Historical modesty warns us to view Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s stunning in Hungary last Sunday as only possibly another such historical inflection, not necessarily an actual turning point. Orbán could come back to power if the opposition fails to live up to its promises. Autocrats in other countries might see the situation in Hungary as a warning sign and crack down even harder on their populations. Nevertheless, his electoral defeat was important.

Orbán was not just a local strongman, but rather a central model and muse for an entire generation of nationalist right-wing leaders, including US President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) imitators. If the architect of “,” as he boasted, can be routed, despite a captured media, tilted institutions and deep corruption, that raises implications far beyond Budapest.

We cannot yet know whether this is the beginning of a long global backlash against authoritarian nationalism or a localized setback. But several forces now converging — from economic strain and war fatigue to Trump’s visible physical and mental decline and the humiliation of his chosen lieutenants — suggest that the winds may finally be shifting against the nationalist right.

Orbán’s illiberal model

Orbán’s importance was never just about Hungary’s just under ten million citizens. Since returning to power in 2010, he consciously branded himself as the avatar of a modern form of illiberalism, democratic in form but authoritarian in practice. He tightened control over broadcast media and large parts of the press, channeled state contracts to cronies, reshaped the courts and electoral rules, and used xenophobia and culture-war politics as glue. 

For American and European populists, Hungary became a kind of nationalist TED talk convention. Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest while former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, American political activist Tucker Carlson, Claremont Institute intellectuals and social-conservative activists paraded through Orbán’s orbit. Conservative activist, former FOX News commentator and lobbyist Matt Schlapp’s Center for Fundamental Rights approximately��€1 million (~$974,659) in 2022��and over��€2 million (~$2,173,913) in 2023��from state-funded Hungarian foundations to co-organize the CPAC conferences. There is substantial evidence of Hungarian government funding for CPAC events, primarily through state-linked foundations and think tanks.

Hungarian Prime Minister-designate Péter Magyar after his victory that Orbán diverted taxpayer money to fund CPAC as part of a “criminal offense” involving party financing. Magyar an immediate halt to taxpayer funding for CPAC and pledged to establish anti-corruption agencies to investigate these payments. Out in the open, meanwhile, Republican politicians from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to pay homage to Fidesz and learn from what they openly espoused as a model for the US.

The rise of Magyar

Despite all the countervailing winds, Orbán did not merely lose; he lost badly. His party’s vote collapsed after years of seemingly unassailable dominance. He had designed a system to entrench himself and suffocate the opposition. Yet voters, mobilized by a new movement under Magyar, broke through. For American politics, the symbolism is powerful. The regime that MAGA elites openly admired as a blueprint has just been overthrown at the ballot box.

The story of ’s rise matters because it shows how to beat a deeply entrenched populist regime. Magyar is not a left-wing revolutionary. He is a center-right figure who came out of Orbán’s own party, roughly analogous to former US Representatives Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, who finally, from inside the Grand Old Party (GOP), broke decisively with Trump. That background gave him credibility with voters who had once supported Orbán.

Magyar built a movement, not merely a party. Deprived of fair access to the media, he went directly to voters, especially in rural areas where Orbán’s media environment had been most suffocating. Magyar traveled relentlessly, holding town halls and rallies, using social media as a force multiplier. The opposition parties, including the left, swallowed their pride, thought strategically and accepted Magyar’s leadership, uniting behind him even though he was to their right on most issues.

Magyar notably rooted his campaign in everyday concerns, what we call the affordability crisis, health care, education and, above all, the cost of living, while still framing Orbán as a threat to Hungary’s democratic future and European orientation. He often the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956 to arouse patriotic feelings and turn the citizenry against Russian domination and interference. Hungarians didn’t just tire of Orbán’s culture war and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s influence; they tired of stagnant living standards, demographic decline and the sense that neighboring countries were doing better.

During the Cold War, Hungary enjoyed “,” the highest standard of living within the Warsaw Pact. Today, the Hungarian economy (in terms of purchasing power) has fallen behind Romania, a significant blow to national pride. Hungarians look across their borders and see that their economic decline was not inevitable, but rather the product of bad, corrupt governance.

Magyar’s campaign promises to defend democracy and fix people’s material problems were crucial. The anti-Trump forces in the US should take note, however, that he did not exaggerate Orbán’s threat to democracy, nor did he concentrate on wedge-issue culture wars; instead, he focused on bread-and-butter issues. Liberal democracy won in Hungary not as an abstraction, but as a promise to improve daily life under an honest government.

The limits of populist governance

Trump’s rise in 2016 was part of the same global upsurge that lifted Orbán and fueled Brexit. Nationalist parties and leaders could channel legitimate grievances about migration, globalization and the failures of centrist elites into a politics of resentment. They could promise simple solutions and muscular “strongman” leadership without having to demonstrate competence.

But demagoguery governs badly. Orbán’s Hungary offers a case study. Once in power, strongmen face the same stubborn realities as democrats: pandemics, inflation, geopolitics and economic complexity. Populism cannot protect a domestic economy by erecting barriers against the entire globe. Populism cannot pretend to listen to the voice of the people while it silences any dissent. Populism cannot pretend to be defending the interests of the common man while enriching the already wealthy and powerful. After all the bluster, populist authoritarians tend to revert to crony capitalism, institutional hollowing-out and theatrical nationalism instead of sound policies.

Trump fits this pattern. Twice now, he has ridden anti-incumbent waves to power, first in 2016 against the Obama-era Democratic establishment, and again in 2024 against President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris amid post-COVID inflation. Americans who voted for Trump did so primarily because they believed he would turn the economy around for them. But Trump and his family have profited enormously, while the net worth of average Americans has stagnated. As of March 2026, Trump’s net worth has increased by approximately��$3 billion to $4.2 billion��since returning to office in January 2025, with estimating his total wealth at a record $7.3 billion, up from $4.3 billion in 2024.

Trump’s second presidency is already visibly failing on its own terms. His , launched impulsively and then managed erratically, has rattled oil markets, worsened an already acute affordability crisis and brought the Strait of Hormuz to the brink of closure. Gasoline prices, already a source of voter anger, have climbed further. Voters may not follow every twist of Middle Eastern diplomacy, but they understand six-dollar gas.

Like Orbán, Trump tries to distract from policy failure with melodrama: social-media tirades, personalized feuds and symbolic gestures designed for the base. But there are growing signs that the spectacle is wearing thin. Even many Americans who once voted for Trump now show signs of exhaustion and disillusionment. The man who once seemed, to his admirers, like an iconoclastic outsider now looks like a tired, angry incumbent.

Trump’s late-night screeds on his own Truth Social platform have become longer, more erratic and more self-pitying. At least on Twitter, he was limited to 140 characters. Posting an of himself as Jesus, not merely blessed by Christ, but��as��Christ, and lashing out at the pope is the kind of grandiose behavior that, in any other era, would raise urgent questions about a president’s fitness for office. The “stable genius” shtick is shading into something more disturbing.

Corruption and cronyism exposed

Corruption also lies in plain sight. Americans are increasingly aware that Trump governs as he does business, by enriching family, cronies and co-investors. From Middle East envoys with vast financial stakes in the region to cronies profiting from regulatory changes, the pattern is unmistakable. Special envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner not only have no credentials to negotiate an end to the Iran War — they have no technical expertise in the details of nuclear weapons, nor any background in history and diplomacy, as is normally required of high-level negotiators — but they also have substantial business dealings in the region and the outcome of the war will personally affect their own self-interest. Orbán’s downfall reminds voters that crony corruption is not just “how politics works” but rather is what happens when populists with disdain for expertise run a government.

Vance embodies this problem. Once a bestselling critic of Trumpism, he reinvented himself as a loyalist and is now tied to Trump’s misadventures abroad and at home. He for Orbán just before the Hungarian strongman’s rout. The high mark of chutzpah was Vance complaining about foreign interference in domestic elections while he was actively on the stump for Orbán’s party. He then traveled to Islamabad to help sell Trump’s Iran policy and came home empty-handed as the war worsened. Even Trump’s treatment of Vance, sending him to do the dangerous, thankless work while Trump an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event with Rubio, underscores the dynamic.��

In any other presidency, a foreign war would take precedence over just about any other issue. But Trump thought it would be a good idea to take Rubio to watch UFC fake fighters put on a Vaseline-rubbed mixed-martial-art cosplay rather than deal with statecraft. This is not the behavior of a confident leader grooming a serious successor, but rather that of a flailing boss toying with subordinates.

Authoritarian decline and coalition fractures

Trump’s actions are reminiscent of late-stage authoritarian movements elsewhere, when once-feared lieutenants begin to look ridiculous, and being close to the leader starts to look like a political liability rather than an asset. Vance’s much-touted conversion to Catholicism now sits awkwardly alongside a with an American pope who embodies a morally serious, anti-authoritarian Catholicism, and who clearly wants nothing to do with Trump’s court. The Pope is also a savvy organizer, against whom Trump is flailing.

When US President Richard Nixon was behaving as erratically as Trump does now, as the consumed his presidency, there were similar worries about whether the chief executive was mentally capable of carrying out his duties. The (which addresses presidential succession and the temporary transfer of power) was seriously considered. But in Trump 2.0, there is no adult backup in the White House or conscientious generals in the military — such as former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, retired Lieutenant General Herbert Raymond McMaster or retired General Mark Milley — to guide us through such a constitutional crisis.

The clash with the pope matters politically because it exposes a fissure inside Trump’s own coalition. For years, many white evangelicals and conservative Catholics offered elaborate rationalizations for their support of Trump, casting him as a flawed but necessary instrument in a larger culture war. Many believed God had chosen him to lead America. They accepted his insults, his affairs and even his boasts about sexual assault as the price of power.

But many of those voters are recoiling from the imagery of Trump as a quasi-divine figure and from direct attacks on a pope who speaks in recognizably Christian terms about peace, human dignity and the perils of idolatry, with a Chicago accent. When rank-and-file evangelicals and Catholics criticize Trump openly on these grounds, they offer what political scientists call “,” the cues elites give their followers to take unpopular stances. These kinds of changes do not happen overnight.

In Hungary, Orbán retained impressive support on paper until quite late. But once a critical mass of respectable figures begins to defect, or simply to speak candidly about a leader’s failings, momentum can shift quickly. Voters suddenly feel they are not alone in their misgivings. What was once unthinkable, breaking with “their” leader, becomes, at first, possible, and then inevitable.

Historical parallels and future implications

History does not repeat itself, or even rhyme, as the old cliché goes, but it does offer patterns. The current moment has resonances with several earlier inflection points in liberal democracies. The Progressive Era marked a reaction against the corruption and inequality of the Gilded Age. Reformers did not overthrow capitalism, but they imposed constraints, antitrust laws, regulation and social insurance, which made it survivable for ordinary people.

The civil-rights movement equally represented a profound moral and political break with the “respectable” segregationist laws of the mid-20th century. For years, it was unclear whether the cause would prevail. Then, abruptly, the combination of movement pressure, political leadership and cultural change produced a new consensus and a new generation of leaders that would have been hard to imagine in the 1950s.

The Thatcher–Reagan era then saw a turn away from postwar social democracy and activist government toward market liberalism and limited government. For young conservatives at the time, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 victory, soon followed by US President Ronald Reagan’s in 1980 and the emergence of Pope John Paul II in the Vatican, created a sense that history’s momentum had shifted in their favor.

