POOR EUROPE! THE EPITOME OF A FAILURE

Foreword

The Maidan Square coup, supported in 2014 by then Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland (a protagonist and architect of US policy in Ukraine and considered the linchpin of the anti-Moscow policies of the Democratic Party administrations led by Barack Obama and Joe Biden) has been officially recognized. While Donald Trump calls the Russian-Ukrainian conflict Biden's war, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Trump's special envoy Keith Kellogg openly speak of a proxy war between the US and Russia.

Economists, including Jeffrey Sachs, as well as many historians confirm that the US has sought to draw Ukraine, since its independence in 1991, into the Western economic orbit by militarily arming it as a bulwark against Russia. The goal was to exploit Ukraine's natural resources and surround Russia. All this was intended to consolidate the US hegemonic position because in a unipolar world there can only be one dominant power that sets the rules: all the others must submit.

But the US has lost this battle. In February 2025, Rubio acknowledged: “We live in a multipolar world.” A clear demonstration of this is the global economic war waged by the West against the BRICS, led by Russia and China. The West is also losing this battle. The 18 (to date) sanctions packages aimed at isolating Russia have backfired. Without cheap Russian oil and gas, the German economy is no longer competitive. With the explosion of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, the energy trap has sprung for Germany while the sanctions against Russia are having no serious effect. The Russian economy is surprisingly robust and in the 193-nation General Assembly of the United Nations, only 40 nations have joined the sanctions, while 153 continue to cooperate with Russia. It is not Russia that is isolated: it is the West that is, especially Europe.

The European Transatlantic Elites

The people responsible for this situation in Europe are the transatlantic elites who have made their careers serving the US more than their own countries. And they were promoted by the US government. For example, Annalena Bayerbock had to appear in Washington to clarify her political position. Then she was sent back to become foreign minister in Germany. Ursula Von der Leyen herself (former German defense minister) was supported in 2020 and 2024 by the US for the presidency of the European Commission. This is the result of how supranational organizations like the EU and international ones like NATO have developed, with positions available to individuals becoming more powerful and elites more important within these institutions than in their own countries.

These institutions are linked to the US and controlled by it. The fact is that, through American soft power, many European elites have been educated at transatlantic organizations and foundations such as the German Marshall Fund, the Young Global Leaders or the foundations of billionaire Soros such as the Renaissance Foundation.

It is ideological colonialism, but the chosen ones have to remain loyal and ideologically aligned. If they leave the system like Ulrike Guèrot (political scientist and founder and director of the European Democracy Lab - EDL) they can never re-enter. This is an interesting aspect because the most important media, the mainstream media, are completely aligning themselves with NATO propaganda and the narratives of its security apparatus.

The crux was the second Iraqi war in 2003 when then Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and President Jacques Chirac refused to align themselves with the US to attack Iraq. It was then that the US spoke of old Europe and new Europe. This was a clear warning signal to the European elites: this deviance must never happen again. After all, there is no easy cure to escape this ideological colonialism, well rooted in the bones of Europe.

Europe is ready to take up arms

To arms! It seems that this cry echoes throughout Europe, where until yesterday peace was taken for granted, as if it were an acquired human right: but why do Europe rearm and against which enemy?
EU does not answer these questions, gives vague, conflicting answers. Normally, rearmament is the result of a three-pronged reasoning.

First. What is the strategy? Who is Europe with, against whom?

Second. Planning the strengthening of the military instrument in all its components: technical, industrial, but above all psychological and cultural. In short, without popular consensus there can be no credible armed force, but all this as a consequence of the strategy.

Third. Allocating the necessary resources to the rearmament plan that derives from the strategy and therefore from the definition of the enemy or enemies.

EU is proceeding exactly in reverse: from point three to point one. First it rearms, then builds perhaps a strategy and finally decides what the problem is, who the enemy is. All this in the name of a hyper-European ideology ready to fight. But how to define this enemy? Here are two schools of thought.

The first one thinks that intentions count more than capacity. Privileging intentions means it does not matter how armed or not armed is the enemy. What matters is understanding what he wants, if he really wants to attack.

The second school of thought says intentions, which are variable, don't count: what counts instead are the capacities that are material and measurable. This reasoning, starting from capacity regardless of intentions is what, coincidentally, led to the catastrophe of the First World War.

