Europe, Alone

When at the end of the Cold War the United States found itself as the single remaining superpower, theories like Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” or the Wolfowitz Doctrine turned the unipolar reality into a mandate. US global hegemony was to be preserved at any cost, and its military would have to be able to defeat challengers anywhere in the world — if need be simultaneously. Regional powers, lagging far behind the US militarily and economically, would have to bend to American primacy. Accordingly, military alliances — above all NATO — were expanded, and from North Africa to Central Asia, eventual forever wars were launched.

Then, in the last decade, a new generation of American thinkers began to critique the pursuit of dominance as unsustainable, detrimental to national security, and ruinous for democracy and societal well-being. Primacy took on a negative connotation across much of the US political spectrum. But word never got around to Europe.

It wasn’t even noticed in Brussels’s inner sanctum, according to Eldar Mamedov, a former senior foreign policy advisor at the European Parliament: “When I ask European policymakers why the US would want to help Europe bring Russia to its knees, they mention leadership, dominance, and primacy, as if they don’t know that primacy is now a dirty word in DC.”

Still, rude Trump-administration demands that NATO members spend more on defense shouldn’t have been surprising. The Americans had long told their European allies to increase military spending: in the 1950s to contribute to containing the Soviet Union and since the 1990s to co-fund the joint project of global primacy. Yet America has also drawn enormous advantages from its military presence in Europe, the crown jewel and key hub of its global primacy.

If European leaders are now grasping for desperate measures, like a high-stakes gamble of borrowing against frozen Russian assets, it is because the end of US primacy represents a far more dramatic loss of status for Europeans than it does for Americans. The United States remains a superpower, one of the indisputable poles of a multipolar order. But what should Europe be, on its own, in terms of military might and power politics? A great power? Do Europe’s citizens want that? Do they also want the great-power rivalry that would inevitably come with it, which would poison their democracy, exacerbate inequality, and threaten peace the world over? No one has asked Europeans about it. They have been ordered into panic and arms races in blind haste.

But it’s not out of fear of an attack by Russia on NATO states.

Europe’s political influencers like to tell a story in which Putin looms as a berserk and ravenous conqueror of worlds, attacking one country after another, in the process (and against all logic) becoming ever stronger. An ogre, in the words of Macron, “a predator at our gates who has to keep feeding to survive.”

This is also how the Brussels think-tank Bruegel explained it: Russia will attack Europe. Why? Because it possesses so many pieces of this or that weapons category. But this argument lacks any evidence from (leaked) Russian sources, clues from modern (and older) Russian history, and, above all, good strategic reason. Never mind that NATO’s collective armies are far superior to Russia’s, which is exceedingly well-documented.

For much of this year, Europe’s elected representatives, still awkward in their newly martial bearing, beat around the bush when asked about Russia’s attack plans. Sometimes one commits the faux pas of letting slip that one’s country has nothing to fear, like Spain’s premier, Pedro Sánchez, who said that Russian troops will hardly march across the Pyrenees.

Some showed passive-aggressive resistance against the enormous rearmament and comprehensive militarization of politics, the economy, and society that are supposedly Europe’s only salvation. The EU’s loans-for-arms facility SAFE, which European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen announced to great fanfare in the spring, ended up undersubscribed, with Germany backing out late in the game.

NATO members paid lip service to the 5 percent of GDP in defense spending that Trump demanded, though Spain bucked the trend, pleading the country’s social peace. But they are getting there via creative bookkeeping: everything from repairing bridges to investing in AI will count. Still, even this disunity — Spain’s no to 5 percent defense spending, Slovenia’s short-lived stunt of a plebiscite on NATO membership, Hungary’s chronic contrarianism — may slow but not halt the march of European neo-militarism.

Hegemony in Eurasia

European leaders’ reaction to Israel and the US’s illegal attacks on Iran in June further clarified the motives behind Europe’s neo-bellicism: German chancellor Friedrich Merz thanked Israel for doing Europe’s “dirty work” and von der Leyen pontificated about Israel’s right to self-defense, while chastising Iran. Two months later, the “E3” — Germany, France, and the UK — snapped back sanctions on Iran. Ostensibly because Iran failed to return to the negotiation table, the action was in fact a show of anticipatory obedience to Trump, intended to keep him sweet on keeping the war in Ukraine going.

Europe’s neo-bellicism is about dominance, not protection from danger.

“Unease over security-related questions can often be a stand in for deeper concerns about status,” Canadian expert Zachary Paikin sums up, after months of interviews with European foreign policy–makers. European elites do not fear an attack on their respective homelands so much as the loss of primacy, in which they have been nestled comfortably for decades as junior partners of the United States.

European politicians, diplomats, aid workers, and the commentariat that cozies up to them have become used to living beyond their power-politics means: pompously lecturing others about values, heavy-handed interference in the internal affairs of third countries, seizing their resources and forcing their markets open, and dabbling in military adventurism, as in Libya. In the comfortable shade of American primacy, European states have been able to afford a self-centered, lucrative, and at times unscrupulous foreign policy. If the United States bids goodbye to its unipolar-era global hegemony, Europeans will lose the stature of vicarious primacy and have to start treating states around the world as sovereign equals. The thought of it brings many in Europe’s foreign policy establishment to the verge of a nervous breakdown.