Orbán’s defeat, President Volodymyr Zelensky’s resistance in Ukraine and Magyar’s emergence in Hungary may play a similar galvanizing role for defenders of liberal democracy today. Two leaders from small countries with big megaphones in Central and Eastern Europe are showing that it is still possible to both resist Kremlin-linked illiberalism and speak convincingly to their citizens’ immediate material needs. Their example should put to rest the idea that only a nationalist strongman can channel popular frustration or that only the far left can credibly oppose inequality and corruption. A broadly liberal, anti-authoritarian politics can be tough on borders and security, serious about economic grievances and uncompromising on democratic norms.

If Orbán’s defeat offers lessons for the US, they are not about importing Magyar’s precise policy platform. They are about coalition, leadership and moral clarity. In Hungary, long-time liberals and leftists accepted a center-right, ex-Orbán figure as their standard-bearer because he was the candidate best positioned to win. In the US, that translates into a willingness among Democrats, moderates and anti-Trump conservatives to unite behind candidates, sometimes imperfect ones, who are serious about defending democratic norms, fighting corruption and improving living standards. Above all, it means jettisoning purity tests and focusing on the issues that matter to regular voters instead of to the loud fringe.

Voters respond not to ideological checklists, but to leaders who seem to understand their lives and can explain in plain language how things can get better. The most effective Democratic voices today are those who treat affordability, education, safety and the border as real problems, not as talking points to be brushed aside, while drawing a bright line against authoritarianism and bigotry.

The centrality of anti-corruption and the need for action

As the Hungarian opposition showed, opposing corruption and illiberalism is not ancillary to economic progress; it is central to it. In the US, that means making clear that Trump’s crony capitalism is not an unfortunate side effect, but a primary reason why ordinary people keep losing ground while insiders thrive. It is important to resist two temptations. The first is despair, the conviction that Trumpism is an unalterable feature of American life. The second is complacency, the belief that history has now turned, that liberal democracy is once again “inevitable” and that our only task is to ride the wave.

The truth lies between. Orbán’s fall, the limits of Trump’s war and the visible fraying of his personality cult all suggest that we may be entering a period of backlash against nationalist authoritarianism. New coalitions are forming, new leaders are emerging and even some former loyalists are beginning to peel away.

But history offers no guarantees. Inflection points only become turning points when people act, when citizens organize, when parties make courageous choices, when leaders articulate a compelling alternative and when institutions prove stronger than demagogues.

Hungary’s voters have reminded the world that even a deeply entrenched illiberal regime can be defeated democratically. The question now is whether Americans, facing a weaker but still dangerous form of Trumpism, can learn from their example and seize the moment before it slips away.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Military Service Modernization , which entered into force on , is an overdue correction. It rebuilds the state’s ability to register, examine and, if necessary, conscript young men for service in the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces). It also contains a controversial provision linking prolonged foreign travel for 17- to 45-year-old men to military registration — a rule that the government has now in peacetime after public backlash.

Critics see a creep toward authoritarianism and a betrayal of post-war �ұ�������Բ�’s pacifist consensus. But if one takes both the state’s duty seriously to protect its citizens and the lessons of European history, the logic of the new framework is compelling. Germany needs a larger, more capable army. It needs legal tools to mobilize quickly if Russia’s war spreads, if NATO fractures or if new crises emerge. And it must build this power within a robust constitutional framework that guards against abuse.

Reforming �ұ�������Բ�’s defense: the path to a modern conscription system

A Germany that refuses to arm itself adequately is not more moral. It does not make a society of Gutmenschen (virtuous citizens), but rather of weak and vulnerable people, much more dependent on others. Besides, the 2026 reform does not restore the blanket, open-ended draft of the Cold War era. Instead, it constructs the machinery that would make a genuine conscription system work if activated.

All males born in 2008 or later will receive a mandatory questionnaire on turning 18. They must disclose basic personal data, indicate their willingness to serve and list any additional nationalities they hold. Women can participate voluntarily, but the constitutional basis for compulsory service remains gendered.

After the 2011 of conscription, Germany stopped systematically collecting such data. Today, the Defense Ministry lacks precise knowledge of how many potential soldiers exist in each cohort, their health status and their skills. In a crisis, this ignorance would be crippling. Re-establishing Wehrerfassung — military registration — is a precondition for any credible defense posture.

Next will come the phased reintroduction of medical examinations (Musterung). Starting with volunteers in 2026 and expanding to all eligible 18-year-old men, the Bundeswehr will again conduct health checks to determine fitness for service. This moves Germany away from an abstract, paper-only draft and back toward a concrete understanding of who can actually carry a rifle, maintain a tank or operate a radar.

The new law further requires the creation of a needs-based conscription mechanism (Bedarfswehrpflicht). The law stops short of an immediate, general draft. Instead, it empowers parliament to activate conscription in targeted ways if voluntary recruitment falls short. The government’s is to increase the ���ܲԻ����ɱ���’s strength from about 184,000 active troops to between 255,000 and 270,000 by 2035. Without the option of compulsory service, this is unlikely to be achievable.

The exit-permission clause

The controversial “exit-permission” clause fits into this architecture. As amended, Section 3, Paragraph 2 of the nominally requires men aged 17 to 45 who are resident in Germany to obtain approval from a Bundeswehr Career Center before staying abroad for more than three months. An earlier version of the law limited such a requirement to declared emergencies. The new text extends it to peacetime.

On paper, permission is “to be granted” so long as full conscription has not been activated, and refusal must not impose “particular hardship” on the applicant. In other words, as long as military service remains voluntary, the state is not supposed to stop anyone from leaving. The provision is less about stopping travel than about maintaining an accurate conscription register: Who is where, and for how long. In a real mobilization, that information could be decisive.

The exit rule once it became widely known, months after the law was passed. The outrage has two main roots. The first is procedural. The provision was buried in cross-references in a long modernization bill. The Defense Ministry did not publicize or explain it, and when newspapers finally reported on it in April, Career Centers themselves lacked clear procedures. Young men technically had a legal duty to seek permission for multimonth trips abroad, but no functioning mechanism to fulfill that duty. That is bad lawmaking by any standard, and it gave critics an easy target.

The second root is �ұ�������Բ�’s understandable obsession with civil liberties. Conditioning the right to leave one’s country on approval from a military office, even if approval is automatic, touches a nerve. �ұ�������Բ�’s guarantees freedom of movement and general personal liberty. Traumatic memories of state control over travel are deeply embedded in political culture, from the Nazi era to 40 years of communism in the east and the division into two Germanies during the Cold War. Opposition parties and legal scholars argued that a peacetime permission requirement could not be reconciled with these guarantees.

Under heavy criticism, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius that as long as service is voluntary, there will be no practical permission procedures; an administrative directive will suspend implementation. In other words, the legal lever exists, but it is locked in a cabinet marked “break glass only in case of emergency.”

This outcome is actually a sign of a functioning constitutional democracy. Parliament legislated for worst-case scenarios; the executive scaled back the application to match current needs and rights guarantees; courts remain available as a backstop if the rule is ever used in earnest.

But it is also a reminder of the deeper tension Germany must navigate: how to arm itself seriously without sliding toward the abuses of its 20th-century past.

Assessing �ұ�������Բ�’s military readiness

To understand why a strongly pro-armament stance is not warmongering but realism, one must begin with the Bundeswehr’s current condition.

For years, Germany spent well NATO’s notional 2% of GDP defense benchmark. Successive governments made lofty promises about European security while quietly allowing the armed forces to shrink and age. Training hours were limited by budget constraints and ammunition stocks. Soldiers complained of a lack of basic kit, from functioning radios to winter clothing. Key weapons systems — tanks, helicopters, aircraft — were often unavailable due to maintenance problems and spare-parts shortages.

The suspension of conscription in 2011 accelerated a cultural shift. Military service ceased to be a near-universal experience for young men and became a niche career path. Many draft-age men in the late conscription years had opted out of uniformed service by choosing community work instead. When the draft disappeared altogether, so did a major channel through which the Bundeswehr connected to society at large.

Meanwhile, the technological gap widened. Modern warfare depends on integrated air defense, cybersecurity, drones, electronic warfare and robust logistics. �ұ�������Բ�’s procurement system proved sluggish and risk-averse. By the time Berlin announced its (“turning point”) in 2022 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the gap between rhetoric and reality was enormous.

It is against this backdrop that the new law’s personnel focus must be judged. Without enough trained people, no amount of money for hardware will suffice. And without a functioning registration and mobilization system, Germany would be dangerously slow to respond to a sudden deterioration in its security environment.

The case for a stronger, larger German military is not abstract.

�ұ�������Բ�’s role in European defense

Russia’s war against Ukraine demonstrates that large-scale mechanized warfare in Europe is not a relic of the 20th century. A revanchist Kremlin has shown itself willing to erase borders by force. So far, the front line has remained east of NATO territory, but there is no law of nature that guarantees it will stay there.

At the same time, the political foundations of NATO’s deterrent power have been shaken. US President Donald Trump America’s willingness to defend allies he deemed delinquent on defense spending. His rhetoric, including remarks suggesting Russia should be free to “do whatever” it wants to undermine allies, made explicit what European strategists had long feared: US security guarantees may not always be sacrosanct.

Even if future US administrations reaffirm their commitment, the message has landed in Berlin: Europe must prepare for a world in which the American shield is thinner, more conditional or, in the worst case, withdrawn.

In such a world, German weakness is dangerous. A militarily feeble Germany cannot anchor European defense. It cannot credibly deter aggression on NATO’s eastern flank. It cannot support vulnerable partners. Nor can it shape the security architecture that might emerge if NATO were to weaken or fragment.

The choice is not between armament and peace, but between responsible, democratic armament and the illusion that others will always fight �ұ�������Բ�’s battles for it.

A strongly pro-armament stance in today’s Germany does not mean embracing militarism. It means accepting that the use or credible threat of force is sometimes necessary to defend a liberal order and building the capabilities to exercise that force under strict civilian, constitutional control. In this light, the Military Service Modernization Act is a step in the right direction. It treats defense as a national responsibility, not an afterthought. It restores tools, registration, medical examination and conscription triggers that every serious state with a conscription tradition maintains. It signals to allies and adversaries alike that Germany is no longer content to be a security free-rider.

Ensuring a responsible and transparent approach to military service in Germany

To make this project compatible with �ұ�������Բ�’s history and civil-liberty commitments, some guardrails are crucial, beginning with transparency and parliamentary oversight. Any move from registration and voluntary service to actual compulsory service should require explicit parliamentary authorization and be accompanied by open debate. Hidden clauses and poorly communicated rules, such as the initial handling of the exit-permission provision, undermine trust and feed fears of a slippery slope.

A strong constitutional review will also be necessary. The Federal Constitutional Court should, if asked, scrutinize measures that condition core freedoms, such as movement, on military needs. A clear doctrine distinguishing necessary and proportionate wartime measures from disproportionate peacetime restrictions would help legitimize the system. �ұ�������Բ�’s post-war success rests partly on the willingness of courts to place limits on state power; that must continue.

A set of meaningful alternatives but narrowly tailored protections for those who refuse to fight because of conscientious objections should also be included. A modern conscription system need not be purely military. Civilian service in critical infrastructure, disaster relief or social care can complement uniformed duty. Robust procedures for conscientious objection should remain in place. The key is not to force everyone into combat roles, but to make clear that citizenship in a vulnerable democracy entails obligations as well as rights. Within those guardrails, however, Germany should embrace a straightforward truth: Rebuilding the Bundeswehr is not just acceptable; it is necessary.

