The triggers may differ — schools in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, the cost of living in Italy, corruption and a mixture of the above in Serbia — but the root is the same. These are the protests of a generation that believes it has been robbed of its future. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to argue with. The social contract its parents knew — work hard and you will, at the very least, secure a home, be able to support a family and be better off than those that came before you — has collapsed. For many young Europeans without inherited wealth, adulthood means drifting from one precarious job to the next, earning barely enough to cover the cost of rent and groceries, let alone start a family. That is, if they find work at all. Meanwhile, they have watched the institutions that were supposed to give them a start in life and cushion its blows — schools, universities, health and youth services — wither under austerity and privatization. 

There is no doubt that young people have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the neoliberal policies pursued over the past decades. That neoliberalism has driven inequality to new heights is widely acknowledged; what is less often noticed is that this inequality is increasingly drawn along generational lines. The geopolitical analyst Arnaud Bertrand recently shared some pretty extraordinary statistics on X regarding France: the over-60s — roughly a quarter of the population — hold around 60% of the nation’s wealth. They also receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government, in the form of pensions that, under the current system, are paid for by younger generations. This continuous bottom-up generational transfer of wealth is even more extraordinary when one considers that the average French retiree now has an income higher than the average worker.

Yet though the protesters often explicitly frame themselves in generational terms — most obviously Germany’s “Gen Z regelt” (which roughly translates as “Gen Z’s got this”) — their demands aren’t phrased as claims against the old. This is surely the right approach. Blaming the boomers would be a mistake. They simply had the good fortune to grow up in an era of full employment, affordable housing and decent pensions, and there is nothing scandalous about aging societies spending more on the old. Moreover, much of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of boomers; not all older people live a luxurious life, of course. Ultimately, the problem is not that pensions are too high; it is that the young are being denied what their parents took for granted. The generational divide is simply how a decades-long class war from above is experienced by those who came of age after workers had already lost it, and who inherited a political-economic regime built to transfer wealth upwards. In Europe, that regime has been written into the institutional architecture itself — the euro, the Maastricht treaty, the fiscal rules — which systematically favors asset holders over wage earners, and established workers over new entrants. 

The mechanisms are well understood. A decade of quantitative easing inflated the property and financial assets held by the old while wages stagnated, locking the young out of home ownership. Labor market reforms — from Italy’s Treu package and Jobs Act to Germany’s Hartz laws and France’s El Khomri law — preserved the security of those already inside while consigning newcomers to a revolving door of temporary and increasingly precarious contracts in the name of “flexibility”. After 2010, austerity fell disproportionately on education, youth services and public investment. Existing pensions were largely shielded, while future ones were quietly cut. As a result, across Europe, government spending on older people has risen, while public investment has been gutted. Then came the pandemic, which cost Gen Z years of schooling, work and social life, followed by a surge in inflation, made worse by an energy shock that Europe’s leaders largely inflicted on themselves. 

As if that weren’t enough, the young are now being told to accept further cuts and deteriorating living conditions to make room for rearmament and an open-ended war — for which, it seems, there is always money. Just a few weeks ago, as French police were firing tear gas at teenagers, EU leaders tasked the Commission with finding another €70 billion for Ukraine in 2027, on top of the €45 billion already earmarked. The fiscal rules that were never relaxed for schools or hospitals are being bent for defense, through national escape clauses and joint borrowing for weapons procurement. And the young have noticed. They are told there is no money for their classrooms, while new billions are found for a war with no end in sight — a war that, as conscription returns to the European agenda, they may even be asked to fight. In many countries, young people are starting to explicitly link the cost-of-living crisis with the rearmament drive. 

The real question, then, is not why the young are revolting, but why it took them so long. The economic roots of these protests are undeniable. But are they the whole story? Most conservative commentators have focused instead on the presence of second-generation youths of Arab and African background, and on their leading role in the violence and looting, above all in France but also in Italy. For much of the Right, the riots simply confirm what it has been saying for years: that mass immigration has been an unmitigated disaster, filling European cities with a largely Muslim underclass that has no interest in integrating, and that, in the crudest version of this narrative, is cast as bent on destroying the very fabric of Western civilization, in some cases with the help of the “far-Left”. The demands of the overwhelmingly peaceful protests, meanwhile, go largely unheard. 

There is an irony here. The populist Right never tires of complaining that a “globalist establishment” has impoverished and deindustrialized Europe. Yet when young people take to the streets, sometimes violently, against that very establishment and the consequences of its policies, it cannot bring itself to believe that they might have genuine grievances. Instead, it instinctively assumes that someone must be pulling the strings: Islamists, Antifa, Mélenchon. 

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Bon courage to the French protesters

By Yanis Varoufakis

It is, of course, right to distinguish between the peaceful protests demanding economic reform and the rioting and looting that accompanied them. But are they really two entirely separate stories? There is no question that much of the looting, in France as in Italy, had a strong second-generation component drawn from the banlieues and the marginalized peripheries of Italian cities, with little discernible ideology behind it. Nor is there any point denying the costs of mass immigration, from public safety to the pressure on public services. Many of those involved in the violence were clearly acting out of opportunism. And the growth of separate communities of different social and religious backgrounds, often living in conditions of extreme exclusion, is clearly a social time bomb, one that has already done serious damage to social cohesion — and those on the Left who deny this reality are as blinkered as those on the Right who fixate on it at the exclusion of everything else. 

One might go further and argue that mass immigration has itself been part of the neoliberal social engineering of recent decades, not least by creating a reservoir of cheap labor. One might also argue that rioters running amok at peaceful demonstrations damage the protesters’ own cause, drowning out their demands and handing the security forces a pretext for a crackdown. There have even been claims that the French police deliberately allowed the destruction to happen in order to justify mass repression. 

These are all valid arguments. But they raise an obvious question: why do the protesters raging against the status quo not turn their anger on these immigrants and instead often march alongside them? Are they simply blinded by naïve Left-wing ideology? Or is something deeper at work? It is more likely that they experience their struggle primarily through a generational lens, one that cuts across ethnic, and to a certain degree class, lines. That seems far more convincing than the “islamo-gauchiste” theory, which holds that this cross-ethnic alliance is not spontaneous solidarity at all, but something engineered by Left-wing parties such as Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise. That may hold to some degree in France, but it doesn’t hold in Italy, where there is no Italian LFI, no comparable alliance between the Left and Muslim voters, and yet the same mixed crowds appeared in the streets, as elsewhere.

Yet reducing the violence solely to its second-generation component is also misleading, and far too comforting. Young people of European background have taken part in it too. The crowds that recently rioted in Milan included kids with Italian-born parents alongside those from immigrant families. So we have to ask to what extent this violence is also a reaction to a system that offers no avenue for political change. This is not to justify it. Violence, in and of itself, leads nowhere emancipatory. But we cannot escape an uncomfortable fact: an increasingly authoritarian system that is actively committed to blocking any democratic systemic change, with no social intermediaries between power and the masses, and no forces capable of giving the revolt a direction and a political content, of placing it under the guiding idea of social emancipation, is bound to breed violence. And then there is the merciless generational arithmetic: the young are a minority in every European society. They cannot win elections on a generational platform.

But the violence — and especially the wanton looting — also expresses a deeper malaise, one that goes beyond economics. It reflects the nihilistic void into which Western societies have sunk: when individualism, purposelessness, anxiety and despair become the norm, we shouldn’t be surprised if the result is collective depression, or rage. At a time of moral decay at all levels of Western societies, particularly among its political and corporate elites, who systematically display little respect for either human life or (other people’s) property, is not a little delusional to expect the youngest and most disadvantaged to hold themselves to a higher moral standard than their rulers?

Writing about the riots in England in 2011, the German social psychologist Götz Eisenberg described the young as the “surplus generation” — no longer needed by society, its labor expendable, deprived of the chance to build an independent life through its own efforts, yet constantly dazzled by the promise of self-realization through consumption, a state that is increasingly beyond its reach. Fifteen years on, his diagnosis is more relevant than ever — and indeed Britain remains a social powder keg that could once again explode at any moment. Violence is no solution to social problems, but neither does it arise in a vacuum. Where political and economic power has become anonymous, anger turns on the nearest symbols, such as a Louis Vuitton boutique. A shop window can be smashed; financial markets and austerity can’t.

That said, we shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming the protestors represent an entire generation. The same generation that fills the streets also votes, in growing numbers, for the anti-immigration Right. In France’s 2024 election, a third of under-25s backed the Rassemblement National; in Germany last year, more than a quarter of young men voted AfD. The anger at the establishment is the same but it is channeled in the opposite political direction. The question is whether European politicians, whether incumbents or its “populist” challengers, have any real answers.

Addressing the protesters’ grievances would require systemic change: greater public investment in education and housing, higher wages, more secure jobs, economic redistribution (focused on the real wealth hoarders, not pensioners in general), and a rational energy policy, which would itself demand a radical shift in geopolitical paradigm. However, it’s hard to see how any of this could be achieved within the current EU-Nato architecture, which no major party seems prepared to challenge. Meanwhile, the idea that the problem of alienated second-generation youth can be solved through even more heavy-handed repression — or perhaps even “remigration” — is little more than a fantasy.

The question, then, is whether the young people of Europe can replicate what happened in Serbia. That is a country that faces much the same demographics — an aging and shrinking population — yet its student movement managed to build a platform that drew support across generations, partly by shunning traditional ideology and unifying under a simple, non-partisan message for change. It’s ironic that today this seems harder to achieve in the “liberal-democratic” West than in a country routinely described as authoritarian.

Since May, Tirana’s central boulevard had been the scene of the peaceful, and joyful “Flamingo Revolution” protests, named after the animals supposedly threatened by the Kushner-led coastal development project in the southern village of Zvërnec. But if the “Flamingo Boulevard” of the summer was a protest movement that styled itself as a revolution, what is happening now is an attempted revolution that styles itself as a student movement. The demonstrators are attempting to overthrow Edi Rama’s Socialist Party government, elected for a fourth consecutive term only last year, with the aim of installing a caretaker technocratic government before new elections. On Saturday, it looked for a dramatic few hours like they might succeed. Thousands of protesters had filled Tirana’s main boulevard, pressing right up to the Prime Minister’s Office, Albania’s seat of government. Masked and black-clad youths kept pushing forward with howls of joy and rage against the water cannon and shield walls of riot police, cheers going up as petrol bombs exploded in flames against the armored trucks, forcing them to retreat. If the underlying causes — an end to political corruption, greater social spending, an entirely new political system — are the same as before, the mood among the protesters has become newly fierce. Gone is the summer’s disaffection with Edi Rama, replaced by a burning, visceral hatred.

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Inside the Albanian revolution

By Aris Roussinos

Whenever the rioters wavered, chants of “Down with the dictator, Down with the communists” rang out, motivating them to push forward once again into the thick clouds of tear gas, hurling back the CS canisters, and aiming fireworks at the police ranks. Hijacking a parked car, the protesters rolled it towards the police lines and set it aflame, forcing the police to retreat. Young women in gym wear and Covid masks, and young men in black tracksuits and ski masks ran as close to the police as they could to hurl their missiles, jeering and cursing at them, the men often thrusting their groins at their opponents to indicate, in a manner it does not take a fluent command of Albanian to understand, what they wished to do to the officers. Dozens of times that Saturday night, I had to escape from the choking tear gas; every time, within seconds, a volunteer ran up to squirt distilled water in my eyes, an indication of the impressive and seemingly organic level of student organization behind the protests. Tea, a 21 year old math student, asked me where I was from as she squirted water into my eyes. England, I spluttered. “Then you don’t know us Albanians, we are crazy as fuck,” she laughed. “He is going, and we are going to make him go, as quickly we can.”

At a pavement cafe near the protests, I met Genc Pollo, a prominent conservative intellectual and politician, and a strong critic of Rama’s government. An urbane figure, it was a surprise to see him with swimming goggles perched on top of his head, an attempt to keep out the tear gas from the protests he now observes nightly. If the Flamingo protests had been listened to by the government, he told me, all this violence could have been avoided. “But the answer from the government was mostly derision, mockery, calling them foreign spies, calling them algorithmic manipulators, and the usual stuff.” Instead of concessions, “immediately, with the police, replying with tear gas and batons, and now rubber bullets, it turned into a violent confrontation. That is “a very logical evolution of the situation. Should the frustration, and the discontent, and the legitimate grievances have been really dealt with, not with decoys, not with propaganda, and on the top of that, derision for the protesters, it could have been channeled into peaceful ways, peaceful solutions, and arrangements.” Was there a solution that ends with Rama still in power? “I don’t think that’s possible,” Pollo told me. “Since it has become tense and also violent, I don’t think it will last as long as the Flamingos. By the nature of it, I mean if it’s either way, it will be decided in a shorter time frame.”

Back on the boulevard, beneath the din of the tear-gas grenades, I asked Jurgen, a  20-year-old law student, why he was here. “Because of the corrupt government and everything that has been happening in the past 13 years,” he told me “The PM will resign, hopefully this weekend, because of the mass protests, he should reflect on that. We gave him 140 days of just asking nicely, he didn’t listen, so now things took a turn. This is the result of not listening to the people of Albania. I cannot name a single thing he’s done that has benefited me as a student or as an Albanian.” Behind him, a group of older women, one in a hijab, were busy tearing up the cobbled pavement and filling a wheeled shopping trolley with rocks to be trundled towards the young men at the front. Indeed, for a Gen-Z protest, there were a surprising number of men with gray hair at the forefront of the clashes, hurling rocks and metal poles at the police lines.

While the violence is led by students and schoolchildren, the polite middle-class protestors of the summer have been joined by older toughs, with indications that ultras from Tirana’s football firms have set aside their rivalries to unseat their embattled Prime Minister. To the chants of “Rama resign” and “Rama to jail, Berisha to jail” from the peaceful summer protests have been added a new one: the slogan of the Balli Kombëtar, the Right-wing Second World War resistance movement: “Albania for Albanians, Death to Traitors.”

For many protesters, however, it is contemporary geopolitics that most concerns them. “Rama will go,” one man in his 30s told me, “but he will only go when other nations, America and Europe force him to go, because he has a bad personality, he is difficult, and also because he is implicated with criminal gangs, and with Israel.” If the Kushner-led Zvërnec project was the spark for the summer Flamingo protests, a broader sense that the Rama government is too close to Israel has led to widespread conspiracy theories that Tel Aviv has sent reinforcements and crowd control equipment to the Albanian police, and that Rama has sold the country out to Israeli interests. Among the many demands for revolution scrawled along the walls of the boulevard was the terse spray-painted message: “Fuck the Jew Rama.” In a country that is fiercely nationalistic even by Balkan standards, multiple shades of political opinion, both Left and Right, have now converged on a joint struggle to overthrow the government. I asked Eldison, a 20-year-old software engineering student, if the Flamingo protests had become a revolution. “It was always a revolution, because we are fighting for our future, our rights, our country,” he said. “Rama won’t resign, but he will kill himself.” Why, I asked. “It’s kind of Jewish stuff,” he shrugged.

The Albanian government did not grant a request for an interview, instead offering to respond to a set of written questions. When I sent a detailed list, it didn’t answer them, instead forwarding me a transcript of Edi Rama’s television address in which he blamed antifa, “neo-Communists”, “neo-Ballists”, the political opposition and Iran for the disturbances. At a café in a shopping mall, I met a prominent Socialist Party insider who granted me an interview on the condition of anonymity. “What is new now is that there was this very sudden explosion in terms of attacking public institutions, destroying public offices,” the insider told me. “But I guess there’s also the element of the police doctrine linked to it, in the sense that there was an effort in the very early days, at least, to sort of let them let steam off.” The explosive rhetoric, meanwhile, which the insider blamed on “bots,” was also apparently new. “What do the bots say? You have sold this country to Israel. You are all thieves, that’s the second element. And we are gonna kill you and burn you. So these are the three overarching themes.”

The rhetoric was becoming increasingly dark, my interviewee told me. “The last time Albanians have called other Albanians traitors, it was in 1943, 1945, 1944. And it’s so out of context now, but again, this is a generation that does not understand the specificity of that word in Albanian history. And for me, it’s very dangerous.” Indeed, “there are three things I fear in terms of keeping me up at night,” the insider told me. The first was rising inflation of essential goods, carried over from Albania’s main trading partners Italy and Greece. The second was that the heightened rhetoric might cause a death, after which things could spiral out of control. The third, they said, was an unwillingness to explore constitutional means of resolving the impasse, in favor of absolute victory. “That’s why I’m a bit bemused by them saying, like, ‘We need a political answer to this crisis’, I mean, if you go to the government and say, ‘Look, before we talk, you should step down’, it’s a diktat. It’s not a political solution, right? It can be a political outcome, but it’s not a political beginning of the sentence.” Will Rama step down? “No, but there are discussions in terms of what’s the method forward.” The interview over, our smalltalk was abruptly ended by their driver coming up to warn them that protestors had reached the area, and that they should leave. This protest, like almost all the protestors’ gatherings now, was quickly dispersed by the police’s liberal deployment of tear gas and water cannon.

At the headquarters of Albania’s conservative opposition Democratic Party, I met Belind Këlliçi, the party’s young and American-educated vice-chairman. In his office, with signed photographs of Donald Trump and JD Vance framed on the wall behind him, a jumble of gas masks and plastic body armor sat on the floor. The night before, police had fired volleys of tear gas into the compound, in what Këlliçi told me was part of a plot to have agents provocateurs burn it down and blame it on rioters. I asked Këlliçi what he meant by his tweet the day earlier, which said that: “This monster who demands blood at any cost deserves the fate of every dictator who has been dragged away by his own people.” “[Rama] is a dictator, and he’s the head of the first narco-state in Europe,” he answered. “I say that the Socialist Party is not my enemy. It’s my political opponent, but for what Edi Rama has done to the Socialist Party, and if you can check the records in the last decade, you have dozens of ministers, mayors, members of parliament, and high-ranking officials that are in jail for either corruption, drug dealing, stealing money, money laundering, and other affairs.”

I asked Këlliçi what will happen next for Rama’s government. “I cannot tell you within this month or within this calendar year, but I’m very positive that within a very short period of time, in the next few weeks or months, it will be forced to leave,” he said. “There is no way that people can go on with this. There is no way that we will go in parliament and pretend it’s business as usual. We will not do it. We will stand by the students. We will stand by the protesters. We will do everything in our capabilities to support and protect them.” In terms of the coming days, Këlliçi claimed, “We have received a tip from his closest team within the Prime Minister’s office that he’s trying to have a fatality in the protest. It doesn’t matter if it’s from the students or from the police forces. He’s trying to use it as a justification to stop immediately the protest and to find a way to come to an agreement with the students and to say that this is enough, you cannot take it anymore, one fatality is enough, and we have to find a political solution.” But, Këlliçi added, “I don’t see the students stopping. I don’t see the civilians, the people of Tirana and other cities stopping.”

Certainly, the street violence, which now comes in waves of lulls and escalations, has not ended, and neither have the mass rallies, which have now been joined by striking university lecturers and teachers. On Friday, I’d joined the protesters outside the Ministry of Education on Durrës Street, which has become the hub for morning protests, before a far larger crowd gathers later in the day along the government boulevard. The police assumed a defensive posture, huddled around a water cannon whose nozzle twitched and dripped in anticipation of the violence to come. A line of schoolgirls linked arms and pushed to the forefront, daring the police to blast them away, which, after male protesters ran from behind them and began to throw stones, they did, first with blasts from the water cannon, and then with volleys of tear gas. I asked one of the girls for an interview. “My parents would not be happy,” she said, lowering her Covid mask. It would be anonymous, I said. “Oh, OK,” she replied, “We are here to bring down the dictator Edi Rama,” smiling happily before running away at the next round of gas.

Women were as prominent at the forefront of the fighting as men, one woman in her 30s wearing pink angel wings running right up to the police to hurl a rock into their faces, another young hijabi in modest clothes smashing a cobblestone against the curb then throwing it at the police, skittering away laughing. Later that evening, as the crowd of protesters outside government buildings on the boulevard morphed into a riot, I watched as a few hundred protesters began ripping up the cobbled pavements and hurling the stones at police. Some climbed onto the parliament building and smashed the windows with steel bicycle racks, trying to batter down its thick wooden doors before being dispersed with volley after volley of tear gas in fighting that went on through the night. In the first days of the riots, the government tried to project an air of normality, sending in overnight teams to clear away the wreckage and paint over the slogans on the walls, no doubt hoping that the protests would fizzle out naturally. Yet at the very least, large crowds smashing the windows and doors of parliament and the Prime Minister’s palace to burn them down is surely a distraction from normal parliamentary procedure. For over a week, Parliament was suspended as the riots overtook the capital’s daily life.

Each side, government and protesters, blames each other for the violence. On Friday and Saturday, it appeared from the scene that the police used force only defensively, after coming under sustained assault, or in an attempt to prevent the storming or destruction of government buildings. But in an attempt to prevent an Albanian Maidan in the capital’s seat of power, the police have evolved new tactics of dispersing attempted concentrations of protesters with water cannon and baton charges, rubber buckshot fired from shotguns, and constant volleys of tear gas, which hangs around the city center like a thick Dickensian fog. Potential rioters are pre-emptively arrested by police snatch squads, sometimes seemingly at random. At night, operators from the elite police special forces unit RENEA surround the Prime Minister’s office, where they make their disinclination to be photographed assertively clear. But if the police’s new tactics have eased the threat to government buildings, the result, so far, has been to push the violence into surrounding streets, as knots of rioters fight evening running battles in the main shopping boulevards and narrow alleyways in between, smashing up banks and CCTV cameras and erecting impromptu barricades of burning bins and street furniture to slow down the police vans chasing them, and throwing firecrackers and pyrotechnics into government buildings along the way in an attempt to burn them down.

The protests, and riots, have swiftly evolved from a shock event into part of the fabric of Tirana’s daily life, a new normality for Albanians to navigate, with all its inconveniences and strange advantages. The kiosk where I was accustomed to buying my preferred local cigarettes has been burned down, like many others in the city center. On the other hand, crossing the road, a hazardous enterprise in ordinary times, has been made easier by the destruction of all the center’s traffic lights, forcing drivers to begrudgingly stop for pedestrians. The television news channels are now devoted to rolling coverage of street battles, filmed by gas-mask wearing cameramen perched atop vans. Pavement diners in restaurants and cafés watch the disorder like football fans, restaurant owners hand out bottles of water to passing rioters to shouts of “bravo”, and confused tourists choke at the tear gas as they leave their hotels, trying to make their way between the clashing lines of demonstrators and police.

Along Mine Peza Street, one of Tirana’s main thoroughfares, almost all the shops are shut, with A4 signs proclaiming “We are with you! Please don’t destroy our business!” taped to the metal shutters. At the landmark Taiwan cafe, in a park beside the main boulevard, I watched burly security guards order away riot policemen attempting to enter to arrest protesters. When the police gave up and trooped away, the park erupted in cheers and clapping. With both sides digging in for the long haul, the battle to come is for the patience and goodwill of Tirana’s wider population. In one busy shopping street, I saw passersby remonstrating with rioters attempting to burn down a bank, gesturing angrily at the occupied apartments above. “I’m disgusted at this,” a café owner told me, “Burn down all the ministries, sure, good, but leave private property and small businesses alone. Rama will never leave. I’m 40 years old, and I know Albania will never change.”

Outside the Ministry of Education, I met the 25-year old MP Marjana Koçeku, elected to parliament for Rama’s Socialist Party only last year, and who resigned when the Flamingo protests began. As we spoke, over the loud explosions of tear gas grenades, our conversation was twice interrupted by older women coming up to kiss her, thanking her for her support. “Being part of this group [the Socialist Party] I understood that just by being part and having my vote on their support, I am contributing to the destruction of my country,” she told me. “I think it’s very important to have a deep reformation of the system of the political elite that we have right now, because they are strongly rooted in a mentality of corruption, in a systematic violence of making politics and [its approach] to the citizens. So if this is a safe and healthy solution for our country, I fully support it.” Indeed, she added, “I believe that this protest will not end soon,” she told me. “I expect it to last for some time, and I definitely believe in good and positive results of this protest, and of this movement. The only and the most necessary reflection into political actions that should be coming now from the government part, is the resigning of the Prime Minister, from his government, and from politics at all, because he had enough time to witness what our nation is really looking for, and enough time to understand that he cannot be the right image of leading Albania toward the European Union, especially with all the scandals that have popped up.” I asked Koçeku if the Flamingo Protests had now become a revolution. “Revolutions are beautiful,” she smiled, “I’m looking forward to seeing one in my country.”

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France has not fallen

By Mary Harrington

In the clashes on Durrës Street, I bumped into the Canadian-Albanian revolutionary activist Bora Mitrovica, who I had interviewed in the summer. You were right, I said to her, that the Flamingo protests would soon turn violent. “I know my people,” she replied, “I’m just surprised it took so long.” But whether the protests will really force Rama to resign seems doubtful. Seemingly wavering last weekend, the state’s use of coercive power has since become stronger and more confident, hampering the ability of the protesters to gather or hold their ground. The protesters’ appeals to claimed European norms on humane crowd control also suffer from comparison to the riots, and robust policing methods, now seen in France and Italy. With Rama directly linking the violence in Tirana with the riots in Western Europe, it is perhaps unfortunate timing for anti-government Albanian activists that their uprising has been overshadowed by events in the EU’s heartlands.

Whether or not the protesters evolve new and more effective tactics, as the government has, remains to be seen. The country’s religious leaders — Sunni Muslim, Orthodox, and Catholic, —have made joint appeals for calm and dialog, hinting at a political transition. But even if the government wished to negotiate with the protesters, it is unclear who they could negotiate with. Over lunch, an exasperated Western diplomat, who had attempted to reach out to the demonstrators, told me that they still don’t know who is leading the movement, or indeed if anyone actually is. The government’s hope, then, must now be that the attempted revolution turns back into a protest movement, with which it can choose to negotiate or else continue to ignore. Winter rains will soon be coming, perhaps diminishing the will of protesters to gather in large numbers, but also limiting the effectiveness of tear gas, upon which Rama’s authority increasingly rests. Another possibility is that the protests will evolve into an electoral movement beyond the control of either main party, as in Serbia, where the two-year student-protest movement looks this weekend to be on the cusp of power. The one thing that could tip the balance, almost everyone I spoke to told me, would be a death resulting from the riots, at which point, I was told over and over again, “anything could happen.”

But for now, two immovable objects, Edi Rama and the protesters, are locked in a battle of wills with no plausible means of de-escalation other than the total defeat of their foe. On Monday, on the boulevard, eerily quiet after the police’s overwhelming use of force the day earlier, I bumped into Bora again. “I don’t like it,” she said, gesturing at the small knot of placard-holders outside the Prime Minister’s office. “If this protest turns back to peaceful, we’ve lost.” She need not have worried: the clashes have since resumed. Overshadowed by turmoil elsewhere in Europe, Albania’s most serious political crisis in years still has a long way yet to go. Perhaps, rather than appealing to EU institutions for mediation, the greater impact will be a disenchantment with a European core not so very different in its essence to Albania after all.

Observing this, my thought was: but this isn’t the future for America! This is recent American history. Does no one remember the summer of 2020? Six months into Covid, George Floyd’s death triggered riots across the USA. Cities burned, youths rampaged and looted, and at one point an anarchist group took over central Seattle, declaring it the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”. The total cost in insurance claims would, according to reports, total more than a billion dollars.

There are parallels between the Floyd riots and the disorder now sweeping France. But there is one significant difference. The Floyd riots didn’t stop at the borders of physical America: they permeated digital America, and spilled back out into other physical places, triggering copycat protests wherever social media holds sway.

Back then, the mimetic riptide was swift and widespread. The Guardian reported BLM protests in locations without any black people. In Manchester, Bristol, and Westminster, crowds chanted “Hands up, don’t shoot” at British police officers who — unlike their counterparts in the US, where the chant originated — almost never carry guns. There have been mimetic echoes of the French violence in other European countries; but no one in Minneapolis has come out on the streets in solidarity with the banlieues of Paris or Marseilles. Why not? Well, while we have grown used to thinking of the digital realm as sort-of neutral, a de-materialized “public square” in which every voice carries something like equal weight, the reality is that it’s not neutral. It’s American.

That means the mimetic currents mostly flow the other way. Arguably recreational protest looting is itself mimetic and (as Time put it) “as American as apple pie”. For those of us who live substantially inside the Anglophone internet, but outside geographic America, it’s easy to forget this. Like the protesters chanting at unarmed British bobbies, this can sometimes have absurd or comical effects. In 2023, for example, the British Left-wing commentator Ian Dunt decried the damage the Tories’ then-proposed “Rwanda bill” would do to “separation of powers” in Britain. Except that “separation of powers” is a political concept native to the USA, but nonexistent on this side of the pond.

