It will head for a double Cold War and self-isolation through pathological militarism
NATO and the EU chose the wrong path after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. Instead of dissolving NATO, building a new European common security structure and conflict-resolution mechanism à la the UN in Europe, it broke all promises given by Western top leaders to Gorbachev about not expanding NATO ”one inch.”
Deaf and blind to all warnings, Europe – also failing to become more independent of the US – finally fell into its ultimate hubris trap of trying to get Ukraine into NATO against the will of 85% of its people.
The NATO meeting, followed by the Munich Conference of February 14-16, 2025, changed everything. The Trump 2.0 administration bluntly drove over the European allies (not Europe as such, US nuclear weapons remain, and the US wants a future war to take place there to remain unscathed) to build an autarchic Greater America grabbing resources from Panama over Canada and Greenland to the Arctic, Scandinavia and the resources outside what I call Trump’s ”Las VeGaza”.
That Greater America is, of course, all a fantasy that will not come about peacefully.
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The cynicism vis-a-vis Europe is indeed tangible. The root cause of the tragic war in Ukraine was neither Russia’s taking over Crimea nor invading Ukraine but the Obama administration’s 2014 regime change in Kiev, the selection of a pro-West/NATO leadership, and arming Ukraine to conduct a devastating politico-military war on everything Russian in that mixed country.
No Western leaders considered President Putin’s concerns about this: NATO had 12 times higher military expenditures than Russia and thought it did not have to listen.
Predictably – because he had said he would stop the war – Trump now deals directly with President Putin and drives over both Europe and Ukraine. His future focus is the Greater USAutarchy and then China.
The Europeans – imbued with self-righteous groupthink (except for Hungary’s Orban) – never grabbed the phone to Putin. It cancelled diplomacy, humiliated Russia and Russians and acted over three years as if they should never meet a Russian again. Childishly, they now feel betrayed by Washington for not being invited to the table! European leaders, despite their manifest havoc and Ukraine’s devastation, insist on ”winning the war against Russia” (now without the US) through continued cynical bleeding of Ukraine, arguing that Ukraine must be further re-armed to be strong at the negotiation table later.
They also talk about NATO soldiers as ”peacekeepers”, shockingly ignoring that the UN is the eminent, experienced peacekeeper.
Europe will now live with a double Cold War – Russia to the East, the US to the West – and militarise itself to death.
Tragic beyond words, it is all of its own making.
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Jan Oberg is director of the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research, TFF, Sweden.
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