�ұ�������Բ�’s shift towards military readiness and strategic responsibility

For too long, Berlin profited from a strategic environment shaped by others. It enjoyed cheap Russian gas, benefited from Chinese demand and was sheltered under American security guarantees. That era is ending. Like bankruptcy, it came gradually and now all at once. Germany now faces a world in which authoritarian powers are more assertive, alliances more contingent and the costs of military unpreparedness potentially catastrophic.

In that world, the new conscription framework is less a radical departure than a long-overdue normalization. It is what serious countries do when they acknowledge that they may, at some point, have to defend themselves and their neighbors without relying on someone else’s sons and daughters.

Yes, parts of the law were drafted clumsily. Yes, the travel-permission clause in its original peacetime form overreached, and the government was right to scale it back. But to use that misstep as a reason to reject the broader project would be to confuse procedural flaws with strategic necessity.

Europe needs a militarily capable Germany, not to dominate, but to stabilize. Germans who, with good reason, invoke history to argue for restraint should also remember a different lesson from their past: that power vacuums can be as dangerous as power excesses. A Germany that cannot defend itself invites either domination or dangerous dependence.

Arming responsibly, building a credible conscription-based mobilization system and embedding it all within the rule of law is not a betrayal of post-war �ұ�������Բ�’s values. It is their logical extension into a more dangerous century. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once that the Germans are either at your throat or at your feet. That verdict was obviously too harsh. But a grain of truth resides in the witticism that Germans have shown themselves to be either too militaristic or too pacifist. It is high time for some common-sense middle ground.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post �ұ�������Բ�’s Return to Conscription Is Not a Mistake; It’s an Obligation. appeared first on 51�Թ�.

I am 44, German, and have lived and worked in Vienna for over a decade. I found out about this provision the same way most people did: through a social media post. That alone should give pause.

A paragraph hidden in plain sight

The��Military Service Modernisation ��(Wehrdienst-Modernisierungsgesetz []) came into force at the start of the year as part of �ұ�������Բ�’s broader effort to rebuild its defense capabilities. The policy rationale is straightforward: Germany wants to�� the Bundeswehr (German armed forces) from roughly 184,000 to over 260,000 active personnel by 2035, and it needs to know where its military-age population is in the event of mobilization. Germany is simultaneously��sending mandatory to all 18-year-old men��this year (voluntary for women), building a clearer picture of available manpower.

The legal mechanism requiring advance approval for extended stays abroad is not new.��A existed in German law since 1986. What changed on January 1 was the trigger: Previously, the rule only activated in a declared state of tension or defense. Now, it��, even in peacetime.

That is not a minor administrative tweak. It is a fundamental shift in how Germany defines the relationship between the state and citizens in the security domain. And it ended in a .��

The week that followed

Once the provision came to light, the reaction was swift and politically broad. From the Greens to the Alternative für Deutschland,��virtually every party in the Bundestag . Some comparisons made — Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance leader invoking the Berlin Wall — were overwrought. This is a democratic government, not an authoritarian one. But the breadth of criticism carried a signal worth taking seriously.

Within days, Defense Minister Boris Pistorius that “we are suspending the permission requirement as long as military service is voluntary,” adding that different rules would apply in a crisis or defense situation. What had been presented as a considered legislative measure was effectively reversed under a week of public pressure, without a substantive parliamentary debate.

The real problem is not the policy

Europe is remilitarizing. That sentence would have seemed alarmist five years ago; today it is simply a description of political reality. Estonia, Finland, Poland and Sweden — countries that never lost sight of what security requires — have been�� by a growing number of EU members reconsidering or reinforcing conscription frameworks. Germany, which�� mandatory military service in 2011, is trying to reconstruct the institutional muscle memory that others never let atrophy. Strategically, the direction is difficult to contest.

What this episode exposed, however, is a governance failure that could prove costly precisely because the direction is right. A provision�� of men entered into force on January 1, generated no public information campaign, produced no application infrastructure and was discovered three months later through a report by the . The Federal Ministry of Defence promptly confirmed the finding to the German news agency . When the legal basis for a significant restriction on individual freedom is enacted without public communication or parliamentary spotlight, trust in the very institutions that need public buy-in is eroded before policy can take effect.

A pattern worth watching

This is not uniquely a German problem. Across Europe, the logic of security preparation is outpacing the democratic conversation required to legitimize it. Governments are rebuilding defense frameworks that were deliberately dismantled after the Cold War, doing so at speed and under pressure, often in legislative packages that receive little scrutiny. From a planning perspective, the rationale is coherent. The process frequently is not.

For countries in Central and Southeast Europe — Poland, the Baltic states, the Western Balkans — the rearmament debate carries a different texture. These are societies where the memory of occupation and war, as well as the proximity of threat, have kept collective security in public consciousness. They have been making this argument for years. They were right. But being right about the destination does not make the journey automatic.

�ұ�������Բ�’s stumble over a single paragraph of its Military Service Act is a small illustration of a larger risk: that Europe rearms its institutions without renewing the civic compact that makes those institutions legitimate. An army that citizens distrust is a weak army. A security policy that is quietly legislated, reversed under pressure, and poorly communicated rests on fragile foundations.

What should come next

The suspension of the approval requirement is a sensible short-term response. What is needed now is not just a public conversation, but a structured one. First, clarity: Who is affected, under what conditions and through which procedures? Second, visibility: Legal provisions of this scope cannot remain buried in technical legislation. Third, comparability: Germany should actively draw on models from countries where conscription has remained embedded in democratic practice.

The contrast with Austria, where I live and work, is instructive. Vienna never abolished conscription, and its approach to citizens living abroad reflects a different philosophy: notification, not permission. Under section 11 of the Austrian Military Act, men who relocate abroad for more than six months are required to promptly their regional military command and register with the nearest Austrian embassy or consulate. Those who permanently reside outside Austria are typically upon while abroad, and their obligation becomes relevant again upon return. No advance approval is required. The state stays informed; the citizen retains the presumption of freedom.

That distinction between a system built on notification and one built on permission is precisely what �ұ�������Բ�’s critics have been pointing to. It is also what separates an accepted system from one that risks being contested. 

Europe’s security challenge is real. Meeting it requires not just legal frameworks and defense budgets, but governments willing to explain, justify and build genuine consent for the obligations they are asking their citizens to accept.

Hiding a paragraph in a 37-page bill is not how you do that.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post �ұ�������Բ�’s Conscription Misstep Exposes a Deeper European Problem appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Cybersecurity, particularly in jurisdictions such as the US, has traditionally been framed as a defensive discipline, preventing intrusion, restoring systems and limiting disruption. That framing no longer captures new forms of exposure. The most consequential cyber risks facing private banks emerge when nothing visibly fails.

This exposure becomes critical in areas where private banks within regulatory frameworks that increasingly emphasize the traceability, justification and suitability of financial decisions. In such contexts, the integrity of decision-making is not only an operational concern but a matter of regulatory and fiduciary accountability.

As long as platforms remain online and business continuity plans operate as designed, no immediate financial loss is typically recorded. Yet the informational in which regulated decisions were formed may have shifted in subtle but material ways. In that scenario, the institution remains operational. The question is whether it remains .

Modern private banks extensively on automated and semiautomated processes to generate regulated such as risk classification, sanctions screening, transaction monitoring, suitability , credit and surveillance controls. These systems are engineered for continuity. They are designed to avoid abrupt breakdown. When upstream data quality , when dependencies introduce distortion or when external conditions change in ways not fully anticipated, the machinery rarely collapses. It continues to produce outputs that appear coherent and compliant.

The governance gap: fiduciary accountability in the age of automated logic��

From a governance , this is precisely the danger. An institution may remain procedurally compliant and technically resilient while becoming substantively exposed. With being delivered on time and documentation in a timely way, the assumptions underpinning those decisions may nevertheless no longer hold with the same strength. If the informational premises were compromised, the reasoning based on the observation that “the was running” does not answer the fiduciary question of whether the decision truly served the client’s best interest.

In such cases, fiduciary accountability is tested . Across major financial jurisdictions, expectations are converging toward greater scrutiny of how decisions are formed. Institutions are required to demonstrate not only that processes functioned, but that the underlying reasoning remained reliable, explainable and aligned with client interests. It arises when regulators reconstruct the file, when clients question outcomes or when litigation forces explanation. At that moment, system is irrelevant. What matters is whether the institution can that its judgment was formed on reliable foundations. Whenever decision-making becomes embedded in data pipelines, model calibrations and third-party integrations, cyber risk ceases to be a peripheral operational concern. It becomes a structural condition of governance.

Moreover, automation a familiar asymmetry. Responsibility remains anchored to the institution and its leadership. Causality, however, is dispersed across complex technical , data configurations, integration logic, vendor , model behavior and design assumptions made long before any specific decision is rendered. When are challenged, explanations often fragment across technical, contractual and procedural boundaries. Each may be accurate. None alone resolves whether fiduciary standards were met.

The architecture of trust: securing the soul of the decision

Private banking adds a further dimension. Its value rests on continuity, discretion and reasoning across decades. A visible breach can be repaired and . A silent erosion of decision integrity is more corrosive. It undermines the bank’s capacity to explain itself convincingly. Credibility, once weakened, is difficult to restore.��

Given this context, we need to acknowledge that judgment in a digital private bank is no longer solely a human . It is embedded within infrastructure. When that infrastructure is , failure does not always translate as downtime. It resembles doubt.

In conclusion, cybersecurity in private banking is only about operational resilience; it is about fiduciary credibility. And fiduciary credibility is harder to rebuild than any system. The institutions that will distinguish themselves are not only those that demonstrate strong perimeter defense or rapid recovery, but those capable of clearly and demonstrating that the integrity of their decision-making remains intact even when the informational environment is under strain. This shift is visible across both the US and European regulatory environments, where the ability to defend decisions is becoming as critical as the ability to execute them.��

[Ainesh Dey edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Beyond the Breach: Safeguarding the Integrity of Private Banking appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Upon seeing this message, most English speakers will wonder what the hell Sunil and I are talking about.

It has to do with a book he’s reading, called Alex’s Adventures in Numberland: Dispatches from the Wonderful World of Mathematics. Chapter one covers counting systems used in various societies — the Arara in the Amazon count in pairs, the Revolutionary French tried to make clocks count by tens and the Babylonians counted in base 60. But the most interesting counting system, to me, was the one used by shepherds in Lincolnshire, England, to count sheep.

1. Yan
2. Tan
3. Tethera
4. Pethera
5. Pimp
6. Sethera
7. Lethera
8. Hovera
9. Covera
10. Dik
11. Yan-a-dik
12. Tan-a-dik
13. Tethera-dik
14. Pethera-dik
15. Bumfit
16. Yan-a-bumfit
17. Tan-a-bumfit
18. Tethera-bumfit
19. Pethera-bumfit
20. Figgit

So when Sunil told me that covera pimp dik bumfit and bumfit pimp dik was 69, all he really said was that 9 + 5 + 10 + 15 + 15 + 5 + 10 = 69, which is true.

I find this counting system fascinating, and not just because counting pimp, dik, bumfit, figgit is hilarious and fun.

