Have you ever watched someone double down on a terrible bet long after everyone else has left the table? That’s exactly what Europe is doing right now in Ukraine.
It’s painful to watch, honestly. Perfectly rational people in Brussels and major capitals keep insisting that a bankrupt, demoralized proxy must somehow dictate terms to a nuclear superpower that has already achieved most of its objectives. The cognitive dissonance would be fascinating if the stakes weren’t so terrifyingly high.
The Matryoshka Doll of European Delusion
Think of current European strategic thinking as one of those Russian nesting dolls. Open the first layer and you find blind ideological commitment. Open the next and there’s fear of admitting failure. Another layer reveals the military-industrial interests that profit from permanent tension. Keep going and eventually you reach the hollow core: the growing realization that the continent no longer drives world events.
Each layer reinforces the others, making it almost impossible for European leaders to step back and admit the obvious – the war they encouraged and funded has been lost on the battlefield. The longer they refuse to accept reality, the deeper the eventual reckoning will be.
Why Losers Don’t Get to Write the Terms
History is remarkably consistent on one point: the side that achieves its military objectives gets to set the basic framework for what comes next. Europe seems to believe it has discovered an exception to this rule.
The latest European “counter-proposal” circulating in Brussels reads like a wish list written by people who have never seriously studied the actual military situation. Thirty-day ceasefire with everything frozen in place? Continued occupation of parts of territories already annexed by the victor? Security guarantees that amount to NATO Article 5 in disguise? It’s almost admirable in its detachment from reality.
The conditions for serious talks have been public for over a year: withdrawal from the four new regions and a permanent renunciation of NATO membership. Everything else is detail.
These aren’t new demands. They’re the same basic framework laid out long before the current phase of the conflict began. The difference now is that Russian forces hold significantly more territory and have built defensive lines that would take years to breach at enormous cost.
The Economic Time Bomb Nobody Wants to Discuss
Here’s the part European leaders truly fear to acknowledge: folding now means facing their own voters with the bill for three years of delusional policy.
German industry has been de-industrializing at a speed that would have been unthinkable five years ago. French farmers are in open revolt. Energy prices remain structurally higher than pre-conflict levels. The sanctions weapon turned out to be a shotgun aimed at Europe’s own foot.
- Loss of cheap Russian energy
- Explosion in defense spending commitments
- Hundreds of billions already transferred with nothing tangible to show
- Growing recognition that frozen Russian assets may never be seized without destroying the euro’s reserve status
Admitting defeat means explaining all of this to electorates that are increasingly skeptical of the entire project. Far easier to keep doubling down and hope something magically changes.
The Religious Dimension Nobody Talks About
One of the more interesting observations coming from serious European thinkers lately concerns the cultural roots of current policy. There does seem to be a distinct geographic pattern to the most aggressive postures.
The most enthusiastic supporters of permanent confrontation tend to come from northern European Protestant cultures or the Baltic states. Southern Catholic countries – Italy, Spain, even Hungary despite its complications – show markedly less enthusiasm for eternal war with Russia.
When faith in transcendence collapses completely, what remains can be a particularly aggressive form of nihilism – the kind that sees no beauty worth preserving in the world and thus has nothing left to lose.
– French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd
This isn’t about theology anymore, of course. It’s about what happens to societies that once organized themselves around demanding moral frameworks and then abandoned those frameworks entirely without finding anything meaningful to replace them. The void gets filled with something, and sometimes that something is crusading ideology dressed up as universal values.
The Forever War Business Model
Let’s be brutally honest about one aspect nobody in polite European society wants to discuss: permanent conflict has become extraordinarily profitable for certain interests.
The reconstruction promises alone run into trillions. The weapons contracts are measured in decades. The consulting fees, the NGOs, the endless conferences – all of it creates a self-sustaining ecosystem that has zero interest in actual resolution.
Every month the conflict continues is another month of guaranteed revenue for an entire class of people who never have to face the consequences of their advocacy. When your think tank is funded by arms manufacturers and your speaking fees depend on maintaining a certain temperature of crisis, peace becomes the real threat.
The Military Reality on the Ground
While Europe drafts fantasy peace plans, Russian forces continue their slow, methodical advance. The asymmetry has become almost embarrassing.
- Complete dominance in electronic warfare
- Massive advantage in drone production and deployment
- Ability to strike any target across the entire theater with precision glide bombs
- Growing artillery advantage as European stockpiles reach exhaustion
This isn’t 2022 anymore. The idea that Ukraine can somehow negotiate from strength while losing several hundred soldiers a day and entire villages every week has moved from optimistic to delusional.
What Actual Peace Would Require
Real negotiations – the kind that end conflicts rather than pause them – require both sides to have something the other wants. Right now Europe has nothing Russia needs.
Russia already has the territory it considers vital for security. It has demonstrated NATO’s inability to protect members on its border. It has exposed the sanctions weapon as largely ineffective against resource-rich economies. What exactly does Europe bring to the table except demands and threats?
The harsh truth is that any durable settlement will look much closer to Russian terms than anything Europe currently contemplates. The only question is how much more destruction occurs before this reality is accepted.
The Coming Reckoning
In my view, we’re approaching the moment when the European position becomes mathematically impossible to sustain. The combination of battlefield developments, economic strain, and growing public skepticism creates a pincer movement that no amount of media management can indefinitely contain.
When the dam finally breaks – and it will – the political consequences across the continent will be profound. Parties and leaders who tied their fortunes to permanent confrontation will face devastating accountability. The European project itself may not survive the backlash intact.
Perhaps paradoxically, this crisis represents the continent’s best chance in decades to rediscover some form of strategic autonomy. The era of automatically following Washington into every adventure may finally be reaching its natural conclusion.
Europe has spent three years discovering the hard way that being a loyal vassal doesn’t actually protect you from the consequences of your overlord’s bad decisions. The next few years will determine whether the continent learns from this experience or simply finds new ways to repeat the same mistakes.
For now, though, we watch the spectacle of a continent that can’t quite bring itself to admit what everyone else can plainly see. It’s tragic, it’s unnecessary, and it’s entirely self-inflicted. But that’s the price of living inside a matryoshka doll of your own ideological making – eventually you discover there’s nothing substantial at the center after all.
