can't spend: the 19-billion-franc bill** The paradox of "self-made security" also has a distinctly managerial face. A parliamentary commission certified, at the end of 2024, that seven military and IT projects of the Department of Defense — worth a combined 19 billion francs — present "serious problems and major risks": cost overruns on the F-35A fighter jets (up to 1.8 billion francs), the Israeli ADS-15 drones running seven years behind schedule, the ground-to-air defense system suspended since 2016 with no replacement, the FIS Heer IT system that collapsed after nearly a billion francs invested, and mobile military telecommunications delayed by years. No executive has been removed, no political responsibility taken. The international comparison, the essay explains, shows that the only way to reconcile armed neutrality with industrial credibility is the Swedish model — Saab and the Gripen fighter — which, however, costs nearly five times what Switzerland currently spends as a share of GDP (0.72% versus the 3.5% Sweden is moving toward). Over 80% of Switzerland's recent military procurement now comes from a single country, the United States, or its close allies such as Israel: the exact opposite of the industrial autonomy that the June 2025 Armaments Policy Strategy itself claims to pursue. **Who pays the bill: the regressivity of VAT** The VAT increase proposed to finance rearmament — from 8.1% to 8.9%, aimed at bringing military spending back to 1% of GDP by 2032, against a current 0.72% and a 1960-2024 historical average of 1.43% — is, by its very nature, a fiscally regressive choice: it disproportionately hits those who spend nearly all of their income on consumption (low-income families, pensioners on fixed incomes) compared with those able to save or invest a substantial share of their earnings. According to the estimates cited in the essay, a family with an annual income of 30,000 francs would face an added burden equal to 0.72% of its income, against 0.60% for a family with median income. The Federal Council could have chosen progressive instruments instead — a higher marginal rate on federal direct tax above 250,000 francs, or an extraordinary levy on the profits of multinationals benefiting from the November 2025 deal with the Trump administration (200 billion dollars in investment committed to the United States) — but did not: none of these alternatives has ever been publicly discussed. **Horizon Europe and Bilaterals III: neutrality mortgaged** An entire chapter of the essay is devoted to a little-discussed contradiction: starting in July 2025, the European Commission opened the Horizon Europe research program (2028-2034, budget nearly doubled to €175 billion) — for the first time in over forty years — to dual-use projects, meaning those with both civilian and military applications: drones, artificial intelligence for weapons systems, quantum technologies, satellite surveillance. Through the Bilaterals III package and the EU Programmes Agreement (EUPA), in force since 1 January 2025, Switzerland participates as an "associated country," contributing hundreds of millions of francs a year with no safeguard clause, no opt-out right, and no independent audit over how the funded technologies are ultimately used. Article 4 of the EUPA requires the dynamic adoption of all future EU program rules: the only way out would be to denounce the entire agreement. On top of this comes the infrastructural integration foreseen by Bilaterals III in energy (ENTSO-E) and transport, which in the event of a conflict between the EU and a third state would force the Confederation into discriminatory choices toward one of the belligerents — an automatic violation of the equal-treatment principle enshrined in the 1907 Hague Conventions, and with it, effectively, the end of the very possibility of remaining neutral in the legal sense. **From equidistance to economic subordination** The picture is completed by the November 2025 trade deal with the Trump administration — 200 billion dollars in Swiss private investment committed to the United States by 2028 — and by a symptomatic episode of the current political climate: in January 2026 the municipality of Muralto revoked authorization for a screening of the documentary "Maidan: The Road to War," organized by the Ticino chapter of the Friends of the Constitution, a case of preventive censorship that the essay places within the same trajectory of rhetorical and political alignment with the Atlantic bloc. **Open questions for citizens** The essay closes with a constitutional reading: Article 185 of the Federal Constitution charges the Federal Council with "safeguarding neutrality," yet the decision to join sanctions against Russia was never ratified by Parliament on an ordinary legal basis, and Bilaterals III is headed only for an optional referendum, not the mandatory one required under Article 140 for treaties involving supranational integration. A signature drive is currently underway, the author notes, for an initiative that would enshrine in the Constitution a mandatory double-majority referendum requirement for this type of agreement. In its final chapter — an afterword devoted to twenty-first-century threat scenarios — the essay judges a conventional invasion of Swiss territory to be extremely unlikely, while rating the probability of hybrid threats — cyberattacks, disinformation, economic pressure — as high, threats against which F-35 jets and armored systems are largely useless. Its conclusion is that, among the four available paths — a full return to armed neutrality on the 1960-1990 model, explicit Atlantic integration through NATO membership, a "Irish-style" light neutrality, or a reinforced light neutrality that selectively retains elements of the classic model (mandatory military service, strategic reserves, cyber-defense) — the latter offers the best balance between cost, effectiveness against real threats, and compatibility with public