First of all, you’ll notice that this system is a hybrid base-five, base-twenty counting system. You have unique words up to ten, then compound words (Tan-a-dik = Tan + dik = 12) up to 15 (bumfit), then some more compounds with bumfit up to figgit (20).

Secondly, this counting system felt weirdly familiar to me. Yan and one, tan and two, tethera and three, pethera and four. What about dik? Well, this is clearly similar to dec, the Latin root for ten (French is dix, Spanish is diez, Italian is dieci). Even figgit looked familiar — the Latin ��ī�����Գ�ī, meaning 20, sounds a lot like figgit. My first thought was that this system is some kind of corrupted Latin, mixed with whatever Celtic language existed in Lincolnshire before the Roman conquest.

I wasn’t right about this, but I was close.

Consonant shifts and Proto-Indo-European

Why does pethera, which begins with a “p,” sound familiar to four, anyway?

Consonant shift! Linguists have discovered regular patterns of consonant shift that occur as languages evolve. The most famous of these sound shifts are the shifts that transform into its daughter languages (Latin, English, Sanskrit, Persian, etc.).

states that the Proto-Indo-European consonants underwent predictable, regular evolution as they evolved into Proto-Germanic and Germanic daughter languages.

For example, the Proto-Indo-European word for “brother,” ��ʰ��é��₂tŧ�� (something like “breh-ter”) evolved into the Proto-Germanic ����ōþŧ�� (“b����-�ٳ���”), and eventually into the Old English ������þ�ǰ� (“b����-�ٳ�ǰ�”).

By the way, that funny letter þ is called , which is an Old English letter pronounced “th.” If you had to read in high school English class, you might remember seeing þ all over the place.

“Father” is another good example of regular consonant shifts. Proto-Indo-European *���₂tḗr (“peh-ter”) evolved into Proto-Germanic *�ڲ���ŧ��, and eventually Old English ��æ����.

So “p” and “f” are linguistically very similar, especially in a Germanic language like English. Pethera and four could easily be derived from a common Indo-European ancestor.

The idea is similar to ��ī�����Գ�ī (Latin) and figgit (Lincolnshire shepherd’s dialect). The “f” and the “v” are very similar sounds, followed by the “g” and “t” sounds. Try pronouncing “vigint” ten times fast and see if it morphs a little into “figgit.”

It was at this point, while googling consonantal shifts, that I found this video from Numberphile, with one of the least searchable titles I’ve ever seen. From Numberphile, I present the gloriously titled :

In the video, Professor Roger Bowley says that the yan-tan-tethera number system is Celtic and predates the Roman conquest of Britain. So my theory of corrupted Latin is wrong — actually, both Latin and this obscure Celtic dialect have a common ancestor in Proto-Indo-European!

This explanation of the yan-tan-tethera origin fits much better than mine does. Wikipedia has a whole list of different variations on the yan-tan-tethera for various English regions.

Apparently, this weird-ass counting system is actually a very old counting system that probably predates the Roman conquest of Britain, and it’s linguistically related to all the other Indo-European languages! Some of the words are even the same!

But wait, what about bumfit?

Consider the bumfit, and make sure it’s hovera covered

Bumfit is a hilarious word. However, I don’t think “bumfit” sounds like “fifteen” at all. Nor does “hovera, covera” sound like “eight, nine” in any way. But if all the numbers in the yan-tan-tethera counting system are derived from Proto-Indo-European, how did eight and nine (*��₽�ḱt���₃ and *��₁né�ܲ� in Proto-Indo-European) become hovera, covera?

The explanation from the same says that bumfit and the rest are Proto-Celtic numerals that died out in modern English. The Welsh numerals do have something in common with the yan-tan-tethera system:

The Welsh pymtheg is … sorta similar to bumfit, I guess? And the Welsh pump, deg, pymtheg, ugain is at least partially recognizable as pimp, dik, bumfit, figgit.

The Ancient British word for twenty, �ɾ��첹�Գ�ī, is essentially identical to the Latin ��ī�����Գ�ī (remember, in classical Latin, “v” is pronounced “w”), so I guess the Wikipedia page’s claim that multiples of five are highly conserved checks out.

But this hypothesis seems somewhat lacking to me. Where do you get hovera (8) and covera (9) from? The Welsh versions are wyth and naw, and the Ancient British versions are oxtu and nawan. That’s not even close.

Counting Rhymes

Another friend of mine, Jill, mentioned to me that she had just finished reading The Writing of the Gods: The Race to Decode the Rosetta Stone, and the book had mentioned that the children’s nursery “Hickory Dickory Dock, the mouse ran up the clock” was originally a .

Short, common words, learned early in life, tend to be the most constant throughout language evolution (“mama,” “father,” “brother,” etc.). In the same way, counting rhymes, taught to children at a young age, are highly conserved linguistically.

This led me to the fantastic “The Secret History of ‘Eeny Meeny Miny Mo,’” by Adrienne Raphel, on the origin and history of counting rhymes. Seriously, give this article a read; it’s fascinating.

I would venture a guess that pretty much every English-speaking schoolchild knows some version of the rhyme:

Eeny, meeny, miny, mo
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers, let him go
Eeny meeny miny mo

This rhyme has a darker history than I knew. According to Adrienne Raphel:

In the canonical Eeny Meeny, “tiger” is standard in the second line, but this is a relatively recent revision. If it doesn’t seem to make sense, even in the gibberish Eeny Meeny world, that you’d grab a carnivorous cat’s toe and expect the tiger to do the hollering, remember that in both England and America, children until recently said “Catch a nigger by the toe.”

Didn’t know that one. Yikes. But it seems that this is a fairly recent revision of a much more ubiquitous class of counting rhymes. In Denmark:

Ene, mene, ming, mang,
Kling klang,
Osse bosse bakke disse,
Eje, veje, vaek.

And in Zimbabwe:

Eena, meena, ming, mong,
Ting, tay, tong,
Ooza, vooza, voka, tooza,
Vis, vos, vay.

However, while reading this article, one particular rhyme caught my eye.

In 1830, children in Scotland chanted:

Zinti, tinti,
Tethera, methera,
Bumfa, litera,
Hover, dover,
Dicket, dicket,
As I sat on my sooty kin
I saw the king of Irel pirel
Playing upon Jerusalem pipes.

In that rhyme, found in Scotland, we see “tethera, methera, bumfa, hover, dover, dicket,” all recognizable yan-tan-tethera numbers. Raphel goes on to connect this counting rhyme to the same yan-tan-tethera counting system we’ve been discussing, which she gives as:

Yan, tan, tethera, methera, pimp,
Sethera, lethera, hothera, dovera, dick,
Yan-dick, tan-dick, tether-dick, mether-dick, bumfit,
Yan-a-bumfit, tan-a-bumfit, tethera bumfit, pethera bumfit, gigert.

Now I see what’s going on. The yan-tan-tethera counting system is much more than simply a linguistic evolution of the ancient Proto-Indo-European numbers; it’s a counting rhyme! Likely, it is designed to be a memory aid for a nonliterate population that needs to count things.

Some of the numbers are the same as ours — multiples of five, especially, are conserved from their Proto-Indo-European roots, but the system as a whole is meant to roll off the tongue as a rhyme, as unforgettable as “eeny meeny miny mo.” In fact, the children’s nursery rhyme “Hickory Dickory Dock” probably has its in this ancient Celtic counting rhyme, via the numbers “hothera dovera dick.”

The reason the yan-tan-tethera numbers are so fun to say out loud is the same reason that epic poetry is written in rhyming meter — repetitive, rhyming lines are very easy to memorize, which is enormously important for primarily oral cultures.

This really blew my mind.

It turns out that the yan-tan-tethera counting system really was familiar to me, and probably you too — every schoolkid in America already knows it as “Hickory Dickory Dock,” though its origins as a Proto-Celtic counting system are long forgotten.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post A Brief History of Dik: Indo-European Linguistics and Counting Rhymes, or, Dik + Pimp = Bumfit appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The document was addressed personally to President Donald J. Trump of the United States, in keeping with what participants described as “standard diplomatic protocol for declarations of this nature,” though no officials could immediately confirm the precedent for that protocol when asked by reporters.

Among those present and signing were Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the United Kingdom, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland. Mr. Tusk, who arrived last and signed with what witnesses described as “a certain theatrical flourish,” was referred to throughout the proceedings by an unofficial honorific that spread quickly among the delegations: Polonius. Mr. Tusk was said to be aware of the nickname and to have taken it in good humor, though he declined to comment on whether he found it apt.

Viktor Orbán of Hungary was notably absent. His office issued a brief statement saying he had not been invited, which was confirmed by four officials with direct knowledge of the guest list, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly confirm whom they had deliberately not invited.

“We wished to act with all appropriate urgency. This is why, having finalized the text in the final week of March, we waited until today to release it.”

The text of the declaration

The declaration, drafted over approximately four days by a working group of senior legal advisers, runs to slightly under two pages and opens with language that several historians of American constitutional documents described, when reached by telephone, as “familiar.” The full preamble reads as follows:

Excerpt — European Declaration of Independence, April 1, 2026

When in the course of European events it sometimes becomes necessary to think about who we are and how we live (without thinking about who we were in our colonial past) and to break the bonds that prevent us from being separate and equal powers trying to manage the global economy, a decent respect for our somewhat compromised dignity compels us to state the position on which we have hitherto remained silent.

To wit, we proclaim our equal and separate right to declare and wage our own wars in West Asia and elsewhere around the globe, as well as back the genocides of our choice, as befits any independent political entity. We regret any inconvenience this may cause to unfolding events, but we trust that your own precedent that took place 250 years ago will help you understand the urgency of this act.

Furthermore, we assert our sovereign prerogative to impose tariffs of our own devising, to conduct our own trade negotiations with parties of our choosing, and to organize our own security arrangements without prior consultation with or approval from Washington, Mar-a-Lago, or any other executive residence or golf property.

We hold these geopolitical truths to be negotiable, that all blocs are created with overlapping interests, that they are endowed by their treaties with certain inalienable prerogatives, that among these are the right to a unified agricultural subsidy regime, the unimpeded movement of professionals across member-state borders, and the pursuit of a competitive single market.

In testimony whereof, we have caused the seal of the European Union to be affixed to these presents, along with the signatures of such non-EU members as have been graciously permitted to append their names in a supplementary column to the right, formatted, it must be noted, in a slightly smaller font.

Reactions and context

The declaration was the culmination of a process, officials said, set in motion by the expanding scope of the United States-Israeli military campaign against Iran, which has reshaped strategic calculations across the continent. Several leaders, speaking to reporters after the signing, said the document had been in preparation since the final days of March — a timeline that, they were at pains to stress, reflected careful deliberation rather than impulsiveness.

“We did not wish to act in haste,” Ms. von der Leyen said at a brief press conference held in the castle’s Great Hall, beneath what is believed to be a reproduction of a sixteenth-century tapestry. “This is why, having finalized the text in the final week of March, we waited until today to release it.”

She did not elaborate on what had been gained by the intervening days. A spokeswoman later confirmed that the delay had allowed time for the document’s signatories page to be properly typeset.

Mr. Macron, who signed third and paused briefly to recap his pen before handing it to Mr. Starmer, said the choice of Elsinore had been intentional: “There is a question being asked here. It is not unlike another question famously associated with this place. We believe we have answered it.” He did not specify which answer Europe had chosen.