The call of the hour, then, is to preserve Western primacy, ideally as nepo baby of the Americans, as in the past — however absurd this is at the moment the empire is imploding. Europe “takes responsibility for its own security,” translates to this: it spends a lot of money on all things war and drive the message home by placing large orders from the obscenely expensive US defense industry. These aren’t motivated by fear of an attack by Russia but meant as a bribe. NATO secretary-general Mark Rutte’s pathetic brownnosing vis-à-vis Trump or the most recent arrangement, under which Europeans will pay for American arms deliveries to Ukraine, express such thinking.

To make sense of this, both top-tier op-ed pages and the rougher corners of the internet charge that Europeans are vassals to the United States, or self-vassalized. But this suggests that European leaders are acting under coercion or indulging a masochistic streak, and that makes no sense at all. They commit economic self-harm and debase themselves, expecting that the reward — continued vicarious enjoyment of American primacy — is worth the steep price.

Alternatively, some Europeans fantasize about a free-standing European hegemony outside of America’s shadow, as the world’s third great power. Europe has form: the British saw the colonization of the world as the “white man’s burden,” the French as their “mission civilisatrice,” and the Germans, less famously, claimed the German essence could heal the world. Today the EU serves both as a plane for projecting delusions of supremacy and as a bureaucratic machine for acting on them.

All year long, European leaders’ speeches have echoed with “being better” and “victory”: we have more money, don’t we?; we are smarter, stronger, better; we have defeated Russia once before. It cannot be that we will not beat the Russians this time. What must not be, cannot be.

Disenchanted Brussels insiders have told Mamedov in invitation-only gatherings that these beliefs are widely held, disturbingly shallow, and never interrogated: “there’s 500 million of us, a billion in NATO, to Russia’s 140 million”; “Russia’s GDP is only that of Spain’s, or Italy’s”; and “it’s simple math that we can’t not defeat Russia, therefore we must defeat Russia, and we can easily afford it.”

Long-exiled former Russian central banker Sergey Aleksashenko comments on European faith in Russia’s impending economic doom with a dry “Western politicians like to deceive themselves.” His German interviewer follows that it’s one thing to disparage Russia as part of information warfare, but that he had lately found that “these people actually believe what they say.”

The Economist crows about a “historic opportunity to shift the balance of power between Europe and Russia.” The price for Europe to put Russia in its place may be “high” at $390 billion, but it’s “excellent value.” Hegemony in Eurasia is worth it.

In Mamedov’s account, European foreign policy circles believe “any compromise in Ukraine, any suggestion of Russia keeping territories it controls, would be tantamount to defeat — a strategic defeat of the EU, as the official jargon has it, and that would be unacceptable and demeaning.”

But what strategy do they refer to? What would the much-vaunted “security” look like? Should Europe replace, one for one, all military hardware and troops the US stationed in Europe and has now started drawing down? Possibly with our own European-commanded nuclear weapons, as Green former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer demands from his perch in the lobbying industry?

This is a simplistic, inadequate calculation. In the dawning multipolar order, the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting worldwide, like on a Rubik’s Cube: you turn it by one click and suddenly several sides look different. A Europe that no longer serves as the global hegemon’s military base and rocket launcher would be perceived differently by its neighbors — less privileged but also less threatening.

Any definition of security in Europe demands what scholars call a grand strategy — an answer to the question “Which role do we want to play in the world, and which means will we deploy to that end?” That question remains unanswered; it has not even been posed, certainly not to the citizens of Europe.

From such a grand strategy, a concrete foreign and security policy would be deduced, and from that a military strategy in the narrow sense — the deployment of weapons, troops, and logistics (and all things hybrid) for the achievement of certain military objectives. The current rearmament instead seems frenzied, a headless ticking of boxes on order sheets that have long lain in defense lobbyists’ briefcases, but which have nothing to do with the rapidly changing realities of warfare.

The recent drone hysteria that washed over much of Eastern and Northern Europe followed an analogous pattern, at even more precipitous speed. EU officials all the way up to von der Leyen talked of building up a so-called “drone wall,” arrogated themselves the lead on financing and implementing it, drew up concrete budgets and won enthusiastic plaudits from think tanks — all before there was time to clarify that sightings in Denmark, Germany, and Lithuania were not Russian drones or even drones at all. “Drone wall” evokes cutting-edge technology, responding in real time to an emerging threat, fail-proof protection for peace of mind. But it is only a marketing term, behind which stand nebulous, competing, and untested technological proposals.