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By Aris Roussinos

But perhaps this is understandable, given that the online realm is as much a projection of US soft power in the 21st century as Hollywood was in the 20th. Joseph Stalin is reported to have once said: “If I could control the medium of the American motion picture, I would need nothing else to convert the entire world to Communism”. And, back in his day, the US State Department was sharply aware of Hollywood’s role as a vector for soft power, working closely with film industry bodies to entrench US movie-making dominance overseas.

In our own time, digital tech plays an analogous role. Just recently, for example, the US ambassador to the EU threatened “devastating” retaliation to EU proposals to reserve some satellite bandwidth for local operators, a proposal that would weaken US competitors such as Starlink in the European market. Ongoing tussles between the US and EU over “freedom of speech”, and proposed US legislation against overseas speech restrictions, can also be understood in this light.

The result is not just a tight American rein on economic and legislative leadership of digital media, but also an ideological and discursive landscape in which everyone is incentivized to filter their own country’s news through an American register. Last week, in explaining to Americans her decision to move back to Britain, the writer Freya Sanders felt compelled to describe her homeland as “a silly little country”, and there are many more such cases.

Ever since the Great Depression, it’s been said that “when America sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold”. So I say this mostly without rancor: empires gonna empire. We in Britain had our turn being Top Nation. But the important thing is not to get confused. And it’s easy to get confused: as the Irish writer Conor Fitzgerald has noted, the sheer volume of money, and the loudness of transatlantic Anglophone discourse, can have a distorting effect on domestic politics outside the US.

The absurdities of the Summer of Floyd vividly illustrate this. As Tomiwa Owolade has pointed out, so too does the propagation of American progressive race politics in cultures without America’s history of slavery and segregation. More recently, the Democrat Congressman Ro Khanna added his Left-wing contribution to the general noise of American projection onto European affairs. This time these events were pegged not as the tragic consequence of open borders, as Trump suggested, but what happens “when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few”.

This kind of projection and confusion abounds on the Right, of course, and is not confined to commentary on France. It’s most pernicious when it works to refocus contentious issues away from domestic coalition-building, toward whatever sells in the international clickbait economy. For instance, Elon Musk’s contribution to amplifying domestic British debate on the so-called “grooming gangs” certainly did much to draw attention to the issue. But it was also an egregious case of this precise dynamic in play: the cost of this amplification was a hyper-focus on internationally legible, highly emotive aspects of the crimes, particularly race and sexual torture. These aspects are real. But the net effect has been further siloing the topic as a Right-wing talking point, foreclosing otherwise fruitful lines of coalition-building. And, in the process, a crucial point has been drowned out, namely that the industrial-scale horrors suffered by British girls at the hands of these gangs is the tip of horrifically large iceberg: entrenched, networked, predominantly Pakistani-heritage organized crime, active across a plethora of criminal activities beyond child sexual exploitation, and most likely embedded in British local authorities.

Tackling this represents a policing challenge roughly analogous to the measures required to curb the Sicilian mafia, which plagued American cities in the last century. A problem of this kind, and on this scale, ought to be a clear bipartisan issue. No one, Left or Right, wants to live in a mafia state. Unfortunately, a large and eager market exists, well beyond Britain’s borders, for prurient ragebait about sexual torture. That market is likewise eager for proxies through which to debate “mass immigration”, “Islamification” and the like. And when all the incentives pull toward rage-bait, anyone trying to get a hearing for a concrete program to tackle organized crime can forget it.

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Let me be clear. None of this is to say that everything in Europe is hunky-dory. Ethnic mafias is no one’s definition of “hunky-dory” here in Britain. The riots currently raging in France, meanwhile, are the most violent and widespread since the gilets jaunes protests of 2018. There is footage reportedly of private homes being invaded, and unconfirmed reports of some rioters being found with guns. If true (and not hysterical clickbait) the situation may be escalating. France has deep underlying demographic and fiscal problems. These structural issues are real, and a version of the same pattern now plagues most developed nations to varying degrees: a shrinking tax base relative to welfare liabilities, and social solidarity weakened by the demographic pluralism embraced by political leaders, the latter done in an attempt to mitigate the former.

But also? The Floyd riots did a billion dollars of damage, but America did not “fall” in 2020. France has not “fallen” this week either. The point is this: while the structural patterns producing this week’s riots may be echoed across many Western polities, the political choices best placed to respond will vary in each case. France’s political process will grind on, toward a leader able to grip the country’s domestic difficulties. This is a matter, in any case, for the French to resolve. An overwhelmingly loud, one-size-fits-all internet discourse has little to contribute to that process, except Schadenfreude and its own projections.

And this is perhaps most urgently a lesson for those polities that share a language with the USA, but diverge in political culture. The French remain at least somewhat insulated by the barrier of language. By comparison, divided as we are by a common language, we in Britain are all but defenseless. As for becoming better-defended, inasmuch as it’s possible at all, this likely entails some strategic blocking and muting. It might also entail knowing our own political history and constitution better than Ian Dunt, and by that I don’t mean the castrated postwar account approved for “Western Civilization” enjoyers.

If the AI boosters are right, American hegemony is going nowhere. Though also, if they’re right, social media will soon be so overrun with bots and slop that everyone abandons it. That might be a mercy all round. But whether Britain would emerge on the other side with a distinct political culture once more is anybody’s guess. Perhaps instead by then we’ll all just sound like AI.

Meanwhile there’s still that standing invitation, from the internet, to offer up our home for likes and reposts. As a spectacle, a “silly little country”, a cautionary tale, an object of scorn or synthetic pity: a succulent morsel for the clickbait economy. Don’t take it.

***

A previous version of this piece incorrectly attributed the “silly little country” comment to Freya India. This has now been corrected. 

Certainly, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, is prepping for it. “I have stocks of rice, I have a hand pump at home, and I have also made preserves from fruit from my own garden,” he told the Polish magazine Fakt last week.

It is easy to mock Sikorski and his jam. But he does have a point. In times of war, nobody cares about the percentage of GDP that their country is spending on defense: they care about food and water. Not  that our military leaders and planners will listen, though; soldiers like to talk about battles and gear, not rice and jam.

Tales of heroic battlefield victories are far more persuasive, after all, than those of supply chains. And yet, defeat often comes because of weakness elsewhere. A few years before Napoleon lost his famous battle at Waterloo, he had launched a disastrous attempt to invade Russia. Although the brutal winter contributed to his failure, Napoleon had struggled to keep his troops fed and healthy. Hunger and disease took a terrible toll. As much as the enemy, it was his supply chains that thwarted him.

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Likewise, when the German high command unveiled its master plan to invade France in August 1914, the generals hadn’t factored in an unexpected heatwave. The right wing of the German army was to invade France from the north and encircle Paris. But the soldiers were marching in thick woolen uniforms and carrying heavy backpacks in 30-degree heat. As the men advanced, the supply lines fractured leaving the troops exhausted, hungry and weakened.

Meanwhile the Allied naval blockade of 1914 triggered food shortages in Germany which escalated over the years into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe. Germany and Austria did not lose the First World War on the battlefield alone, they also lost it in the warehouse and the kitchen. The people starved.

The food situation was better during the Second World War, but this time the critical shortage was of oil. Back then, the US produced over 60% of the world’s oil and together, the Allied powers controlled most of the global oil supply. But the German generals were heavily reliant on machinery that used diesel and the chronic shortage of oil was why Hitler diverted his troops from the outskirts of Moscow to the south of Russia: to capture the oil fields in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. En route, they became trapped in Stalingrad and suffered their worst defeat of the Second World War.

The battlefield perspective of history, then, critically underestimates the importance of supply chains. The stories of Europe’s wars are understood much better in terms of logistics than in tales of battles.

And nothing has changed. One of the consequences of the Iran war is the fluctuating cost of crude oil. But that is only part of the story. As the Ukraine war has led to critical shortages of diesel and kerosene on global markets, the price of European diesel has gone through the roof. In a display of his classic short-termism, Donald Trump suggested that the US should stop supplying Europeans with diesel. He almost certainly did not think this through. If the US were to carry out his plan, Europe would suffer an immediate supply emergency. And we need only look at the vast number of diesel-powered lorries on European motorways to realize how critically reliant we are on the fuel. The economy would grind to a halt. It might be a smart idea if our leaders addressed that situation before heading into battle with the Russians.

But it’s not just diesel. The other shortage is natural gas. Iranian attacks have taken out 17% of liquid natural gas (LNG) production in Qatar, the world’s second largest LNG producer after America. Russia is the fourth — but Europeans have imposed an import ban on their gas. That’s why Europe is currently assessing whether it has enough fuel to get through the winter. And remember, this is still peacetime.

On the other side of the ledger is Russia. It, too, suffered from a diesel shortage last spring after Ukrainian attacks on its energy infrastructure. But Moscow immediately increased production in the east and halted exports of diesel to stabilize the situation. By doing so, Putin reduced the globally available supply of diesel and contributed to the rise in prices.

Russia’s food supply is also secure. This year, it had a bumper crop of grains, the wheat crop is forecast to be one of the best on record and oilseed production is also better than usual. Is this the “bad position” Rutte was talking about?

And let’s not forget those other vital commodities: good, old-fashioned money and debt. Russia is practically debt-free. It runs a small fiscal deficit because of the Ukraine war, but nothing compared with the crippling deficits of the US, France, and nowadays also Germany.

As a consequence, the West is vulnerable to a potentially crippling financial crisis. Last week, the interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bonds, the most important financial security on earth, rose to a 21-year high of 5.2%. Ordinary investors such as pension funds are dumping their US bond holdings because they are no longer secure following Joe Biden and Donald Trump outbidding each other in terms of fiscal irresponsibility.

All the while, the war in Ukraine drags on. And could get much worse this winter. The peace process is effectively dead; Putin gave up on it after Ukraine rejected his demand for the entirety of the Donbas region and is now determined to achieve his military goals by war alone. Ukraine is running short of interceptor missiles and so is more vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure. And there is no sign of Ukraine’s western supporters stepping up military supplies — if only because they need what they have for themselves. Exacerbating the situation in Europe are the attacks, possibly orchestrated by Russia, on western supply infrastructure for Ukraine within Germany and Poland.

So this is how the Ukraine war risks escalating. Consider if Russia shoots down a plane over Nato territory carrying supplies to Ukraine. If Nato were to retaliate with a strike on Russia, we would be at war. Over the past few months, my assessment of this scenario has shifted from small but non-trivial, to one with a significant probability.

We should be under no illusion about a war with Russia. We are absolutely not in a position to win. Whose bond markets are going to be blown up first? Who is going to run out of interceptor missiles first? Thanks to the much maligned Common Agricultural Policy, Europe is not going to run out of food. But on every other count — military, energy, finance — Europe is at a disadvantage.

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That’s not all. There is a relatively plausible scenario in which Ukraine and Iran merge into a single West Eurasian war — and become the ultimate proxy conflict between the US and China. The love-in between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China notwithstanding, the rivalry between the US and China is and will remain the dominant geopolitical story of our time.

Trump’s war against Iran and Putin’s war against Ukraine have demonstrated how difficult it is even for a larger power to impose its will on a smaller adversary. Putin may have the advantage over Ukraine, but his struggles there suggest that war against Nato wouldn’t produce a quick or decisive victory.

More likely, it would be the kind of war where, in the end, nobody would care who won and who lost. You might as well stock up with jam.

Following a Russian strike on an air-defense system in Poland a week before, which Putin framed as retaliation for Nato involvement in the war in Ukraine, the alliance has sheepishly declared Article V. But, leaning on the North Atlantic Treaty’s legal technicalities, Donald Trump has refused to intervene, preferring to support European allies in “other ways”. Without American backing, only a handful of European states have deployed their armed forces to bolster Poland and Estonia. And with a second Russian army assembling in western Belarus, and the prospect of missiles flying at Warsaw from Kaliningrad, Poland’s large and robust military is mostly tied up at home. As American envoys arrive in Moscow to negotiate Putin’s terms on Estonia, and likely much of Nato’s east for that matter, British commanders aboard HMS Duncan train their guns on the Neustrashimy, a Russian frigate just appeared on their radar. With fighters screaming into action overhead, the Duncan’s crew hold their breath, as their ship enters the range of Russian guns.

I’m hardly the first observer to speculate on what war between Russia and Nato might look like — and, given the storm clouds gathering in Eastern Europe, I surely won’t be the last. After months of escalating Russian gray-zone attacks against Nato, ranging from drone incursions to stray missiles and attempted bombings at Leipzig airport, warnings about Putin’s plans for Europe have grown louder on both sides of the Atlantic. And now, just last week, Polish and Lithuanian leaders have both separately claimed to have intelligence that Russia is planning “accidental” rocket and drone strikes on pro-Ukrainian members of Nato, a conclusion corroborated by Emmanuel Macron. Together with CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit to Moscow last month, among other things to warn Putin off attacking Nato, the atmosphere feels worryingly similar to the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Yet if a flashpoint on Nato’s borders appears increasingly likely, we equally shouldn’t expect a shooting war to start tomorrow. If he does indeed choose to throw his armies westward, Putin’s aim will first be to break the alliance’s internal cohesion, and to exploit its central weakness in an age of hybrid warfare: that the cost of actually honoring Nato’s self-defense clause is too much for most members to contemplate, until it’s too late anyway. It helps, here, that just like in Ukraine, Putin’s goal wouldn’t really be recovering lost territories. As always, rather, it’d be about control. Removing Nato as a cohesive bloc would allow Russia to once again dictate terms to its European neighbors, a generational shift in the balance of power on the continent, and marking the apotheosis of Putin’s decades-long political project. And, if all went to plan, the Russian premier could plausibly achieve all of this without triggering the world war many in the West have feared.

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The first phase of any Russian provocation campaign would likely start with a strike on a border crossing between Poland and Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has already warned of just such an attack, claiming that one has already been foiled via a joint Polish-Ukrainian operation. Russian forces have already been striking targets mere kilometers from the Polish border, and attacked a civilian Warsaw-Kyiv train not long after European officials including Boris Johnson had traveled along the line. Hitting border crossings would benefit Russia from several standpoints: Putin could plausibly claim attacks were accident; could make weapons shipments to Ukraine via Poland more logistically difficult; and crucially, could broaden the “acceptable” field of operations of the Ukraine war.

Now is where things would start to get really dangerous, with drones of the sort that were shot down by Nato jets over Lithuania this week finally starting to find their targets, striking critical energy or security infrastructure close to the border with Belarus. Such strikes may start innocuously enough, with drones “accidentally” hitting unmanned border watchtower or rural power lines. But then, one might damage an oil pipeline in Latvia; or a critical LNG terminal in Lithuania; or even a section of Poland’s Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, which serves as a logistics hub for transferring Western arms to Ukraine.

Ultimately, though, the real aim of such attacks would not be material damage — but instead making low-level air assaults a regular part of European life. Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians alike have already become inured to headlines about Russian-sponsored arson attacks or drone incursions, and it’s not a huge stretch to imagine they’d do the same with this new wave of provocations. That matters: for despite the alliance’s tough talk, no one, including Putin, realistically expects that Nato would go to war with Russia over a damaged pipeline, no matter how important it might be. We already have clear proof of this: Nato failed to act even after a Russian drone struck a residential building in the Romanian city of Galați in May, injuring two residents. The trouble with the alliance’s intentionally defensive framework is that there is no clearly stated middle ground; war and peace are the only two options available. And, within such binary parameters, Nato will almost always choose an insecure peace over a highly disruptive total war.

All the same, European Nato states would have to send a message to Moscow sooner or later. Rather than striking at Russian soil directly, however, they’re more likely to give Ukraine the intelligence and hardware to hit drone-launching sites on their behalf. In the end, though, politicians in Nato’s east would still have to signal to their citizens that they were willing to take decisive steps to protect them and their infrastructure, and would finally take a leap into the unknown: shooting down Russian projectiles heading toward their borders. This is something Polish leaders have been discussing for years, and within such a volatile threat environment, it would be the obvious next step for the alliance short of full-scale war.

At this point, for Putin, all the pieces would be in place for the final step in the escalation ladder. The Russian leader, and the Russian public for that matter, have considered themselves to be in a de facto state of war with Nato for quite some time now. Not only would all of these developments make this even clearer, but would also fit squarely within the foundational push of Putin’s national narrative. Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2022, and the West in 2026 has always been justified by the politics of grievance — and, by becoming directly involved in Ukraine, Nato will have crossed a red line. Coming off the high of a record win in Russia’s latest State Duma elections, Putin’s party would gladly use these events as fuel for another, much-anticipated mass mobilization, adding some 300,000 new conscripts to his armed forces. Russian authorities would still face plenty of resistance, but much less than if the drive had been solely framed around the war in Ukraine.

With Europe besieged but complacent, Putin could then make his biggest gamble: a direct missile or drone strike against a Nato battery involved in aerial combat in Ukrainian airspace. Poland’s Small Narew surface-to-air missile system, stationed in the quaint city of Zamość near the Ukrainian border, would make a perfect target. And this time, there would be no beating around the bush: Russia would own the attack, framing it as a retaliation for Nato intrusion in Ukraine, and demanding that the alliance reverse course to safeguard Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”.

A tired Europe would finally consider Article V at Poland’s request. But the outcome would be a foregone conclusion: the appetite and social cohesion necessary for a war of this scale simply isn’t there, especially in Washington. What’s crucial to understand here is that, in a Nato-Russia shadow war, there wouldn’t be some single event, like the 1939 invasion of Poland, that suddenly snaps Europe from its lethargy. This is what lies at the core of Putin’s strategy: even if the frog finally realizes it’s being boiled, things will be too far-gone for it to gather the strength to jump out the pot.

Far from Nato’s frontline, meanwhile, publics in both Western Europe and the US would hardly be willing to leap headfirst into a conflict with Putin: the strike on Zamość would hardly be shocking at this point. More than that, Putin’s rhetoric of victimhood would play well with both MAGA and Left-wing campists, who’d probably see the circumstances of the Zamość strike as yet another reason to disengage from both Ukraine and Europe. With the Iran war still unresolved, meanwhile, Trump would see no reason to commit troops to a European theater he has long seen as marginal — especially if Pete Hegseth’s “force posture review” ends with the withdrawal of up to 25,000 American soldiers from Europe later this year.

Though the US might acquiesce to an Article V declaration, in short, it would likely also use the Treaty’s open-ended language around mutual-assistance obligations to weasel its way out of fighting. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has already stated he would do exactly that if Article V were ever invoked. Of course, no one will miss Slovak troops in the event of a conflict with Russia, but the lack of American involvement would surely dissuade many smaller countries from sending help. So Article V or not, make no mistake — American apathy would break the alliance, something Putin himself is well aware of.

Nato structures may remain strong on paper, in this scenario, but the organization would actually resemble a malleable “coalition of the willing” — far more than an all-encompassing defensive alliance. That would be a massive blow for the bloc’s frontline states, and with dramatically lower stakes and a broader field of movement, Putin would act accordingly. Any strike against Poland likely wouldn’t lead to an actual invasion, but it would keep its forces locked in a cross-border standoff. That leaves Estonia. Though Britain, France, Germany and Poland, perhaps alongside Denmark or Canada, are likely to send troops or ships to defend a threatened Tallinn government, US indifference precludes a broader campaign. Even nearby Sweden and Finland would likely be cautious about overextending themselves too early, mobilizing their populations but then remaining holed up for whatever comes next.

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What would come next? Certainly, whatever the limitations of the Russian military machine, victory for the new anti-Putin coalition would be far from guaranteed. Yet even if, to borrow our scenario, the Neustrashimy’s commander relented off Hiiumaa, or else engaged HMS Duncan, lost, and rendered Russia unable to enforce a blockade, Putin might still hope to carve a new European order from the chaos — especially if he felt he still enjoyed Trump’s good graces.

Alongside what we might call the “Belarusification” of Ukraine, that would surely include attempts to disarm the Baltics, while keeping heavyweights like Poland contained and self-interested. To be clear, Putin would likely be unsuccessful in meeting all of his goals here. Indeed, surrounded by sycophantic generals, he may well stumble. But like in Ukraine, after suffering an initial loss in Estonia, the Russians could yet regroup, adjust their strategy, and lock Nato’s rump in a fresh quagmire, turning border cities like Narva into Bakhmuts on the Baltic. Whatever happens, Putin will understand that, without America, the old equation in Europe has gone, while his new opponents will hardly have time to react.

Some might see these hypotheticals and conclude that the only way out for Nato is to disengage completely from Ukraine. But this would simply kick the can further down the road — Russia at this stage sees Ukraine as merely one theater within a much greater war over the future of Europe. Even if Trump decides to unilaterally welcome Russia back into America’s embrace, Putin’s steadily escalating gray-zone war with European Nato would anyway likely continue, regardless of events in Washington or Kyiv. The choice facing the Europeans, then, is not simply between peace and war, but between accepting Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe — and opposing it. Exactly how they do that remains the challenge of our time.

Compared to the election of 2026, the difference is like night and day. Though 2006 was, in essence, a true watershed election, one that ended an entire political era, the political rhetoric of the day hardly reflected it. Back in those days, the campaign saw genuine debates about the policy differences between the major parties, as the Moderates, restyled the “New Moderates” by their then-leader, angled to make the case that Sweden’s old social-welfare model had become stultified and unresponsive, and that the Social Democrats themselves, so used to automatically gliding into power every election, were unwilling to reform. The most famous Moderate slogan from that election was “Det Nya Arbetarpartiet” — literally branding themselves as Sweden’s new (and only) working-class party.

Today, by contrast, elections in Sweden bear increasing resemblance to the electoral process of the United States, right down to the political rhetoric used by both sides. In 2026, after all, both political blocs were eager to dub this election the most important, most critical, most life-and-death election in history. If the evil Right-wingers won, fascism and darkness would descend on all and sundry, and there wouldn’t even be a Sweden left come 2030. If the crazed leftist Islamo-Marxists won, meanwhile, tens of millions of immigrants would descend on the country; no election would ever be winnable again due to changed demographics; being heterosexual or white would soon be punishable by death; and Sweden would shortly become Europe’s first Islamic emirate.

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Of course, the problem here is that the “evil Right-wingers” have been in power for the last four years. Despite some internal drama, the four parties that make up the so-called “Tidö government” — the Moderates, the Liberals, the Christian Democrats and the Sweden Democrats — have ruled the country largely without incident, and certainly not with jackboots sounding in the distance. Some things, like food-price inflation, have certainly got worse, but it’s hard to blame that on any specific policy. Meanwhile, big planks of the 2022 election, like massively expanding Sweden’s fleet of nuclear power plants, have quietly been thrown overboard in the last few years. But, again, there is no reason to think anything would have been different had the so-called “Red-Green coalition” been in power instead.

Certainly, it’s unsurprising that electoral participation actually plummeted this time round. The figures, with turnout in the eighties, would, of course, be impressive in many other countries. But for ultra-democratic Sweden, this is one of the lowest figures since the Second World War. The point, of course, is these figures hit up against the electoral rhetoric. If the future really was at stake, and this really was the last election before migrants or fascists destroyed the state, why did fewer people than ever bother to vote?

The answer is probably structural. In Sweden, just like in America, the louder the pundits’ voices, the less elections actually seem to matter in terms of hard policy. Nobody talked about the looming end of the Swedish democratic system or nation in 2006, but the choices on offer were actually meaningfully different. Today, though, those meaningful differences are becoming rarer and rarer. Consider the American example: as the Trump campaign put it in the lead-up to the 2024 election, a vote for Kamala Harris was a vote for sending America’s sons and daughter to war against Iran, and a vote for ruinous price inflation and unaffordable gas at home. To be fair, that description is probably true as far as politics under a Kamala Harris presidency would have turned out. Unfortunately, the idea that Trump was against these things turned out to be a huge lie. No matter which side you picked, the end result was the same.

This dynamic seems to have spelled the end of the current Tidö government. It came into power with much fanfare, promising a drastic reduction of immigration. Yet critics are today quick to point out that little has changed in terms of migrants granted citizenship. And, indeed, even as a government of the Right looks slated to be replaced by a government of the Left, the chances of anything meaningfully changing in the other direction look very slim as well. The number of granted asylum applications may have diminished, after all, yet other forms of migration — for family reunification or labor — have picked up the slack. Other policy differences between the political blocks, notably attitudes toward Natos, have been retired too. One way or another, business as usual looks set to continue.

One doesn’t need a crystal ball to make that prediction in 2026: the general trend in Europe is that little will change whoever you vote for. Once again, that’s clear on demographics. Boris Johnson promised to cut down on immigration: what he delivered was the “Boriswave”. Giorgia Meloni, the current Italian prime minister, belongs to a party that traces its history back to the Italian fascists. Yet despite these august credentials, Meloni’s tenure in power has seen her quietly increase migration. The structural reasons for this aren’t hard to understand: Italy’s demographics are terrible and the country has long been plagued with financial woes. No matter how much Meloni might rage against immigration rhetorically, her deeds aren’t particularly different from anyone else. Perhaps a figure to Meloni’s Right — such the former army officer Roberto Vannacci — would finally change course if voted into power. But the question one has to ask here is simple: why didn’t Meloni do it?

Perhaps our political classes have simply given up because the problems are too intractable. It wouldn’t exactly be shocking if that was the case, and it would mean that America and Europe are in the same boat. Consider the fact that, less than two years ago, the second Trump presidency promised to fix the deficit, reindustrialize America, and cut huge amounts of waste from the budget. Back then, DOGE was at the top of the news cycle, for good and for ill. Today, that organization no longer even exists. Americans, after trying to fix the national debt or stop the forever wars in the Middle East, simply gave up. It was too hard to change anything meaningful. The same might be said of the Europeans and migration: trapped by the remorseless logic of globalization and with native birthrates that simply refuse to go up. Amid these seemingly intractable challenges, why not grant another few thousand visas? Voters are perhaps to blame here too, unwilling to countenance much change, whatever they might claim in vox pops.

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Whatever the cause of this malaise, in it we can spot the paradox of European politics in the 21st century. We can all clearly see that monumental, historical changes are happening. Wars and energy shocks rage all around us, deindustrialization and demographic problems keep getting worse and worse, and yet everyone seems too afraid to do much beyond shouting, with the rhetorical temperature seemingly rising in inverse proportion to actual policy solutions. But as the American economist Herbert Stein put it, things that cannot go on forever simply won’t. If fixing pensions or finding a new geopolitical strategy or addressing the deficits is too hard for anyone to make the attempt, there will eventually come some sort of crisis that forces the change that politicians have been avoiding.

Unlike 2006, the election of 2026 was heralded the most important Swedish election of our lifetimes  — if not the most important election ever. Every election these days seems to be the most important election ever, of course, and just as in America or the United Kingdom, the more important an election is, the less anyone expects anything to actually change. But as the Middle East burns and an energy crisis the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Seventies approaches, the age of business as usual may be ending sooner than many people think.

Based on the information we have, the most plausible explanation for the visit is that Ratcliffe and his Russian counterparts were discussing de-escalation. If Russia’s war against Ukraine were to turn into a broader European war, it would pose a vast security risk to the entire world.

What the US and Russia have in common is that they are both already fighting wars. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump clearly do not wish to go to war with each other. There are reports that Putin may be planning a large autumn offensive in Ukraine. Russian troops are currently making slow but steady progress towards the Donbas cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. It is quite plausible that Putin could step up this war — but for this he would need to recruit more troops and intensify his attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Some Western security officials are convinced that once Putin is done with Ukraine, he will try to test Nato’s cohesion.

I struggle to see what purpose this could possibly serve. If he really wanted to test Nato’s resolve, by far the best way would be to escalate the hybrid warfare that is already going on. One of the more serious recent incidents was a military drone flying into the wing of a parked Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig airport in early August. Attached to the drone was 600g of Semtex explosives, which did not detonate because of a malfunction. At the time there were several drone sightings in Germany. However, military leaders tend to underestimate hybrid warfare, even though it can easily morph into a conventional war.

Another escalation scenario is disagreement on what constitutes legitimate European support for Ukraine. International diplomacy has its rules on this that everybody including the Russians pretend to accept: if you support a party in a war financially, or with defensive weapons, you are not deemed to be participating in the war. If you take part in maneuvers, you are considered a party of the war. The supply of offensive weapons falls into a gray zone. Nato has gone to great lengths to steer clear of that zone. The Western European countries that support Ukraine also made it clear that they did not wish to participate in the war.

But beware of the gray zones. The issue is not who is right and who is wrong. Wars are not settled by fact-checkers in broadcasting companies. The issue is disagreement itself.