Mr. Merz said the declaration represented “the logical conclusion of a process that began some time ago and has been accelerating in ways that those responsible for accelerating it perhaps did not fully anticipate.” He added that Germany remained committed to dialogue, cooperation, and the rule of international law, and was simply choosing to pursue those commitments independently.

Mr. Starmer, for his part, noted that while the United Kingdom was not an EU member, the spirit of the declaration was one in which Britain could “wholeheartedly share, at least in this particular regard and subject to parliamentary review.” He signed in blue ink. All other signatories used black.

The White House had not responded to a request for comment by the time of publication. A spokesperson for the National Security Council said she was “not aware of any such document” and asked that it be sent over by secure fax.

Historical echoes and practical questions

Scholars of transatlantic relations were divided on the declaration’s legal standing, its diplomatic implications and, more fundamentally, its coherence as a framework for international action. “It’s a gesture,” said one professor of European constitutional law, who asked not to be named because his tenure review is pending. “A significant gesture, but primarily a gesture. The question is whether gestures, when signed at sufficient altitude in a sufficiently old castle, acquire the character of policy.”

Several signatories acknowledged that implementation would require further discussion. A joint working group was announced to address questions including, but not limited to: which wars Europe intended to wage, in what sequence, under whose command and whether a common European war would require a qualified majority in the Council or could proceed under enhanced cooperation. A subcommittee on genocide backing criteria was said to be meeting in Geneva next Thursday, with an indicative agenda circulated but not yet agreed.

Officials confirmed that Mr. Orbán had not been invited specifically because, as one diplomat put it, “the spirit of the declaration is that we are declaring independence, not that we are providing an opportunity to register objections to the concept of independence at length and then block the communiqué.”

“It is not unlike another question famously associated with this place. We believe we have answered it.”

The document ends with a provision — Article VII, Paragraph 3, footnote (b) — specifying that the declaration “shall enter into force upon ratification by the relevant national parliaments, a process estimated to take between eighteen months and the heat death of the current geopolitical order, whichever comes first.”

After the signing, participants repaired to a reception in an adjoining hall, where they were served smørrebrød and a locally produced sparkling wine. Mr. Tusk — Polonius — was seen in conversation with a senior Commission official near a window overlooking the Øresund strait. Asked later what they had discussed, he said: “The view. It is very fine. You can see Sweden from here.”

He paused. “We did not invite Sweden either, but for different reasons.”

The document was to be transmitted to the White House by courier, officials said, with a digital copy sent by encrypted email and a decorative framed version dispatched separately via registered post. It was unclear whether anyone was expected to respond.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Her earlier memoir, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History (2021), established her as a rare writer capable of weaving rigorous political philosophy into a lived autobiography — a quality that earned it extraordinary international acclaim. In Indignity: A Life Reimagined, she goes even further. 

What makes Indignity philosophically extraordinary is not merely its scope, though that scope is vast, running from Constantinople to Salonica to Tirana to the prisons of Burrel, but its governing question: what becomes of a person’s dignity when the state has the power to name them, surveil them, archive them and ultimately to decide, on paper, whether they lived or died? That power, Ypi argues, is never innocent, and its victims are never simply historical.

As an example, let me quote the German constitution of 1949, written specifically to remind us that dignity takes work and intention from everyone: 

Die Würde des Menschen ist unantastbar.
Sie zu achten und zu schützen ist Verpflichtung aller staatlichen Gewalt.

Human dignity shall be inviolable/untouchable. To respect
and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.

— Grundgesetz, Artikel 1 (1949)

The catalyst of the story was a photograph

Indignity is a hybrid novel-memoir, a book that moves between archival research and literary imagination, between historical fact and the admission that facts alone can never reconstitute a life. Its governing epigraphs — one from Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (“Everything has either a price or dignity”) and one from Friedrich Schiller’s On the Aesthetic Education of Human Beings — announce from the outset a work that breathes philosophical ambition, situating itself within the German Idealist tradition’s deepest preoccupations: what it means to be a moral person, and whether that meaning survives our deaths.

The book begins with a photograph — a honeymoon of Ypi’s grandparents, Leman and Asllan, at a luxury hotel in Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1941 — discovered one day on a stranger’s social media page, accompanied by venomous comments that sought to reduce her grandmother Leman to a caricature: collaborator, spy, fascist accomplice.��

Ypi’s response is not a refutation but a quest. She travels to the Albanian State Security archives to retrieve her family’s secret police files, and from this bureaucratic excavation grows a three-part narrative spanning the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the interwar scramble for the Balkans, the Italian and Nazi occupations, the rise of Enver Hoxha’s hermetic communist state, and the long aftermath of exile, surveillance, and dispossession that crushed two generations of her family. 

Who decides who we are?

At the heart of Indignity is the terrifying ease with which a totalitarian regime can claim authority over a person’s identity. Ypi’s grandfather, Asllan, was a man of considerable standing — his father, Xhafer Bey Ypi, had served as Albania’s tenth prime minister. Yet the communist state reduced him, in its files, to “enemy of the people,” imprisoned him for decades on fabricated charges of collaboration with British intelligence and stripped the family of property, status and freedom of movement. Her grandmother Leman, born in Salonica to an Ottoman administrative family of cosmopolitan refinement, was reclassified as a class enemy, surveilled for years and eventually declared dead by the secret services — not because she had died, but because an informant’s false denunciations had been discredited and the file needed to be closed. The state simply wrote her out of existence. 

In a chilling discovery, Ypi realizes that the surveillance file she has been reading belongs partly to another woman who also bore the name Leman Ypi — two lives entangled by bureaucratic error, both equally erased. The archive, Ypi writes, “structures events in the same way grammar structures thought: regulating an amorphous mass of discourse, establishing patterns of transmission, prescribing who says what, when and with what implications.” To be named in those files was to have one’s story colonized; to be absent from them was no freedom either, only a different kind of obliteration.

The book is equally attentive to the ways in which political violence deforms intimate life. Relationships — between spouses, between parents and children, between friends who may or may not be informants — are never merely private under a totalitarian regime. Asllan’s friendship with Enver Hoxha, his school companion who went on to found the Albanian Communist Party and rule the country until 1985, is one of the book’s most haunting threads: It shows how the personal and the political are not just adjacent but lethal when they collide. 

Ypi reconstructs, with great delicacy and uncertainty, how her grandparents’ marriage — forged in elegance and cut short by arrest — was also shaped by contingencies of empire, displacement and political allegiance that neither could entirely control. The chapters on the population exchanges mandated by the Treaty of Lausanne, the Greek and Albanian borders redrawn around living people like chalk lines around bodies, capture with particular force the violence of state-imposed identity. It demonstrates how a family could find itself suddenly belonging to a nation that had not existed when its members were born, required to prove belonging in the land of their birth, stripped of property in Salonica that was now Greece’s to dispose of. Regimes, Ypi demonstrates, do not simply oppress individuals; they reshape the conditions of love, loyalty and recognition within which persons form themselves.

And then there is the most piercing question the book poses: Who protects who we are when we die? Ypi is prompted to write, in part, by the brutal fragility of her grandmother’s posthumous reputation — vulnerable to the cruelties of social media, to the reductions of strangers who found in a honeymoon photograph an occasion to convict. In death, Leman cannot speak for herself, cannot shape her own narrative, cannot refute the lies. Ypi frames this as a Kantian problem: Kant held that dignity is the property of rational beings capable of self-legislation, of giving the moral law to themselves. But the dead are no longer capable of self-legislation. Does that mean their dignity evaporates? Or does it persist as a demand — a claim on the living to remember rightly? “Does dignity require someone’s continuing existence — an active capacity to defend that dignity, protect it from assault, stand up in its name?” Ypi asks. 

Her answer, arrived at slowly and through pain, is that dignity is not merely a private possession but a relational achievement. It must be sustained by those who remain, which is why writing — imagining the truth of a life with the full awareness that imagination is not the same as documentation — becomes an act of moral obligation. The book is that act. In a remarkable coda, having discovered that the other Leman Ypi has no living descendants and exists only in the secret police files, Lea Ypi decides to adopt her too: To give her, as she puts it, “the dignity of memory.”

Reading Indignity in this light, one cannot help but hear the resonance of a far older conflict — one that Western philosophical tradition has never entirely resolved.

The ghost of Antigone still haunts us

“Zeus does not / Justice does not / the dead do not / what they call law did not begin today or yesterday / when they say law they do not mean a statute of today or yesterday / they mean the unwritten unfailing eternal ordinances of the gods / that no human being can ever outrun”

Anne Carson — (New Directions, 2012)

In Sophocles’ Antigone, Creon, the king of Thebes, decrees that the body of Polynices — Antigone’s brother, slain in civil war — shall be left unburied, exposed to carrion birds and denied the rites that the dead require. The edict is and punitive: Creon has decided that this traitor shall not only die but be unmade, stripped of the rituals through which a community recognizes a life as having been fully human. Antigone refuses. She buries her brother in obedience to the gods’ will. Divine law, older and deeper than any human ordinance, demands that the dead be honoured. When Creon demands to know how she dared transgress his edict, she answers with perfect clarity: The gods’ unwritten laws are not subject to the override of any magistrate. For Antigone, there are three competing authorities — the city’s laws, the divine order and the voice of individual conscience. When the city’s laws violate the other two, conscience must prevail.

The parallel with Ypi’s predicament is striking and philosophically productive. Creon’s decree, like the Albanian communist state’s archive, is a political act masquerading as a legal one. It is, at its core, an exercise of sovereign power that claims the authority to define reality. This man was a traitor; this woman is an enemy; this person is, by official decree, dead. Antigone’s insistence that there is a law above the city’s law — the unwritten law that obliges us to honour the dead — is Ypi’s insistence too, though she pursues it through secular and Kantian rather than divine coordinates. 

For Ypi, the “unwritten law” that compels her is the moral imperative to treat persons as ends in themselves and never as mere instruments of history, ideology or bureaucratic convenience. Her grandmother — and the other Leman Ypi, the stranger she adopts — must be remembered rightly, not because God commands it but because to do otherwise would be to collude with the violence that reduced them in the first place. 

Creon’s tragedy was his refusal to see that political authority has limits: that the city cannot claim sovereignty over the dead without doing violence to what makes the living human. Ypi’s book enacts the same insight across four generations and half a century of Balkan catastrophe, demonstrating that the tension Sophocles dramatized — between the state’s demand for obedience and the individual conscience’s demand for justice — is not a problem ancient tragedy solved. It is the permanent condition of political life, and it is with us still.

Indignity is a book of unusual intellectual and moral seriousness, and of considerable beauty. It does not resolve the questions it raises. It is too honest for that. It insists instead with the force of lived and even embodied history (Erlebnis), that those questions matter: Who has the right to name us, to archive us, to decide the meaning of our lives? What do we owe the dead who cannot answer for themselves? And where, when the city’s laws fail and the gods are silent, does individual conscience find its ground? These are Antigone’s questions. They are also ours.

For those who would like to listen to a reading of Antigonick, the experimental translation by Anne Carson, you can find it .��

[A special thank you to Professor , Rome, ��formerly University of Bologna, who helped me connect with Antigone and find the quote from the German Constitution.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Although President Trump ultimately cooled his interest in acquiring European territory, Europe briefly faced a dire situation: For many staunch Atlanticists, the prospect of defending themselves against a US military land grab signaled the end of an era. Following the shock of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Europe now finds itself caught between an aggressive Russia and an unpredictable US.

