2025 was dismal for Western Europe. And at this rate, it will get worse

To be fair to the dismal year on the way out, at least 2025 won’t be a hard act to beat. In particular, if last January anyone was recklessly optimistic enough to hope for the West to come to its senses about its catastrophic relationship with Russia and the war in and over Ukraine, they will have been largely disappointed. (Let’s not waste time on those who were still dreaming about actually defeating Russia: the clinically delusional and deliberately disingenuous are an unrewarding topic.)

It is true that the disappointment delivered by 2025 in this area has not been total. There has been one major positive – if still incomplete and reversible – development: After many abrupt twists and turns, Washington seems to have settled on a policy of “strategic stability” (in the language of the new National Security Strategy) with Moscow. This marks a possible path to mutually beneficial normalization, perhaps even a future détente. (I will plead the Trump Unpredictability Caveat here, though: if the American president and disrupter-in-chief flipflops again, don’t blame this author.)

But, at the same time, the almost 30 countries best labeled NATO-EU Europe, with politically rigid and ideologically zealous Germans in the lead not only in Berlin but Brussels as well, have found the single most perverse issue to finally assert some independence from their US overlords: stalling an end to the Ukraine War. This obstructionism has been so obvious that even (some) Western observers have started noticing it.

Though little noticed, this is actually a historic reversal. Silly pundits used to say that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But now when even the traditionally ultra-bellicose Americans have finally been backing out of an ever-worsening confrontation between, in effect, the West and Russia, NATO-EU Europe’s odd – and unpopular – elites have resisted the prospect of peace.

Cut through the nauseatingly hypocritical “value” cant and the hysterical “Russia-is-coming-for-us-too!” nonsense, and the real reason for this resistance is obvious. Any peace anchored in reality (and thus with a chance to last) would inevitably have to reflect that Russia has long gained the upper hand on the battlefield over both Ukraine and its Western backers. And among the proudly not-quite-from-this-world leaders of NATO-EU Europe, having to accept reality is considered an insufferable affront.

With a little bit of bad luck for ordinary Ukrainians – and they have had plenty, from their cynical Western friends-from-hell to their ultra-corrupt rulers at home – peace will be nipped in the bud once more, and the war last well into next year.

Yet the NATO-EU Europeans’ rearguard action to keep peace at bay was not their only sensational mistake in 2025. At least two more are obvious.

First, let’s look at the ongoing transformation of NATO with a little bit of historical perspective: NATO’s first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, is said to have quipped that the Alliance’s purpose was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” That was as honest as it gets from a man in that position, and it certainly beats his non-entity successors, such as Mark Rutte and Jens Stoltenberg, on no-bullshit straight talk.

Historically speaking, it’s a curious and revealing fact that NATO kept sticking around when “the Russians” first took the initiative to end the Cold War and then dissolved their own Cold-War military alliance, the long-forgotten Warsaw Pact (officially, the ‘Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance’.)

Instead of following suit, NATO set out on a course of over-reach and expansion. Between the early 1990s and the present, the alliance has furiously provoked Russia by blunt bad faith and ceaseless enlargement. It has also cast about globally for pretexts for prolonging its existence, often at the cost of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of its regime-change and country-devastation operations or, as in the case of Ukraine, as pawns of a failed proxy war.

But then, NATO’s real main purpose has never been to protect (Western) Europe from Moscow but to keep it dependent as well as subordinated to Washington and to protect US grand strategists from their worst nightmare coming true: game-changing cooperation between Europe, in particular Germany, and Russia. As a result, by 2025 the alliance’s new, post-Cold War essence seems to be “keep the Europeans poor, the Americans in charge, and the Germans paying (and down, too, of course).”

To be fair to 2025, this is a much longer story. But the NATO summit in The Hague last June marked a milestone no less than the radical break with good-faith parliamentary procedures and solid budget politics engineered in Berlin in March. If The Hague was where the new spending goal of altogether 5% of GDP on defense and defense-related infrastructure became official, then Berlin had already shown the way into a policy of reckless debt in the name of a badly unbalanced policy that seeks national security only in re-armament and rejects diplomacy and the search for compromise.  That this policy also includes a massive fresh Arrow-3 air defense deal with Israel, while the latter is committing genocide, adds extreme moral vileness to the economic insanity.

The financial self-cannibalization would be bad enough. But things are even worse, which brings us to the EU in particular. If historians will remember the 2025 performance of what once started as a (Western) European peace project for anything except the EU’s continued support for genocidal apartheid Israel, its massive attacks on freedom of speech, privacy, and the rule of law, and its total failure to protect Europe’s economy and its people from US tariff and trade assaults, then it will be the EU’s escalating metamorphosis into a crusading cult in the style of resentment-rich eastern European nationalism, targeting not simply Russia but its own populations.

On one side, the EU is doing what the most fanatical national governments and NATO are doing as well: shoveling ever more money into the arms industry and its notoriously wasteful entrepreneurs, including trendy disruptive types. From consulting contracts to “drone wall” schemes, the EU is continuing and explosively amplifying a tradition of waste and graft that can be traced back easily to its current de facto boss’s Ursula von der Leyen scandalous days as German defense minister more than a decade ago (not to speak of her Covid swamp contributions…).

Yet what is really original about the EU’s share in driving us ever closer to self-destructive war is something else, namely its massive contribution to cognitive warfare and propaganda. While that too is a busy field, where NATO and national European governments compete fiercely for who can frighten their people the most, there is something special about the EU. It is clearly striving for a leadership role in “cognitive security,” which is a euphemism for a license to propagandize your own, based on accusing the other guy – here, Russia, of course – of cognitive aggression.

What makes the EU such an especially detrimental force in this area are two things: First, it has already developed a whole set of ideological rationalizations for manipulating its own citizens, marked by catch-phrases such as “resilience,” “pre-bunking,” and even “cultural warfare.” Second, it makes no secret out of its intention to learn from the experience of Ukraine – that is, under Zelensky – an aggressively authoritarian regime. And a regime that von der Leyen and friends would love to see join the EU as soon as possible. An ‘EU Commissioner for Cognitive Resilience and Cultural Defense’ from Ukraine may well lurk in our common dystopian future. Unless we, the Europeans, learn to take our continent back.