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Another gray-zone matter is the raids by Western countries of Russian ships or vessels that transport goods from Russia. The same goes for the supply of British drones for Ukrainian attacks inside Russia. Russia has responded with outrage to Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s decision to provide Ukraine with technical blueprints that would enable Ukraine to manufacture the Franco-British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. This prompted Putin’s spokesman to declare Britain to be a participant in the war. This is how escalation starts.

There is an awful lot of stuff going on that could blow up in our faces. The US economist Branko Milanović wrote an essay last week in which he described a very plausible escalation scenario. He writes the thirst for war is palpable in the Nordic and Baltic countries and is also growing in the UK and Germany. “The role of small countries—that through their geopolitical irresponsibility can wreck great damage to the world—tends to pass under the radar,” he writes. “The Nordic-Baltic coalition is essentially calling for a war with Russia, citing its own fears and traumas of Russian/Soviet control and occupation.”

I agree with his assessment. If I listen to assorted Finnish and Baltic politicians, it feels to me like 1914, the year when Germany started the First World War in a mood of euphoria. The person who sets the tone in European foreign policy right now is Kaja Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister who is now the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy. I see her as the European warmonger-in-chief. 

The job of diplomacy is to find solutions to problems. This is a tough job. You keep your diplomatic back channels open and talk to the enemy. But the EU has cut off all diplomatic channels with Russia. EU countries have their ambassadors in Moscow, and they all reiterate the official lines they are given.

The US, meanwhile, has maintained diplomatic relationships with Russia. The Ratcliffe-Russia meeting makes it clear that these exist at several levels, including that of intelligence chiefs. The officials in charge of nuclear policy also talk to each other. Henry Kissinger maintained a strong diplomatic back channel with the Soviet ambassador to the US during the Nixon administration.

The reason why a war with Russia is so dangerous is the presence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Russia has an estimated total inventory of over 5,400 nuclear warheads. France has 290 and Britain has 225. Given the vast size of Russia, the French nuclear arsenal could make 0.1% of the Russian territory uninhabitable. The Russian nuclear arsenal could completely destroy all of Western Europe, and still have a lot of missiles left. This is not a war Europe can win.

If Putin were to launch an unprovoked attack on a Nato country, the picture would be different. This would draw in the Americans. I assume that Ratcliffe would have taken the opportunity to clarify the US position and possibly contradict statements from some administration officials that Europe is now in charge of its own security and that the US would not directly intervene in case of a war.

The big European countries, meanwhile, are following the lead of the war-mongering minions because they have no plan B. If the war in Ukraine were to end, they would have to provide security guarantees. They would have to integrate Ukraine into the EU at an enormous cost. Only last week, Germany and five other EU countries announced that they would cut the EU budget by several hundred billion euros. This is Germany not putting its money where its mouth is.

Rhetorical escalation often precedes physical escalation, often triggered by a particular event — like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914. One such foreseeable event would be the seizure of Russian assets held in Europe, which amount to around €200 billion. People have gone to war over much less.

The Europeans already tried to seize the money at an EU summit last December. They failed. Most of the money lies at Euroclear, a large bank depository and clearing house in Brussels. If the EU had seized it, Belgium would have been legally liable in the case of litigation in foreign courts. Belgium is a very small country with a very large bank — a bad combination. Back in December, Bart De Wever, Belgium’s prime minister, demanded robust risk-sharing guarantees by the other EU members. They refused because they did not want to put themselves at risk of another financial crisis.

But if the EU is good at one thing, it is coming up with technical solutions to complex problems. They could attempt to develop a hideously complex financial instrument, similar to the subprime loans that gave rise to the global financial crisis 20 years ago. There is only ever one purpose behind such financial instruments — to hide risk, and lure naive investors into making unwise decisions. The same logic applies here. National parliaments would have to sign up to any risk-sharing deal, but they might be fooled into thinking that the risk is well controlled.

I have no idea how likely such a scenario is. All I am saying is that the sequestration of Russian assets is once again under discussion. If it were to happen, I would attach a high probability that it would trigger a dramatic Russian response.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Ratcliffe and his Russian counterparts spoke about something entirely different: Iran. But Russian support for Iran is not the critical factor in the Gulf War right now. Trump has clearly found himself in a predicament in Iran. He cannot afford another conflict. Therefore, an attempt to de-escalate tensions with Moscow seems like the most plausible explanation of the Ratcliffe-Russia meeting. A war is in nobody’s interest, least of all Europe’s. European countries are simply not prepared; de-escalation is the only rational strategy.

The problem is that escalation is not by definition a rational thing. The fact that something is in nobody’s interest does not mean that it is not going to happen. History is littered with examples of irrational wars and, lest we forget, the biggest ones were mostly Europeans.

As the fighting grinds on, the backlash against the pro-war nuns has continued. At a Christmas fair in the Polish city of Szczecin, Belarusian pro-democracy activists protested in front of the nuns’ stall, accusing shoppers of “supporting torture in Belarusian prisons and Russian aggression against Ukraine”. Ukrainians in Belfast warned of the nuns’ ties to the Kremlin and urged the city council not to host them again. Last Christmas, in the parish of Täby, a suburb of Stockholm, the rector allowed the nuns to flog their wares in the church corridor. But the Church of Sweden later warned that the nuns “use their income to support Russian nationalism” and “have close ties with GRU”, referring to Russia’s military intelligence service. It advised its believers “against supporting their activities in any way”.

The Saint Elisabeth Convent in Minsk refutes such claims. On its website, it says money from the sales helps orphans and funds “humanitarian aid” for residents of Russian occupied Donbas. Yet Archpriest Andrey Lemeshonok, the convent’s spiritual father, has made no secret of his backing of the invasion. He once boasted that his nuns were part of “a combat unit”, fighting for Russia’s future. Saint Elisabeth nuns, with flak jackets over their habits, have been photographed in occupied Ukraine and posing with Russian flags decorated with the pro-war Z symbol.

Four and a half years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Kirill did not call for peace. Instead he called Russia’s opponents in Ukraine “evil forces”, casting the war as a metaphysical battle against what he labeled the corrupting values of the West. Since then, his rhetoric has only hardened, sanctifying the bloodshed in Ukraine. But his hawkishness is nothing new: a poisonous co-dependency between church and state has existed for centuries. Many of the patriarch’s predecessors were under the Kremlin’s thumb and in hock to the secret police. In Soviet times, not a single bishop was appointed without the blessing of the KGB. But today, more than ever before, the church acts as an instrument of Moscow’s geopolitical power projecting influence, and posing a growing threat, across Europe.

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European security agencies increasingly view Russian church networks with suspicion. An open-source investigation by the Kyiv-based Molfar Intelligence Institute in late 2024 concluded that the ROC “constructs churches near strategic facilities, government institutions, and military bases across various European countries” in a systematic effort to use religious outposts for espionage. In Bulgaria, Czechia, North Macedonia and elsewhere, “spies in cassocks” have been used as an alternative to diplomatic cover after the expulsion of Russian embassy staff following the invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, a priest from a Russian church in the Czech resort town of Karlovy Vary was expelled over suspicions of hostile activities. “We would be particularly foolish,” said one Czech MEP,  “if we did not recognize that Russia is undeniably using the Orthodox Church to carry out its hybrid warfare.”

Russia’s church has even tried to sway elections. Ahead of Moldova’s 2024 presidential poll and EU integration referendum, Russian state officials funded all-expenses-paid “pilgrimages” to Moscow for dozens of Moldovan Orthodox priests and gave them debit cards loaded with hundreds of dollars as going-home presents. In exchange, the clerics were instructed to create channels on the Telegram messaging app warning against joining the EU.

Moscow has also been quietly hoovering up strategic real estate. In Vardø, a remote Arctic town close to Norway’s GLOBUS radar station, the Moscow Patriarchate secured local approval, and even Norwegian state funding, to build a chapel. Clergy from the nearby Russian diocese of Plesetsk and Kargopol, including its bishop, made frequent visits to Vardø to unveil monuments to Norwegian partisans and consecrate Orthodox crosses. They said the chapel would serve Orthodox sailors and be a reminder of the cultural ties between Russia and Norway. But when the proposal was eventually submitted, the chapel had grown to 17 meters in height and, according to Vardø’s current mayor, the Russian bishop insisted the exact location under Nato radars had been “dictated” to him “by God himself”. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and growing scrutiny of Moscow-linked institutions, the plans were shelved.

But many Russian churches have been built in sensitive spots, including in neighboring Sweden. The Church of the Holy Mother of God of Kazan in the town of Västerås, west of Stockholm, built and consecrated in 2024, is near a major airport, a water treatment works and a network of energy companies. Markus Göransson, a researcher at the Swedish Defense University, felt it was too close for comfort. “When Sweden’s defense forces undertake exercises on or near the airport… they do so under possible surveillance from the church,” he complained. Moreover, locals discovered that the plot of land for the church had been bought by Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation which also, through an intermediary, funded the construction. Last August, the agency overseeing non-state religion funding in Sweden cut off state subsidies to the Västerås parish citing security concerns.

Finland, meanwhile, knows Russian pressure only too well. It shares an 833-mile border with its eastern neighbor, the longest in the EU. Decades of conflict and more recent hybrid tactics have fueled deep distrust. After the invasion, officials in the Finnish city of Turku moved quickly to close a Moscow-linked Orthodox church near a naval base, the port, government offices and Russia’s consulate. Governments in other countries have also wised up. Following the open-source intelligence findings of the Molfar report, governments across Europe are responding with sanctions, security investigations and pressure on Moscow-linked churches to cut ties with the Kremlin.

The issue is especially acute in the three Baltic states, where the Orthodox Church has become a flashpoint between a Soviet past and a European future. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are firmly anchored in the West through Nato and the EU, but all have sizable Russian-speaking populations, many descended from the Soviet era. Few attend church regularly, yet for many, Orthodoxy remains closely tied to Russian identity. In Estonia, where more than a quarter of the 1.4 million population are native Russian speakers, that makes the issue particularly sensitive. Parliament has now ordered Orthodox churches to sever ties with Moscow or face closure by the end of the year.

The sharpest confrontation to date in Estonia has been with the Pühtitsa Convent, which is a stavropegic monastery, meaning it comes under the direct authority of Patriarch Kirill rather than the local diocese. Pühtitsa’s abbess, Filareta Kalatšova, argues that the convent cannot unilaterally drop its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate without breaking Church law. In an open letter to Parliament, she accused Estonian MPs of forcing her to commit a canonical crime. Though Martin Tulit, the Estonian official in charge of religious affairs, pointed out that the 134-year-old convent has changed its canonical affiliation before — including during the nation’s period of independence between the two world wars.

Outside Russia and occupied Ukraine, some Orthodox clerics who refused to follow Moscow orders eventually found they had other options. In January 2023,  in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, I met five unemployed priests who had been serving in a diocese linked to the Moscow Patriarchate but were defrocked for opposing the war. One had become a taxi driver to feed his family. The clerics were in limbo until the following year when Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople agreed to reinstate them under his jurisdiction. Not all the parishioners reacted well to the swap. Father Vladimiras Seliavko said many cold shouldered him and even relatives viewed him as a traitor but he “could not remain with a patriarch who blessed war criminals”. Although the Orthodox have no Pope, the Constantinople Patriarch, based in today’s Istanbul, is the closest equivalent. He is also known as the Ecumenical Patriarch and — much to Moscow’s annoyance — is seen as primus inter pares: first among equals and senior among all Orthodox bishops. Some Russian priests defrocked and forced into exile for refusing to read Kirill’s mandatory Victory Prayer have also been transferred to Bartholomew’s jurisdiction.

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In northern Europe, Poland and the Baltics, where Catholicism and Protestantism dominate, Russia’s church is widely seen as an arm of the Kremlin rather than a religious institution. The picture is very different in Orthodox eastern Europe, particularly in Serbia, Bulgaria and Georgia, where Moscow retains far deeper religious and cultural ties. Indeed, one of the challenges in countering the Russian Orthodox Church’s political influence is the hold it still has over its believers and its propensity to treat any criticism as tantamount to religious persecution. Last month, Bulgaria successfully blocked the European Union’s attempt to sanction Kirill. “The era of the Crusades is over,” said the country’s prime minister, Rumen Radev. He said he was wary of alienating millions of Eastern Orthodox believers. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is administratively self-governing but its patriarch, Daniel, has aligned himself with Kirill’s position on the war. He warned his clergy against “inciting hatred” by labeling Russia as the “sole and unprovoked aggressor”.

Then there is the fraught question of the church in Ukraine. The establishment of the self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018, with the blessing of Bartholomew, was a slap in the face to Putin and his vision of the Russian World. But it was also a humiliation for Kirill. His Church, the biggest and the richest in the Orthodox world, stood to lose at least a fifth of its 150 million members, thousands of parishes and several hundred churches and monasteries. Nato encroachment aside, Ukraine’s desire to cut ties with the mother church in Moscow, to which it has been linked for three centuries, became a casus belli.

Disagreements over which Orthodox church in Ukraine is the most legitimate have not gone away. Even today, as bombs rain down on Ukrainian cities, many parishioners are reluctant to change jurisdictions to the autonomous Orthodox Church of Ukraine. They believe that it is uncanonical and that joining it means that they will be deprived of divine grace. This agenda is relentlessly pushed by the Kremlin. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, hardly an authority on matters ecclesiastical, routinely invokes “canon law” to condemn Ukrainian and Western action against the branch of the church historically linked to Moscow.

Such talk leaves parishioners particularly open to manipulation. “The church is very convenient for dictatorships”, says Father Vladimiras, one of the five Lithuanian priests defrocked by Moscow, “because any propaganda can be spread through its channels. Believers are accustomed to trusting their clergy and rarely doubt the statements of their patriarch, bishops or priests.” Recent reports in the Ukrainian media suggest Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are being used to recruit Ukrainian refugees. It is not clear how these refugees would be deployed, but it’s not unimaginable they could become Russian intelligence assets.

Throughout the Cold War, Soviet propaganda relentlessly targeted Uncle Sam. Now, Europe has morphed into Russia’s main enemy. And the Russian Church is key to Putin’s plan to destroy European liberal democracy and the institutions underpinning it. According to Kirill, the continent is mired in moral decay thanks to its acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights; Orthodox politicians and talk show hosts often use the pejorative term “Gayropa” instead of Evropa.

The war has given the Patriarch a chance to reassert his authority in a post-Soviet world as he championed the twin causes of Orthodox unity and Russian imperialism. Since the Western world “has fallen into Satanism”, in Kirill’s view, Russia functions as the Katechon — the biblical force that restrains the Antichrist. In a recent sermon he praised Russia’s atomic bomb for thwarting its enemies plans to “to destroy and enslave the Motherland”. In other words, massive military destruction is justified as an act of cosmic purification.

Europe may now have to confront this increasingly aggressive alliance of “the missile and the incense burner”, as one French theologian put it, with little help from across the Atlantic. If previous US administrations made equality for sexual minorities a pillar of American diplomacy, Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last November, puts “traditional values” at its heart instead. On a trip to Texas last year for the BBC, I was struck by how some ultra-conservative Americans now see Russia as a Christian bulwark — even a model to emulate. The strategy contains little criticism of Moscow despite the mounting death toll, while voicing support for “patriotic parties”, several of which enjoy the Kremlin’s favor and, in some cases, the backing of its pliant church. For a continent already facing a resurgent Russia, Europe’s isolation on this issue is an uncomfortable prospect and one it can no longer afford to ignore.

However, a better assessment would have understood the Ankara summit as Nato returning to its roots. In recent months, the theme of Nato reverting to its original Cold War purpose — European deterrence and defense — has been advanced by the Trump administration. The idea was rolled out in February as “Nato 3.0” and is the brainchild of Undersecretary of War for Policy Elbridge Colby, a restrainer who advocates for limiting military interventionism and who has therefore been maligned by the liberal Atlanticist set and reportedly spied on by Israel. As Colby describes it, Nato 3.0 is not an abandonment of Nato but rather “a return to and validation of its foundational purpose”. In other words, “make Nato great again” by ensuring Europeans pour billions into defense industrial production and technological innovation so they can take care of their own conventional (non-nuclear) defense. 

At this year’s summit, I witnessed the transition to Nato 3.0 in real time. The Trump administration surely regards Europe’s acceptance of its shift in policy and philosophy as a major foreign policy “win”. Multiple senior Nato officials spoke of the need to build “a stronger Europe in a stronger Nato”, and repeatedly recited figures testifying to leaps in European defense spending in accordance with Trumpian demands. One senior Nato official spoke of the “simultaneity problem” — the Trump administration’s concern about a scenario in which the US military would be forced to fight multiple major conflicts at once, which he described as the reason “why Europeans are stepping up and taking more responsibility for their own defense”. Whatever their distaste for Trump’s bullying rhetoric, it was clear that Nato officials and allies are now taking the Trump administration’s words very seriously.

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A few weeks ahead of the summit, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth echoed Colby at the Nato defense ministerial meeting in Brussels, tying Nato 3.0 to Washington’s demands that allies raise defense spending. “That’s what defense spending commitments are all about,” he said, “transforming Nato into a real military alliance that’s focused on hard power and real deterrence, a Nato 3.0 modeled on the Nato 1.0 that won the Cold War.” During the same meeting, Hegseth gave trans-Atlantic allies an ultimatum. Going forward, he said, American Nato dues would be contingent on allies meeting their own defense spending targets. “Where other allies do not spend with urgency, our dues contributions will go down,” he warned. He also told allies to expect a review of their progress in six months. If insufficient strides had been made by then, the US would spend less on Nato. This threat contributed to a sense of elevated fear in Ankara. It wasn’t an entirely irrational one either: the Trump administration is dramatically scaling back its involvement in other multilateral institutions. In January, the United States withdrew from 31 UN entities and is currently withholding around $4 billion in mandatory UN dues.

To understand “Nato 3.0”, it’s essential to understand the alliance’s evolution. Nato’s founding was rooted in Cold War ideological and military competition with the Soviet Union. As such, Nato 1.0 was a firmly Right-wing organization, one interested above all in strengthening American dominion over Europe and confronting the Soviet threat. But it also had several other functions, among them spreading the gospel of free markets and crushing internal Left-wing subversion. The North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 established the military alliance and outlined Nato “values”; the pact promised “to safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law”. From the very beginning, not all members lived up to the pompous rhetoric. Founding member state Portugal was then ruled by dictator Antonio Salazar, whose one-party regime Estado Novo, or New State, employed a menacing secret police and outlawed all opposition parties; the dictatorship’s “new” name was an irony, as according to Tom Gallagher, the puritanical Salazar “manifested the true reactionary’s horror of change”. 

The United States was often the alliance’s biggest proponent of working with unsavory regimes, pushing for Franco’s Spain to become a member of Nato with overwhelming support in Congress and the Senate. The US saw Francoist Spain as an ideal ally owing to its “strategic location and furiously anti-communist sentiment”. When some European member states objected to admitting Franco’s regime into the alliance, the United States signed the Pact of Madrid with Spain in 1953, furnishing the dictatorship with aid and allowing the US to build military bases on Spanish soil. French colonial Algeria was also an original part of Nato, with Article 5 extending to the colonized country where systematic torture and concentration camps were used to subdue the population. Meanwhile some former Nazis from West Germany’s supposedly “clean Wehrmacht” — the alliance shamelessly propagated the myth that Wehrmacht officers fought honorably during the Second World War — were also integrated into the pact, with some rising to Nato’s senior leadership. In the face of the Soviet threat, there could be no enemies to the Right.

Nato 2.0 covered a period we might describe as the “long Nineties” and was characterized by End-of-History hubris and excess: rapacious eastward expansion, self-aggrandizing rhetoric about liberal values, and zealous out-of-area operations. Nato’s “out-of-area” actions — operations undertaken beyond the territorial limits of member states — undermined its claim to be a “purely defensive alliance”. As “humanitarian” operations, their results ranged from mixed to disastrous. While the 1999 Nato bombing of Yugoslavia forced Serbian security forces from Kosovo, it did not bring down President Slobodan Milošević; he wouldn’t fall until a contested election several months later. Indeed, Milošević’s own Minister of Information during the bombing, Aleksandar Vučić, has been leader of Serbia in some form for 14 years, and his regime employs Serbian nationalist rhetoric barely distinguishable from that of his former boss. In 2011, Nato intervened in Libya with even more catastrophic results: though sold to the public as a “humanitarian intervention” to protect civilians, the real goal was regime change, with the removal of leader Muammar al-Gaddafi judged a strategic imperative worth many Libyan lives. In the end, a report from Harvard’s Belfer Center determined that “Nato’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold”. Nato 2.0 also included the Great War on Terror, which meant the emergence of non-state actors as a new threat; costly cross-border operations and occupations ensued. If Nato 1.0’s main purpose was containing the Soviet Union in Europe, then Nato 2.0 represented the mother of all mission creep.

The summit in Ankara was the alliance’s response to Trumpian demands for a Nato 3.0: a scaled back, “Europe-led” pact that doesn’t rely on the United States as the guarantor of Europe’s conventional defense. As such, the summit kicked off with a grandiose Defense Industry Forum, where Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte repeatedly invoked the term “defense industrial revolution”. The event was an opportunity for Turkey to hawk its indigenous defense industry wares, but it was also an opportunity for Europe. As one official from a European defense ministry wryly put it to me, the forum allowed allies to make a big show of complying with Trumpian dictates to spend more on their defense.

Just to drive the point home, President Zelensky gave a speech at the event likening the current revolution in drone technology to the invention of missiles. He described Ukraine as a reluctant defense industrial powerhouse forged in war and asserted that it should therefore be admitted to Nato. In other characteristically immoderate statements, the Defense Industry Forum was widely touted as a success. A Nato official confirmed that “at least” $50 billion in new defense deals were announced at the forum; among them were $40 billion worth of investment in counter-drone capabilities and multi-country initiatives for the continued militarization of space. The pivot to Nato 3.0 would appear to be well underway.

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Turkey is perhaps the model Nato 3.0 ally, which makes its hosting of the first summit of this new chapter richly appropriate. Though Turkey has contributed to Nato 2.0 peacekeeping missions and interventions in places like Kosovo and Bosnia, Turkish President Recep Erdoğan, like Trump, has no time for liberal internationalist pieties. Like Trump, he would like to see Nato stripped bare to its raw essentials of defense and security, ditching democracy promotion and the dissemination of “Western values”. Turkey has the second largest army in Nato and a burgeoning defense industrial base: Turkish defense and aviation exports broke records last year, exceeding $10 billion. All of this has won admiration from Trump. Throughout the summit, Trump repeatedly praised Erdoğan, calling him “really a great man”, “a great leader”, and “a strong person”. Trump’s affinity with Erdoğan suggests that what is most valued in Nato 3.0 is a capacity for deterrence and defense; democratic deficiencies are of little concern in an ally that is seen to be pulling its weight.  

Despite the notable absence of liberal rhetoric in Ankara, elements of Nato 2.0 remain for now, including the tradition of the annual summit. During the Cold War, Nato held just 10 summits. Today, it holds a wildly expensive summit every year. Last year’s one in The Hague reportedly cost about €1 million per minute, with some media reporting that it was the most expensive meeting in the alliance’s history. Preparations for this year’s summit reportedly cost €235 million. In addition to being expensive, international relations scholar Patrick Porter believes that annual summits present risks. “The curse of regular summitry…wasn’t a feature of Cold War Nato,” he tells me. “There are these relentless opportunities for trouble and mischief and misunderstanding.” It’s a critique now shared by some other allies. While Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte told journalists in Ankara that the next summit will be in Albania, he would not confirm that it would happen next year.

Whatever the similarities between Nato 3.0 and Nato 1.0, there are also a few striking differences. Nato once justified itself with the Cold War platitudes of prosperity and liberty. This was propaganda to be sure, but it was still integral to winning an ideological battle that once divided the world. Now, the rhetoric of prosperity and freedom has been replaced with the cold, uninspiring promise of “security” — a nebulous, constantly expanding concept emblematic of an ideology that has lost the ability to excite or be believed, and must now rely on coercion, censorship and repression to get its way. While Nato holds a lavish summit each year and member states ramp up spending for a “defense industrial revolution”, people living in allied countries are being told they must endure brutal cuts to health care, education, and social welfare to pay for it all. Alliance boosters like to boast that Nato “protects one billion people”. If it does, it does so at a steep cost.

Authorities issue orders to drink water, stay in the shade, stay at home, use a fan and so on. One scientist even suggested coating windows with yogurt. It’s easily spreadable, he argued, dries quickly, and can be removed with water and cloth. In straitened circumstances, the idea might make some sense.

But it seems anachronistic that we must rely on fans, yogurt and wheelie bins when, as much of the world has understood for many decades, the best defense against a heatwave is air conditioning.

This relatively simple physical mechanism has become the locus of rather more complex social conflicts. In the more innocent time that was the year 2015, AC became a battleground of the gender wars. “Air conditioning in your office is sexist,” read one headline, beneath which a writer argued that her workplace, that of the Telegraph newspaper, was kept at a temperature suitable for men (strolling around in their shirtsleeves) rather than women (huddled under communal jumpers).

The problem of sexist air conditioning remains unresolved, but the culture wars have metastasized. Already accused of being unfeminist, AC is now viewed in some quarters as being an example of “climate colonialism”, where Western standards of comfort, and the energy-hungry practices and buildings needed to maintain them, supersede non-Western architectural styles that might result in lower emissions. Perhaps, these critics suggest, it is time to use courtyards and organic materials rather than glass-and-steel monoliths.

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Sometimes this line of thinking veers into patronizing deference to anything non-Western and pre-industrial. “How can we learn from indigenous technologies,” asked a Guardian contributor during the 40°C heatwave of 2022, “that better incorporate collective management of resources and collaborate with natural systems?” He suggested we consider an irrigation system native to the steep terraces of rice paddies in Bali. Granted, there is a prelapsarian charm to the idea of water gushing down the great residential ziggurats of central London, slaking the endless thirst of a Babylonian hanging garden of shade-bestowing greenery. But to re-engineer the West’s housing stock into irrigated rice paddy terraces would be the work not only of decades, but also gigatons of carbon emissions.

A more practical solution, from this anti-colonial, pro-environment perspective, is simply not to use air conditioning at all. By now, of course, AC is used on a vast scale outside the West; even Chinese pigs, which are generally treated notoriously poorly, sometimes enjoy cooler air than European commuters. Nevertheless, the view on the European Left is that most Europeans should endure heatwaves without AC, that the hottest summers on record should simply be rawdogged. France’s Right-wing National Rally wants to install AC across the country; the Left is scandalized. “We must absolutely not install air conditioning everywhere,” said Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of La France Insoumise, in June. “That would only make things worse.” The Left minds its own business, of course, when it comes to the soaring third-world use of AC. The Global South does what it will; Europe’s aged Boomers, conscripted into a continental display of self-flagellation, suffer what they must.

A softer form of this strain of thinking, but one that is nonetheless real, has made AC practically impossible to put into British newbuilds. To qualify for AC, a building must first satisfy the demanding requirements of the “cooling hierarchy”. Is the design of your house energy-efficient? Are the windows thick cuboids of plastic? Are there plants on the roof? Are the ceilings high? Are there solar panels on the roof as well as plants? Fail to comply and your council will order you to tear out the AC and open your windows instead.

With air conditioning now demarcated as a Right-wing technology, Americans mock overheated Europeans and joke about turning down their own ACs so low that they wake up cold. The war over air-conditioning is therefore a mirror to the faults of its antagonists: the know-nothing Right revels in its own selfishness, while the anti-Western Left finds ever-more inventive outlets for its narcissistic illiberalism.

How do we find our way out of this morass? Heat pumps, a favorite of the British establishment, are not the answer. In winter, Britons like warmth to come from plumbing rather than from vents. This means that our heat pumps are built into that plumbing, which makes them incapable of cooling. The only answer is air conditioning.

Fortunately for overheated Britons, the harms of AC are rapidly diminishing. Earlier types of AC unit used refrigerants that were potent greenhouse gases, but newer models use less damaging alternatives and are less liable to leak. As for the power consumed by the AC unit, there is no reason that it need be derived from fossil fuels. By definition, AC is required when the sun is at its hottest — which is, of course, when solar power is at its most useful. Without fossil fuels, our dysfunctionally decarbonized grid would find it impossible to warm our homes over winter; but in summer, cooling the same homes should be less of a challenge.

For that reason, the war over air conditioning has a good claim to being the culture wars’ stupidest excrescence yet. America aside, the Western public is broadly sympathetic to policy measures designed to curb global warming, but that sympathy is not inscribed in stone. If it becomes clear that ideology rather than righteous parsimony is responsible for our sweaty offices, restless bedrooms, and menaced grandparents, then the ideology itself will be threatened. Buoyed by the support of a well-intentioned public, the Left has dangerously overreached in its hostility to air conditioning, just as it has dangerously overreached with regard to multiculturalism and Net Zero.