For Germany, these developments are particularly worrying. A country that has long prided itself on its close relationship with the US, its major role in advancing European integration and its determination to build a constructive relationship with Russia now finds itself in a world turned upside down.

As Germany contemplates how to organize its defense in this altered security environment, , both within and outside the country, have concluded that, now allegedly bereft of American protection, Germany should acquire its own nuclear weapons. However, Berlin is not likely to go down this path. Even though the world has changed and Germany is now investing heavily in its conventional defense, the costs of a national nuclear option would far outweigh any potential benefits.

Breaking nuclear taboos

The German nuclear debate started during the 2016 US presidential campaign when candidate Trump questioned long-standing US policies of protecting allies. Some German observers that the loss of the US “nuclear umbrella” was becoming increasingly likely, which would force Germany to pursue a national nuclear option. However, when it became clear that President Trump did not intend to question the US’s nuclear commitment to Europe, the debate quickly died down.��

Still, Trump’s return to the White House, which resulted in an even more aggressive stance towards Europe, reignited the nuclear debate. Some German have commented on the need for alternatives to a fading US commitment, but have getting into specifics. The most vocal proponents of a German bomb are a few security experts in academia, as well as journalists. Parts of �ұ�������Բ�’s conservative press, in particular, are fueling this discussion. Guest authors are regularly invited to write about the need for a German bomb. also seem eager to educate reluctant German decision-makers on the fundamentals of robust nuclear policy. Even the arts and culture sections of some newspapers are startling unsuspecting readers with by previously unknown authors portraying Germany as being in urgent need of its own nuclear weapons. These authors seem to relish their role as nuclear taboo-breakers.

However, closer inspection reveals that �ұ�������Բ�’s self-styled taboo-breakers are at best reluctant arsonists. For instance, most German proponents of a national nuclear option rarely express their views unequivocally. Most are content merely to refer to the new security situation, in which one must now “think the unthinkable.” Only a few dare to go further. proposed that Germany should simply buy 1,000 nuclear warheads from the US, thereby becoming a nuclear power virtually overnight (while leading to the imminent collapse of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty []).

Others argue that the treaties committing Germany to permanently renounce weapons of mass destruction , as the conditions for these commitments no longer exist — “rebus sic stantibus.” This line of argument would enable Germany to withdraw from the Two-Plus-Four that paved the way for its reunification. It could then follow up by withdrawing from the NPT, which West Germany joined in 1969 as a non-nuclear-weapon state. Once these legal obstacles were removed, the argument goes, the path to the bomb would depend only on financial resources and technical know-how.��

Consequently, proponents of nuclear weapons argue that, like Japan and South Korea, Germany should invest in “nuclear latency,” i.e., the maintenance of the basic technologies necessary for a national nuclear weapons program. However, �ұ�������Բ�’s exit from nuclear power generation has left the country with very little “nuclear latency.”

Moreover, as the British and French experiences demonstrate, the financial costs of a national nuclear program would be enormous. Developing a true nuclear option — which must include command systems (including satellites) and delivery vehicles (such as missiles or submarines) — would take 20 years or more, which seems too long to deter a belligerent Russia. 

Concerns from �ұ�������Բ�’s neighbors��

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, those in favor of a German bomb tend to avoid the question of what would happen if Poland, Italy and other larger European countries were to follow �ұ�������Բ�’s example and initiate their own nuclear programs. Even if Washington dropped any objections to allied countries acquiring nuclear weapons, a German bid for the bomb could trigger a major political earthquake with unforeseeable consequences.

If official government about Germany wanting to build Europe’s strongest conventional armed forces are already in Europe and beyond, what would happen if Berlin were to commit to a national nuclear weapons program? Old resentments among �ұ�������Բ�’s neighbors, which have been kept in check until now, would resurface. Germany would make a tactical gain, but suffer a strategic loss.��

�ұ�������Բ�’s withdrawal from several major international treaties would strike fear into many Europeans more than Moscow’s nuclear weapons would. Although the German public’s towards nuclear weapons remains fickle, the idea of their country developing its own nuclear arsenal would hardly be widely approved of.

In a speech in February 2026, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Berlin was engaged in talks with Paris on nuclear matters, but hastened to add that Germany was opposed to “different zones of security” in Europe. This message was intended to reassure �ұ�������Բ�’s neighbors that Berlin was looking at the broader European context and not seeking a privileged position under a strictly bilateral Franco-German deterrence framework. In sum, whatever the reasoning behind a German nuclear arsenal, no German government would pursue it.��

�ұ�������Բ�’s NATO Option

Germany has two options for organizing its nuclear protection. The first is NATO. Since the 1960s, NATO has had a system of “nuclear sharing” in place that balances Washington’s desire to maintain decision-making power over nuclear use with the interests of non-nuclear states in political and military consultation, without undermining the NPT. In practical terms, this means that Germany and several other NATO allies maintain specialized fighter jets and crews that could carry US nuclear warheads in times of conflict. Nuclear sharing is a laborious compromise, but it represents the greatest degree of nuclear cooperation possible between sovereign nation-states. 

Despite the Trump administration’s use of stark language to cajole European allies into increasing their defense budgets and conventional military strength, the US has not challenged its commitment to extended deterrence in Europe. As the US “nuclear umbrella” has effectively prevented allies from developing their own nuclear arsenals, the US would gain little but lose much by abandoning it. Therefore, as long as Washington does not openly raise doubts about the “nuclear umbrella”, neither will European governments.

While long-standing French calls for European “strategic autonomy” may sound more pertinent today than a few years ago, they only apply to the conventional realm. On nuclear matters, France would prefer to maintain the status quo, including a continued US nuclear presence in NATO Europe.

�ұ�������Բ�’s European Option

All this explains why the NATO option remains �ұ�������Բ�’s preferred solution. However, what if “Option A” were to fail, and the US were to withdraw its nuclear protection from Europe? In this case, Germany would seek to organize its nuclear protection within the framework of a nuclear-armed EU. West Germany explicitly mentioned this possibility when ratifying its accession to the NPT in 1975, stating that the NPT should not hinder the European integration process.  At that time, this was still purely hypothetical, but it demonstrated considerable foresight. Should the transatlantic security partnership collapse completely, the European option would become �ұ�������Բ�’s “Plan B.” 

Clearly, such a “Europeanization” of nuclear deterrence would be extremely challenging. Setting aside the unusual proposal of one prominent German analyst to have a “” circulate among the capitals of major EU member states, the nuclear arsenals of the UK and France were designed solely to protect their respective national territories. These are traditional “sanctuary weapons” that were neither intended nor built for a pan-European extended deterrence mission.

While the UK has allocated its nuclear weapons to NATO, France has consistently emphasized its national sovereignty in nuclear matters and has even to join NATO’s Nuclear Planning Group. Furthermore, the UK is no longer an EU member, and its nuclear arsenal relies heavily on cooperation with the US. Although France and the UK have moved closer together on nuclear matters, neither is likely to unequivocally commit to providing extended deterrence for the rest of Europe. Complicating matters further, the two staunchly anti-nuclear EU members, Austria and Ireland, are likely to obstruct attempts to establish an EU-wide nuclear culture.��

Therefore, the most likely would be for interested European nations to establish a European Nuclear Planning Group similar to NATO’s and to participate more regularly in French and British nuclear exercises. Another option would be to strengthen existing consultation and cooperation agreements, such as the 2024 between the UK and Germany. French dual-capable aircraft could regularly visit air bases in other European countries, and major EU foreign policy documents could contain more references to nuclear issues. Taken together, these measures could project a semblance of European nuclear solidarity, though they could not fully compensate for a loss of US nuclear protection.��

Keep calm and deter

For all these reasons, arguing in favor of a German nuclear program remains largely an intellectual exercise. �ұ�������Բ�’s reluctant nuclear arsonists aren’t actually setting fire, but merely playing with it. Many of them know full well that their calls will not translate into official policy. Nor will �ұ�������Բ�’s commitment not to possess weapons of mass destruction be rendered meaningless by a few toughly worded op-eds. “Rebus sic stantibus” is not a magic spell from a Harry Potter movie that can set the world right again.

Even if Germany does not go nuclear, however, the debate holds an important lesson: The US “nuclear umbrella” is far more important than some analysts and politicians on both sides of the Atlantic dare to admit. It spares Europe a destructive debate on nuclear-driven renationalization and spares the US the prospect of having to deal with a multinuclear Europe. Therefore, both sides of the Atlantic should refrain from making reckless statements about the diminishing credibility of the US “nuclear umbrella” or the desirability of new national nuclear options. Perhaps those who boast about “thinking the unthinkable” should try “thinking the thinkable” first.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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According to the Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP), the international system is undergoing “intensified fragmentation and geopolitical polarisation” as competition among China, Russia and the US reshapes the global order. In this context, the behavior of states that are neither great powers nor small, dependent states is crucial to systemic stability.

Why the middle matters

Middle powers matter because they offer more than geographic or economic weight; they constitute a relational space that sustains cooperation even when the largest actors retreat into rivalry. 

Middle powers are not solely defined by material capacity but by their strategic behavior, which explains that these states “leverage their resources through selective leadership, niche diplomacy and active engagement in specific issue areas.” Their influence arises not from overwhelming force but from credible, flexible diplomacy embedded in international networks.

Yet middle power behavior cannot be purely transactional. Unlike great powers, which can absorb reputational costs through sheer weight, middle powers depend on a consistent record of principled engagement — the moment their positions appear for sale, their value as mediators and bridge-builders evaporates. Strategic flexibility is only credible when it rests on stable principles.

Notably, some of the most effective middle power actors — Norway, Qatar, Singapore and Switzerland — formally present themselves as small states, yet their diplomatic footprint tells a different story. 

This capacity to function between poles gives middle powers a unique stake in stability — they thrive not by domination but by preserving openness and predictability in a world where rivalry threatens to narrow options for all.

The pressure to choose — and the value of autonomy

Great power rivalry today extends beyond security to trade, technology and supply chains. The pressure on other states to align is real. Yet for most, alignment is neither simple nor costless.

Kazakhstan, for example, openly maintains relations with Russia, China, the EU and the US — not out of indecision, but as deliberate diversification that enhances its strategic autonomy and flexibility. As Thomas Greminger, the author of the GCSP brief, explains, this diversification gives such states greater agency while preserving room to maneuver amid competing pressures. And, Türkiye offers an even sharper illustration: a NATO member that nonetheless purchased Russia’s S-400 missile system, demonstrating that strategic autonomy is exercised not only outside alliances, but sometimes in deliberate tension with them. 

Scholars describe this as “flexilateralism” — shifting coalitions across different issues and configurations — or simply “multialignment,” where a state maintains simultaneous partnerships across rival blocs without fully committing to any.

Autonomy in this sense is not neutrality in a moral vacuum but a careful exercise of agency — preserving space for diplomacy, cooperation and engagement across rival blocs.

When geography constrains

Geography shapes middle power behavior, but does not determine it. A strategic location between major powers can amplify diplomatic options — Kazakhstan’s position at the crossroads of Russia, China and Central Asia sharpens rather than limits its multivector diplomacy, while Qatar’s contested neighborhood has pushed it toward mediation and strategic connectivity as survival tools. But geography can also become a trap.