EU defense commissioner Andrius Kubilius, who has recently sought to control the drone-wall portfolio, in May helpfully provided an answer to the grand strategy question (albeit without possessing a democratic mandate to do either). He explained “Pax Europaea in short: What is coming — Europe up, with defense capabilities; Russia down, materially and politically; United States out, preparing for withdrawal; Ukraine in, preparing for urgent integration with Europe in defense. Make Europe independent again!” From this perspective, Russian perfidy lies not in plans to invade Europe beyond Ukraine but in not bending to the EU’s claim to be the leading power in Eurasia.

Eurasia does not end with Russia. Merz’s full-throated “dirty work” comment and a chain of hostile policies toward China suggest that such a grand strategy of EU hegemony on the Eurasian continent, like a buy-one-get-two sale, would also extend to Iran and China.

This throws a new light on statements like ”we must be ready for war with Russia” — whether that’s as far away as 2029 or, as a recent French warning would have it, this very evening. They rest less on supposed Russian attack plans uncovered by spycraft than on intentions on the West’s side: the perpetuation of the proxy war against Russia for at least another two or three years, stationing German troops in the Baltic states, massive rearmament, and boasts of NATO preparing a preemptive blitzkrieg against Kaliningrad are all priced into the assessment that a war with Russia is bound to happen. Indeed, European leaders seem increasingly intent on making it happen. Merz, Donald Tusk, and Macron have all said recently that we are already at war — at least sort of. All that matters, the think tanks’ reasoning goes, is turning Europe’s “crushing” latent superiority in money and people into military power, with the right resolve.

Not priced in — because not intended — are alternative scenarios, such as a constructive participation in peace talks, de-escalation, the restoration of diplomatic relations, reciprocal arms control, and confidence-building measures. If European decision-makers had their continent’s literal security in mind, they would surely prioritize political and diplomatic measures rather than militarization, because the former promise far more success.

If You Want Peace. . .

But anyone expressing criticism of Europe’s neo-bellicism and proffering alternatives to these precipitous arms races will be sidelined by European opinion leaders and incur ridicule and tirades from the politically mobilized and the extremely online public. Between them, they have discovered deterrence and declared it the final word on war and peace. It is a lopsided perspective, as if they had skipped part two of the “Introductions to International Relations” lecture, where they would have heard about the inevitable result of a deterrence-based strategy: the security dilemma. The Romans coined the phrase “if you want peace, prepare for war,” but they were living a lie. W. E. B. Du Bois had it right: “The cause of war is preparation for war.”

The drone incursions this fall — those that actually happened and those that possibly didn’t but fueled much hype anyway — are a textbook illustration of how deterrence entraps us in a security dilemma. On the dial of escalation, we are entwined with our opponent. Every time we move the dial forward by a click, so does the other side. After years of fiddling with the dial, Russia and Europe are locked deep into a spiral of mutual escalation. Russian drones and planes encroaching into European airspace are a warning, a conspicuously loud click on the dial after months of loose talk by European leaders about moving a “reassurance force” into Ukraine the moment a cease-fire takes hold.

The loudening drums of war drown out rational debate. In conditions of pervasive militarism, the natural law of politics is suspended, and whoever points out obvious absurdities gets punished. For example, the notion that we can arbitrarily pick a share of GDP — for years it was 2 percent; yesterday it was still 3.5 percent; and now it’s already 5 percent — to spend on vaguely defined defense needs, so that we. . . well, what exactly? So that we will live in peace and security? Or maybe to ram through that new grand strategy of hegemony in Eurasia after all? In no other area of democratic governance and politics, in no other department, can a minister pull a number out of thin air and with it decree the beginning and the end of the debate.

There are definitely things that need debating. Europe is on course to spend hundreds of billions — perhaps as much as €3 trillion — for outrageously expensive, so-called “gold-plated” weapons systems. As Adam Tooze describes it, “The greatest waste of public money one can imagine”: the 123 tanks Germany has ordered through 2030 will have to be lovingly manufactured by hand, because the conveyor belts that once made them stopped running long ago. Such a tank, which costs up to €29 million to build, may well be destroyed by a dirt-cheap drone minutes after it lumbers onto the battlefield. We have been watching it live on the OSINT channels.

All players in the game of multipolar great-power rivalry are subject to this new, devastating cost-benefit calculation. In May, the Americans concluded a cease-fire with the Houthis because squandering pricey planes and ships in a fight against bargain-basement drones and rockets launched from one of the world’s poorest countries was just not worth it. Weeks later, Russia lost a good part of its strategic bomber fleet in a drone action by the Ukrainian security service that was as spectacular as it was low-cost.

Does all this mean that — instead of arming themselves to their teeth and betting on deterrence — Europeans should lean back and do nothing? Not at all. We need a lot of thinking, debating, organizing, and work to escape the illogic of militarism, expose arms races as a threat, and, through patient, disciplined diplomacy, put a halt to escalation and find peace. Vicarious primacy, courtesy of an America descending into white nationalist imperialism, or Europe as a militarist great power clawing for hegemony in Eurasia, are not the only options out there. We Europeans need a better answer to the question of what role we want to play in the world and which means we deploy to that end.