values, provided, however, that Switzerland forgoes precisely those Bilaterals III commitments which, by integrating it into Europe's energy, digital and research structures, would in any case leave that same autonomy only partial. What remains, as the author's closing note, is a question no official document has yet put directly to citizens: what kind of Switzerland do we want for the twenty-first century — neutral and coherent, allied and declared, or still trapped in a hybrid that has so far accumulated the costs of every option without the benefits of any? Niccolò Salvioni, Locarno Neutrality Trapped: The Security Switzerland Built for Itself -political synthesis of the essay "Swiss Neutrality Trapped: Protecting Powers, Atlantic Alignment and the Paradox of Self-Made Security" (Niccolò Salvioni, 8 February 2026) On 27 January 2026, Federal Councillor Martin Pfister asked Swiss citizens for a permanent 0.8-point increase in VAT — 31 billion francs over ten years — because the Confederation "would no longer be able to defend itself alone." Read against the grain, the announcement reveals a historical paradox of the first order: much of the threat citizens are now being asked to pay for stems from political choices made by the Federal Council itself starting in 2022, when Bern decided to join the European Union's sanctions against Russia, effectively abandoning — though never formally declaring so — two centuries of armed neutrality. Moscow reacted by immediately placing Switzerland on its list of "hostile countries." The bill for that political shift, never put to a referendum, is now being presented to taxpayers as a consumption tax. From Vienna 1815 to today: a neutrality constantly reinterpreted Swiss neutrality was born as an institution of international law at the Congress of Vienna in May 1815 and was ratified by the Treaty of Paris of 20 November of that same year, when Russia, England, Prussia, Austria and France recognized the Confederation's "perpetual" neutrality, declaring that its inviolability was "in the interest of the whole of Europe." Since then, doctrine has distinguished five defining traits: voluntary, permanent, armed, internationally recognized, and active (oriented toward good offices and humanitarian aid). In practice, however, Swiss neutrality has never been a rigid bloc, but a principle constantly renegotiated with history: - First World War (1914-1918): integral neutrality, defended through mobilizations of up to 450,000 men, yet crossed by strong internal linguistic tensions between opposing sympathies for the Central Powers and the Entente. - Second World War (1939-1945): the peak of military credibility — the "Alpine Redoubt" strategy made invasion too costly for the Wehrmacht — but also the lowest point on moral and economic grounds, with Swiss arms manufacturers (Bührle chief among them) supplying the Reich and the National Bank purchasing German gold of uncertain origin, while Jewish refugees were turned back at the border. - Cold War (1945-1989): Federal Councillor Max Petitpierre's formula, "neutrality and solidarity" (1953), describes a Switzerland formally equidistant yet culturally and economically anchored to the West. - From 1990 to today: the Confederation accepts UN sanctions (Gulf War, 1991), joins NATO's Partnership for Peace (1996), and sends unarmed contingents to Kosovo (1999). But the turning point of 28 February 2022 — joining EU sanctions against Russia — is of a different nature: for the first time since 1815, Switzerland took sides in a conflict between great powers without a universal UN mandate, and did so by autonomous choice, not out of membership obligation as was the case for Ireland or Austria, which are bound by the EU's common foreign policy. The silent collapse of the protecting powers Less well known to the general public, but central to the essay, is the trajectory of the protecting-power institution: the neutral state that, on a belligerent's mandate, represents its interests before another state with which diplomatic relations have been severed — a function codified by the 1949 Geneva Conventions, of which Switzerland is the depositary. During the Second World War, Bern administered 219 such mandates, the absolute peak of its diplomatic influence. Today only eight remain. The best known — representing American interests in Iran since 1980, in the aftermath of the hostage crisis — is also the most emblematic of the current paradox: Switzerland represents Washington in Tehran while simultaneously applying sanctions against Iran under Western pressure, a structural conflict of interest that Tehran cannot help but perceive as taking sides rather than as equidistance. The same mechanism has reproduced itself, on a larger scale, with Switzerland's adoption of anti-Russian sanctions: a reciprocal protecting-power mandate between Bern and Moscow, on the model of the one activated after the 2008 Russo-Georgian conflict, is today politically unthinkable. Sweden and Finland, which during the Second World War administered 114 and several mandates of their own respectively, closed the circle by formally joining NATO in 2023-2024, acknowledging the abandonment of neutrality. Switzerland, by contrast, remains in a hybrid position: too aligned to be believed impartial, too formally neutral to enjoy the guarantees of collective defense. An army that can't spend: the 19-billion-franc bill The paradox of "self-made security" also has a distinctly managerial face. A parliamentary commission certified, at the end of 2024, that seven military and IT projects of the Department of Defense — worth a combined 19 billion francs — present "serious problems and major risks": cost overruns on the F-35A fighter jets (up to 1.8 billion francs), the Israeli ADS-15 drones running seven years behind schedule, the ground-to-air defense system suspended since 2016 with no replacement, the FIS Heer IT system that collapsed after nearly a billion francs invested, and mobile