EU leaders double down on war strategy, ignoring battlefield realities and dismissing Russia’s security concerns, as NATO expansion since the 1990s fuels a conflict now drifting toward a terrifying 2030 escalation—with Europeans potentially becoming cannon fodder in a nuclear-tipped proxy war.
The conclusions of the June 18-19 European Council meeting confirm, after more than four years of war, that Europe’s strategy remains unchanged. The situation on the battlefield is ignored, while calls are made for a “just peace” that in reality would amount to Russia’s capitulation.
Ukraine’s territorial integrity is reaffirmed, as is the right to maintain NATO troops in the country, masked by so-called Western guarantees. Russia’s legitimate security concerns are once again dismissed. The historical causes of the conflict, which date back to the 1990s and to the ill-advised decision by the US State Department to expand NATO, are treated as non-existent. The hopes generated by the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s among many Europeans and Americans, including George Kennan, that the Cold War could be definitively ended and Europe’s eastern frontier stabilised through a political, economic and human rights dialogue with Russia within the OSCE framework, were shattered almost from the outset. Within the US deep state, the hawks prevailed. They were inspired by the strategy outlined in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski, former National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter, in his essay “The Grand Chessboard” and revisited in 2019 in a study by the RAND Corporation, a Pentagon think tank (the Russian Ministry of Justice has declared the RAND Corporation undesirable in Russia), which consisted of eroding Russian power through Ukraine. In other words, according to the Americans, it was necessary to prevent cooperation between Russia and Europe and the unification of Eurasia, which was considered the real threat to American hegemony.
Without Europe’s subservience, Washington’s power would be diminished. The complementary nature of Russian and European interests—which gave rise to the economic model of importing low-cost Russian gas in exchange for technology exports—was viewed as a danger. Germany, along with continental and Mediterranean Europe, had increased its power and autonomy, through its collaboration with Russia. In order to counter German and European autonomy, Washington and London support EU enlargements and rely on the “new Europe”, comprising the Baltic states, Poland, and Scandinavia, which is more aligned with American neoconservative interests.
Until the 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, Germany, France, and Italy still held out hope of saving the dialogue with Moscow and opposed inviting Ukraine to join NATO, refusing to set a specific date. The open-door policy toward Georgia and Ukraine—defended in Bucharest by then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski—remained, however, NATO’s strategy, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel was forced to make the best of a bad situation. After the 2014 coup in Kiev, events accelerated. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who had sought to reconcile two essential needs, integration into Western economic governance and Russian sovereignty, was faced with a dramatic choice. The annexation of Crimea met the country’s need for preventive defence but was fraught with consequences. The West’s economic war began with sanctions, which, according to the rhetoric of the “liberal order”, are an instrument of the international community intended to punish aggression and violations of international law. Anglo-Saxon military penetration into Ukraine was consolidated. The army was trained, funded, and made interoperable with NATO.
In fact, violations of international law began on the part of the West as early as 1999, with NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia, and continued with Bush’s “democracy-exporting” wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the fomenting of civil war in Syria, and the Anglo-French aggression against Libya, sponsored by Obama. Foreign interference in Ukrainian internal affairs is yet another violation of UN principles. The NATO expansion decided upon in 1997 had in fact gradually replaced the pillars of multilateralism established after World War II, the UN and the OSCE, with an offensive military alliance, deployed to its fullest extent on the international stage as the armed wing of US unipolar policies.
Despite the failure of neoconservative strategies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Ukraine, Western policy remains unchanged. For many analysts, the goal being pursued is not victory, the ousting of the Taliban, or Western influence in Iraq or Libya, but rather a state of permanent war that benefits the financial sector and the arms lobby, and that artificially sustains the dominance of the dollar against surplus powers, China and other countries of the Global South. In the Russia-Ukraine conflict, while the weakening of Russia remains a strategic objective, the realisation that a collapse of the Russian government is objectively unlikely does not deter the Western political elite.
The reversal of Germany’s pacifist policy, a post-war dogma, is being passively accepted by Europe because, contrary to the rhetoric surrounding strategic autonomy and a “Europe of Defence”, NATO is alive and well. The US President has merely divided up the tasks and outsourced the conflict with Russia to Germany and the United Kingdom. German rearmament serves NATO and is therefore accepted by France and other European states. The military alliance will maintain, as usual, Germans down, Russia out and Americans in. The troubling question, which European citizens do not seem to be asking, is whether the planned war of attrition after 2030 will escalate into a direct NATO-Russia conflict, and whether Europeans will replace the Ukrainians, becoming cannon fodder themselves. The military “readiness” envisaged by the EU for 2030 has become the stated goal in European documents. Threatening a nuclear power like Russia would seem illogical unless a tactical nuclear conflict has been factored in. Military doctrine has shifted from Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) to Nuclear Utilisation Targets Selection (NUTS).
The future looks bleak. The people of Europe are unaware of this; distracted by consumerism and propaganda, they seem to be marching in a cheerful dance of death toward the precipice. It is essential to engage citizens in a public debate in order to put an end to this planned suicide. No one has ever explained why Ukraine’s neutrality would have been detrimental to Kiev and to Europe. Now, after a million deaths and the devastation of Ukraine, Western elites are advocating for the indefinite continuation of the war against Moscow, heedless of the nuclear threat.