The English, a hegemonic power, felt challenged by the Germans who were building a fleet capable of threatening that of His Britannic Majesty, then master of the seas. The English said: if these people rearm it means they are about to attack us. So they also rearmed and so on in a vicious circle that then ended in war.

Once you enter this vicious circle, as seen in 1914, all it takes is a gunshot in Sarajevo and the war begins almost without noticing.

Today in Europe everyone is rearming on their own. Some at a furious pace like the Poles, the Baltics, the Scandinavians. Some starting from almost zero, but investing hundreds of billions like Germany where they publicly discuss atomic weapons. And some like France that already has the bomb, has a fair amount of military power and above all loves to fight every now and then.

Italy is far from having a propensity for war but it has armed forces that in Western Europe are second only to France. And it has promised America that it will immediately reach the goal of 2% of military spending in relation to GDP.

European leaders want to rearm

European leaders want to rearm. It is said: America is in crisis, all focused on China, it has no time to waste with freeloaders.

But let's go back to the enemy. For the US, the war in Ukraine has shown that Russia is not a strategic threat. The important thing is that it does not form a fixed pair with the real enemy: China. And that Russia does not become a formidable warehouse of energy resources (in Siberia, Central Asia, the Arctic) and not only for China.

For the Northern Europeans, the war in Ukraine shows that Russia is a threat, that Russian imperialism is on the offensive: a position that does not convince Western Europeans. Nevertheless, everyone rearms on their own also based on the interests of their own defense industries and those industries in crisis that see in the military reconversion of their production lines an otherwise closed future.
From a geopolitical point of view, this structuring in view of war causes an anti-Russian steel curtain from the Arctic to the Mediterranean.

But without the Americans all these discussions and lucubrations do not work. Europe lacks the technical capacity to resist a possible Russian aggression. Or worse, Russia and China together.
More importantly, demography, biology and culture demonstrate that EU is not ready for war. Europeans are old (median age 44) and increasingly less willing to die in war. Wars are won on the home front. If the people do not support the enterprise, it is lost from the start.

Finally, the deadly temptation of the bomb. The only real deterrent consists of nuclear power. In his intentionally provocative speech US Vice President Vance in Munich said: “Threat vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it's not China. The threat is within Europe. The retreat of Europe from some of the fundamental values. I was struck that a former European commissioner went on television recently and sounded delighted that the Romanian government had just annulled an entire election. He warned that if things don’t go to plan, the very same thing could happen in Germany too …..”. For centuries, Europeans have fought each other. After War World II, they enjoyed 80 years of relative peace in Europe, interrupted in February 2022. Now we risk going back to the old war displays that accompanied past generations.

A defensive war is the last resort for which it is good to be ready. But if you cannot truly defend yourself, you need to invest in peace, that is, in diplomacy, dialogue, negotiation. We have lived together for over half a century with the Soviet colossus, much more powerful and ambitious than today’s Russia.

Let’s try to give peace a chance, to build a strategy for coexistence. War is not destiny. It would be truly paradoxical if, after deluding ourselves that peace is a given by nature, we surrendered to the idea that war is inevitable.

Europeans at the service of markets' oligopolies 

Attacking the participation of the electorate, excluding it from the political landscape, tying it up in a rigged game and then completing the construction of a new authoritarian system with laws that transfer all decision-making power into the hands of a few people. It is not an easy process, it takes years, money and above all, deaths: this until the system reaches that toxic equilibrium of which abstentionism is the main expression.

Old and new parties are sometimes divided in their strategies, but united by the common interest of creating a class-based and census-based society founded on the concentration of wealth and power in a few hands, on the exploitation of labour reduced to a commodity, on the commodification of human relationships, on the elevation of individual selfishness to a social rule.

The implementation of this strategy must necessarily pass through a rigged political game that has determined not only the enormous growth of the inequality curve, but the chronicization of inequality as a structural element of the economic system, the progressive and planned dismantling of the welfare state, the oligarchization of the political system that rewards narrow elites to the detriment of the majority of citizens, and that day by day increasingly reveals its authoritarian and violent face.

A rigged game where right and left no longer have any substantial difference: the policies have remained essentially unchanged, always anti-popular and classist. In fact, a significant portion of the electorate that does not identify with either of the two offers, that is not willing to choose between the worst and the lesser worst, or that senses that it is a false alternative, practices the exit from the political game.

