We are on the eve of modern Europe’s most humiliating defeat. Donald Trump is pushing ahead with his peace plan for Ukraine, and there are no Europeans in the room. I am not surprised. The Europeans have no strategy of their own to end the war. All they want is to frustrate the peace process, for they have no agreed strategy to deal with post-war Ukraine.
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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-signalling 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 maths 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 meagre 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 candour, 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 defence spending from just under 2% of GDP to 5%. The Europeans agreed immediately. And they are raising the money through debt.
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Ultimately, defence 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 defence 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 defence spending league tables? Defence spending targets are what you end up with when you have no strategy.
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 defence 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.
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.
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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.
haui - 1w
The article makes some good and some bad points imo. That kaja kallas is comically evil is one of the better ones. That trump does good stuff like nobody before him is probably the worst.
But i think as unherd is not a marxist outlet, the arguments arent based on dialectical materialism. I would probably place them in realism, which explains why the eu criticism is so abt but the conclusion is kind of reactionary and sounds rather right wing.
But its very refreshing to hear any criticism of europes leaders at this point. I wish a working class perspective was injected but we'll have to wait for that i guess.
14
cornishon - 7day
Yeah, another bad point is that Europe's problem is "bloated welfare spending" and its unwillingness to cut it.
8
haui - 7day
Yes. I guess that too. One could make the argument that the german welfare state in fact is a giant buerocracy that bloats the cost of everything and siphons money upwards and indeed needs to be cut but that does actually only mean capitalism, not the "welfare spending" in general.
4
cfgaussian - 1w
Agreed.
7
demerit - 7day
Ironic because Biden would have likely done the same but with european leaders doing less of whine than right now.
2
haui - 7day
How is that ironic?
1
demerit - 7day
Because it is made to seem like a bipartisan issue.
1
haui - 7day
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say. It is a bipartisan issue. The US is imperialist. Trump leans into it, biden gave it a nice blue overcoat. Of course everyone loses their shit over it because its more open. It helps us a lot that it is more open now but its still a giant shitfest.
But i fail to see the irony.
1
demerit - 5day
The outcome is the same despite the different rhetoric, it's ironic because people/liberal media try to argue that Biden "wouldnt have done it", and european leaders would be foolish enough to believe it or clever enough to more easily sell it at the homefront.
2
haui - 5day
Oh okay. Thanks for elaborating.
2
SexUnderSocialism [she/her] - 7day
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.
This reminded me of this pic of Witkoff and Kushner in Moscow being shown real estate opportunities, lol.
cfgaussian in geopolitics
Europe's humiliation over Ukraine
https://archive.ph/20251202213008/https://unherd.com/2025/12/europes-humiliation-over-ukraine/[...]
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The article makes some good and some bad points imo. That kaja kallas is comically evil is one of the better ones. That trump does good stuff like nobody before him is probably the worst.
But i think as unherd is not a marxist outlet, the arguments arent based on dialectical materialism. I would probably place them in realism, which explains why the eu criticism is so abt but the conclusion is kind of reactionary and sounds rather right wing.
But its very refreshing to hear any criticism of europes leaders at this point. I wish a working class perspective was injected but we'll have to wait for that i guess.
Yeah, another bad point is that Europe's problem is "bloated welfare spending" and its unwillingness to cut it.
Yes. I guess that too. One could make the argument that the german welfare state in fact is a giant buerocracy that bloats the cost of everything and siphons money upwards and indeed needs to be cut but that does actually only mean capitalism, not the "welfare spending" in general.
Agreed.
Ironic because Biden would have likely done the same but with european leaders doing less of whine than right now.
How is that ironic?
Because it is made to seem like a bipartisan issue.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're trying to say. It is a bipartisan issue. The US is imperialist. Trump leans into it, biden gave it a nice blue overcoat. Of course everyone loses their shit over it because its more open. It helps us a lot that it is more open now but its still a giant shitfest.
But i fail to see the irony.
The outcome is the same despite the different rhetoric, it's ironic because people/liberal media try to argue that Biden "wouldnt have done it", and european leaders would be foolish enough to believe it or clever enough to more easily sell it at the homefront.
Oh okay. Thanks for elaborating.
This reminded me of this pic of Witkoff and Kushner in Moscow being shown real estate opportunities, lol.
https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/9a5ea0d1-54e5-46de-a3b5-ae6f93948893.jpeg
The EU truly are the biggest losers, and they have no one but themselves to blame for being such lapdogs.
It's almost like USA convinced the EU to remove themselves from their business endeavors in Russia to insert themselves in a more profitable position.
War is bad for business? 🤨