Countries wedged between Russia and the West — Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine — cannot exercise middle power agency in the same way; their contested position pushes them toward bandwagoning rather than bridge-building. The difference between a middle power and an “in-between country” is ultimately less about location than about the political space available to make independent choices.

Communication when giants drift apart

As great powers communicate less directly, middle powers often keep vital conversations alive.

The GCSP Policy Brief highlights that middle powers deploy a range of diplomatic strategies — including bridge-building, coalition formation and mediation — to bring parties into dialogue and cooperation. It points specifically to cases like Oman and Qatar playing roles in regional mediation, facilitating negotiations between actors that might otherwise lack direct channels.

This kind of facilitation rarely makes headlines. But preventing escalation matters. When crises do not escalate into conflict, when lines of communication hold even loosely, fragmentation is contained.

Coalitions without camps

Global institutions are under strain. Consensus is harder to achieve. Formal mechanisms stagnate.

In response, middle powers are forging issue-based coalitions that sidestep rigid bloc politics. Rather than insisting on universal agreements that exclude major disagreements, these coalitions generate functional cooperation on shared risks — climate, health, food security and technology governance.

The GCSP brief notes that by forming ad hoc alliances and working collectively, middle powers can help “repair, adapt and stabilise the international order” precisely through these narrower but productive agendas.

This cooperation does not require full alignment on all strategic questions; it is rooted in practical outcomes and shared interests in avoiding collapse into zero-sum rivalry.

Greminger’s most concrete proposal points in exactly this direction. During the Cold War, a group of neutral and nonaligned states — the so-called “N+N” — played a quiet but decisive role in facilitating dialogue between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, contributing to the stable European security order that emerged from the Helsinki Process. He asks whether a similar coalition might be needed today: Should the current Ukraine conflict move toward settlement, reconstructing a European security order will require more than deterrence — it will need committed, credible states willing to facilitate risk reduction, confidence-building and arms control. Could that coalition include middle powers like Kazakhstan, Norway and Türkiye alongside traditional neutrals like Austria, Ireland, Malta and Switzerland, with Germany and Italy as cooperative security anchors? The question is deliberately open, but the precedent is real.

Economic connectivity as a stabilizing force

In a fragmented world, economic interdependence is not just a driver of prosperity. It is a buffer against division.

Middle powers often act as connectors, integrating regional trade networks and hosting platforms for economic cooperation. Financial and logistical corridors, middle powers help build complicated efforts to draw hard bloc lines in the global economy, reducing incentives for complete decoupling.

Even outside the GCSP brief, analysts note that middle powers can exercise influence by mobilizing coalitions and exploiting opportunities where great powers are indifferent or immobilized, essentially shaping cooperative spaces where larger players otherwise struggle to do so.

The risks of erosion

Stabilizing the middle is no guarantee. Strategic autonomy can be squeezed by coercive tactics. Economic levers can become tools of political pressure. Domestic politics may harden into pro-alignment rhetoric.

Here, the GCSP brief highlights that middle powers’ agency depends not just on capacity but on political commitment and diplomatic skill, observing that countries like Norway, Qatar and Switzerland combine principled engagement with reputational credibility to act as effective bridge-builders.

These dual attributes — conviction and craft — are what allow middle powers to operate as stabilizers in fractured environments.

Holding the system together

The international system need not collapse, and rivalry among great powers will surely continue. Yet the degree of fragmentation the world ultimately experiences will depend not only on the behavior of the largest states, but on whether enough mid-level states sustain cooperation, connectivity and dialogue.

In this sense, middle powers do not just fill gaps left by great power abstention. They actively shape the contours of the emerging order — not by opposing or neutralizing superpowers, but by keeping diplomatic and institutional space open.

As the GCSP brief illustrates, middle powers are uniquely positioned to contribute to stability precisely because they do not seek domination but manageable, predictable cooperation in an unpredictable world.

Their success is not a function of overwhelming force, but of relational influence — a blend of credibility, commitment and strategic autonomy. Yet realizing this potential is not automatic. It requires coordinated action, long-term vision and the willingness to lead on principled yet pragmatic agendas. In this sense, the resurgence of middle powers may be the most viable path to sustaining a rules-based international order in an increasingly fragmented and multipolar world, if they choose to act collectively and in time.

[This is an op-ed, summarized version of the publication for the GCSP, where you can find all the sources.]

Roberta Campani had some follow-up questions for the author, which he answered. You can find their exchange below:

1. On Escalation and Structural Change

Roberta Campani: Your policy brief describes a fragmented but still manageable international order. Do the recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran represent a qualitative shift from fragmentation to open confrontation? Has the structural environment for middle powers fundamentally changed?

Thomas Greminger: The recent US-Israeli strikes on Iran have only further strengthened our perception of a polarized and fragmented world order where great powers choose to follow what they perceive to be their interests without any consideration of international law. This is not to say that I wouldn’t condemn the way the Iranian regime has been treating its population. So, I see a further erosion of international law with unpredictable repercussions on regional stability and the global economy, but no fundamental changes of the structural environment for middle powers.

2. On Credibility and Negotiation

Roberta Campani: When major powers signal openness to negotiations and then rapidly escalate militarily, how does that affect the credibility of diplomacy itself? Does such behavior narrow the space in which middle powers can operate as mediators?

Thomas Greminger: It undermines the credibility of diplomacy and, more specifically, conflict mediation. Just imagine that the Omani Minister of Foreign Affairs, tasked to mediate between the US and Iran, was still reporting in Washington on what he perceived to be fairly successful negotiations in Geneva, when the decision to attack militarily was taken. Compare my comments to the :

3. On Strategic Autonomy Under Pressure

Roberta Campani: You argue that middle powers rely on strategic autonomy and diversified partnerships. In moments of acute crisis, does the pressure to align intensify to a point where autonomy becomes unsustainable? How resilient is the “middle” under coercive conditions?

Thomas Greminger: Yes, this may well happen. We have, for instance, witnessed several cases where middle powers came under US tariff pressure and felt obliged to offer major concessions. I believe that resilience can be strengthened through regional alliances that offer stronger bargaining power.

4. On International Law and Norms

Roberta Campani: Many middle powers anchor their diplomacy in multilateral norms and international law. If great powers appear willing to bypass or reinterpret these frameworks, does that weaken the normative foundations on which the middle power agency rests?

Thomas Greminger: It does. At the same time, middle powers have an intrinsic interest to preserve and rebuild a predictable, rules-based international order because they don’t dispose of the might necessary to impose right. The good news is that they can still rely on a large majority of states that continue to believe in international law. There is also still a large majority of states that continue to believe in addressing global challenges through international cooperation.

5. On the Risk of Systemic Fragmentation

Roberta Campani: Is the greater danger today the rivalry itself — or the erosion of trust in diplomatic signaling and institutional commitments? In other words, what threatens the middle more: power politics or unpredictability?

Thomas Greminger: I believe it is easier for middle powers to adapt to power politics that remain stable and thereby predictable over a certain time, as we have seen in the 19th century, than having to deal with the high degree of unpredictability that marks current times.

6. On Collective Action Among Middle Powers

Roberta Campani: Your brief hints at coordination among middle powers. Do you see realistic prospects for collective middle-power initiatives in de-escalation or crisis mediation in the current environment?

Thomas Greminger: We are seeing some initial signs of such alliances. An example is regional powers aligning in response to the war in Gaza. It is true that many mini-lateral structures have popped up in recent years that address specific challenges in a pragmatic, ad-hoc way, but most of them actually serve great power interests. Clearly, middle powers would have to aim for such alliances much more systematically. This would often also imply readiness to overcome regional differences.

7. On Switzerland’s Role

Roberta Campani: Given Switzerland’s diplomatic tradition and your own background, do you see particular responsibilities or opportunities for neutral or non-aligned states in preventing further fragmentation?

Thomas Greminger: Yes, absolutely! At the same time, Swiss foreign policy is very busy regulating its long-term relationship with the EU, dealing with the repercussions caused by the wars in Europe and in the Middle East, and responding to the challenges of the neomercantilist trade policies of one of its most important trade partners. There is therefore a need for a lot of political leadership and commitment for exploiting the opportunities offered to middle powers like Switzerland. It would like other middle powers also to look for creating new cross-regional alliances, perhaps similar to the Human Security Network operating successfully some 25 years ago.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Agency of Middle Powers in a Fragmented and Polarized World appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The continent was split over support for the US-led coalition in the Middle East. Paris and Berlin refused to back it, whereas leaders from mainly former communist states, like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, alongside a few Western allies, Washington’s call for action. Donald Rumsfeld, the American Secretary of Defense, in a press conference at the NATO headquarters in 2003:

You’re thinking of Europe as Germany and France. I don’t. I think that’s “old Europe.” If you look at the entire NATO Europe today, the center of gravity is shifting to the East. And there are a lot of new members.

Rumsfeld, effectively a political ambassador of US President George W. Bush, dismissed the assembled Franco-German opposition in the manner that only a superpower that felt itself globally predominant could. This controversial distinction between “Old” and “New” Europe captured the geopolitical reality of that moment: On security matters, recent EU entrants aligned more closely with the US, while the traditional Western European powers charted a more independent course. This would endure as one of the signals of how the “war on terror” changed the US perspective of its European allies and vice versa.

Fast forward to the 2020s, and US President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has begun to mirror this divide. There is no shortage of parallels between the hawkish of the Bush era and Trump’s revival of the “with us or against us” ethos, often the White House’s will against allied consensus.

In both cases, Europe’s major powers have struggled to restrain Washington’s impulsiveness when its leader is fixated on a course of action. But there is a distinct element to Trump’s invocation of such turn-of-the-century paradigms, and it has more to do with security and the cohesion of the European theater than with anything else.

The new transatlantic reality

Back in December, a leaked draft of Trump’s allegedly laid out a plan to prioritize American support for a select few European governments, explicitly listing Austria, Hungary, Italy, and Poland as countries the US “work more with … with the goal of pulling them away from the [EU].” The document advocated backing European political forces that champion “sovereignty,” a serious pivot from most of the US’s post-1945 stance of bolstering European integration.

The strategy hints that officials in the current US administration might view a nonmonolithic Europe as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. Decades ago, a certain US secretary of state whom Washington should call if it wanted to speak to Europe, implying the fragmented nature of the continent’s political authority.

Today, the question may no longer need to be asked. If governments more sympathetic to the American leadership can offset Brussels, then America might be able to advance its interests by working with a more ideologically aligned subgroup of states rather than the EU as a single bloc. Seen in context, this goes beyond a single policy proposal and toward a broader rethink of Washington’s approach toward the EU, with a strategic emphasis on some of its members. Throughout the history of European integration, the Brussels elite has consistently avoided a two-tier or multispeed Europe, but this might suit the White House’s priorities just fine today.

Such a strategy could be particularly challenging for European governments because, while transatlantic rifts have occurred before (some more alarming than others), US administrations have traditionally exercised a degree of restraint and strategic calculation rather than seeking to weaken or undo the European project.

During the Suez Crisis of 1956, Washington compelled Britain and France to withdraw from Egypt, yet did so of a broader postwar order in which European integration remained central to American interests. Similarly, West �ұ�������Բ�’s Ostpolitik in the 1970s US containment policy at the time, but America regarded it as a disagreement the alliance rather than a reason to undermine Europe’s unity.