In the meantime, the State is put at the service of the markets, that is, of the large oligopolies that govern the markets, and the law of competition is assumed not only as the basic rule of the economy, but as the rule of all social coexistence, with the consequent progressive dismantling of the welfare state, and the privatization of essential public services: from health to education, to transportation and so on.

The subjection of politics to the economy, a key principle of neoliberal ideology transfused into the European treaties has been supinely internalized by the national political class of the center-right and center-left. In short, the political class has now been disconnected from popular representation and is embedded within a supranational chain of command removed from democratic control and headed by the great economic powers. Bottom line: abstainers have dramatically increased!

Is there a remedy?

A remedy to abstension is possible by opposing that production of meaning that is daily done by the media that tend to make people believe that the form of organization of society, and the current balance of power have an ontological, absolutist character. People must instead consider alternative paths.

It is Thatcher who invented the slogan there is no alternative. She then described how the system of free movement of capital, sealed in Maastricht, contributed to the debt society, in which “the working classes contribute to the remuneration of the capitalist classes”. These dynamics marked the end of the social-democratic and Keynesian pact, which had allowed the construction of the welfare state.

In the field of international relations, the West is no longer able to maintain its power, it is careful not to access a slice of power with a compromise, with a mediation that could help to reform political multilateralism, the United Nations. The immobility of the Security Council is due to the lack of mediation with Russia, with China, and linked the war in Ukraine to the expansion of NATO, which destroyed the European security architecture that the OSCE had created.

Europeans deserve a different Europe, capable of mediating and promoting peace.

The crisis of journalism

A further point is the structural crisis of the journalistic sector and the growing editorial concentration thus threatening democracy.

The importance of independent information must be stressed:  without free, autonomous information, capable of walking on its own two feet, there can be no authentic democracy.

There is a structural crisis in the journalism sector, marked by a strong editorial concentration and declining resources. Revenues from media services (newspapers, dailies, periodicals, radio, digital publications) have decreased. In particular, the press has suffered a collapse. At the same time, television broadcasts dominate the media landscape but they are the most subservient to political power. Thus, people become misinformed by watching the television, which accentuates the dependence of information on political power. On the press front, editorial concentration is equally worrying. There is the need for structural reforms. The information system should be profoundly reformed by lowering the antitrust thresholds of the daily press that are too high.

The Realities in Ukraine

What do the Europeans do? They meet every day to try to keep this war going on. Incredible! It's hard to see Europe prioritizing geopolitical moves over peace. The meetings should be about ending wars, not prolonging them. If this is diplomacy, it's blindfold diplomacy.

But one wonders why Europeans are willing to risk so much in this war against Russia, because the expansion of NATO, including Ukraine, was intended to create a collective hegemony in Europe. Now, as this era of global supremacy seems to be coming to an end, the US is making new adjustments. They are now openly stating that they will give priority to Europe.

Europeans are witnessing the end of an era, and yet many in power are still clinging to a post-Cold War script that no longer works. The problem is that European deep states have refused or forgotten or blindly refuse to see that there is an alternative to NATO in Ukraine or to Russia's domination of Ukraine. It is called neutrality. It is called state buffering.

And this agreement goes back several thousand years. It is throughout human history that when you have great empires or great powers that are competing with each other, you leave a territory in between that is not affected. It simply prevents the two sides from colliding unnaturally, and there is nothing shameful about neutrality.

It is a very clever policy and it has worked extremely well for Switzerland. Why is it so hard to imagine the same for Ukraine? Prosperity does not come from alignment but from stability in the world.

But what do Europeans think? Why can't a leader just stand up and say clearly that it would be smarter if Ukraine were neutral? Not with Russia, not with NATO, just neutral. Not the worst thing in the world, but the best for everyone, because that would keep wars away.

Making peace is not easy after this 30-year project of expanding Western hegemony, mainly US hegemony. Trump is trying to stop it but a single sensible European voice from a major power to tell the truth is badly needed.

And that is the tragedy. Truth has become rare in global leadership. The issue now is not just about politics. It is about courage. Who will stand up and say enough is enough? Because until someone does, the cycle will repeat itself at the cost of countless lives in a fragmented Europe that is moving ever further from peace.