Europe and Britain still hope, perhaps, to set a virtuous example to the rest of the world, to atone for the original sin of industrialization and to demonstrate our moral superiority. But nobody will follow us into a sweltering cul-de-sac; air conditioning is a technology of tremendous importance to a country’s prosperity and wellbeing. In one of his first acts as Singapore’s prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew had AC installed in buildings where his civil service worked, hailing it as “key to public efficiency”. China, thanks in part to government subsidies, has more home AC units than it has homes. Even today, the US Government conducts, via its National Labs, its own work on AC, attempting to make it cheaper and more effective.

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If a continent decides, instead, to become a 4,000-square mile armpit, it should not be surprised if it inspires few imitators. In the 21st century, we find it unconscionable that the Aztecs cut out prisoners’ hearts to feed the sun god; but we ourselves are sacrificing our elderly to that same god’s heat.

If Europe and Britain were to play to their strengths, they would be optimizing air-conditioning technology. And rather than settle for the ugly units that blemish the exteriors of American homes, the Old World could find more tasteful ways of retrofitting the technology — even combining it, as per the progressive academics, with what we might call indigenous European building styles.

And if the anti-AC lobby remains stubbornly in favor of heatwaves au naturel, then it should bear in mind an additional expression of thermodynamics. No matter how much of it is produced, hot air will always dissipate.

We have been here before. At regular intervals since Putin’s invasion, the Western political-media complex has worked to convince the public that victory for Ukraine was just around the corner, and that Russia itself was on the verge of collapse. In 2023, for instance, Western journalists and agenda-setters spent months hyping Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which was going to “turn the tide” in Kyiv’s favor. The campaign was a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains.

The latest alleged game-changer is Ukraine’s drone-strike campaign inside Russia — reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow — targeting logistics, fuel depots, refineries and supply lines. Several civilian targets have also been hit, causing numerous casualties. On Monday, Moscow suffered the largest drone attack so far. President Zelensky has now announced a 40-day operation against Russian targets to “influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war”, which is likely to mean many more such attacks. These measures coincide with the EU’s disbursement of the first €3.2 billion installment of its €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

The timing is not coincidental. On Tuesday, a crucial Nato summit began in Ankara, where the pro-war lobby — both in Europe and in Washington — is desperate to make the case that Ukraine is winning. It’s a narrative that Trump himself appears happy to indulge, probably to compensate for the Iran fiasco: he even signed the G7 leaders’ recent statement committing to “increase the delivery of air defense capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities”; to consider extending production licenses to Ukraine; and to “strengthen our sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors”.

It is also, in all likelihood, a response to mounting war fatigue in the West, confirmed by the refusal of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to finance the aforementioned loan — an opt-out that Hungary’s new pro-EU government has strikingly not reversed so far — followed by the new Bulgarian government’s decision to prohibit arms supplies to Ukraine.

Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. Russian oil production has been affected; there have been serious fuel shortages across the country, as even Putin has admitted. Ukraine has also disrupted Russian supply routes north of the Sea of Azov, causing power outages in Crimea and in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region nearby. But these attacks are unlikely to change the course of the war. The Russian economy is faltering, yet it remains in a better position than much of the EU. Indeed, citing higher oil prices, largely a consequence of the Iran war, the International Monetary Fund in April raised its forecast for Russia’s 2026 GDP growth by 0.3 points, to 1.1%. Meanwhile, it revised the forecast downward for the EU’s top three economies — Germany, France and Italy — to 0.8%, 0.9% and 0.2% respectively.

More crucially, though, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol. The city was one of the last strongholds on the road to important Ukrainian-controlled cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose capture is the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in the Donbass. Russian troops are also advancing around Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, making gains in urban fighting and on elevated positions, and continue to advance around Lyman and Rai-Oleksandrivka. All this flatly contradicts the prevailing “Ukraine has turned the tide” narrative.

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If further proof were needed that things are going badly for Ukraine, one need only look at the increasingly widespread “busification” policy — the kidnapping of conscription-age men off the streets to be sent to the front, which is fueling growing domestic opposition to the war — or at the EU’s proposal to exclude military-age Ukrainian men, in practice all men aged 23 to 60, from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme.

In this light, the drone campaign looks less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation: given Ukraine’s inability to turn the tide on the battlefield, Kyiv and Nato have decided to “bring the war to Russia”. Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine’s drone campaign will turn the war around — much less force Putin to capitulate. Indeed, over the past few days, Russian forces launched some of the largest drone and missile strikes on Kyiv so far, killing dozens of people.

How much Ukraine’s campaign is affecting public support for Putin is hard to say. It is true that it is having an effect on Russian morale, but as Leonid Ragozin has written, the situation in the country remains relatively stable: for all the dramatic visuals of burning refineries and queues at petrol stations, most Russians have seen worse in their lifetimes, and the vast majority still enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the poorer EU countries — a far cry from what they endured throughout the bad old days in the Nineties.

The most reliable “poll” will come on 20 September, when Russia holds elections to the State Duma; some analysts predict that the ruling United Russia Party will suffer a humiliating result at the hands of the Communists to its Left and the (confusingly named) Liberal Democratic Party to its Right. But anyone hoping this might pressure Putin into ending the war will be disappointed: both parties have taken an even more hardline stance on the conflict than Putin’s United Russia party. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response. After all, history suggests that when Russians feel pinned against the wall, they do not capitulate; they harden. Thus, the greater the pressure on Russia becomes, the more likely it is that Putin will find himself compelled to escalate the war.

Regardless of the short-term effects, Ukraine’s drone campaign is a textbook example of how drones are rewriting the rules of warfare in real time. Strategic deep strikes — the ability to reach the enemy’s cities, industries and leadership far behind the front — were until recently the privilege of countries with powerful air forces and missile arsenals. But low-cost, mass-produced drones have democratized it. A country losing the attritional contest on the ground — as Ukraine, on paper vastly inferior to Russia in material and manpower terms, plainly is — can now inflict vast damage deep inside the stronger power’s territory. And once the weaker side exercises that option, whatever incentive the stronger side may have had to exercise restraint collapses.

It is, after all, a matter of historical record that so far Russia has refrained from inflicting mass destruction on Kyiv and other major cities far from the front line, and throughout most of the war has conspicuously spared government decision-making centers — despite having the means to do so. For the first eight months of the conflict, Moscow also left Ukraine’s energy grid untouched; strikes began only after the Kerch Bridge attack of October 2022. In this sense, drone warfare does level the playing field, but it also invites escalation, by stripping the weaker side of the indirect protection that asymmetry itself — its inability to inflict mass damage on the enemy — once afforded it.

This is what makes the current moment so dangerous. A nuclear superpower is being subjected to a sustained campaign of strikes against its principal cities, its strategic infrastructure and, by extension, its leadership — supported by Western intelligence, executed with Western weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities.

As Matthew Blackburn of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs recently has warned, if Moscow decides its restraint within Ukraine is being exploited to impose humiliating damage on the Russian heartland, it may abandon strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in favor of the European supply hubs and manufacturing sites that make Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign possible in the first place, thereby correcting the asymmetry and restoring deterrence on its own terms. Indeed, Moscow has repeatedly signaled that its patience is not unlimited; voices within the Russian establishment increasingly speak of restoring deterrence by striking targets in Europe itself. The reason Russia has so far refused to do so is obvious: such an attack could easily spiral into an all-out war that Russia has no interest in fighting — as even General Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the alliance’s top military commander, recently noted. Simply put, the cost of retaliation has thus far exceeded the cost of tolerance. But if the latter keeps increasing, Russia’s calculus could very well change.

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The essential fact is that nobody in the West knows where Russia’s red lines lie — and indeed Western policy seems to proceed on the assumption that they do not exist at all. Meanwhile, the Europeans keep arguing that there is no alternative to continuing to support Ukraine indefinitely because “Russia refuses to negotiate”. But as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently wrote, it is the EU — not Russia — that has so far refused to negotiate. While Moscow has spent the past year in sustained talks with Washington and progressively abandoned several of its core demands, the Europeans have made negotiations conditional on an unconditional ceasefire that Russia cannot accept without surrendering its only leverage, and have wrapped this precondition in “principles” that amount to a demand for Russian capitulation.

The main victim of this posture has been Ukraine itself, condemned to a grinding war of attrition it cannot win militarily. Should exhaustion eventually produce a ceasefire without a settlement, meanwhile, it could lead to a Kashmir-style condition of permanent insecurity. It is in Ukraine’s interest — and in Europe’s interest as a whole — to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement instead. We know in broad terms what any realistic settlement would entail: territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees (short of Nato membership and Western troop deployments). Whether such an offer would suffice for Putin to claim his measure of victory and end the war, nobody can yet know. But what we do know is the cost of the status quo.

At night, women cluster around the most exclusive addresses in tiny skirts, towering heels, and fishnets. They are looking for men who will take them to their apartments or hotel rooms; they would refuse the back seat of a car. “These women are high class,” a local bartender tells me. “They look for clients with money.”

Outside his bar, I watch a tall black woman enveloped in fake-fur approach an elegant-looking man with swept-back silver hair and a well-tailored suit. The pair turn together and enter a smart hotel close by. The concierge swings open the door, bidding them a pleasant evening.

Belgium, famous for its chocolate, beer and EU officials, has more recently acquired a less salubrious notoriety: in 2022, it became the first country in Europe to fully decriminalize its entire sex trade. The legislation removed what activists termed “voluntary sex work” from the scope of the criminal law and invited pimps, brothel and escort agency owners to see themselves as legitimate businesspeople.

Then in 2024, following further lobbying from pro-prostitution activists, Belgium went further, offering formal employment contracts to women who work as prostitutes in licensed brothels; coercing others remains illegal, with unlicensed pimps liable for steep penalties. In theory, this should mean that Belgium’s estimated 30,000 women in prostitution are now workers just like any other — with access to maternity leave, sickness and holiday pay, and union membership. This, supporters of the legislation claimed, would “[lay] the groundwork for broader societal change in the perception of sex work and sex workers”. But has it?

In practice, these labor contracts are not available to students, part-time workers, or women without work or residency visas. Given the majority of women in the Belgium sex trade are trafficked — and therefore undocumented — they are excluded. So too are those in the “sugar babe” trades, stripping and porn. In fact, so far only four businesses have been legally recognized as legitimate brothels, compliant with the new laws.

In other words, the majority of women in this “business” are excluded from legislation that activists celebrated as “transformative” and “historic”. To date, there have been no cases in which a “brothel worker” has been granted sick leave, maternity pay, or taken a case against a brothel manager to an employment tribunal. Belgium has contrived to empower every one of its pimps and open up unparalleled choice for the male sexual consumer — while doing almost nothing to improve the lives of the women whose “work” makes any of this possible.

On the outskirts of the city, far from the polished facades of Avenue Louise, the trade is far less glossy. George operates his business from a former family home on a residential street, advertising on the internet. From the outside there is little to distinguish his property from his neighbors. Inside are three cluttered rooms, their walls adorned with pornographic art, including an almost life-size painting of a naked woman on all fours, with a man penetrating her from behind. George tells me he has “many regulars”.

Though he’s currently operating without a license, George hopes to become what Belgium’s new legislation terms a “brothel manager” — that is, a legal employer, entitled to hire women as “sex workers” under formal contracts.

George is keen to convince me that it’s all about giving “proper rights to the girls”, and “doing the right thing”. He speaks the language of regulation fluently. But then, he shows his hand: “I want to have a reliable workforce,” he says. “If they work for me, instead of just doing a shift when they feel like it, I have more control.”

Like all pimps, he’s in it for the profit. And if George gets his license, in the eyes of the law he will no longer be a pimp: he’ll be a respectable businessman with a “reliable workforce” doing his bidding.

Still, the fact that so few sex businesses — just four — have so far been given the green light from the authorities reflects the grim realities of the trade, which can be gleaned from the official guide to occupational health and safety in the sex trade in New Zealand, which decriminalized prostitution in 2002 and is a model for countries like Belgium. It addresses condom breakage, repetitive strain injury, violence from punters, and rape — described in the document euphemistically as an unfortunate occupational hazard which occurs “where workers are forced by clients to have sex without a condom against their will”. It also includes advice on “mopping up semen” potentially contaminated with HIV.

Last year, Belgium’s Public Health and Social Affairs Minister announced that seven STIs — hepatitis B, papillomavirus, syphilis, chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis — would be officially recognized as “occupational illnesses”. The health and safety advice in general is provided by pro-sex work lobbyists. 

The fact is, it is not in most brothel owners’ interests to become legitimate businesses. It would force them to comply with health and safety measures — and most are surely aware that the conditions in which they prostitute women would never pass muster. Some have criminal records, and do not want the scrutiny, or fear prosecution if they fail compliance checks. And most obviously, pimps don’t wish to pay tax.

The reality, then, remains that despite the reframing of pimps as legitimate business owners and vulnerable, exploited, frequently trafficked women as empowered “sex workers”, much prostitution in Belgium remains in the control of criminals. This much is clear from a walk down the Rue d’Aerschot, close to Brussels-Noord station. The street is filthy with litter and drug paraphernalia and lined with “window brothels” in which bikini-clad women, perched on stools, wait for punters. This is where punters come who don’t have a fancy hotel room, or any hotel room at all, to take women. Still it has a semblance of legitimacy. One regular sex buyer writes on a review website that the women behind the windows are more likely to have “been tested for diseases, unlike the ones hanging around on the street corner near the railway station”.

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The windows are rented by small property companies, and private landlords, and then sublet to the women in two shifts — 6pm till 6am and then a swift crossover. Lit up in neon red, they are starkly grotty. Imagine a butcher’s with its merchandise strung up for perusal in large display windows — only here, what’s on sale is human.

I arrive at just past six in the morning and see groups of young men, loitering. They are pimps: watching the street, smoking and speaking to a smattering of punters as they come and go, running through the prices and “services” on offer. The men are mainly Romanian and Bulgarian. Many of them sell drugs as well as sex, and some are part of trafficking gangs. These men are almost certainly operating illegally, in spite of the change in the law, which actually has hardly any effect on them at all. It’s a free-for-all, untroubled by the police.

Two women dressed in tracksuits and coats, and carrying sports bags, emerge from one brothel at the end of their shift. They exchange pleasantries with a similarly-dressed woman who is on her way in. Across the road, a smart middle-aged man disappears into one of the window brothels, beckoned in by a woman in a thong and bikini that barely covers her nipples.

“They often go for a quickie on their way to work — they want the women to be ‘fresh’, hence going there as they change shifts,” Taina Bien-Aimé tells me. She is director of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and has been watching the Belgium sex trade closely since it was legalized. “For these men, it’s just like having their morning coffee.”

This is no flippant analogy. During a previous investigation into the legal sex trade in Switzerland, I discovered an application made by businessman Bradley Charvet in Geneva for a license to open a “fellatio café”. For 50 Swiss francs ($50), customers were invited to choose a woman from an iPad menu, then order her to give him a blowjob along with his cappuccino. This is where the logic of legalization leads: a whole new menu of options for men. What it hasn’t done, anywhere it has been applied, is improve the lives of women.

The Netherlands legalized its sex trade in 2000. Only 5% of women who work as prostitutes have registered for tax. Germany introduced legislation in 2002 that meant that women in prostitution could, in theory, enter into employment contracts, sue for payment and register for health insurance, pension plans and other benefits. It didn’t work. Out of hundreds of thousands of women in the sex trade, only 44 registered for benefits prior to it becoming mandatory. Now that it is a requirement, it remains that only a minority have done so. Germany has become the “bordello of Europe” — with reportedly more prostitutes per capita than Thailand. Indeed, it is a key example of how decriminalization expands demand and creates the conditions in which trafficking can flourish.

It is estimated that anywhere between 200,000-400,000 women are in prostitution in Germany, serving over one million men per day. Mega-brothels are now a common feature of German cities, a form of industrialized prostitution. As in a battery farm, owners pack in as many bodies as they can. Some offer “early bird” deals: burger, beer and sex. Others offer “two for the price of one”, “happy hours” and “all-you-can-fuck” passes.

So who benefits? Again, it’s the men. Only 1% of women in the German sex trade have entered a full “work-contract” at a brothel or escort agency. A government investigation in 2018 could only identify 76 people who had registered as “prostitutes” in order to access social security. “You can’t call it a job and then have panic buttons in the workspace,” Bien-Aimé says. As she explains it, the new legislation only serves to normalize the exploitation and sale of women.

Indeed, the new laws put women at more risk. One clause in the Belgium legislation stipulates that if a prostitute refuses 10 sex acts or individual clients, the brothel owner can make a complaint about her. “A woman being unable to refuse certain johns, or sex acts, is called rape in any other circumstances,” Bien-Aimé points out.

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Nonetheless, the legislators insist they are on the side of the women. By legalizing prostitution and giving “workers” protection, Sandrine Daoud, a spokeswoman for the Belgian health minister, wrote, “we hope to enable all sex workers who want to leave the sector to do so”. However, she attempts to justify the law in the same breath as undermining it. “While we recognize that not all sex workers perform their activities out of their own free will,” she says, “it is much more difficult to get into contact with and inform sex workers about their rights when they hide their activities.”

Inevitably, though, the government didn’t listen to many dissenting voices when drafting its legislation. Natasha and Charlotte work for Isala, a feminist charity opposed to the new laws in Belgium. “They didn’t consult us, they didn’t go in the street, they didn’t open consultations to those of us that are critical of the sex trade,” says Charlotte. “They went through those associations that are openly pro-prostitution.”

Last year, Isala submitted a legal challenge to the government with the hope of eventually repealing the legislation and introducing the Nordic model. This model, pioneered in Sweden, criminalizes the demand for sexual services and stigmatizes the men who go looking for it. Meanwhile, it decriminalizes women who work in prostitution and provide “exiting” services to help them out of it.

I’ve interviewed hundreds of women in prostitution, and they all had very few alternative options and scant opportunity to leave. As Natasha points out, the majority of prostituted women in Belgium do not have a level of French or English that would allow them to have another job. Nor do they have much grasp of the law — and in practice, even if they did, it would likely be of little use. “In principle, the 2022 labor contract says they should be able to refuse sexual acts without being penalized by the brothel owner, but in reality, the client can do what he wants,” says Charlotte. “What control does she have with him when they are alone?”

And what of the argument that, now prostituted women in Belgium are legally able to unionize, new organizations will magically emerge specifically to fight coercive contractual clauses? Well, this is not what has happened, anywhere. As one former prostitute told me: “You can’t unionize prostitution. Why should the pimps care about stuff like sexual harassment, or violence, when this is what they are selling?”

Back on Rue d’Aerschot, squeezed between two window brothels, I find an organization that describes itself as the “Belgian union of sex workers”, or UTSOPI. Set up in 2015, it came to prominence during the Covid lockdowns, its (male) director Daan Bauwens tells me. “Sex workers were not entitled to the same benefits other workers were during the lockdown, so we would raise money to buy them food, and to keep them going. We were on the media a lot, so got quite a few donations.”

By the end of 2020, UTOPSI had hundreds of thousands of euros, much of it from the Government. However, none of that money has been used to help women to leave the sex trade — there is no budget for that, Bauwens tells me. After all, if “sex work” is now indeed just like any other work, why would anyone want to get out of it?

Instead, their budget appears to be spent on what he calls “outreach work”, meaning the distribution of condoms and hot drinks in the winter, as well as lobbying for decriminalization and disseminating pro-prostitution views across the media and public institutions. The UTSOPI has never appeared at an employment tribunal, nor intervened in a workplace dispute in the 19 months since the legal change.

What is the point of this purported union, if not to mitigate for the rights of women? Bauwens tells me that the only resistance to the new laws has come from “the ones we would call ‘sex worker exclusionary radical feminists’ (SWERFS). But that strain of feminism is not here anymore.”

That’s hard to believe, given the existence of groups such as Isala. But Bauwens is dismissive of their attempts to repeal the laws. “Their main argument is that sex work is not decent work, and everybody is entitled to have decent work, so our law should be repealed,” he says. “The constitutional court will never make a moral judgment. So, I don’t think the court will even take the case.” In Bauwens’s view, then, this work is decent.

A short walk from Bauwens’s office is Rue Eunice N. Osayande. It is named after a 23-year-old Nigerian woman who was trafficked into Belgium and put to work in the window brothels. Two years later, in 2018, she was murdered by a sex buyer. The street is close to where she was found stabbed to death.

Would the law that was passed four years after her death have saved Osayande from dying in her “decent” job? The evidence strongly suggests not. Trafficking remains rife and its victims voiceless — and the new legislation doesn’t apply to them anyway. Moreover, the arguments made by pro-prostitution lobbyists — that any criminal sanctions against pimps and sex buyers will only drive the activities underground — are plainly unfounded. “Decriminalization does the opposite of driving prostitution underground,” says Bien-Aimé. “It expands the market, and we know that it leaves the women no safer. Just look at the murders of prostituted women in countries such as the Netherlands, to know that this is not about safety for the women, but simply making it easier for the profiteers to advertise for custom.”

Another of the many promises made by the Belgian legislators was that if men knew these women were legitimate workers, they would treat them with more respect. The new laws would normalize the reporting of abusive punters and reduce social stigma. It would attract a “better class of client”. There is absolutely no evidence to date that any of this has happened.

But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. One Belgian website runs a “guestbook” for punters to leave a review of the women they buy. “Lena was very beautiful, she gave me a super good blowjob with a condom which I  would prefer without. Then I could fuck her in whatever position I wanted,” wrote one.

“She needs more focus on her job, she talks a lot, she doesn’t know how to suck a cock”, says another.

“If she cries, just ignore it,” wrote another. “She’s probably missing her kids back in whatever hellish African country she’s come from.”

In the shadow of the European Parliament at Maison Antoine, a famous frites spot, four young British men are discussing their hangovers as they wolf down fried food and drink pints of Coca-Cola. They tell me they are here to visit the red light area for a boys’ weekend. Why Belgium? “In Prague, the women are dirty, but here, because it’s legal, the government makes them have blood tests to make sure they are disease-free,” says one. “They are not allowed to work if it doesn’t come back clean,” says another. As far as they are concerned, the new laws are a win-win.

Back at my hotel, a middle-aged German man tells me he’s here to visit the Banksy museum, and the red light area. “I’ve given up on women,” he says. When I point out that he’s traveled across a border to be with one, he says: “That’s different. They don’t argue with you, the ones you pay.”

Many locals, however, are less enthusiastic. “We need someone to look at the mess it has made,” says a taxi driver who picks me up from the red light area. “British men, they come over, they’re drunk, and the Germans, they talk about the prostitutes like they are scum. And the pimps of the women are not nice men. I pick them up, and they are mean, violent, often on drugs. It’s ruining the city.”

Unfortunately, though, the trend for this laissez-faire approach to prostitution is only growing. France currently condemns prostitution as violence and abuse of women, and criminalizes the punters rather than the women. However, both Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella of the far-Right Rassemblement National Party are in support of the women running brothels as cooperatives. They too believe that paid-for sex is a necessary part of French society. A decent job.

Meanwhile, several bills have passed through the European Parliament naming the trafficking of human beings into the sex trade as a gross human rights violation. These same panjandrums would seem to be untroubled by the sewer on their doorstep.

“I was told, when I first came to Belgium, that I should work on Avenue Louise because that’s where all the ‘good’ clients are,” sex-trade survivor Margot tells me. “That I would make a fortune and be given champagne in fancy hotels rooms. But the men are the same. They all want to use and abuse you, wherever they buy us.”

The difference between the women on Avenue Lousie and the women in the window brothels of the Rue d’Aerschot is a bit like the difference between free-range and battery-farmed produce. The marketing is different. But the punishment is the same, as is the haunted look in their eyes. “Prostitution takes away our freedom, discriminates against us because we are poor, and female,” Margot tells me. For Eunice Osayande, stabbed on a cold, lonely street, death was the penalty she paid.

But what I can do — rather than offer a range of uncertain forecasts — is assess the range of plausible outcomes to this conflict and consider how each will affect countries and people in different ways. There’s no scientifically accurate way of eliminating uncertainty; so let’s embrace it. This is not a trivial exercise: I can recall only a few times in my own life when the range of possible geopolitical and economic outcomes, good or bad, has been as wild as it is today.

With his “known-unknowns” and “unknown-unknowns”, Donald Rumsfeld has actually provided us with a useful starting place to assess outcomes. The unknown-unknowns are often more important, but they are beyond our reach. “Whereof one cannot speak,” said Wittgenstein, “thereof one must be silent”. These are what economist Frank Knight was referring to when he coined the notion of “unquantifiable uncertainty”, or true uncertainty, as distinct from outcomes that carry a small probability.

So while little of value can be said about the unknown-unknowns, known-unknowns are generally worthy of deeper reflection. We all know about the truly bad scenarios stemming from the war. Airlines may run out of kerosene in six weeks; the world could run out of fertilizer and basic chemicals if the blockade continues for much longer. We know that Asia would be hit the hardest, followed by Europe, with the US affected least.

There are also potentially good outcomes. Europe has been offered a reminder that its investments in energy independence are worthwhile — and this includes both nuclear and renewables. The European Greens were mad to oppose nuclear power, but they were right about renewables, if only from the perspective of energy independence.

Beyond the war, which should end eventually, there are other positive economic scenarios coming down the track. The most interesting part of the latest World Economic Outlook by the International Monetary Fund was not the central forecast, the risk of global recession: but, rather, the wide range of possible scenarios it also weighed up. We truly live in a world of Knightian uncertainty.

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I’m talking here about plausible scenarios, those that have a reasonable chance of occurring: the known-unknowns. Of particular interest are those scenarios at the extreme ends of the spectrum. Some middle-of-the-road scenarios are plausible, of course: economic forecasters always use them for their forecasts. But they have no higher probability of occurring than the good or bad ones. What you really want is information about the spread of outcomes, not the average.

If you want to understand uncertainty, after all, the mean is your enemy. Politicians should care about the voter with the median income; the voter who, when income is ranked from poorest to richest, is sitting in the middle. He would be a different person from the man with the average income, because the super-rich distort the picture. It’s the “Bill Gates walks into the pub” problem, where a single billionaire raises the average income of a group.

There’s an old joke about the statistician who died crossing a river that was three foot deep on average. Real statisticians, of course, know about this stuff. The people most at risk of such misjudgments are those with a Statistics 101 background, who have been taught some powerful techniques they then unleash on an unsuspecting public: economists, journalists, doctors, epidemiologists and unfortunately also climate scientists.

One of the most catastrophic uses of averages is represented by the communication strategy of climate scientists, when, 10 years ago this week, they set a target to keep the increase in average global temperature to below 2°C. But what kills us is not the average temperature — the 2°C extra — but the extremes: floods, heat, forest fires.

These are the metrics the climate community should have communicated. When you’re told, after all, that the temperature is going to rise by a few degrees, you get the deckchairs out. Indeed, I heard one well-known political commentator claiming that it might be nice for the weather to be a little warmer in Northern Europe. When, on the other hand, you receive a flood warning, you get the sandbags out.

In short, how we communicate risk determines how we act, and misusing statistics inevitably leads to misjudgments.

So rather than making sweeping average claims about the future, whether about the climate or war with Iran, a better way of thinking about our planet in the medium term is by reflecting on how different plausible scenarios could affect regions in different ways.

The most important positive scenario we might consider is the AI-led productivity boom. It has not happened yet — but there are data points suggesting that it may be starting to happen. If it does, it would benefit the US a lot more than the rest of the world. After all, America invented the technology; Silicon Valley’s foundational AI models are ahead of everyone else’s; and the US’s AI infrastructure is far and away the global leader. China, for its part, is next in line. The People’s Republic may not have invented AI: but it was easily the most successful second mover.

Unsurprisingly, Europe will gain least from the AI revolution. The EU is still in data-protection mode, as much a function of its cultural stance as individual government policies. From LLMs to driverless vehicles, indeed, the Europeans have decoupled from most of our century’s cutting-edge technologies. Pharmaceuticals is the one important exception, but here too China is catching up fast. China also is ahead on renewable investments, but here, at least, the Europeans do better than the Americans.

When it comes to bad outcomes, then, Europe is at greater risk than its rivals. And I don’t just mean technologically. There is a plausible scenario that the war in Ukraine could spread, for instance to the Baltic states, and the US would almost certainly not come to Europe’s rescue. Donald Trump’s line about how the Europeans “weren’t there for us” when the US attacked Iran will keep ringing in our ears as the scenario of a European war grows — in my opinion, a non-trivial tail risk.

Similarly, the Iran ceasefire could break down and the violence spread across the Middle East. Yet while there’s a lot of uncertainty about all these scenarios, we can say with some confidence that there is no realistic scenario of war hitting America’s shores.