military telecommunications delayed by years. No executive has been removed, no political responsibility taken. The international comparison, the essay explains, shows that the only way to reconcile armed neutrality with industrial credibility is the Swedish model — Saab and the Gripen fighter — which, however, costs nearly five times what Switzerland currently spends as a share of GDP (0.72% versus the 3.5% Sweden is moving toward). Over 80% of Switzerland's recent military procurement now comes from a single country, the United States, or its close allies such as Israel: the exact opposite of the industrial autonomy that the June 2025 Armaments Policy Strategy itself claims to pursue. Who pays the bill: the regressivity of VAT The VAT increase proposed to finance rearmament — from 8.1% to 8.9%, aimed at bringing military spending back to 1% of GDP by 2032, against a current 0.72% and a 1960-2024 historical average of 1.43% — is, by its very nature, a fiscally regressive choice: it disproportionately hits those who spend nearly all of their income on consumption (low-income families, pensioners on fixed incomes) compared with those able to save or invest a substantial share of their earnings. According to the estimates cited in the essay, a family with an annual income of 30,000 francs would face an added burden equal to 0.72% of its income, against 0.60% for a family with median income. The Federal Council could have chosen progressive instruments instead — a higher marginal rate on federal direct tax above 250,000 francs, or an extraordinary levy on the profits of multinationals benefiting from the November 2025 deal with the Trump administration (200 billion dollars in investment committed to the United States) — but did not: none of these alternatives has ever been publicly discussed. Horizon Europe and Bilaterals III: neutrality mortgaged An entire chapter of the essay is devoted to a little-discussed contradiction: starting in July 2025, the European Commission opened the Horizon Europe research program (2028-2034, budget nearly doubled to €175 billion) — for the first time in over forty years — to dual-use projects, meaning those with both civilian and military applications: drones, artificial intelligence for weapons systems, quantum technologies, satellite surveillance. Through the Bilaterals III package and the EU Programmes Agreement (EUPA), in force since 1 January 2025, Switzerland participates as an "associated country," contributing hundreds of millions of francs a year with no safeguard clause, no opt-out right, and no independent audit over how the funded technologies are ultimately used. Article 4 of the EUPA requires the dynamic adoption of all future EU program rules: the only way out would be to denounce the entire agreement. On top of this comes the infrastructural integration foreseen by Bilaterals III in energy (ENTSO-E) and transport, which in the event of a conflict between the EU and a third state would force the Confederation into discriminatory choices toward one of the belligerents — an automatic violation of the equal-treatment principle enshrined in the 1907 Hague Conventions, and with it, effectively, the end of the very possibility of remaining neutral in the legal sense. From equidistance to economic subordination The picture is completed by the November 2025 trade deal with the Trump administration — 200 billion dollars in Swiss private investment committed to the United States by 2028 — and by a symptomatic episode of the current political climate: in January 2026 the municipality of Muralto revoked authorization for a screening of the documentary "Maidan: The Road to War," organized by the Ticino chapter of the Friends of the Constitution, a case of preventive censorship that the essay places within the same trajectory of rhetorical and political alignment with the Atlantic bloc. Open questions for citizens The essay closes with a constitutional reading: Article 185 of the Federal Constitution charges the Federal Council with "safeguarding neutrality," yet the decision to join sanctions against Russia was never ratified by Parliament on an ordinary legal basis, and Bilaterals III is headed only for an optional referendum, not the mandatory one required under Article 140 for treaties involving supranational integration. A signature drive is currently underway, the author notes, for an initiative that would enshrine in the Constitution a mandatory double-majority referendum requirement for this type of agreement. In its final chapter — an afterword devoted to twenty-first-century threat scenarios — the essay judges a conventional invasion of Swiss territory to be extremely unlikely, while rating the probability of hybrid threats — cyberattacks, disinformation, economic pressure — as high, threats against which F-35 jets and armored systems are largely useless. Its conclusion is that, among the four available paths — a full return to armed neutrality on the 1960-1990 model, explicit Atlantic integration through NATO membership, a "Irish-style" light neutrality, or a reinforced light neutrality that selectively retains elements of the classic model (mandatory military service, strategic reserves, cyber-defense) — the latter offers the best balance between cost, effectiveness against real threats, and compatibility with public values, provided, however, that Switzerland forgoes precisely those Bilaterals III commitments which, by integrating it into Europe's energy, digital and research structures, would in any case leave that same autonomy only partial. What remains, as the author's closing note, is a question no official document has yet put directly to citizens: what kind of Switzerland do we want for the twenty-first century — neutral and coherent, allied and declared, or still trapped in a hybrid that has so far accumulated the costs of every option without the benefits of any? Niccolò Salvioni, Locarno

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