The eu doesnt plan to go to war, so the strategy revolves around that. They just need to be thorny enough to make attacks painful and then sit behind their nuclear Shield and allies
As an EUropean I'll say that's where the big problem lies with the EU's fairytale idealist pacifist strategy: that its limp-dick approach being the key to endless peace and prosperity, it only (barely) works inside Europe with pacifist liberal equal-minded nations sharing a common identity and values, but doesn't actually work in real life outside the EU in a world where you're surrounded by hyper-nationalistic predatory thugs with imperialistic tendencies who want to see you take you down so that their empire can dominate you, and it ends up affecting us anyway leading to EU being forced to make concessions to these extortionist thugs (Trump, Putin, Erdogan, Aliyev, Modi, Xi etc) who know the EU will always sacrifice the financial welfare of its own citizens in order to pay up racketeering fees to avoid any and all direct confrontations, leading to a slow but constant decline in its global influence and economic prosperity.
That's why guerilla soldiers in conflict areas around the world typically kidnap EU tourists but not American ones, because they know EU nations are so weak they'll just pay them ransom, while they're afraid the US will send some military team or a drone strike and kill them.
The only guaranteed thing in real life, is that (someone else's) war always finds you anyway, whether you want to or not (see Trump's tariffs and his conflict with Iran how much that affected EU economy and consumers). So it might as well find you well prepared for it, which the EU sadly never is, because it holds on to an outdated mindset from the peaceful period of the post-USSR collapse, that was only a once in a lifetime exception in human history, in a world slowly returning to default factory settings, which is "might makes right".
So "better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardner in a war."
>They just need to be thorny enough to make attacks painful
How did that work against Trump's tarif war? The truth is that you're right, but the EU isn't thorny enough, and that's the problem.
>and then sit behind their nuclear Shield and allies
And what happens when your allies don't feel like being your allies anymore and instead turn into economic adversaries working to undermine your economic prosperity to further their own in a zero sum game? How does your nuclear shield help then? Is the EU gonna nuke the US over an economic trade dispute? Who do you think has more nukes and better shields?
That also encourages everyone else to go kidnap your citizens knowing you're a free walking ransome bag waiting to be seized, thereby making the problem worse and increasing the chances that you'd be in such a position.