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Absent any definitive forecasts, from this brief analysis, I can make some sharp observations. First: the US is clearly in a better position than everyone else. Second: the US is more likely to benefit from any upside scenario, and less likely to be hit by a downside one. I’d therefore warn against those heralding the end of US global dominance, let alone the end of Trump’s presidency. This is mostly wishful thinking. The President has certainly made some foolish decisions, but the US is still at the head of the pack.

Things don’t look so rosy for Europe: it will not benefit from a global productivity boom and will be disproportionately exposed to the bad scenarios. And in those areas where it is strong, it is under attack by China. East and South East Asia sit somewhere in between the two polar opposites — beneficiaries of 21st-century technologies, but not as much as the US. But even though Asia is at greater risk of disruption from the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, it is still more resilient to shocks than Europe.

Whatever happens, one single forecast, or even a focus on two or three scenarios, can’t hope to capture the deep asymmetry of the uncertainty we’re currently facing.

But people who embrace uncertainty don’t think in terms of baselines. They don’t look for polls or projections. Nor do they seek to control that uncertainty. They seek to learn from it. Perhaps we could all learn from them. Forecasts are for losers, and once you’re comfortable admitting that you just don’t know — you might end up seeing things more clearly.

Which raises a larger question: why is Europe falling behind? The average European is much better off than the average Chinese, and the EU population of 450 million is larger than that of America, with its 324 million. And yet in one industry after another, Chinese or US firms dominate world markets and global rankings. Between them, Chinese and American firms are responsible for 40% of global output.

Even worse, Europe is lagging behind the United States and the People’s Republic in fast-growing, innovative industries, not least artificial intelligence — in part because European R&D spending is half that of  its Chinese and American rivals. 

The upshot, then, is that the lack of pan-European champion firms that can invent and invest in new technology, dominate the European market, and make inroads abroad, is the fundamental cause of Europe’s lack of competitiveness with the United States and China — not the costs of the European welfare state, or higher labor union density, or export surpluses, or high energy costs, or other factors that are often cited.

Some degree of relative decline by Europe is unavoidable. The economic development of China and other parts of the world naturally is causing both the American and European shares of global GDP to shrink. While shares of world GDP are important for military power, in the long run, progress in an advanced society depends not on overall output, which can be boosted merely by population growth, but on productivity growth — making goods and providing services with less labor and other material inputs over time, thanks to technological innovation. 

That’s why Europeans should be concerned by the fact that, between the outset of the pandemic in late 2019 and 2024, labor productivity per hour grew by only 0.9% in the eurozone (in the United States, by contrast, it grew nearly 7%).

Since the Industrial Revolution, labor productivity has mostly been driven by technological innovation. Today’s libertarians, trust-busters, and populists don’t want to hear it, but modern technological progress isn’t incremental and driven by constant competition for customers among many similar firms. Rather, it is transformational and driven by radical technological breakthroughs whose development and deployment must be paid for by the deep pockets of giant firms, along with governments and huge pools of venture capital.

Laptops didn’t evolve incrementally as a result of free-market competition among manual typewriters; they drew on new technologies, originally developed by the US government and big firms like IBM, rendering typewriters obsolete. 

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The economist Joseph Schumpeter coined the term “creative destruction” to mean the replacement of entire products and entire industries by technological innovation, which he described as a “process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one.” In the words of Schumpeter: “The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens, but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.”

Nylon stockings for women were made possible by corporate chemistry labs and mass-production factories — Big Chemistry and Big Factory, to use the pejorative language of today’s antitrusters — not by competition among small businesses. Contra Hollywood and business-school mythology, the next big breakthrough technology isn’t going to come from a college dropout in his parents’ garage or an eccentric solitary inventor with Einstein hair.

When laptops wiped out typewriters, and nylon stockings replaced cotton and wool stockings, they wiped out a lot of jobs. That’s OK. A dynamic technological economy doesn’t have to be anti-worker. On the contrary, high wages give employers an incentive to substitute technology for labor. But it must be easy to close down failing businesses and shrink obsolescent industries, while transferring workers as painlessly as possible to dynamic firms and growing sectors. 

Economists call this “labor-market churn.” According to the US Federal Reserve, during the recession that came in the wake of Covid, three times as many American as European workers changed jobs, even though the workforces of the United States and the European Union are comparable in size.

While the European social model has much to teach America in terms of social insurance and sectoral collective bargaining, all too often, the attempt to preserve specific jobs means preserving specific companies and specific industries, as well, and this reactionary preservationism comes at a price in an era of transition from one techno-economic paradigm to another.

The reason is simple. There are two ways that technological innovation can spread throughout the economy. One is the brutal Darwinian method — the early adopters of innovation wipe out their less-innovative rivals and replace them. A gentler alternative to mass extinction is for government to diffuse technological innovations to small businesses, which, unlike big firms with deep pockets or promising startups with rich backers, lack the ability to invest in R&D and new machinery or software.

As a guest of the French government some years ago, I met with local officials seeking to create their version of Silicon Valley. Using a 1960s-vintage overhead projector, they showed me a diagram of links and partnership among a dozen local firms and educational institutions and asked what I thought of their plan. I explained: “In the United States, we are much more Darwinian. A few successful firms drive the others out of business and absorb their workers and assets.” An official smiled ruefully and said, “In France, no institution can ever be allowed to die.”

It is true that there have been successful examples of this kinder and gentler, non-Darwinian approach to the diffusion of new technologies. In America, land-grant universities helped modernize American agriculture by diffusing scientific and engineering breakthroughs to existing family farmers with the help of county extension agents. In Germany, the Frauenhofer Institute offers R&D and technological instruction to small and medium enterprises that otherwise might not be able to afford them.

As a practical matter, however, the Darwinian, winner-take-all method is the quickest and most efficient way to bring about a technological upgrade of an economy. The permissive attitude toward firm destruction in the United States has allowed firms with new internet-based models — Amazon (retail), Office Depot (hardware), Lowe’s (home supplies) — to annihilate many of their struggling and technologically primitive Mom-and-Pop store rivals. And America’s permissive approach to mergers and acquisitions allows startups to grow by incorporating other companies and likewise permits entrepreneurs to sell innovations to existing big firms that can provide scale.

The Darwinian method of technological development and diffusion by individual firms only works if the baby tyrannosaur, after hatching, can grow to great size. The most technologically advanced sectors of the economy, like manufacturing and software and telecommunications, are characterized by increasing returns to scale or network effects that reward sheer size. In these sectors, free-market competition will quickly result in the elimination of many firms and the domination of an industry by one or a few winners — not because the winners are cheating monopolists, but because they benefited as lucky first movers from the ability to scale up rapidly.

The ability of dynamic firms to scale depends not only on permissive competition laws that allow some firms to die and others to grow or merge, but also on the size of the market, both at home and abroad. Populous countries, including China and the United States, tend to dominate the Olympic games and other international sports competitions. Darwinism again! The best soccer players from Brazil (213 million people) tend to be better than the best soccer players from Suriname (population 645,000). 

As with athletes, so with corporations. Companies from Japan and Germany do well in global trade in part because Japan and Germany are the two most populous democratic capitalist industrial nations, after the United States. And as a rule in Europe, the wealthier nations have the largest shares of their workforces employed by large and medium firms, like Sweden, France, and Germany, while the countries with the highest employment by small businesses tend to be poorer (Greece, Italy).

China’s national champions are supported by the state in various ways intended to minimize the Middle Kingdom’s reliance on foreign technology and foreign firms. They include Huawei in telecom, Xiaomi in consumer electronics, and the Aviation Industry Corporation of China. Both Europe and the United States have imposed tariffs to protect their own automobile companies from China’s state-sponsored electric-vehicle champion, BYD.

Having lost global market dominance to China in many manufacturing industries, the United States holds its own in IT thanks to American champions like Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Meta, and IBM. In the AI race with China, the American team is led by giant firms including Nvidia, Anthropic, and OpenAI.

What about Europe? Apart from Airbus, there is no pan-European techno-industrial giant comparable with these Chinese and American titans. To be sure, there are national champions based in individual European nations: France’s Dassault Rafale in defense, Germany’s BMW and Volkswagen in auto. As one observer notes, “Europe is a graveyard of failed [pan-European] national champions. They span from the glamorous Concorde to obscure ventures like pan-European computer consortium Unidata or notorious Franco-German search engine Quaero” (googling became a verb; no one remembers Quaero).

Attempts to create purely national, rather than pan-European, champions have often failed, as well. After World War II, the British government sought, by means of mergers and industrial policy, to consolidate inefficient industries and create colossal British national champions that could compete with the big American firms: British Steel (steel), British Leyland (auto), International Computers Limited (IT). The execution was a failure, but the strategy was sound, as we can see from the success of immense Chinese and American firms.

Unfortunately, European “competition policy” — what in the United States is called antitrust — is a major obstacle to the scaling up of European firms that can boost productivity and compete with those of China and the United States at the global level. In 2019, the European commission refused to allow a merger between the two biggest train-signaling and railcar systems companies, Germany’s Siemens and France’s Alstom, even though the new corporation might have dominated markets outside of Europe as well as within. 

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Unable or unwilling to understand the industrial economics of imperfect markets and economies of scale, European competition-policy advocates (along with American progressive and populist antitrusters) cling to pre-industrial free-market dogma. According to Margrethe Vestager, a former EU competition policy officer, “competitiveness within a single market translates into external competitiveness.” On the contrary, as China’s and America’s national champions demonstrate, dominance of a single market translates into competitiveness in global markets, and that kind of dominance can never be obtained if a national or bloc government insists on mechanically breaking up successful companies or preventing mergers in order to keep companies small. 

Within Europe, there is growing recognition that scale matters in productivity growth and global commerce. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed that companies be allowed to increase their scale by consolidation, and the lowering of barriers to a single truly integrated European market in strategic sectors. In Germany in 2019, at the time of the EC anti-merger ruling, Economy Minister Peter Altmaier proposed an industrial policy involving the creation of European national champions.

From a technocratic point of view, creating a genuine European single market in which pan-European national champions can be born and grow to compete with Chinese and American titans in global markets makes sense. Is it politically realistic? It will be difficult.

Viktor Orbán may have lost his bid for re-election, and Trump may have alienated his European allies on the Right, but “national sovereigntism” will remain a major force in European countries.  The attempt to create a single European market in labor, in which Albanians and Poles willing to work for lower wages could move to Britain, backfired and motivated Brexit. And while pseudo-populists may campaign as nationalists and then govern as pro-business transnational neoliberals, nationalism is likely to ensure that the project of creating genuine “single markets” in European labor, services, banking, and energy is doomed.

But a compromise between a single European superstate and a nationalist Tower of Babel might be found in the idea of a “multi-speed Europe” in which some member nations can agree to greater integration in certain sectors without requiring others to join them.  Already membership in the Eurozone currency bloc and the Schengen Agreement governing border checkpoints are examples of differential integration. If a few of the larger European countries like Germany and France agree to support European champions in particular strategic industrial sectors, it should not be necessary to give Malta, Luxembourg, and Cyprus a veto. The inspirational success of Airbus should negate the paralyzing memory of failures like the Concorde.

To call a company or an industry a “dinosaur” is usually to dismiss it as doomed to extinction. But in today’s global Jurassic Park, to avoid extinction, Europe needs some young, vigorous dinosaurs of its own.

Correction: An earlier version of this essay misstated the population of Suriname.

In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

The US has too many other interests — both in the Middle East and beyond — to be Israel’s unconstrained ally in its endless fight for survival. And then there is the sharp “post-heroic” asymmetry between the two nations. American tolerance for war casualties is certainly still higher than Europe’s, where President Macron abandoned 1.9 million square miles across the Sahel, long secured by just 5,000 French troops, to the jihadis, apparently terrified that 10 might be killed at once. When that number of French troops died on a single day in Afghanistan, President Sarkozy’s presidency was irredeemably ruined. 

Since October 7, 2023, Israel has lost 1,152 soldiers without political consequence — whereas Trump would be impeached, with plenty of Republican votes, if a population-proportionate 50,732 Americans were killed while fighting Iran. The same is probably true even if that number were halved, or quartered.   

More generally, meanwhile, Netanyahu should have declined Trump’s heart-warming offer to be Israel’s superpower ally because of the very same free-wheeling pragmatism that induced Trump to get involved. Pragmatism has its virtues, and so does Trump’s perpetual optimism. But there are still some unyielding realities in this world, including geographic ones. One of these is that about a fifth of the world’s oil, about a fourth of its liquid natural gas, and over 10% of its fertilizer, travels through the Strait of Hormuz. 

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Iran’s naval warships and submarines are no more, and even the Revolutionary Guards’ motorboats are mostly destroyed. But there are still at least 10 islands that must be denied to infiltrated Revolutionary Guard units to ensure the Persian Gulf’s navigable channels are truly safe. There are also some 1,500 miles of Iranian coastline, every mile of which must be constantly surveilled, in granular detail, to detect and destroy any anti-ship missile launcher or similar threat.

That calls for quite a lot of deployable troops — many more than the 5,000 Marines bandied about these days — with the resultant exposure to casualties. The US may be more willing to bear casualties than Europe, but each death nonetheless entails a political cost much higher than was the case during the Vietnam War, whose soldiers were born when the US fertility rate was well over 3.5. Every death is a tragedy, obviously, but losses must be even more intolerable now that few families have more than one child. 

One can see why some perfectly reasonable people respond to all this by asserting the simple truth that American power is ultimately generated by its own magnificently inventive society, kept in funds by the world’s most courageous investors — European financial prudence is now the biggest obstacle to European progress — and not by anything beyond America’s shores. It is now very possible to imagine a US that is still the leading superpower, by virtue of its vastly superior technology, but without being a global power. 

Abandoning the Persian Gulf to Iran’s Shia supremacists, who would quickly control the Arab side as well, would be a very long step in that direction, and there are even good excuses to assuage the shame factor. That is the “defection” of the European allies, whose very existence as independent states originated in the US decision to remain in Europe after the end of the Second World War. 

This defection was already very plain last year, with the frankly astonishing refusal of most European allies to acknowledge the deadly peril of Iran’s roughly 400 kilograms of 60% enriched uranium which, as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency patiently explained at the time, would allow Iran to produce at least 10 fission bombs in short order.

Yet when dozens of Israeli fighter bombers — and seven US B-2 stealth bombers — demolished Iran’s nuclear installations on 25 June last year, there was no outburst of gratitude across European capitals, each of which would otherwise have had to contend with nuclear-armed Revolutionary Guards, whose willingness to kill tens of thousands of their own citizens suggests a readiness to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of Western unbelievers. 

But there was no applause, no gratitude, no support — only more “anti-colonial” polemics against Israel, and even more anti-American resentment, as if the conjunction of nuclear weapons with fanatics waiting for the return of the Twelfth Imam and the “end of history” were not a danger unprecedented in history. 

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This time around, when Israel’s aim was to prevent its own destruction from a gigantic barrage of Iranian missiles, by attacking missile factories and underground storage sites, and the US aim was to destroy the headquarters and depots of the Revolutionary Guards and their murderous Basij militia, with the faint hope of an uprising, the response was not just a lack of gratitude. It was outright sabotage through the denial of access to US bases or the prohibition of overflights. The first defector was Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s impeccably elegant bourgeois prime minister, who rules his country by herding over a dozen Leftist and regional separatist parties in coalition. 

It was not that Sánchez denied the support of his country’s armed forces — which feature such wonders as a pair of proudly Spanish-made submarines that cost as much as nuclear subs, and an army which has 150 generals for perhaps 4,000 combat-ready soldiers. What Sanchez denied was the use of the Rota naval station, and the Torrejón and Morón airbases, important for US deployments to the Middle East as the first refueling stops after crossing the Atlantic.  

President Macron, who long ago gave up his attempt to modernize France, followed by also denying US military overflights and, more ambitiously, trying to deny freight overflights carrying cargo for US bases. Even Giorgia Meloni — the same one who kept flying to Palm Beach to seek favor at Trump’s court — denied the use of the Sigonella airbase in Sicily.

The British government has been altogether more cooperative, quietly allowing unfettered use of US fighters stationed at RAF Lakenheath, and also the use of RAF Fairford with its especially long runways for the refueling transits of US bombers. Even so, Britain farcically demanded the right to approve individual targets; as if they were not routinely switched in the course of operations.

Trump’s reaction to the performative anti-Americanism of Sánchez, Macron and Meloni has an extra edge. But even Americans who intensely dislike Trump understand that a new elite anti-Americanism now exists across Europe, an embittered reaction to its glaring failure to keep up with US innovation. Yet now that the US has left Iran without an airforce or a navy, Trump has invited the Europeans — the very countries that need oil and gas from the Gulf — to send their own armed forces to secure the Strait. At the very least, they can gain recompense from the Arab states that Iran attacked. 

Nobody in the world is completely independent, but many countries are more robust than we are. Russia has proven resilient, shaking off Western sanctions, which should come as no surprise to anyone who knows the country. China, too, is clearly resilient. And the US is more than resilient. It is a country that thrives under adversity, very much in accordance with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s notion of “Antifragility”.  Modern Europe, however, is most certainly not antifragile. With every shock, it weakens. After the Covid pandemic, the US reconnected with its pre-pandemic growth trajectory. The Europeans, mostly, did not. Our GDP settled at a level below its previous trajectory — growing at an increasingly lower rate.

It is now happening again. Only three weeks into the US-Iran war, European interest rates have risen and there are reports of gas shortages. Why are the European gas tanks almost empty? Why have the Europeans not built a large strategic oil reserve, like the US and China, or gas reserves lasting for several years?

The very essence of dependency is when you let others do your strategic thinking. In Niall Ferguson’s biography of Kissinger, the ex-secretary of state is quoted as saying back in 1966 that “the present system encourages too many of our allies to shift the costs and the responsibilities of the common defense to us”. This has been a theme in transatlantic relations ever since, as Europe’s culture of dependency expanded into other areas, including technology. It’s like a drug addiction that started out casual and harmless but eventually became destructive.

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The problem with political addictions, especially those that have been allowed to fester for decades, is that they become hard to reverse.  For example, Germany made itself dependent on Russia for its gas supplies for the two decades until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It took a war to end it. At that point, the Germans switched towards gas from the US and Qatar and replaced one dependency with another. They are dependent on gas because they persisted in killing the only two energy sources they had: coal and nuclear. Yes, there is clearly a good environmental reason to phase out coal, but this wasn’t the right time. To end both coal and nuclear together, and to do so simultaneously, is hopping mad. Nobody understood nuclear engineering better than the Germans; they gave up on an important energy source, as well as a technology.

If you prioritize strategic independence, the right policy mix for European countries would be the kitchen-sink approach and do everything: nuclear, renewables, gas, and coal. If one goes, you still have the others. The idea that Europe, which is one of the least resource-rich places on earth, has a choice in this matter is delusional. The Europeans Greens were right about renewables, but they messed up by turning it into an ideological debate. So did the parties on the Right, who were anti-renewables. I think this is just as stupid.

Europe hasn’t just sacrificed its energy independence, but its military independence too. Our European armies are in a dreadful state. The decay cannot be adequately measured in terms of military spending as a proportion of GDP. The metric vastly understates the true extent of the dilapidated state of our armed forces. General Sir Richard Barrons, a former commander of Britain’s Joint Forces Command, said that the British Army, were it to act alone, “could seize one small market town on a good day”. I have heard similar comments from German Bundeswehr generals. They all agree they couldn’t fight Russia. When Europe spends on average 2% of its GDP on defense, and the US spends 3.5%, this does not even begin to tell you what’s really going on. If you measure it in terms of what security the money has bought, the gap is much bigger than the one between those two headline numbers.

Because of this, we cannot supply more weapons to Ukraine. We don’t have any left that we can discard without endangering our own security even further. Europe’s armed forces also fail to attract the right people. I know of someone who was rejected by the German army over a decade ago on the grounds that he was overqualified. Back then, the German army was a welfare program for unemployed young men. This was when Ursula von der Leyen was Germany’s defense minister. Today she is President of the European Commission,

The reason why we Europeans hyperventilate so much about Donald Trump is that he threatens our dependence on America like no one else has ever done. He threatened to pull out of Nato unless we spend more money on defense. And now one of the many unintended consequences of his war against Iran, which is a big political and military miscalculation, is that it exposes the weaknesses of our energy policies. It really is his war, and our problem.

If we have to pay for our own defense, our own energy security, and for Ukraine, out of our own pocket, then the math is quite simple: we can no longer afford cradle-to-grave welfare systems. We Europeans arrogantly look down on Americans because the US has food stamps where we have guaranteed citizens’ incomes. We Europeans lived in a delirious state, one in which we mistook our own pathetic dependence for cultural superiority. Once you are at such an advanced stage of delusion, it is going to be very difficult to reconnect back to reality. I don’t see any political party, in any European country, on the Left, the Right, or in the center, that has a concrete strategy for an independent Europe. All that is on offer is different forms of dependency.

This leads naturally to the question of what to expect going forward. Until about a decade ago, I was moderately optimistic that the EU, or rather the eurozone, could emerge as a vehicle for geopolitical power and independence. If the euro had been fortified by a capital markets union, and a sovereign debt instrument, the EU would have acquired an instrument of geopolitical force, very much in the way the US is exploiting the dollar, and its dominance of the global financial market, as a tool for geopolitical sanctions.

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The eurozone crisis was the moment when it became clear that the EU would not go down in this direction. It was a decision of historical importance. The opportunity came, and it went. The EU chose the soft option, a central bank bailout that transformed an acute crisis into the low-burner, long-term decay the EU finds itself in today.

The most probable way for change to occur is through an existential crisis, brought about by one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse: war, pestilence, famine or death. We had a pandemic. Then a war. Then another war. Fertilizer shortages might  lead to a famine. The global financial crisis was an important historical event, but it was not the big one. There is no preordained timeline to any of this. The state of delirium can easily outlast all of us. But however long it persists, it is unsustainable. This won’t go on — not because it shouldn’t, but because it can’t. A dependency is only ever sustainable if the side you depend on plays along. Trump has broken that link. I think it’s unlikely that even a Democratic successor would reestablish it. You can no longer be a drug addict when the supply runs out.

The real irony here is that we Europeans used to be the ones that others were dependent on. But no more.  Connally’s famous quip about the dollar being the US currency and Europe’s problem had a European precursor: the Austrian diplomat Klemens von Metternich. He once said of France, the dominant continental power in the 18th and 19th centuries, that “when France sneezes, the rest of Europe catches a cold”. Today, it’s America that’s sneezing — and Europe can’t shake its cold.

For all the genuine and awe-inspiring might of America’s war machine, geography has given Iran an advantage in the Strait of Hormuz to which there is no obvious military solution. It is difficult to imagine what the Marine Expeditionary Unit, currently steaming toward the Gulf from the Pacific where it had been deployed to deter China, can do to unblock the Strait. Even if the 2,500 deployable Marines seize Qeshm island, on the Iranian side of the strait, they and the shipping they are being sent to guard will still be within range of weapons systems located within the mainland city of Bandar Abbas — and among its half-million population — and in the craggy and desolate mountain ranges behind. Senator Lindsay Graham’s proposal of seizing Kharg island, more than 300 miles away at the other end of the Persian Gulf, would still require the taskforce to sail through the very same strait from which, fearful of losses, the US Navy chooses to steer well clear.

It is all very well for Trump to demand that European, or even Chinese, warships escort oil tankers through the narrow waterway, but there is a reason that the US Navy has refused the same task. What America cannot do without bearing politically unsustainable risk, and very little prospect of success, Britain certainly cannot, and it is petulant and ultimately risible of Trump to demand we try. As Germany’s defense minister Boris Pistorius rightly observed this week, “What does Donald Trump expect from a handful or two handfuls of European frigates to achieve there in the Strait of Hormuz, which the powerful American Navy cannot manage alone?”

In these inauspicious circumstances, the idea that Britain should be doing more to help does not seem compelling, whatever confused and rambling outbursts emanate from the imperial center. The single drone that hit the American hangar in RAF Akrotiri may have been an embarrassment for Whitehall, but it was hardly a catastrophe. The seeming absence of a ground-based air defense system may be a mysterious oversight, but as Israel and the Gulf kingdoms show, even the most modern and extensive GBAD installation does not provide total defense. The carrier that many Fleet Street hawks demanded should immediately sail for Cyprus is already busy in the High North. Indeed, its current deployment, announced last month, came after Trump’s own declarations that Europeans were paying such insufficient attention to Arctic security that America has the right to seize Greenland, and perhaps Canada too. It is not Britain’s responsibility to chase after every military whim, reasonable or otherwise, of our imperial patron. In any case, the whole purpose of Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas is to act as our unsinkable carrier in the Levant: in Cyprus, and in the skies over Jordan, Iraq and the Gulf states, the RAF is already active shooting down missile threats to regional allies, and there is no obvious logic in seeking to do more.

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Macron’s European flotilla, led by France, and assembling in the Eastern Mediterranean, displays more than a touch of overkill: for the level of threat it faces, Cyprus must now be the best-defended country in the world. It is certainly an impressive sight, and a galling one for British observers of our own naval decline — yet competing with France is not in itself a vital national interest. Rather than being driven by strict military necessity, this is an act of political theater in which European leaders can signal both their capacity to act decisively in concert when one of their number is threatened, and their willingness to maintain a certain distance from the United States in doing so. Dismissively quashing Trumpian suggestions that it might sail eastwards to the arena of America’s muddled war, Macron’s government clearly sees the deployment, coming so soon after the announcement that France will expand the defensive umbrella of its independent nuclear deterrent across vast swathes of Europe, as tangible proof of the latent power that a French-led Europe, independent of Nato, can muster in defense of its own interests. We are less weak than we tell ourselves, the flotilla says, and our erratic overlord less strong.

Politically, the implications of all this for Britain are unclear. Starmer’s government has, correctly, chosen not to commit itself to this war, which is unfortunately not quite the same thing as remaining entirely detached from it. There is not, after all, much difference between Britain’s Sovereign Base Areas in Cyprus, unwillingly hosted by Cypriots for use in wars of no interest to them, and the notional RAF bases here in Britain from which American long-range bombers set off to and return from their missions over Iran. For the Greens and Scottish Nationalists to condemn the use of these bases is entirely expected. Yet when we see the keen populist bellwether of liberal centrist opinion Ed Davey demand a fully independent British nuclear deterrent, something has surely changed. It is hard, now, not to palpably feel the tide of empire retreating, though this time round with us as the natives observing, with mixed feelings, the crumbling power of their imperial master. Living through a time of historic changes is a more disorienting and ambiguous experience than the confident hindsight of historians later pretends: we can expect our politicians to struggle with the new realities struggling to be born.

It is reassuring then, at a moment in which Britain’s Right-wing parties have not covered themselves in glory, that Reform’s initial gung-ho enthusiasm for America and Israel’s war was so swiftly backtracked by Robert Jenrick, a long-standing skeptic of foreign entanglements. If his colleague Andrea Jenkyns remains keen to commit British boots on the ground, this is at least beyond the power of the Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire to effect. Yet the spectacle of Reform’s headlong advance to war, and the party’s hurried retreat when faced with polling data, has perhaps obscured the Conservative Party’s own, and perhaps worse, stance on Iran, a position seemingly derived equally from recklessness and a shaky grasp of detail.

Badenoch’s insistence, perhaps extrapolating from her experience of World of Warcraft, that Britain should  “stop the archer” by joining in strikes on Iranian underground missile bases, rather than merely “catching the arrows”, would seem an odd and escalatory response to a UAV launched from Lebanon. Bombing an entirely different weapon system in an entirely different country would not prevent any recurrence of such attacks, presumably undertaken by Hezbollah, unless Badenoch also intends to bomb Lebanon. Yet doing so would require deconflicting and therefore coordinating with the Israelis in a bombing campaign that even the United States is steering clear of, against UAVs launched from mobile and most likely civilian vehicles, in the wooded and heavily-populated landscape of southern Lebanon. The moral, legal, and political risks of accidentally killing civilians, in an aerial campaign that has already killed hundreds, would be unacceptably high for little obvious gain, the product of a soundbite in search of a strategy.

In its latest and even more confusing iteration, published in the Daily Mail, Badenoch’s stance on the American-Israeli campaign is that she is “clear that Britain shouldn’t have joined in – I remain concerned that there isn’t a clear plan behind the strikes – but Britain should also not be neutral” and should “strike the missile and drone sites at source”. The Conservative Party’s apparent position on this urgent question of national security is that Britain should conduct its own entirely independent retaliatory bombing campaign, in the same airspace as American and Israeli jets and against much the same targets. Given the American aircraft losses already to friendly fire, we must presume that Badenoch intends the RAF to coordinate and deconflict with its American and Israeli counterparts, as well as, given Britain’s military shortcomings, leaning upon their support for surveillance and targeting data. How this is considered “not joining in” is hard to discern: the advantage for the nation, even harder.

