One could begin with a rhetorical question, but that would be a waste of time that nobody has any desire left to invest in useless formalities, because the answer is already known before formulating it and the only thing left to do is observe how this truth unfolds in its daily manifestations, in the banality with which it repeats itself every time some European official delivers speeches about strategic sovereignty while signing contracts of military dependence with Washington, given that since the postwar period the United States has financed nearly the entirety of European defense budgets, constructing an architecture of subordination that no one has ever had the courage or will to dismantle.
The European Union doesn’t count for shit, and this statement requires no particular analytical sophistication to be demonstrated: one need only look at its structural incapacity to act autonomously on any issue that goes beyond regulating the dimensions of clams or the sugar content in snack cakes, because when it comes to real geopolitics, the kind measured in armored divisions and nuclear warheads and power projection capabilities, Europe reveals itself for what it has always been since the Suez crisis onward, namely a strategic subordinate of the United States, a hodgepodge of nations that have delegated their own security to an Atlantic master in exchange for the possibility of continuing to pretend that the welfare state and discussions about human rights were the apex of political evolution, while NATO provided the umbrella under which they could afford themselves the luxury of this illusion.
The Atlantic alliance entrenches American political influence and military power directly on the Eurasian continent, and this is the sole reason why Europe still has some significance on the grand geopolitical chessboard: not as an autonomous actor, but as a bridgehead, as that portion of territory that serves to prevent the Eurasian continental mass from organizing itself independently of Washington’s interests. The war in Ukraine has made all of this obscenely evident, with Trump not even consulting European leaders before speaking with Putin, demonstrating how irrelevant they have become even when their geopolitical interests are directly at stake.
And now that the United States openly declares that it is no longer the primary guarantor of European security, one discovers that Europe lacks the military capabilities to defend itself autonomously, that its armed forces lack everything needed for complex operations, from satellite surveillance to long-range air defense systems, from command and control capabilities to experience in commanding large ground formations, and that the United Kingdom could last at most two months in a high-intensity conflict, while Germany would need a decade or more to prepare for war.
But the comedy continues, with European leaders talking about strategic autonomy while doubling down on their dependence on the United States, buying American weapons instead of developing their own industrial capabilities, accepting the demand to bring military spending to five percent of GDP as requested by Washington, trying to placate Trump with promises to purchase liquefied natural gas and American automobiles, in a perfect demonstration of how a vassal behaves when the feudal lord raises his voice.
The reality is that the European Union was constructed through treaties that served primarily to guarantee that no European power could ever again challenge Anglo-Saxon hegemony, that its single market is functional to the interests of Atlantic capital, that its single currency has deprived member states of the instruments of autonomous economic policy without providing in exchange a true shared sovereignty, and that its foreign policy is an exercise in soft power that serves mainly to mask the total absence of hard power, that capacity to impose one’s will which is the only thing that truly counts when states compete for resources and influence.
Even the recent tensions between the United States and Europe are merely theater, a staging that serves to prepare the ground for using Europe as a battering ram against the rest of the Eurasian continent, because Washington has understood that China is the real threat to its global hegemony and that Europe must be kept divided from Russia and hostile toward any project of Eurasian integration that could create a power bloc independent of American influence.
And so Europe will continue not to count for shit, because this is its assigned function in the contemporary geopolitical architecture: to be sufficiently weak as to be unable to act autonomously, but sufficiently armed to serve as a buffer and as a market for the American military industry, to consume resources in conflicts that don’t belong to it and to maintain that fracture with the rest of Eurasia that prevents the emergence of any pole of power alternative to Atlantic hegemony.
The truth is simple and brutal as always: Europe is a colony that has forgotten it is one, too busy celebrating its own universal values to notice that it lacks the strength to defend them, too convinced of its own moral superiority to understand that in geopolitics morality counts for less than zero when you don’t have the armored divisions to back it up, and too dependent on American protection to even imagine constructing its own strategic autonomy without risking that little comfort and security that the United States still grants it in exchange for its obedience.
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