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It seems unnervingly clear that, rather than starting “from first principles,” according to her characteristically high estimation of her own intellectual rigor,  Badenoch had settled on a political strategy of marketing herself as stronger on defense than Starmer, in which the outbreak of war initially seemed a useful backdrop. That the war she initially chose to back proved both chaotically mismanaged and domestically unpopular has now led her to defend, alone, this tenuous and isolated political outpost. On a matter of the utmost gravity, the only principles apparent seem to be feeding the needs of the Westminster media grid, and a desire to cosplay the Iron Lady for her dwindling audience.

If we are to truly start from first principles, they must be that Britain has its own interests, distinct from those of our allies in Europe and the United States, and it is only to those interests British leaders should attend. If the Iran War is an American party to which we have been invited but do not wish to attend, so is it the case that the European effort is something Starmer may wish to join, but to which we have not been invited. Greece did not send its jets and frigates to Cyprus to defend Britain’s SBAs, as British commentators affected to believe, but to reassure and protect its ethnic kin, maximizing the country’s political influence. In the same way, the broader, European effort has its own French political rationale, of advancing a Macronian vision of strategic autonomy, in which Britain serves little if any role. Rather than joining the war at arm’s length, as Badenoch may wish, our current refusal to take part is itself carried out with a certain insular detachment.

Yet the European consensus on this war’s regretful pointlessness, now uniting even the most Trumpian of continental governments, like those of Italy and Hungary, with the liberal center, provides Starmer with the political cover to stay out. At the beginning of this conflict, it was a contrarian position in the British press to unequivocally state that joining the fight is not in our interests: now it is, correctly, the mainstream political opinion in Westminster as across Europe as a whole. What a few weeks ago appeared an unusually bold stance from Starmer now seems boringly, obviously sensible: Trump’s increasingly erratic jibes to the contrary now inspire pity rather than deference. There may well be a case, when the shooting stops, for taking part in convoy escort and minesweeping duties in the Strait of Hormuz, but we and other Europeans should demand a reasonable price from this most transactional of American administrations. Above all, surely, we should require that Trump firmly and publicly commit himself to the territorial integrity and self-determination of both Greenland and Canada, the New World extensions of our European civilization: he may be a boomer, but Trump has no right to consume our rightful patrimony.

At this moment of historic American weakness, so swiftly following Trump’s intimidation of our home continent, we Europeans must be a little more ambitious in renegotiating the terms of our relationship. Yet instead, the Conservative and Reform politicians who would have blindly leapt into war now tie themselves in knots justifying arcane and incoherent positions, isolating themselves from both domestic opinion and the broader European Right. That they find themselves in this position seems almost more pathetic than lamentable, so devoid is it of any political or strategic sense. Like parents, all empires age, wither and then eventually die. Filial loyalty does not generally extend to jumping into the grave alongside them.

On the surface, the explanation appears straightforward: Russia and Ukraine remain deadlocked over territory. Moscow insists on full control of the eastern Donbas region — of which it holds only a portion — as well as of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. On both counts, Zelensky has refused to budge, despite Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s dwindling power grid.

But framing the impasse as a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia obscures a deeper reality: this has always been, at its core, a proxy war between Russia and the United States — one which can only be resolved through an agreement between the two powers. The Ukrainian military, after all, is effectively kept on life support by Washington, particularly through the satellite intelligence that has become indispensable to modern drone warfare. Both Moscow and Washington are aware of this, which is why over the past year they have repeatedly privileged bilateral talks from which Ukraine and Nato allies were excluded.

Last August’s summit between Putin and Trump in Anchorage marked the high point of the new US-Russia détente. It was the first face-to-face meeting between the US and Russian presidents since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. The substance of the talks was never officially disclosed, but the symbolism was unmistakable. From the red-carpet welcome, to Trump calling Putin warmly by his first name, everything was choreographed to signal a turning point in relations, which, since 2022, had sunk to levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

Since then, Russian officials have frequently invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to describe the framework of understanding purportedly reached between the two leaders. In practice, we can surmise that this sought to reconcile Trump’s transactional instincts, in the form of economic arrangements beneficial to US companies and Trump’s own prestige, with Putin’s insistence on the need to address the “primary roots of the conflict”: namely the need for a new security arrangement in Europe. This agreement, however, always rested on very shaky grounds, precisely because the two parties invested Anchorage with two very different meanings. From Moscow’s standpoint, what is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of the rules underpinning European and global security; Washington, by contrast, sees the matter in narrower terms: a specific conflict to be managed and contained, without disturbing the broader structure of international power that suits Washington just fine.

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Russia has sought to manage this tension through what might be called a double-track approach. On the one hand, it has tasked Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated financier who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — with negotiating a large-scale economic deal with the US. Meanwhile, senior diplomats, above all the veteran foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have worked in parallel on the broader geopolitical settlement. This approach has so far failed to yield concrete results, prompting the diplomatic track to ratchet up its rhetorical pressure on Washington. The clearest sign of this came in a recent interview in which Lavrov spoke of the Trump administration in unprecedentedly harsh terms.

Lavrov openly challenged the idea that the US is working towards the cooperative framework meant to emerge from the Anchorage talks. He claimed that Russia had accepted Washington’s proposals on resolving the war in Ukraine, only to find the US backing away from them in practice. “They made an offer, we agreed — the problem should have been resolved. Having accepted their proposals, we believed we had fulfilled the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and could move on to full-scale, broad, mutually beneficial cooperation. But in practice everything looks the opposite”.

Lavrov accused the US of not only failing to take concrete steps to rein in Kyiv — most likely an implicit reference to Ukraine’s continued drone strikes on Russian territory, which could not be carried out without US intelligence and satellite support — but, more fundamentally, of actively intensifying its economic war on Moscow. He cited new sanctions, Washington’s campaign against Russian tankers in international waters, and efforts to pressure India and other partners into abandoning Russian oil. “This is pure ‘Bidenism’”, Lavrov remarked, offering it as proof that the US’s true objective remains that of “achieving economic domination”.

At the same time, Lavrov framed all this as part of a broader “neo-imperial” strategy on Washington’s part that extends well beyond Russia. “The West,” he said, “is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions… With the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit” — a reference to the White House’s hyper-bellicose posture over recent months, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the escalation of US pressure on Cuba, and the growing threats against Iran.

It remains unclear whether Lavrov’s remarks signal a genuine rift — within the Kremlin’s corridors of power and more broadly between Moscow and Washington — or whether they are simply a manifestation of the double-track approach: pairing backroom diplomacy with calculated public pressure. What is clear, though, is that the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

In a recent article, Sergey Karaganov, who heads the influential Council for Foreign and Defense Policy think tank, openly criticized the Kremlin’s “muffled responses to open aggression” by the West: especially the Europeans. Karaganov argues that Russia’s excessive restraint to date — its refusal to retaliate against Nato for Western-backed attacks on Russian territory, or to launch decapitation strikes against Kyiv’s political and military command centers — has in fact increased the risk of all-out war between Russia and Nato, by emboldening the West to keep escalating, in both practical and rhetorical terms.

Karaganov’s prescription is stark. Europe, he argues, is preparing for a future confrontation with Russia, and will likely deploy the reconstituted remnants of the Ukrainian army to prosecute it. The only way to stop this, in his view, is for Russia to demonstrate a genuine willingness to strike the command centers, infrastructure and military bases of those European countries most actively involved in operations against Russia. Should conventional strikes prove insufficient, he argues, Russia must be prepared to escalate to strategic nuclear weapons. His conclusion pulls no punches: “At present, [the Europeans] only give the appearance of fearing us, so as to build up their military strength. But they should actually fear us. They should be in terror of us. They should understand that escalating or even continuing the conflict risks their immediate physical destruction, and that a military buildup is pointless, as it will entail an obliterating nuclear response”.

One might dismiss this as mere sabre-rattling — and it is quite possible that such options would never be seriously entertained by the Kremlin — but the mere fact that these scenarios are being openly debated in Russia ought to send a shiver down the spine of every European. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine war, fringe ideas have a way of becoming mainstream when conflicts drag on and frustration mounts; the longer this one continues without end, the louder and more influential radical voices are likely to become.

There is, moreover, a deeper danger that operates independently of any deliberate choice Russia might make. By allowing tensions with Moscow to keep rising, we are constructing a situation whereby a single miscalculation — an errant strike, a misread signal, an escalatory move that spirals beyond anyone’s intentions — could set off a chain of events that no single actor would be able to arrest. How long, for instance, before the Russian Navy starts providing armed escorts to its oil fleets, and treating any seizure of its tankers as an act of war? Or taking similar action against Western tankers? The gravest wars in history have not always begun with conscious decisions; they have begun with incidents that spun out of control. That possibility grows more real with every week the conflict remains unresolved.

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Yet if that’s partly true of Russia itself — what with the hawkish language of its outriders, and its continued assaults on Ukrainian soil — European leaders appear reckless themselves. At the recent Munich Security Conference, the assembled Brussels elites and their attendant apparatchiks took turns stoking the drumbeat of war, ramping up their own hawkish rhetoric while offering little in the way of serious strategic reflection. Politico captured the prevailing mood with uncomfortable precision. “Western countries see World War III coming”, it said, a headline that glossed over the inconvenient fact that many of those sounding the alarm are themselves among the most vigorous advocates for continued escalation. As Nato’s Secretary General Mark Rutte recently put it, Europeans “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”. There is something deeply troubling about a European political class that cultivates war hysteria while remaining seemingly indifferent to where that hysteria might lead.

The situation is particularly disconcerting when set against the backdrop of Europe’s ongoing industrial decline. One might expect a weakening continent to seek accommodation and de-escalation; instead, European leaders continue to think in rigidly unipolar terms, dismissing Russia’s security concerns as illegitimate while remaining blind to the material reality of a world that is rapidly becoming multipolar — a shift that is already translating into Europe’s own economic and geopolitical marginalization. In this, however, they are simply mirroring Washington’s broader posture.

As the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan recently argued in Foreign Affairs, we are living through a hybrid and deeply unstable geopolitical moment: one marked by growing multipolarity in economic terms, yet remaining largely unipolar in military terms, with the United States still uniquely capable of projecting force across the globe with impunity. The consequences of this asymmetry, Mohan suggests, have been paradoxical. Rather than ushering in a more balanced international order, the rise of economic multipolarity has, if anything, emboldened Washington to shed the constraints that once tempered its behavior and to project its power ever more aggressively — a dynamic that the Trump administration has made more explicit than ever.

This raises difficult questions. Can a world in which the US remains free to engage in repeated acts of military and economic aggression — unchecked by other powers — truly be called multipolar in any meaningful sense? And can a transition to a genuine multipolar order, one in which unrestrained US military primacy gives way to a world based on sovereign equality for all, occur without the world first passing through a period of acute and potentially catastrophic confrontation? These are not abstract theoretical puzzles. Given the trajectory of events in Ukraine and beyond, they are among the most urgent questions of our time.

No, I’m speaking not of President Trump’s plans for Greenland, but Andrew Jackson’s military campaigns in Florida that prompted the Spanish Empire to cede the territory to the United States in an 1819 treaty (Florida would become a state a quarter-century later). The historical parallels aren’t accidental. President Trump has long looked to Jackson — America’s seventh president, first national populist leader, and the co-founder of the Democratic Party — as an inspiration. 

The Greenland gambit is Trump’s most Jacksonian move. It’s also the clearest sign yet that Washington in the opening decades of the 21st century no longer views itself as the preeminent global hegemon, charged with upholding international rules and disciplining a handful of wayward “rogue states.” Instead, America increasingly sees itself as one power among others, locked in rivalry over land, natural resources, and material security.

That about describes the world in which Jackson, known as “Old Hickory,” operated. Trump and the wider Trumpian cohort have drawn what they see as the necessary conclusions and are pitilessly remaking US strategy to meet this new, old moment.

The shift shouldn’t come as a surprise. A year ago, I attended President Trump’s inauguration and one of the inaugural balls — and was struck by the Jacksonian vibes that gripped Washington. As I wrote in these pages, the second Trump inaugural offered “remarkable similarities” with Jacksonian democracy: the hard-charging nationalism, the anti-elite rhetoric (coupled with solicitude for pliant elites), the pledges of a coming golden age.

One step toward American renewal discussed in those early days was the takeover of Greenland. Such talk struck me as “preposterous” — the word I used to describe it in my UnHerd dispatch from the inauguration. I admit: I really didn’t think he meant it; surely, this was the opening bid in a negotiation that would conclude with Washington securing even better military-basing and mining rights than the existing agreement permits (and the current arrangements are extremely generous).

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But under the Jacksonian dispensation, no territory is truly secure without Old Glory planted on its soil. Which brings us to Jackson’s conquest of Florida in the years after the War of 1812. Jackson wasn’t president then. But he was famous as the Hero of New Orleans, the US Army general who’d repelled an invading force of some 8,000 redcoats before news of an Anglo-American peace treaty had reached the New World.

Afterward, Jackson emerged as an irrepressible advocate for the expansion and consolidation of US sovereignty across the North American continent. He found it downright offensive that the Old World powers should exercise any influence nearby. Doubly so when the Europeans conspired with the tribal “savages” — or when they failed, through weakness or neglect, to prevent the Indians from attacking the United States from European-controlled areas.

Spanish Florida presented the latter kind of problem. From it, the Seminole tribe mounted attacks on white settlements in the United States. And inside it, on the Apalachicola River in the northwest part of the territory, a group of escaped slaves had taken over an abandoned British fort heavily stockpiled with arms and artillery. The Negro Fort, as it became known, encouraged resistance to America’s “Peculiar Institution” and invited still more rebels and escapees.

The Monroe administration charged Jackson with suppressing threats along the southern border — but, crucially, without challenging Spanish territorial claims to Florida, unenforceable though they were. But Jackson couldn’t quite bring himself to accept the second half of his orders. And so he both suppressed the threats and took over Spanish forts in Pensacola and elsewhere, diplomatic niceties be damned.

He justified his actions as self-defense against Seminole raids and other threats emanating from Spanish Florida. “The Government of the United States,” he wrote at one point in the campaign, “is bound to protect her citizens, but weak would be her efforts and ineffectual the best advised measures if the Floridas are to be free to every enemy.” Earlier, US forces had already destroyed the Negro Fort, but Jackson’s subsequent campaign in 1818 extended this logic to the broader Florida frontier.

In other words: He believed that so long as the Spanish flag flew on the Florida territory, the American people couldn’t obtain the full measure of security to which they were entitled. And so the Spanish flag had to be removed. And so it was. Jackson’s overstepping of his military authority was initially embarrassing for the Monroe administration. Jackson’s critics there feared that unless Pensacola was restored to Spain, “war would result, the economy would crash, and the administration would be punished by the American electorate,” as the historian H. W. Brands sums up their view.

Outside critics pilloried Jackson’s apparent insubordination and his brutal ways in the campaign, not least his decision to execute two British officers (on the grounds that they had aided and encouraged the Seminoles against America). “We are fighting a great moral battle for the benefit not only of our country but of all mankind,” declared House Speaker (and Jackson arch-rival) Henry Clay. “Remember that Greece had her Alexander, Rome her Caesar, England her Cromwell, France her Bonaparte” — and America its would-be imperial despot, Jackson.

President Monroe returned the Spanish forts, but he refused to censure Jackson on the grounds that pathetic Spain had allowed Florida to become “the theatre of every lawless adventure,” and its rule over the territory was on its way to oblivion. He described it as a place “with little population of its own, the Spanish authority almost extinct [and] in a great measure derelict.” Jackson’s actions, then, merely ratified European weakness, and ultimately led to the full US takeover of Florida through the 1819 treaty negotiated by Secretary of State (and future President) John Quincy Adams. And the town of Jacksonville was so named in honor of Jackson’s military actions in the Sunshine State.

The resemblances to the current controversy are uncanny: the weak empire (Europe); the sparsely populated territory (the 30,000 or so Greenlanders); the Scotch-Irish disdain for European manners (Jackson’s and Trump’s); the threat of third parties endangering the United States through the contested land (China and Russia, in the current case). But above all: the rather expansive view of what it takes to secure the United States and a willingness to use light pretexts to extract lands from states incapable of defending them.

But there is one crucial difference: Most of Jackson’s actions, as a military chieftain and later as president, were either overwhelmingly popular or at least had a base of popular support. That can’t be said for Trump’s Greenland takeover, which is widely unpopular. Still, there is no denying that it is the Jacksonian foreign-policy legacy — both admirable and troubling — that Trump carries with him into the Arctic. “Every man combined with a gun in his hand,” Old Hickory himself wrote, “and all Europe combined cannot hurt us.”

Conspicuously absent, however, was any response from the EU’s institutional leadership. The same Brussels officials who routinely issue dire warnings about the alleged Russian threat to Europe declined to comment on an explicit US threat against European territory. And only hours earlier, most European leaders had offered either tepid or implicitly supportive responses to Trump’s unambiguous aggression against Venezuela. If there was a logic, it was to avoid confrontation with Washington at all costs. And yet ironically those same leaders quickly found themselves facing the prospect of similar US action directed against a European country.

A direct US military seizure of Greenland remains unlikely, though not unthinkable. A more probable scenario is an “association agreement” modeled on Washington’s arrangements with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau. Under these agreements, the US exercises sweeping authority over defense and security in exchange for financial assistance. The states involved remain formally sovereign, but in practice are tightly bound to US strategic priorities. An analogous arrangement with Greenland would offer Washington the advantage of consolidating control while formally respecting Greenlandic self-rule, all while weakening Denmark’s position. A 1951 agreement already allows the US to station unlimited numbers of troops on the island; today, only one active base remains, but the legal framework for expansion is firmly in place.

The ambiguity is intentional. Earlier this week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated that the use of the US military was “always an option” as Trump and his advisers reviewed different annexation scenarios. Whatever path the administration chooses, it is determined to resolve the matter swiftly. And European leaders, judging by their response so far, are likely to acquiesce. How can one account for the seemingly irrational, and indeed outright suicidal, posture of Europe’s political leadership? By acknowledging a simple fact: European elites are deeply embedded in the transatlantic system from which they derive their power and legitimacy. They perceive that system as under threat and are prepared to defend it at almost any cost, even if that cost includes European sovereignty or territory.

After all, Europe has already sacrificed its core economic and security interests to US imperial diktats. It has joined a proxy war against Russia that has devastated Ukraine and hollowed out European industrial competitiveness. It has imposed sanctions that inflicted far greater damage on European economies than on Russia. It has remained conspicuously silent following the destruction of Nord Stream, a critical piece of European energy infrastructure — an act probably carried out with at least indirect US involvement and likely foreknowledge by some European governments themselves. If European leaders were willing to accept all of this, acquiescing to US control over Greenland — whether through military pressure or pseudo-legal arrangements — would not represent a radical departure.

So much for Europe’s much-vaunted “strategic autonomy”. The reality is that beneath the rhetoric of independence, European governments have systematically appeased Trump — from increased Nato military spending, much of which will flow directly into US defense contractors, to punitive trade conditions to accepting financial responsibility for sustaining the war in Ukraine.

From the perspective of Europe’s governing classes, Nato and the proxy war in Ukraine are less about security or prosperity than about preserving an imperial architecture in which they can play a subordinate but privileged role. This is why Nato would likely survive even a US move against Greenland, albeit stripped of any remaining illusions of sovereign equality among its members.

This dynamic also helps explain a seeming paradox. Globalist European leaders openly despised by Trump — figures such as Emmanuel Macron or Friedrich Merz — have been more supportive of US aggression against Venezuela than Right-populist forces openly favored by Trump, such as Marine Le Pen or Viktor Orbán, who have adopted more cautious or critical positions. EU institutions, in particular, have been notably supportive of Washington’s actions — the bloc is not a counterweight to US power, rather one of its central pillars.

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It is therefore plausible that elements of the EU establishment are coordinating closely with factions of the US national security apparatus — or even with the Trump administration itself. After all, while it is true that Trump has abandoned any pretense of transatlantic unity and increasingly treats Europe in openly transactional, even neo-colonial terms, Europe’s political class has demonstrated its willingness to comply. Once one understands that Europe’s current leaders long ago ceased to think in terms of national or even “European” interests, and have instead become beholden to a single objective — the preservation of a dying system of Western hegemony, or the so-called “rules-based order”, and the benefits they derive from it in their sub-imperial role — their seemingly irrational behavior begins to make sense.

What should alarm Europeans is not the prospect of US “abandonment” or Nato’s collapse — developments that could, in principle, create space for genuine autonomy. In fact, it’s the opposite: the likelihood that Europe remains locked into a subordinate role precisely as Washington adopts an increasingly aggressive and lawless posture.

This is the broader context in which Trump’s attack on Venezuela and threats against Greenland must be understood. The events are revealing about the evolving nature of US foreign policy. While some analysts interpreted the latest National Security Strategy (NSS), along with Trump’s attempts to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine and his calls to scale down commitments in Europe, as evidence of a sober acceptance of multipolarity, Venezuela suggests a very different conclusion. Far from abandoning hegemony, the US is attempting to preserve it through new means, by globalizing a proxy-war strategy that targets weaker links in the rival system. While avoiding direct military containment of China or Russia, confrontation is displaced onto peripheral theaters and sustained through permanent destabilization. In this model, even the most elementary rules of international coexistence are discarded.

This shift is a reaction to a deep crisis of US hegemony. Its economic dimensions are well known: ballooning public debt, unsustainable private leverage, a financial system increasingly detached from productive activity, extensive deindustrialization and the gradual erosion, however partial, of the dollar-centric system. In short, this is a specific crisis of both US capitalism and the broader post-1945 imperial order.

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The US response to this is not to accept Washington’s role within a new global arrangement — one in which America could continue to prosper as a powerful but “normal” state — but to aggressively reassert its dominance. This reassertion increasingly takes the form of naked imperialism or neo-colonialism: not merely economic coercion, but the direct seizure of resources, the control of shipping lanes and supply chains, and even the open claim to foreign territory. Trump’s declaration that Venezuela will be “run” by the United States, coupled with the threat of further “kinetic” action should a future government resist, is thus emblematic.

This orientation is stated openly in the National Security Strategy. The document declares that the US will deny non-hemispheric competitors control over strategically vital assets, condition aid and trade on political alignment, discourage governments from cooperating with rival powers such as China or Russia, and use financial, technological and security — including military — means to ensure compliance. In practice, this strategy is already being implemented, well beyond the Western Hemisphere. Over the past year, the US has conducted bombing operations in seven countries — as varied as Iran, Nigeria and Somalia — none authorized by the UN Security Council and none credibly justified as acts of self-defense under the UN Charter. In parallel, Trump has issued direct threats against a growing list of other states.

In purely empirical terms, there is nothing new about the US resorting to violence to defend its economic and strategic interests; this has been a constant feature of US policy, even and especially under the so-called rules-based order. Across Latin America in particular, Washington has repeatedly intervened, covertly and overtly, whenever governments pursued land reform, resource nationalism or independent development paths that challenged US interests. What is new is the abandonment of even the pretense of legality or humanitarian concern. This is what domination looks like without hegemony: power exercised openly and coercively.

And it is precisely this nakedness that makes the current moment so dangerous. By signaling that no rules remain, not even rhetorically — Washington is effectively legitimizing a world of unrestrained power politics — one that is arguably already a reality, but which the West, until recently, at least claimed to oppose. This is particularly destabilizing given that US actions against Venezuela and Greenland should not be understood solely in economic terms; they are also strategic moves directed against China, and to a lesser extent Russia. Contrary to the idea that Washington is willing to divide the world into stable spheres of influence, the goal appears instead to create platforms from which US power can be projected more aggressively, ultimately to confront China before the balance of technological and economic power shifts irreversibly.

This is a gamble rooted in the assumption that sustained military and economic attrition can at least delay a tectonic shift in the global order. It is a position inherited from an older colonial worldview which saw non-Western development itself as an existential threat. In this sense, as one commentator insightfully put it, time itself is being weaponized. American elites are engaged in what might be called governance by delay: prolonging conflict and maintaining instability in the hope that some external shock — let’s say a technological breakthrough, an internal crisis among rivals — will restore lost leverage.

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The irony is that this strategy is profoundly self-defeating. The more openly coercive US behavior becomes, the faster it erodes the very structures that once underpinned American hegemony. After 1945, US dominance was not built through territorial annexation, or pure military power, but through administrative architecture: a dense web of alliances; the dollar-backed financial system; global trade regimes; standards bodies; technological ecosystems. This networked hegemony made integration with US-led systems the path of least resistance for most states — though, of course, the threat of violent reprisal was always there and often used.

Instead, when a hegemon instead behaves like a caricature of imperial power, it encourages states to seek alternatives — which now, unlike even just a decade ago, actually exist. To rephrase, Trump is incentivizing other nations to further diversify reserves, reduce dollar exposure, explore new payment systems and forge new security partnerships. Indeed, many countries, from South Africa to Brazil to India, are already pushing back against Trump’s bullish tactics. Thus, the primary beneficiaries of Trumpian aggression are precisely those Washington seeks to contain. China, and Russia too, have spent years advocating for an alternative framework for global cooperation based on sovereign equality and multipolarity. Each act of US lawlessness strengthens their appeal. After the illegal assault on Venezuela, expect the queue of countries seeking closer association with BRICS (and similar groupings) to grow longer, even as the US responds by escalating threats against those who do.

Europe, meanwhile, risks guaranteeing its own decline. By clinging to a subordinate role in America’s fraying imperial system, European elites are sacrificing the continent’s long-term autonomy for the prospect of their continued access to power. Yet this also means aligning themselves with a hegemon that governs through naked violence and coercion, at precisely the moment when adaptability and restraint are most needed. In doing so, they expose their own societies to escalating risks — economic, political and military — without any increase in security or influence. While the future of the global order remains uncertain, Europe’s own fate seems sealed.

During the Cold War of my youth, there was always potential for accidental conflict. But America and the Soviet Union were both run by people who were working hard to prevent that from happening. Even in the tensest of crises, diplomacy prevailed.

Things are totally different now. On both sides of the Atlantic, in Russia and across Western Europe, I see a rhetorical readiness for armed conflict on a never before seen scale. “Russia has brought war back to Europe,” said Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general recently, adding that “ we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.” Meanwhile, the UK’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said the situation was more dangerous than at any time during his career: “Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans… will all have a role to play, to build, to serve, and if necessary, to fight,” he said. For his part, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency has warned that Russia could attack Europe before the end of the decade.

If this war with Russia were to happen, it won’t only be because Trump has motivated Putin, it will also be because we have allowed the situation in Ukraine to spiral out of control. Our support has been a catalog of misjudgments. When everybody draped themselves in the Ukrainian flag in 2022, so-called experts were spectacularly gung-ho about Kyiv’s eventual victory. Retired generals competed with predictions of how fast Ukraine would get the job done — two weeks, speculated one. Well, we are now nearly four years into the conflict and as members of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, we Europeans encouraged Ukraine to fight to the bitter end — without a chance of victory.

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It is perfectly plausible now that Russia will end up occupying more than the four oblasts it seeks, and that Ukraine loses its independence. Encouraged by victory, Russia might eventually seek more. Exacerbating matters on the other side, some Europeans now seek regime change in Russia. To quote Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for foreign and security policy: “it is not a bad thing if the big power is actually made much smaller.”

We’ve been here before. Ahead of the First World War, young Germans and Austrians were also hungry for battle, as many Europeans seem today. The Germans envied their grandparents who fought the glorious battles of the Franco-Prussian War 44 years earlier. Then, as now, the political and military establishment underestimated how difficult war would be.

Yet there is one big difference. Back in 1914, Europe’s armies were in a position to fight. A victory by the Germans and Austrians was at the very least a plausible outcome. Today, it is no longer possible that Ukraine can win the war, nor that Western Europe, without US help, could defeat Russia.

This broader European conflict won’t necessarily be a classic land war. I don’t think Putin has plans to invade Western Europe, as security officials claim. My main fear, rather, is hybrid warfare: airplanes blowing up over Heathrow airport, say; an explosion in a busy German railway station; or perhaps even an underwater nuclear explosion that sparks a tsunami. Brussels, as the home of Nato and the EU, would be particularly vulnerable. And any counter to such a provocation would swiftly escalate.

This is the type of warfare for which we Europeans are least prepared. Western security experts see hybrid warfare as a lower genre for lesser people, like Russians. But it is lethal, and we Europeans are ideal victims. We live in tight spaces. We are dependent on critical infrastructure and technology. And, from the Russian perspective, such attacks would helpfully not trigger Nato’s mutual defense clause. Why invade Estonia if you can create utter chaos in European capitals, all while maintaining plausible deniability?

The UK isn’t unaware of this. In November, the Defence Select Committee warned that the UK Government was moving “at glacial pace” to adopt the “Home Defence Programme”, a new national resilience and security strategy to secure the country against serious risks: including unconventional attacks. But the programme has been delayed for over a year, even as Britain’s leaders are desperate to ramp up the war rhetoric.

It is clearer than ever, though, that our political systems are far from ready for a fight. The UK, Germany and France are all unwilling to pay for the support of Ukraine from their own budget, or indeed raise taxes. This is why they were so keen to use the Russian assets that lie frozen in European banks. Now that Belgium, the country where most of the assets are held, has blocked the heist, European politicians will have to put their money where their mouth is.

The trouble is, their electorates won’t let them. European voters won’t give up their welfare payments to fund a war and polls consistently show a marked lack of support for further financial aid for Ukraine. And please don’t ask them to put on their boots and actually fight for their country.

The irony here is that, whatever their problems, Europe’s leaders see war as a way of distracting from even deeper crises. If peace broke out, for instance, the EU would have to reform its absurd Common Agricultural Policy, redirecting funds away from French farmers towards Ukraine. Continued profligacy would become tougher to defend in other ways. The EU ditched its fiscal rules to make room for more defense spending. Without a war, deficit spending is hard to justify. War is the ultimate excuse for failing policies, keeping dysfunctional governments in power and delaying the moment of reckoning.

Like so many of my generation, I always thought that Europeans had learned from the mistakes of the past — including the oldest mistake of all. As Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese strategist of war, warned some 2,500 years ago: if you “know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Unfortunately, we keep on overestimating ourselves and underestimating our enemies. Putin initially underestimated his enemy with an amateurish attack on Kyiv. But he recovered and the Russians are now fighting a well-organized, fully-funded, focused war. And perhaps his strategists would conclude that now is the right time to launch an extended hybrid war against Europe. What has Putin to lose?

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Meanwhile, our misjudgments continue. Just as Napoleon and Hitler underestimated the sheer scale of Russia and its freezing winter temperatures, contemporary European politicians continue to discount the economic resilience of modern Russia. The first mistake happened right at the beginning of the war, when we thought we could exhaust Russia economically through sanctions. We fooled ourselves with deeply misleading statistics, according to which Russia’s GDP was approximately the size of Spain’s. But what matters in a war is purchasing power — literally bang for buck. On that metric, Moscow spends more than twice as much as Germany on defense, and far more efficiently. While experts insist that the Russian economy is on the verge of collapsing. there’s no sign of that happening. Similarly, certain international lawyers continue to claim that the sequestration of Russian assets is risk-free. There is a pattern here — one that could yet prove catastrophic in both treasure and blood.

In contrast, the geopolitical realists of earlier generations, such as Henry Kissinger or George Kennan, the legendary US diplomat of the post-war era, had a much deeper understanding of superpower politics. Nobody would have accused Kissinger of being soft on the Soviet Union. But nor was he a trigger-happy war monger.

Back then, the Americans maintained diplomatic channels with Russia. And they didn’t indulge in ritualized virtue-signaling about the rule of law. Their job was risk-management — and they performed it admirably. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the Trump Administration is not in the business of managing risk, but of pursuing short-term commercial advantage.

Greenland may well be next. Its vast, largely unexplored deposits of rare earth elements, combined with its strategic position make it an obvious target. Indeed, Trump has already laid the groundwork both with the National Security Strategy and with the appointment of an envoy tasked with its acquisition. Ownership would dramatically strengthen the US position in the Arctic Sea, a region of growing strategic importance that Europe has largely ignored.

Nor is Canada immune: Trump has already identified it as a security threat. It also happens to sit on 163 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, ranking 4th globally according to the US Energy Information Administration, after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. As the US becomes more dependent on oil for its energy needs, the acquisition of Venezuela and Canada would certainly follow a commercial logic, if not strategic reason.

It’s completely mad, I know. But it reflects a geopolitical reality in which risk is no longer managed and diplomacy discounted. The Cold War world was a safer one, not because the situation was safe, but because adults were in charge.

Their pearl-clutching reminds me of Captain Louis Renault, that cynical and corrupt police officer in Casablanca. But unlike Renault, who only pretended to be “shocked!” as he uncovered the gambling den and pocketed the proceeds, Europe’s political class truly didn’t see any of this coming. Perhaps they should have.

Instead, the Europeans are still clinging on to those end-of-history ideas that characterized Western policy thinking between 1990 and 2020. Europe’s legacy media and many of its intellectuals are creatures of that period. They hate Maga and its European mutants, but don’t understand why it is happening. They see the rise of Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage as a Russian conspiracy, aided and abetted by a pernicious Big Tech industry. They keep pointing the finger and shrieking, and keep losing the battles.

And they keep on underestimating Trump — their fatal error. The NSS may be odious as it attempts to build a new nationalism, but it is a foreign policy statement that should be taken seriously. I’d place it in a similar category as the Mar-a-Lago Accord, which was widely dismissed, even though it held the key to Trump’s economic policy. The paper, written by Stephen Miran, a former Trump policy adviser and now a member of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, had two important messages that Europeans failed to spot. First, Trump would use tariffs to gain advantage over other countries in global trade. And second, the Europeans would have to pay the US for security guarantees in the form of increased military procurement. The Europeans should have heeded these warnings. But after Trump announced the tariffs, they sent the B-team to negotiate in Washington — then they folded. Then Europe folded again on military spending.

Superficially at least, the NSS appears to resurrect the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, something defense secretary Pete Hegseth has explicitly vowed to do. This old doctrine stated that the US would not tolerate interference in its domestic affairs by its former colonial powers, and that it likewise would not interfere in the politics of other countries. While there are contradictions here — the NSS explicitly advocates interference in others’ politics — there are also similarities. Trump, like Monroe, sees foreign countries as transactional business partners or competitors, or both. But there has been a reshuffling of traditional roles. Today, the EU is considered a competitor; Russia a future business partner. Trump is also happy cutting deals with Arab leaders, including Ahmed al-Sharaa, the Syrian president and a former member of Al-Qaeda. No wonder the old-school foreign policy crowd is confused.

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Moscow, though, will probably be the single largest beneficiary of the new approach. Unlike most Western leaders, Trump understands Russia’s commercial strength. It is one of the most resource-rich countries in the world, and not just in oil and gas. It is the world’s largest producer of palladium. It has large deposits of rare-earth elements in Siberia, many of which are unexplored. It is a leading producer of nickel, copper, aluminum and zinc. Russia also stands to benefit from global warming. The warmer Arctic weather is opening up the Northern Sea Route, a maritime passage that stretches from Alaska to Norway. Trump understands this; Europe does not.

There is one passage in the NSS that is particularly revealing. It lies at the heart of America’s current influence and Europe’s decline. The passage pinpoints why the US is so powerful. This is not primarily thanks to military might, instead the document lists a nimble political system that can course-correct; the world’s most innovative economy, especially the tech sector; and the world’s leading financial system and currency. Europe can boast none of this.

Boasting only a surfeit of group think and deficit of strategic foresight, Europeans have relied on the US to provide critical services — such as the global financial backstop, the absorption of excess savings, and of course military protection — and basically gave up on innovation. The EU never managed to form a joint capital market because narrow national interests intruded. Even the single market, once the showpiece of European integration, has been crushed by over-regulation.

Meanwhile, Europe’s politics are stagnating. Yes, there is a real danger of “civilizational erasure”, but the cause is not immigration. Instead, it’s this overdependence on the US; this has created political inertia and a collection of failing states. Consider the Europe section of the NSS document. It comes with the Maga-style headline of “Promoting European Greatness” and kicks off with a recognition of Europe’s decline. Europe constituted 25% of global economic output in 1990; today, that figure has fallen to 14%. The document notes that Europe’s economic and political weakness has given rise to a general lack of self-confidence. In no area is this more apparent than in Europe’s relationship with Russia. The following statement about the war in Ukraine in the NSS is more coherent than anything you will ever read in Europe: “The Trump Administration finds itself at odds with European officials who hold unrealistic expectations for the war.” European policy is premised on the idea that Ukraine can still repel Russia from the occupied territories. This is delusional. It has been clear since Ukraine’s failed spring offense in 2023 that it has no pathway towards victory.

Inevitably, Europe reacted to the document with unmitigated, and delusional, horror — they are shocked! — especially regarding the threat to cultivate “resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”. It is now America’s official policy to support Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Alice Weidel. As Germany, France and the UK struggle to deliver meaningful political change, Trump is threatening to take control.

To be fair, it is shocking to see it spelled out. This is clearly not the Monroe Doctrine. The US is trying to meddle massively in Europe’s internal politics. In that sense, the policy is imperialist. The US will do everything in its power to maintain its leadership in technology, finance and the military and keep Europe a de facto US colony. But, instead of pearl-clutching when the penny dropped, the Europeans should have seen it coming. They should have been prepared.

Henry Kissinger joked that it may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but it is fatal to be America’s friend. This describes with deadly accuracy the European position right now. Any self-respecting country, or group of countries, would at this point try to break free of America’s grip. But, like an addict confronting his withdrawal, that would require strength, and a willingness to make sacrifices. Europeans would have to give up on their cushy social models. They would have to acquire the skills of strategic thinking and planning. They would have to cut taxes and reshuffle their public spending priorities.

Trump’s re-election could have been an opportunity for Europeans to take their destiny into their own hands. But I’ve said it before, and will again, this is not going to happen. Obviously, the Europeans will not resist. They never do, as they are full of fear. It is not the failure of Trump’s policies that Europe’s foreign policy elites dread, but their success. They fear the end of their beloved multilateral global order will catapult different people to the top — people like Steve Witkoff, whom Europeans keep on referring to as a property tycoon with no experience in foreign policy. But you underestimate dangerous people at your peril. And this arrogance hides insecurity, encourages inertia and augurs failure.

Trump wants Europe to stay hooked on the American supply, just as Europe fears the withdrawal symptoms if they go cold turkey. Trump wants to maintain the dependency relationship and his new security doctrine says as much. As the NSS puts it “Europe is strategically and culturally vital to the US”. And this reference to “culturally vital” perfectly explains Trump’s attitude towards us. Americans see Europe as the world’s museum. And Europeans have long conformed to this stereotype. They are the champions of preservation and conservation, obsessed with protecting listed buildings and medieval villages, while at the same time suffering from housing shortages. There was a time when Europe’s classical music and literature was modern. But today, Europe is a cultural theme park, owned by American entertainment companies. That’s what I call civilizational erasure.

Casablanca is a story about Americans and Europeans. The version we’ve watched ends with a famous line about the beginning of a beautiful friendship. But this is not how our story will end. Our fate will be more like the original ending of the film, with the final tragic dialogue between Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, when the American said: “We’ll always have Paris.”

Indeed, they will.

How did Europe get in a position where it has no strategic choices left? It is quite a reversal. Machiavelli, an Italian, was one of the early architects of modern strategic thinking. Strategic diplomacy reached a peak with Metternich and Talleyrand, the foreign ministers of Austria and France: each played an instrumental role in the Congress of Vienna. This was the ultimate peace conference, one that provided Europe with stability and security for a century. After the Second World War, the diplomatic giants were mostly Americans such as George Marshall, George Kennan and Henry Kissinger.

Beside the chess-board type diplomatic strategist, there is another kind: the long-term strategic actor. The most successful modern example is China. China’s transformation began with the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in 1978, at which Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms. It took three or four decades until these reforms translated into geopolitical power. During the transformation, uninformed Western opinion held that China was becoming more Western. The genius of the Chinese project was that it led others to underestimate it.

Both types of strategy, chess-playing and long-term scheming, have their place. Modern Europe has neither. We Europeans used to be good at the long-term stuff, like the Chinese today. The early European Economic Community was an example of a focused strategy to defragment Europe’s splintering economies. The single European market in the Eighties and early Nineties was the most important of the EU’s grand strategic projects, but also its last. To devise the single market, around 200,000 experts gathered in 2,300 technical bodies. They spent half a billion to one billion hours on it. That’s strategy. The euro was more ambitious than the single market, but it was not strategic, because the EU never built upon it. The EU could have turned the euro into a challenger to the US dollar, but that would have required different economic policies, like the introduction of a European sovereign bond.

When strategy fades, action turns first into reaction, and eventually into delusion. The Europeans do not have the foggiest idea of how to help Ukraine defeat Putin on the battlefield, and yet they dream of dragging him in front of the International Criminal Court in the Hague. Their discourse is about the rule of law. They are prosecutor, jury and judge in their imagined trials. They think of themselves as on the right side of the virtue-signaling spectrum.

I find it personally painful to watch Kaja Kallas, the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy, make a fool of herself with variably informed war-mongering discourse that lacks any strategic content. But she is not the only one. I have yet to identify a single official in any national capitals, including London, who has a strategy to end the Ukraine war. There is no one who has done the math of the military capabilities Ukraine would need, on the logistics of how to produce or procure it. There is also no strategy whatsoever on how to finance it.

Take the French contribution, or lack thereof. Emmanuel Macron is one of the loudest cheerleaders for Ukraine. And yet the French government is allocating a mere $120 million for Ukraine aid in its 2026 budget. Italy and Spain, another two large European countries, also spend little. The Germans and the UK are not in a position to bankroll this operation.

Do European leaders believe their meager contributions can deliver a Ukrainian victory? A dead giveaway is the overuse of the passive tense. They don’t say: “We will do whatever it takes to defeat Putin.” They do say: “Putin must be defeated”. In other words: We want Ukrainian soldiers to die and American taxpayers to pay. In a rare moment of candor, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, admitted only last week that the European taxpayer is not going to pay for it. Indeed.

When Trump came to power, he demanded that the Europeans increase their defense spending from just under 2% of GDP to 5%. The Europeans agreed immediately. And they are raising the money through debt.

Faced with Trump’ demands, a strategic approach on the part of the Europeans would have been to identify the precise shortcomings of the continent’s defense, like staffing, technology, and military procurement, and compare them to existing capabilities. The second step would have been to devise a strategy to acquire what is needed and start with the development of new technologies. Then you calculate what it costs under different scenarios and make the corresponding budget allocations. At this point we have to remember that ammunition made in Germany costs five times as much as what the Russian army pays for.

Ultimately, defense spending is called spending for a reason. It is not investment. Trying to fund it through debt is self-defeating. Considering that we are talking about a defense strategy, this approach is monumentally stupid. A strategic thinker asks: What sacrifices do we make so we can match Russia’s military capability? A European military planner asks: how do much do we need to borrow to get ahead in the defense spending league tables? Defense spending targets are what you end up with when you have no strategy.

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When people don’t have strategies, they often seek refuge in procedures — to a point where the procedures take on a life on their own. Since the war began, the EU has passed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. The sanctions have been an abject failure, but Brussels refuses to acknowledge it. The officials did not think this through. They are shocked to see that China supported Russia, that sanctioned goods flow through Kazakhstan. Some EU countries still buy Russian oil and gas because they are dependent on it. Partly as a result, the Russian economy has massively outperformed that of Europe since the start of the war. Whereas Europeans are drowning in debt, Russia is an example of fiscal strength. Unwilling to make cuts to their bloated welfare spending, the Europeans have identified the frozen Russian assets as the only way to finance the war. Even with that money, they do not have a strategy to end the war, either through victory or peace. The simple goal is to keep the show on the road. That’s what non-strategic procedural thinking does to you.

It also makes you dependent. By outsourcing all strategic thinking, the Europeans have become dependent on the US for defense and trade. Now they get angry with Trump for excluding them from meetings.

Trump, like the Europeans, is not a strategic actor of the kind I describe, but this is for different reasons. Trump’s politics are transactional. He likes peace because war is bad for business. Trump could not care less about whether Putin broke international law. To the European diplomats who huddle in the antechambers of the peace process, Trump’s attitude is disturbing and alienating.

The Germans, with their special business relationships with Russia, used to be more like Trump. German politicians had their own private channels with Russian counterparts, just as Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy, does today. The Germans used to be the largest crowd in the St Petersburg International Economics Forum, Russia’s answer to Davos. Now I am hearing that the hotels in Moscow and St Petersburg are filled with Americans hoping to strike lucrative deals with Russia. It is an ironic twist of fate, for it was the US that tried to force Germany to abandon the Baltic Sea gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Now there is talk of the Americans injecting themselves as the middleman to sell Russian gas to Germany. You could not make this up.

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I expect the Germans will eventually rejoin the Russia-is-open-for-business club. They are distrustful of the French in military affairs, and they don’t have any ambitions for the EU to develop into a global strategic actor. They may want to reconnect with the only vaguely successful independent economic partnership they had this century — with Russia.

There is a lot of literature on the subject of why nations rise and decline. My own favorite is Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations, published in 1982. It explains that Japan and Germany succeeded in the post-war period because the war destroyed political and elite systems. For Olson, decline is preceded by a slowdown in innovation, a focus on redistribution of wealth, and the power of special interest groups. His method perfectly describes not only the rise of Japan and Germany, but also both countries’ subsequent decline. The socio-political factors that Olson describes as the cause of national decline happen to be exactly the same as those that discourage strategic thought and action. Europeans think they can safeguard their welfare and their influence through regulation, procedure, the rule of law, and international institutions. The Europeans dream of a world in which no one acts strategically. This is also a world in which innovation is rare, a world without disruption and creativity.

Like no US president before him, Trump exposes Europe’s delusions, its lack of a strategic thinking and action. This is why the Europeans hate him so much. And to no avail. It promises to be another bad week for Kallas et al.

Brentford’s best chance also came from a long ball, misjudged by a defender who headed towards his own goal, letting in Brentford’s mountainous new striker, Igor Thiago. Modern football has become throwback football — a return to something basic, traditional, earthy. Across the Premier League, fussy ministrations and careful planning are out; the big man and uncompromising directness are back. Gone is the approach of cosmopolitan globalized technocracy and in its place has come something grittier, more visceral, perhaps more immediately appealing, something that — at least at first glance — feels more English. More like Brexitball. Who needs patient build-up or sophisticated theorizing when you can just get it launched? In football as in politics, the big man is back.

There will be those who think this is absurd, that it is ludicrous to discern in the way a team plays some sort of expression of a broader culture or societal trend. But if we accept that literature or music or architecture reflects the world around it, why should football be any different? Like any other cultural mode, football presents its practitioners with a series of challenges, some practical and some aesthetic: how could the way in which they answer them not be conditioned by the prevailing sensibility, even if they are willfully striking against it?

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2008, a moment of crisis for Europe’s political technocrats as they wrestled with the Eurozone crisis — and coincidentally, a major turning point in the game’s tactical evolution. Before 2008, there was only one occasion when the average number of goals in the knockout stages of the Champions League was higher than three. From then until 2020, there was only one occasion when that average dropped below three.

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As it happened, 2008 was also the year that Guardiola took over as head coach of Barcelona — but clearly something was already beginning to shift. No coach, not even one as gifted as Guardiola, can have that sort of impact in his first season. Changes in pitch technology had improved playing surfaces to the point that a player could almost take his first touch for granted; as the ball approached him, he didn’t have to give it his full concentration, waiting for a bobble — but could already be assessing his passing options. That made the game more chess-like. It was less about the ability to react than about strategy. How could players move around to create overloads or to isolate defenders? At the same time, the liberalization of the offside law meant defensive lines sat deeper, increasing the effective playing area. There was also a crackdown on intimidatory tackling, which allowed technically accomplished, creative but less physically imposing players to play a greater role. This was the era of Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, David Silva and Luka Modrić.

So Guardiola emerged into an environment perfectly suited to his approach. As a player at Barcelona under Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, he was schooled in the Total Football played by the Dutch in the early Seventies and managed to repurpose the style for the new era. He was extraordinarily successful, first at Barcelona, and then at Bayern Munich and Manchester City. His way of playing was derided by his detractors as tiki-taka — an onomatopoeic term coined in the Eighties by the no-nonsense, Basque coach Javier Clemente for passing football that went nowhere. He preferred to call it juego de posición — the positional game — though Pepism might be a more useful label, given how closely identified it is with one man.

Whatever the label, the style became hegemonic. It became broadly accepted that “good” football — progressive football, the football elite sides had to play — must follow the Guardiola template. You try to dominate possession, and when the ball is lost, you win it back by pressing aggressively with a high defensive line. But Guardiola was also a cautious coach; his priority was always control. As the background conditions made retention of possession easier it became possible to defend by keeping the ball from the opposition. When Spain, playing a particularly sterile version of Pepism, won the 2010 World Cup, they did so by winning all four knockout fixtures 1-0.

Given the globalized nature of modern football, it’s probable that there has never been such consensus across the game as to how it should be played. But not everybody liked it. A vague culture war grew up. Did you admire the level of control, the triumph of tactics and technical ability — or did you find this attrition by possession all desperately dull? Did you yearn for the old days, for big tackles and working the channels? Did you seek a footballing identity outside what the European technocracy deemed acceptable, progressive, correct?

It should realistically be possible to hold both views simultaneously, to see this degree of control as impressive while acknowledging that there was something slightly bloodless about it — but that’s not how modern media works. Various figures within the game have recently taken to claiming that Guardiola, the most revolutionary and influential figure in football for 50 years, has somehow “ruined football” — a list diverse enough to include the former England manager Fabio Capello, the former USA goalkeeper Tim Howard and the Colchester striker Lyle Taylor.

If there is an issue, it probably lies less with Guardiola than his imitators. Guardiola himself has never stopped evolving — as can be seen in the way that two of his former assistants, Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and Chelsea’s Enzo Maresca, have their sides play in such different ways having learned from the master at different stages of his career. Certain core principles have remained, but Guardiola has never stood still. He’s a pragmatist. It’s his disciples, the likes of Xavi, Jorge Sampaoli and Russell Martin who are the ideologues — who insist on playing their way however inappropriate that may be for their players or the circumstances.

Over the past year, though, Guardiola has acknowledged that he is no longer at the vanguard of the game’s evolution. “Today, modern football is not positional,” he said. “You have to ride the rhythm.” He was talking specifically about how there are now so many fixtures that there is no time to drill their players into efficient positional machines — and so, it is now external factors that are shaping the evolution of the game rather than individual coaches. Guardiola has been moving for several years now towards a more physical model of play, while against both Manchester United and Arsenal this season he had his City side sit deep, eschew possession and play on the counter-attack. Against Arsenal they had only 34% of the ball. Only once before had any of his sides ever dropped below 40% in a league game. This felt shocking — a Götterdämmerung. And as the one true faith falls away, what is left is confusion.

In the gloom, without an obvious ideology to follow, many teams have gone back to basics. Football has, abruptly, become more direct and more focused on set-plays. Over the first month of this Premier League season, non-penalty goals from set-plays rose by 21%. Long balls are up 7%. High turnovers (that is, occasions when the ball is won back in the opposition’s defensive third, an indicator of a high press) are down 14%.

On the level of personnel, inverted wingers and false nines are out, and in their place has returned something more traditional. Football at its simplest level is about putting the ball in the net, and who better to do that than an old-fashioned, physically imposing number 9? The summer transfer window was characterized by the great carousel of center-forwards: Liverpool spent £125m on Alexander Isak and £100m on Hugo Ekitiké; Manchester United spent £65m on Benjamin Šeško; Newcastle spent £65m on Nick Woltemade; Arsenal spent £55m on Viktor Gyökeres; Chelsea spent £30m on Liam Delap; Tottenham brought in Randal Kolo Muani on loan. That’s six of a putative Big Seven shelling out on center-forwards over six feet tall. The odd one out is City, who began the trend — Guardiola as usual leading where others follow — by signing the 6’ 5” Norwegian striker Erling Haaland in 2022. Not since the Eighties have big men been so in demand.

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As the dominant, often over-intellectualized, globalized liberal consensus falls away, so there is a demand for something more straightforward, more direct. For somebody who gets things done without worrying about retaining possession while a structure is established to rebuff a potential counter-attack should the ball be lost. Deal with that if it happens; for now, get it to the big man. There is a weariness with Pepism, a background sense that it is the ideology of a dominant international elite that has spent the past 20 years enriching itself at the expense of those lower down the economic scale.

The Champions League is now the preserve of, at most, a dozen sides. The superclubs dominate like never before. The gulf between the Premier League and Championship has never been so vast. Traditional fans are increasingly priced out in favor of wealthy tourists and globalization is destroying the community function of major clubs. The ticket prices for next summer’s World Cup, released last week, are just the latest example of a game that has lost touch with its roots, with most costing several hundred dollars. This used to be the working man’s ballet. And so there is a desire to go back — back to a perhaps illusory simpler past when the game was open to all, when it was possible to compete without being owned by a state, an oligarch or a private equity group, when football was a simple game, unadulterated by boffins with iPads, in which defenders defended and attackers attacked.

There are tactical-evolutionary reasons for a post-Pep reset, but it’s surely no coincidence that the form that it’s taken is this one. As politics has become more direct, so has football; as strength, unencumbered by subtlety, becomes a virtue in one sphere, so it does in the other. Football is part of culture, inevitably influencing it and being influenced by it. They may be very different people with very different views, but the turn to Haaland, Šeško and Gyökeres stems from the same place as the turn to Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Javier Milei.

The man born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, in 1226, has been defied ever since, and not merely by Franciscans. Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni recently announced that his saint’s day, 4 October, is to be celebrated as a national holiday, a just reward for the man she called an icon of Italian identity. The move is partly economic — an extra day off implies a buoyant economy — but also represents the latest phase of a wider nationalist agenda. Over recent years, Meloni’s ruling party has cut taxes on Italian art, cut English from Italian documents, and even banned lab-grown meat in an attempt to defend the nation’s culinary heritage. 

This is hardly the meekness Saint Francis had preached. But, then, Meloni isn’t the first to politicize the friar either. Since Italy was united, over 150 years ago, Il Poverello (“The Poor Little One”) has been revived again and again, his story defaced for a shifting polemical present. And if that makes him vulnerable to any regime in need of a hero, it also obscures the real Francis: a medieval mystic who bathed in frenzied piety, and one who anyway seems snubbed in a land where the local still reigns. 

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The modern obsession with Saint Francis began on the 700th anniversary of his birth, in 1882. That year, barely a decade after unification, the fresh-faced monarchy recalled the friar with gusto. There were new biographies and new magazines, such as The Echo of Saint Francis, which called him “Italian of heart and mind”. Art told a similar tale. One sculpture from 1882 shows the friar arms-outstretched, blessing a triumvirate of Dante, Giotto and Christopher Columbus. 

Equating Saint Francis with these well-worn civic heroes makes sense, given the 19th-century state’s awkward relationship with the Catholic Church. By 1870, as they united the peninsula under the tricolor flag, Italian troops had besieged the Papal enclave in Rome. Twelve years later, anticlericalism remained strong, with many nationalist leaders condemning the Church for its venality and obscurantism. But if they loathed the Church — Giuseppe Mazzini famously asked if priests really knew the Gospel — they couldn’t ignore the fact that most normal Italians disagreed. Embracing Saint Francis was therefore a way of integrating the Church into the new state. And if, to borrow a phrase, that made turning peasants into Italians slightly less challenging, Saint Francis was a plausible icon in other ways, too. For one thing, his modesty was the perfect foil to Papal pomp. For another, he wrote his famous Rule in an Umbrian vernacular familiar to Dante, meaning he could be retroactively cast as the father of modern Italian: helpful when roughly nine-in-ten subjects knew only dialect. 

If the Francis of the 1880s was a thoughtful theologian, font of the Renaissance and model for an enlightened kingdom on the make, other elements of his story would prove helpful in the following century. Before he embraced destitution, helping lepers and rebuilding churches, Francis was a knight. As a young man, he joined his native Assisi in a war against Perugia and was captured and imprisoned for a year. Later, deep into his ministry, he crossed the Mediterranean on a daring mission to convert a Muslim sultan. 

Not quite a ruthless killer, but certainly enough to be conscripted by fascism. That was obvious even before the Blackshirts seized power. In 1919, for instance, the poet and rabblerouser Gabriele D’Annunzio occupied the town of Fiume. This Yugoslav port, now Rijeka, was claimed by Italian patriots, and D’Annunzio invoked the friar as his hoodlums ran riot. “Are not the poor of Fiume the favourites of Saint Francis?” His successors were even starker. Just as the constitutional monarchy he destroyed needed the support of the clergy, so too did Benito Mussolini. Hence the first 4 October holiday swiftly following, with Francis designated an Italian patron saint in 1939. The propagandaists got started too. Comparing Francis to Mussolini, one said they had the same liveliness of gaze and nobility of bearing. The only thing missing from Il Duce, he suggested, was a halo. 

As the dictatorship became more aggressive, it also imagined Francis as a rifle-toting crusader. When Italy attacked Abyssinia, in 1935, the mayor of Assisi argued the invaders were following the “bloody footsteps of the Franciscan missionaries”. And just as the 19th century remade Saint Francis in chiseled stone, the fascists employed the new medium of film. One excellent example is Frate Francesco, a 1927 biopic that blends Franciscan unity with national pride. “It must be a very Italian film,” said the director, “a triumph of faith and beauty to demonstrate that we Italians are still capable of standing up to foreign competition.” 

Saint Francis has proved just as flexible since 1945. His love of charity made him a hero of postwar socialism, his love of animals the patron saint of ecology. By the time you reach Margaret Thatcher’s famous speech, which wrongly attributed a later prayer to Il Poverello, Francis begins to feel less like a real historical figure — and more like a cipher, a vessel for whichever statesman needs him at the time. 

There’s an irony here. On the one hand, Francis’s supple biography, made suppler still by the passage of time, means he can easily be twisted this way or that, by Romantic liberals, or jackbooted thugs, or indeed by Right-wing populists whose approval ratings are down. At the same time, however, that very impermanence means Francis, whatever his guise, can never truly enter Italian hearts. For whenever he does, someone else will soon recast him. Explaining the importance of Meloni’s holy day — itself reviving one axed in 1977 — a member of the ruling party claimed it would restore “to the public sphere a pillar of our collective memory”. That’s unsurprising from yet another government that values good relations with the Pope. But the question remains: which public sphere, and which collective memory? If Francis’s posthumous journey tells us anything, it’s that polemic by one ideologue will only be usurped by the next. 

But if echoes of the flesh-and-blood friar endure, in his elegant prose and his lust for adventure, the cleric as a whole was far more arcane. He was, after all, a man who had a dream-time revelation to remake the celestial city here on Earth, and who gave up his possessions so freely that his merchant father disowned him; a man who then stripped to his skin, and declared he’d own nothing, and who fled to the woods singing a French ballad — yet who emerged to found an order that conquered all Europe. The real Francis, as far as we can tell across the chasm of centuries, was a man who blessed captured rabbits, and who admonished the birds to thank God for their wings. 

I’d love to see Meloni describe these hair-shirt passions to her voters, if only because it would force her to ground Francis in something more interesting than politics. It would be funny too: that this bewildering world of medieval devotion could accommodate anything as prosaic as Giorgia Meloni is laughable, particularly when churchgoing is far lower now than it was in 1882. And yet, in another irony, freeing Francis from the vagaries of modern discourse might actually make him a more appealing national figure. 

The fact is that, whatever the shrill insistence of Meloni and the rest, many are simply unwilling to embrace a truly Italian identity, new books proclaiming Francis a proto-nationalist notwithstanding. According to a 2021 poll, just 20% of citizens identified primarily as Italian, an 8% drop from a decade earlier. Another survey found that half feel closer to their city or region than they do the country as a whole. 

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Perhaps that’s to be expected in a nation so young. But what’s undeniable, too, is that these sentiments are reflected in practice. Regionalism remains common from the Alps to Sicily, both politically and across the wider culture: not least when it comes to sainthood. In 2017, to give one example, officials in Rome tried to ban the Venetian authorities from flying the Banner of Saint Mark, an artifact of the city’s ancient republic. “It’s a flag with more than 1,000 years of history,” lamented one local politician. 

And if the evangelist is more admired here than Saint Francis, you can spot the same pattern across the peninsula. The Milanese are sometimes called “Ambrosiani” after their patron Saint Ambrose. In Naples, Saint Januarius Day is a time for frantic celebration, as his blood-stained relics are paraded through the streets. John the Baptist is the patron saint of Florence, where like equivalent days elsewhere, his feast is an unofficial holiday. Taken together, anyway, it hints again to the enduring power of the local in a land where Rome remains weak — and explains once more why centralizers are so desperate for a Francis. 

And what of Il Poverello himself? From a purely religious perspective, he doubtless remains popular. Visit Assisi, with its vast double church, and you can find plenty of trinkets for sale. But unlike Francis’s political cult, these commemorations feel wholly unstudied, a universe away from that pompous talk of public spheres and collective memory. Think of it as a kind of revenge, for a man who only ever wished to be forgotten, with his ballads and his rabbits and his birds. 

The series begins in 1868. Sir Benjamin Guinness is dead, and his two eldest sons inherit what is now Ireland’s largest brewing concern. From small beginnings in 1759, when Arthur Guinness took out a 9,000-year lease on a site at St James’s Gate in Dublin (rent: £45 per annum), the eponymous stout had gained ground year on year. A degree of brand recognition must have been achieved by 1815, when a cavalry officer found himself desperate for a jar of the black stuff after sustaining wounds at Waterloo. “When I was sufficiently recovered to be able to take some nourishment,” he wrote, “I felt the most extraordinary desire for a glass of Guinness.” By 1840, more Guinness was sold in England than Ireland, and when Sir Benjamin died, the brewery was on the cusp of global success.

House of Guinness follows Sir Benjamin’s children as they scheme, slurp and swive their way through Victorian Dublin. Some work hard, others hardly work. This is all a good laugh, but the most interesting thing is not what these baby Guinnesses do, but who they are. In the words of one proto-Republican, the Guinness family are “the Protestant gentry that make us Irish suffer at the hands of the British.” Another character refers dismissively to “dice-rolling Protestants.” And these brewers aren’t just Protestant. They’re English, too. The family feels the weight of this identity, knowing that success in business has brought other, unwanted responsibilities. When a homosexual Guinness is blackmailed, he is warned that “The Fenians would use you as proof of a degenerate English Protestant ruling class.”

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All this might come as a surprise to some international viewers. House of Guinness is, in part, the story of how a quintessentially Protestant product became a quintessentially Irish icon. Dramatic license is used in spades — each episode begins with the legend, “This fiction is inspired by true stories” — but confusion about whether England or Ireland is home surfaces frequently and rings true. Arthur, the eldest Guinness brother, educated at Eton and living in London, is chided for his English accent and rigid Unionism. His younger brother Edward, raised in Dublin, has a more pragmatic view of the Irish question. Taken together, the two young men embody the contradictions of their ethnicity and class. Knight sensibly avoids the term “Anglo-Irish”, but that is what they are, or at least what they had become.

Who were the Anglo-Irish? Mainly the scions of those English colonists granted large estates during the plantations of the early 1600s, and in the wake of Cromwell’s Irish wars. Still, it’s an elastic term, and includes the Gaelic nobility and descendants of Norman invaders who converted to Protestantism to retain land and status, as well as those who had done well enough in business or politics to gain entry to Dublin’s ballrooms.

In Brendan Behan’s 1958 play, The Hostage, an Anglo-Irishman is defined simply: “A Protestant with a horse.” But not just any Protestant. These, after all, are established Church of Ireland types rather than Methodists or Presbyterians. Work is important, too, or rather the lack of it. Their days, Behan wrote, are spent “riding horses, drinking whiskey and reading double-meaning books in Irish at Trinity College.” He evokes a leisured people, and by implication a landed people, whose only true passion has four muscular legs and an alluring whicker. Still, he was a clubbable sort. He’d mock the Anglo-Irish on stage and gladly accept their hospitality off it. At the height of his fame he was a regular guest at Luggala, the Guinness family pile in County Wicklow. Some say he was even asked to write a slogan for the brand. I can’t find any evidence for that claim one way or the other. The only certainty is that Behan’s reputed suggestion — “Guinness gets you drunk” — was never used.

The Guinness who took out a lease at St James’s Gate in 1759 wouldn’t qualify as Anglo-Irish according to Behan’s definition. This wasn’t just about English heritage, after all, but class. The first Arthur Guinness had little money and no status, and you’d need at least one of those to count. But in the era covered by House of Guinness, things were changing. Sir Benjamin was the first member of the family to receive a knighthood. His son, Edward, was created Baron Iveagh in 1891. The baronetcy was named for a certain Magennis of Iveagh, who was “re-granted” his 22,000 acres of Ulster in 1623, presumably after conversion from Catholicism. This connection is probably hogwash, as nothing is known about the Guinness family before 1690, but the attempt to anchor themselves within the ranks of the old Gaelic nobility is revealing. In part, this was a natural desire to present themselves as being of ancient stock. But searching for a fantastic origin in a long-ago Ireland also betrayed an Anglo-Irish anxiety about where, exactly, home was to be found.

It’s no accident that Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent, arguably the first Irish novel, is concerned with precisely these anxieties. Published in 1800, the satire charts the decline of an Anglo-Irish dynasty as seen through the eyes of the family retainer, Thady Quirk. Quirk — who is either loyal to a fault or completely full of shit, depending on your reading — watches four generations of Rackrents succumb to folly and distraction. Each exhibits the traditional, if exaggerated, maladies of their class: profligacy, litigiousness, absenteeism, cruelty, indebtedness. The Rackrents fail their tenants, who are left at the mercy of viperous middle-men, and who are often forced from their tenancies altogether. Yet they also fail their own flesh and blood. Wives are tortured, heirs are few and far between, and no thought is given to the security of the next generation. Edgeworth, herself of Anglo-Irish stock, turns the increasingly decrepit “Big House”, with its broken windows and leaking roof, into a tiny model of Ireland. Her unspoken question is: who would treat their true home in such a way?

In the end, the whole estate passes into the ownership of Thady’s son, Jason. Young Quirk, who works as the family’s land agent, uses his mastery of property law and accountancy to ease house and lands from Rackrent hands. Acre by acre, stable by lodge, he deploys the English weapons of lawbook and ledger to secure his own landowning dynasty. The scholar George Watson has described the novel as “an Anglo-Irish nightmare”, and whether by accident or design, the same dynamic appears in House of Guinness. While the children squabble, Mr Rafferty, their looming foreman, quietly extends his authority throughout the brewery and into the most private reaches of the family itself.

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Bad dreams needn’t have worried the Guinnesses. They had a great advantage over older Anglo-Irish families, who by the late 19th century relied on ever-diminishing rents to service ever-growing debts. Unlike the others, though, people always wanted to buy what the Guinnesses were selling, and there was always more to sell. You can’t brew up more land, but stout is a truly renewable resource, and the thirst for it is just as inexhaustible. House of Guinness contains some sharp scenes where the daughters of grand, penniless old dynasties deign to marry “a brewer”. The Guinnesses gain access to aristocratic bloodlines, and the aristocrat gains an orangery overlooking the sixpence-sweep of Dublin Bay.

The pedigree aristos got the best of the deal. The show never openly states that the age of Big Houses and huge estates was coming to an end, but the drama is heavy with the sense that time is being called for all but the wealthiest. The generous terms of the 1903 Land Act saw large numbers of the Anglo-Irish sell their estates, often for more than they were worth. Some downsized to Dublin townhouses; others left Ireland for good. Their last show of strength came in 1914, when Anglo-Irishmen made up a third of the British officer corps.

There are still a few of them about, of course, though they tend to live quietly. If the Anglo-Irish are spoken of at all in Ireland today, it is usually in the wry register that Behan employed. Perhaps their continued relevance to contemporary Irish culture lies, above all, in fiction. The Big House novel is now an established genre, presided over by the ghosts of its three greatest practitioners: Elizabeth Bowen, J. G. Farrell, and Molly Keane.

And then there are the houses themselves. Stripped and lonely, shivering on hills or choked by trees, most have been left to rot away. And while the Irish Georgian Society — founded in 1958 by none other than Sir Desmond Guinness — continues to campaign for the preservation of beautiful buildings, much has been lost forever. Few of the Anglo-Irish learned the lesson that the brewing Guinnesses knew so well: the best legacies are liquid.

Dutch F-35 fighters bagged four of the drones, and the others went down by themselves: they were not bombardment drones, just plastic decoys without explosive warheads. Debris aside, in fact, the only damage was the destruction of a house near Lublin, caused not by the Russians, but by a sophisticated $1.9 million US air-to-air missile. It had been launched by a Polish F-16 fighter at a drone — and missed.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, was quick to use the Russian incursion to call for more defense spending, urging Nato members to spend 5% of their GDPs on defense. This week’s latest apparent drone incursion, this time over Denmark, has raised the pressure even further: especially now that Scott Bessant, the US Secretary of the Treasury, is warning that Trump has no plans to send more troops to help out his European allies.

But simply raising defense spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defense and yet can mobilize some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defense minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

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By Edward Luttwak

Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilized. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defense spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defense budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defense system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meager 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defense needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

With its 38 million inhabitants, Poland could certainly raise an adequate army to defend its two borders with Russian Kaliningrad and Russian-dominated Belarus. But its governments have persistently chosen not to do so, rejecting conscription followed by reserve service along Finnish or Israeli lines. In November 2021, just four months before Ukraine’s invasion but with every sign that Russia was on the move, Poland had just 42,000 combat-ready soldiers. That is more or less the right number for a country of 38 million — if, that is, Poland were located somewhere between Fiji and Tonga.

And now, even after the drone attack, Prime Minister Tusk still refuses conscription, the only way to generate the large forces Poland needs to defend two fronts. The official explanation is that conscription under communism subjected 18-year-old recruits to humiliation rituals, which all too often slid into torture and even rape. Those are practices which the Poles like to explain are caused by the infiltration of the Red Army’s notorious “dedovshchina” (“reign of old-timers”) system of abuse by older soldiers. But the reputation of Poland’s pre-communist army was no better here, and indeed for Belorussian, Jewish and Ukrainian conscripts things could be much worse.

The truth, then, is simpler: Polish youth are just as post-heroic as their peers across Europe. Unlike their predecessors, they do not feel the urge to prove themselves in combat, let alone to serve as long as it takes to defend their countries. The many young Ukrainians in Poland, who fled their own country to avoid being conscripted to defend it, do nothing to induce patriotic attitudes. Nor does it help that Warsaw constantly talks up the few thousand US combat soldiers foolishly deployed in Poland. As Bessant’s latest comments imply, this is a force that will be evacuated rather than reinforced if there is a major Russian offensive, but which now induces young Poles to say that if “Nato” wants more troops, let them send more Americans.

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In Britain, for its part, the post-heroic refusal is irrelevant. His Majesty has only 73,847 full-time soldiers at his disposal, most of whom are recruited from the small subset of British families with strong military traditions. Foreign recruits with similar backgrounds make up the remainder, most notably the 4,127 Gurkhas, but also some from Fiji. The French Foreign Legion has fewer than 9,000 soldiers — self-selected aspiring warriors from everywhere, and whose French officers are just as atypical. But the rest of the French Army is so far gone that even among the 11,000 supposedly elite Troupes de Marine, less than half are willing and able to fight.

As for the other European armies, the less said the better. The Danes and Swedes announced with great fanfare that they were joining Finland in introducing conscription: only to accommodate so many demands for exemptions that in 2024 they enrolled some 10,000 troops between them, as compared to 77,000 Finns 18 year olds drawn from a far smaller population. The Belgians and Dutch, who used to provide three armored divisions to Nato, might now field a tenth of that: a mere three battalions. The Italian, Spanish, Portuguese armies do not even train in earnest anymore. Their exercises are bored drills, their maneuvers theatrical displays scripted to look good, instead of being deliberately disrupted by supervisors to test the mental and physical agility of officers and men as in real maneuvers. As total numbers shrink, moreover, those armies did not reduce the number of officers anywhere near proportionately, meaning many Nato armies have plenty of generals but very few combat-ready troops for them to lead.

All of the above explains why Putin’s motley army — home-grown mercenaries from Russia’s poorest backwaters, convicted criminals and North Korean slave soldiers — can nevertheless frighten European governments into rearming at great expense. As for Donald Tusk and his Poles — they would do well to learn the lessons of another Russian incursion in September. Not in 2025, but in 1939, when the French army did not move, and the Royal Air Force did not bomb. The difference now, of course, is that Poland really could defend itself, if it emulated the Finns across the Baltic and conscripted 18-year-olds, while continuing to add trained soldiers to its reserve units. Fail, however, and Putin will only keep pushing.

On paper, this is presented as a decisive step to “cut Russia’s war revenues” and to force Moscow to the negotiating table. In practice, it is little more than the continuation of a policy that has failed time and time again. Russia has not been brought to its knees and has redirected energy flows elsewhere, while Europe has been crippled by higher prices and locked itself into a position of permanent dependence on the United States.

Before the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia was the EU’s largest supplier of oil and natural gas. Since then, Russia’s share of EU oil imports has dropped from 29% to 2%, and that of gas from 48% to 12%. Yet imports have not ceased entirely. Two pipelines remain operational: the Druzhba pipeline, which still delivers oil to Hungary and Slovakia, and the TurkStream pipeline, which supplies gas to Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece and Romania. Meanwhile, the EU has rushed to replace Russian pipeline gas with much more expensive and volatile LNG, whose share of total EU gas imports has more than doubled from 20% to 50%. Nearly half of this LNG now comes from the United States, making Europe the most important market for US LNG exports.

The irony is that while the EU boasted of cutting pipeline imports from Russia, it has quietly increased its purchases of Russian LNG, most of which goes to France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. This is simply a matter of economic reality: not only is Russian LNG “significantly cheaper” than American liquefied gas, but existing agreements bind European buyers to Russian supplies.

Nothing, however, illustrates the absurdity of the EU’s sanctions regime more than the fact that Europe continues to indirectly import large quantities of Russian oil. Instead of buying cheap crude directly from Russia, as it used to, it now purchases refined products from countries like India and Turkey, which import Russian crude, refine it and sell it back to Europe at a significant markup. In the first six months of 2025 alone, the EU and Turkey imported 2.4 million tonnes of petroleum products from India. Estimates suggest that two thirds of this originated from Russian crude. In effect, the EU and Turkey paid India around €1.5 billion for oil that was Russian in all but name.

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This means that Europe is now paying more for the same Russian oil than it did before, while also paying more for LNG to replace Russian pipeline gas. The bloc has thus shot itself in the foot twice: once by substituting cheap Russian pipeline gas with more expensive American (and Russian) LNG, and again by substituting direct Russian oil imports with indirect and more costly purchases from India and Turkey.

The consequences have been brutal. Europe has endured three consecutive years of industrial stagnation. Germany — once the engine of the continent — is now experiencing outright deindustrialization, with 125,000 industrial jobs lost in just the past few weeks.

Russia, meanwhile, has emerged relatively unscathed, redirecting its exports to Asia and consolidating its partnership with China. From the standpoint of Europe’s long-term interests, the obvious path would be to re-normalize economic relations with Moscow, resume cheap energy imports and work towards a negotiated end to the war. But rationality has long since disappeared from European policy. Indeed, Brussels has doubled down, announcing not only the LNG ban but also a de facto prohibition on any future use of the Nord Stream pipelines, while at the same time sabotaging any peace effort.

The justification, once again, is that sanctions will force Russia to end the war on the West’s terms. The reality is that 18 packages of sanctions have failed to achieve this goal, and the 19th will fare no better. What it will do, however, is deepen Europe’s dependence on the United States.

Indeed, the timing of the new sanctions package was not coincidental. Just days earlier, Donald Trump issued an ultimatum to Nato allies. The US, he declared, would only impose “major” new sanctions on Russia once Europeans had agreed to stop buying Russian oil. He went further, suggesting Nato impose 50-100% tariffs on China and India, both of which he accused of circumventing sanctions. He insisted such measures would weaken Russia’s “strong control” over its partners. Trump even claimed that halting Russian energy imports, combined with heavy tariffs on China, would be “of great help” in ending the conflict.

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The logic is baffling. Europe has no power to force China or India to stop buying Russian oil. Tariffs on those countries would fuel sky-high inflation and trigger counter-tariffs that would devastate European exporters, while doing little to change their purchasing behavior. Even EU diplomats privately acknowledge that Trump’s conditions are unrealistic — as Trump himself likely understands all too well. Yet his demands reveal the transactional essence of transatlantic politics today.

Trump’s ultimatum dovetails with a broader US strategy: to dominate Europe’s energy market. US Energy Secretary Chris Wright made this explicit: “You want to have secure energy suppliers that are your allies, not your foes.” Under Washington’s plan, the US could account for nearly three-quarters of Europe’s LNG imports within a few years. Indeed, ExxonMobil now expects Europe to sign multi-decade contracts of US gas as part of its pledge to buy $750 billion American energy.

Until recently, EU countries resisted such deals, fearing fossil fuel dependence and the undermining of climate goals. But the tide has shifted. Italy’s Eni recently signed a 20-year deal with Venture Global, its first long-term agreement with a US LNG producer. Edison and Germany’s Sefe have signed similar agreements. The result is structural dependence on US gas — which is not only more expensive but also has a far higher carbon footprint than Russian pipeline gas — for decades to come. This is a textbook example of geopolitical vassalage.

But it gets worse. Even as Europe is told to cut all ties with Russian energy, reports have emerged of secret talks between ExxonMobil and the Russian oil company Rosneft about resuming cooperation on the massive Sakhalin project in Russia’s Far East. If confirmed, it would mean that while Europeans are forbidden to buy cheap Russian gas and oil, American companies are quietly preparing to return. The aim, it would seem, is to buy Russian energy cheaply, resell it at a premium and push competitors like Turkey and India out of the game.

But there’s a clear flaw in this strategy. It is hard to imagine US companies actually resuming business with Russia while the war continues — especially as Washington threatens ever-tighter sanctions on Russia and its key partners, such as China and India. Indeed, Exxon’s CEO has denied the rumors. This contradiction highlights the limits of Trump’s transactional approach: the belief that he can neatly separate economics from politics, striking commercial deals with Moscow while challenging Russia’s broader security and geopolitical aims.

All the while, the push to decouple Europe from Russian energy has only strengthened the strategic partnership between Moscow and Beijing. Earlier this month, they signed a memorandum to build the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, a $13.6-billion project stretching 2,600 kilometers through Mongolia. If confirmed, it would deliver 50 billion cubic meters of gas annually to China, providing Beijing with a reliable source of cheap energy.

For Europe, this is a disaster. Having voluntarily cut itself off from Russian energy, the continent is now committed to a future of high prices and low competitiveness. Russia, by contrast, is securing long-term markets in Asia. The new pipeline would also have implications for the US as well. Analysts predict the pipeline will cause a “structural shock” to global LNG trade, reducing China’s reliance on seaborne cargoes and undermining US ambitions for long-term contracts.

But this simply highlights why it is imperative for the US to keep its client states as reliant as possible on American fossil fuels. Seen in this light, the war has been nothing short of a triumph for the United States: guaranteeing windfall profits for its energy companies and binding Europe ever more tightly to its geopolitical priorities. Indeed, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that this outcome was part of the rationale all along. After all, driving a permanent wedge between Europe and Russia while securing Europe as a captive market for US energy has arguably been a consistent objective of American strategy for decades.

By adopting sanctions that align with Trump’s demands, Brussels is sacrificing what remains of its autonomy. The result is a geopolitical paradox so twisted that it almost defies comprehension. European governments, trapped by their own rhetoric and by a dogmatic commitment to permanent confrontation with Moscow, have maneuvered themselves into a laughable position. They have allowed Trump to frame his demands as a perverse quid pro quo: he can present Europe’s economic self-harm and growing dependence on US energy as the price they must pay in order to accelerate their own strategic decline.

Overall, the EU’s energy policy since 2022 has been a textbook case of self-inflicted harm. By cutting itself off from cheap Russian supplies, it has handed the United States a once-in-a-generation opportunity to dominate Europe’s energy market. By embracing sanctions, which have failed to weaken Russia but have devastated European industry, Brussels has turned the continent into a geopolitical pawn. Europe’s leaders claim to be defending values and solidarity; in reality, they are presiding over a process of deindustrialization and decline, while continuing to dangerously escalate tensions with Russia. Unless there is a dramatic shift, the continent’s future will be one of stagnation and irrelevance — and, at worst, all-out war.

“Max Weber, whom we know of as a harsh melancholic realist, wrote about ‘this great and wonderful war’ and how marvelous it was to still be alive to experience it, and yet how bitter it was that his age prevented him from going to the front.”

At no point did Weber and many other war-cheerleading Germans of the time appear to consider the possibility that the war might not turn out the way they thought it would.

I see Europe in a similar position today. Like Weber, many intellectuals and politicians of our era are gung-ho about going to war with Russia. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Western military intervention is the historian Timothy Snyder, previously at Yale, now at the University of Toronto. He said in 2023: “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”

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European politicians, too, are becoming increasingly gung-ho about fighting the Russians. One of them is Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president. I knew him from my time in Brussels, when he was a humble MEP, the embodiment of a calm, intellectual northern European. He said last week that security guarantees for Ukraine invariably mean that the guarantors are willing to fight the Russians.

I am not underplaying the security threat posed by Vladimir Putin. The intrusion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace no doubt constitutes an unacceptable act of aggression. Nato has every right to shoot them down and should signal strongly that this is what will happen next time. But defending your alliance is different from fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, a country that is not part of Nato.

The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today’s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.

The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgments are more persistent.

The biggest of all was that Russia’s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgment has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie — that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain’s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country’s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money — how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.

If you measure an economy on the grounds of purchasing power, a completely different picture emerges from that suggested by our complacent statistic. According to the World Bank, the world’s largest economy, by far, is China, provided the measurement is made on the basis of purchasing power parity. (Purchasing power parity accounts for goods being more affordable in some countries than in others.) Number two is the US. Then comes India, and then Russia. Germany, in sixth place, is the biggest of the European countries.

Based on this measure, the 10 countries that form part of an alliance with China and Russia, the so-called Brics, are bigger than the US, Western Europe and Japan together. We live in a truly bi-polar world. The US and China are the leaders of each side. We no longer call the shots, even if we think we do. Over time, the other side will become bigger, because they are growing faster than us.

Since the start of the war, Russia has outgrown all of the G7 economies. The British economist John Maynard Keynes would not have been surprised, because what happened was a classic Keynesian war economy effect. The UK experienced this effect during the Second World War. Putin re-organized Russia into a war economy.

I am emphasizing these economic facts because this is what will inform the reality on the ground in Ukraine going forward. It is money that buys weapons. This money for Ukraine has dried up. The US has given €115bn in total bilateral aid to Ukraine so far, which dwarfs Germany’s €21.3bn and €7.56bn from France. Without the US, there is absolutely no way that the Europeans could afford to bankroll the war themselves. For that, they have to borrow money.

Or they could raid the €210bn of frozen Russian assets that sit in Europe. Previously, Germany, France, Belgium and the European Central Bank have opposed an asset raid — for different reasons. Belgium has most of the money on its soil. The money sits in the vaults of Euroclear, a large financial depository based in Brussels. France and Germany might be on the line for any compensation claims should Russia win in commercial courts. The ECB believes that an asset raid is illegal and would irrevocably damage Europe’s reputation as a financial center. Under normal circumstances, it would be hopping mad for the EU to take such risks, but if they want to continue to support Ukraine, this is the only financial vehicle they have at their disposal. Now that the European Commission has come out with a proposal for unlocking the money, there is now a good chance that it could happen.

And then what? Leaving the complex technical and legal issues aside, the EU will run into a problem very similar to Margaret Thatcher’s caricature of socialism: eventually, they will run out of other people’s money. The misjudgment is that the €200bn will tide us over until Donald Trump leaves office, when he will be succeeded by a Democrat who will happily resume providing the lion’s share of the funding. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said recently that the war will end when Russia is economically exhausted. That’s the Western strategy.

But our sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy. Remember Einstein’s characterization of madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes. The EU has so far agreed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. A nineteenth is now being prepared.

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There are indeed some signs of financial stress in the Russian economy. Russia’s central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, admitted earlier this year that the Russian economy managed to expand on the back of essentially free resources, labor, sequestered industrial capacity, and liquid assets from the country’s National Wealth Fund. These resources have been truly exhausted, she said. But this comment was not addressed to the West, but to Putin. Putin needs to find means to create new resources. As does the West.

But Russia has something that Ukraine has not. China is a better ally to Russia than the US is to Ukraine. The Western neocons keep on underestimating the depth of the China-Russia alliance, which is the result of inept US foreign policy over the last ten years. By placing sanctions and tariffs on both countries, the US ended up creating a strategic alliance between them. The US, meanwhile, is much more detached from Ukraine under Trump than under Biden.

The mistaken idea behind Western sanctions is that Russia and China are dependent on Western technology like semiconductor chips. Very much to the surprise of the Biden administration, China managed to build high-performance chips themselves. Last week, China turned the tables by placing a ban on the import of Nvidia chips.

The €200bn in frozen assets that we might unleash in loans to Ukraine can also easily be matched by the other side. China could give a loan to Russia, collateralized on Western assets in China, or on receipts from legal compensation that Russia may be entitled to in the future. It is an ongoing misjudgment to think that the West — the smaller part of our duopolistic world — is going to smoke out the larger one.

Misjudgment of this scale and number is what turns regional wars into world wars. Our army of tweeting, war-hungry Western intellectuals are Max Weber’s successors. They leave me in no doubt that there is substantial support for a glorious war, just as there was over 100 years ago.