In the 1990s, Washington’s frustration with the European governments’ divided and stalled response to the wars in and exposed the serious limits of Europe’s ability to act. Still, it did not turn the US away from the idea of working together with its allies. Even later disputes, such as the US hesitation during NATO’s , were still treated as disagreements over who should lead and who should pay, not as attempts to undermine Europe’s institutional core.

Alas, this might be changing. What seems to set the current US administration apart from its predecessors after World War II is that its differences with Europe now seem less about specific policy disputes and more about viewing divisions within the continent as strategically advantageous.

The east and the west

This hinges on two separate but overlapping divides: Rumsfeld’s “Old” vs. “New” Europe paradigm, which splits the European project along geographic and historical lines, and the decades-old distinction between so-called “Atlanticist” and “Europeanist” states. Within a longstanding in European affairs, Atlanticist-oriented countries tend to prioritize NATO and a tight bond with Washington when it comes to their security, whereas Europeanists emphasize Europe’s capacity to act independently of the US, both on defense and on the global stage. Historically, the latter has appeared through several conceptions, be it of independence, French President Emmanuel Macron’s or .

The two rifts often reinforce each other. Poland and its neighbors, for example, have long seen the US as their ultimate security guarantor, a view shaped by their history and proximity to Russia. During the Iraq War, these countries stood firmly by the US, and today they remain to trust American protection than the prospect of a joint EU defense force, even amid current ruptures within NATO. They firmly believe the US security umbrella remains indispensable for the continent, at least for now.

While this is slowly shifting due to the Trump administration’s rhetoric, Eastern and Central European states have been moving away at a much slower pace than their Western allies. By contrast, nations like France have historically championed a self-reliant Europe, and President Macron has warned that the EU must not be merely “,” repeatedly urging the development of a European defense capacity that can operate without US involvement.

Certainly, internal divisions beyond geographical and regional context play a considerable role here as well. In Poland, for instance, Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s pro-European stance coexists uneasily with the more Trump-sympathetic voice of President Andrzej Duda, while in the Czech Republic, President Petr Pavel’s steadfast support for a stronger European pillar of NATO clashes with the MAGA-like rhetoric from recently elected Prime Minister Andrej Babiš.

These splits suggest that Europe’s response to the current U.S. administration remains shaped not only by regional security concerns but increasingly by domestic political competition – perhaps another point of contention welcomed in Washington.

Nevertheless, as both sides seem to be gradually adopting a in response to the White House’s strategy, there are signs that even in Central and Eastern European capitals, such alarming rhetoric go uncontested. European states have against Trump’s attempt to reframe the EU’s trajectory much as they did against Bush’s attempts in 2003. What’s more, Trump’s approach may be inadvertently strengthening the Europeanist position and catalyzing the very European unity and self-reliance that America has demanded, at least publicly.

As a result, every time Washington floats an idea like a punitive tariff on EU goods or throws doubt into whether it will come to the defense of its NATO allies if needed, it strengthens the hand of those in Europe, even in Central and Eastern European capitals, who argue for “strategic autonomy,” or at least a stronger European defense pillar within the alliance. Yet, recent defense spending and preparedness mean Eastern European Atlanticists now see themselves as the upholders of Western security and, though welcoming the recent increase in NATO spending from Western European capitals, have “Old Europe” leaders for their delayed response and a supposed lack of resolve.

United and divided

Understandably, many new variables play into these emerging divisions, as the issues of today and the discourse across the Atlantic have inevitably changed. It might no longer be only about coalition building, defence spending, and the survival of NATO, as tensions are brewing over migration policy, relations with China and Russia, and the very future of European integration. But the pattern is familiar. Trump is effectively encouraging a “New Europe within Europe” in an alliance of sovereignist, America-friendly governments, positioned against an “Old Europe” often perceived as too multilateralist and liberal.

Thus, it is no understatement to say we are witnessing uncharted territory for the transatlantic alliance in the post-1945 era. From the late 1940s through the 1960s, Washington played a key role in fostering European integration, beginning with the Marshall Plan, which tied US economic aid to cooperation among participating European countries. Subsequent American Presidents had often been ambivalent about this emerging “Brussels,” especially when it came with what they inevitably saw as a Gaulist, anti-American agenda. But throughout the Cold War, the strategic conclusion was that European unity was inevitably in the American interest. When President Bush occupied the White House at the turn of the century, he asked whether this should change. As President Trump sits in the Oval Office today, the answer is becoming clearer and clearer.

[ edited this piece]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The “Old” and the “New”: Trump’s Approach to Central and Eastern Europe Revives Bush-Era Themes appeared first on 51�Թ�.

So says , with a measure of defiance. She’s someone who understands that endurance, not provocation, is her greatest transgression. She is now 67: For more than four decades, she’s offended religious leaders, unsettled moral guardians and insulted polite society. Yet none of those affronts has proved as subversive as her refusal to exit quietly. In a culture organized around novelty and replacement, she’s managed to weaponize longevity.

Madonna’s career might be seen as a sequence of calculated shocks: The wedding dress writhing of “,” the supposedly sacrilegious imagery of “,” the BDSM themes of . A notable biography of her is subtitled . But her subversive moments, however incendiary at the time, were ephemeral. If anything, her most renegade accomplishments often went relatively unnoticed. Like earning $50 million (£26.7 million), a record for a female singer in 2004. Or selling more than 400 million records, including albums, singles and digital. Grossing more than $1.3 billion from her tours, another record. In 1992, she signed a then-unprecedented $60 million with Time Warner.

But what really distinguishes Madonna is not the intensity of any single provocation or her prodigious earnings but the cumulative force of her continued presence. She’s outlived her critics, her imitators and many of her contemporaries. The real scandal is not what she did but that she survived so long.

Her endurance matters not simply because it is unusual but because it allowed her cultural experiment to take place. Over decades, Madonna tested the limits of exposure, turning private life into public performance until the distinction between the two appeared to dissolve. What started as provocation became a template for modern celebrity.

The zeitgeist

In February, she sat in the front row at Dolce & Gabbana’s Milan Fashion Week , her arms wrapped around her knees, heavily tinted glasses shading eyes that have seen nearly every iteration of fame in the modern era. Leather gloves accessorized her black outfit, a theatrical flourish that harked back to her Erotica of 1992–93 (gloves, corsets and leather were part of the visual vocabulary she borrowed from fetish subcultures and, in that tour, repurposed for public consumption.) Across the mirrored runway, models twirled in lace and pinstripes, reflecting Madonna’s many incarnations of the past.��

To call Madonna a diva is almost tautological. She is the very definition of a temperamental, world-renowned singer, famed for her volatile temperament and for being notoriously difficult to please. Formidable, demanding, exacting, she’s a force as likely to exhaust collaborators as she is to enchant audiences.

Her epigones and successors — Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Beyoncé, Ariana Grande, included — entertain, enchant, influence and inspire, yet all seem anodyne next to Madonna. None has matched her performative ferocity, her willingness to court scandal and alchemize controversy into precious metal. Forty years in, Madonna remains unrepentant, uncontainable, unyielding, the center of attention. She may no longer shape the zeitgeist on her terms, but she remains part of it.

In the 1980s, the world was barely aware of cellphones, the internet was inconceivable and social media was something English novelist H.G. Wells might have dreamt up. Madonna arrived in this landscape as a wannabe dancer who soon learned how to take the cultural pulse. She figured out that the press (as it then was) could either proclaim or annihilate her, that audiences rewarded artists who aroused as well as just entertained them, and who provided spectacle as well as song and dance. She decided to combine them all. In doing so, she did more than respond to a shifting world; she helped catalyze a further shift, scandalizing at every opportunity and dissolving the binary between private and public.

The experiment

Madonna Louise Ciccone moved to New York in 1978, a 20-year-old with nothing but ambition and a few borrowed instruments. She danced, drummed and sang with local bands before releasing her debut single “” in 1982 and her first album, , in 1983. By 1984, her second album, , produced by Nile Rodgers, cemented her international status. The video for the title track and her at the MTV Video Music Awards in a wedding dress simulating masturbation was a foretaste of what was to come.

In 1985, few could imagine a woman deliberately inducing scandal and usually achieving the results she desired. Madonna’s real innovation lay in recognizing something earlier entertainers had missed: Scandal had changed its meaning. No longer necessarily career-ending — as it had been in the cases of Roscoe Arbuckle, Ingrid Bergman and Errol Flynn — controversy had become a resource. Madonna didn’t provoke randomly; she choreographed provocation, each gesture and outfit a calculated engagement with public sensibilities. Audiences, she seemed to conclude, actually enjoyed being outraged: the surge of anger, shock and indignation was oddly satisfying. This may appear obvious today. In the 1980s, it was radically contrarian.

Her 1989 album marked what might have been a Eureka! moment. Madonna appeared to sense that audiences would demand ever more from stars. This was before ’s launched in 1992, allowing viewers to eavesdrop by watching what became known as reality TV. Madonna seems to have arrived at a broadly similar conclusion: Audiences were turning into peeping Toms.

Her ambition was not to shock for its own sake, but to maintain attention by disclosing more and more of what once passed as a private life — and without inhibition. Madonna became, in essence, her own living experiment in making her personal life open to inspection. Before her, entertainers like Elizabeth Taylor had, in the 1960s, allowed private lives to seep into public view via a more cautious media, but this was rare or sensational and delivered to surprised audiences by the then-nascent paparazzi. Madonna made it a career strategy, presenting her personal self as indistinguishable from her stage persona and inviting audiences to witness. Not just witness: Audiences were encouraged to judge her; condemning Madonna was integral to her success.

Like Semtex

The 1990s solidified Madonna’s role as a cultural provocateur. The Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) documented her tour with unprecedented candor, offering glimpses into backstage rivalries, rehearsals and intimate moments, all alongside the theatricality of her onstage performances. The film predated reality television by years, yet already anticipated its voracious appetite for the minutiae of celebrity.

Around the same period, her book Sex and the album pushed boundaries of sexual representation, blending performance, fetishism and artifice. She intentionally offended, proving unequivocally that scandal was like Semtex, a powerful explosive, but very pliable so that, handled carefully, it can be turned into different shapes. In the years that followed, Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian corroborated this when they appeared on that would have ruined show business careers in earlier times.

Yet Madonna’s influence went beyond shock and outrage. Critics like recognized her as a harbinger of postfeminist performance: She demonstrated how a woman could be sensual, assertive, ambitious and aggressive while curating her image in a way that conferred power. From this perspective, being sexy was a form of empowerment. Madonna’s conquests were both commercial and symbolic, reframing what it meant to be a female entertainer in a male-dominated industry. Her affectations, from the pink cone bra to platinum blonde hair, were signifiers of her autonomy.

By the mid-1990s, Madonna was both a diva in the operatic sense and a pioneer in media literacy. Her aforementioned 1992 renegotiation with Time Warner secured her own record label. She remained a polarizing figure: The world alternately praised and disparaged her, keeping her relevant. She had transformed scandal into art and fame into an instrument of social influence. The celebrity landscape she helped sculpt is what we see all around us today.

Even into the 2000s and 2010s, Madonna’s career reflected a Darwinian adaptability to changing environments. The 2003 MTV Video Music Awards with Britney Spears sparked a viral debate, raising questions about bisexuality. Tours such as and albums like demonstrated a willingness to collaborate with younger artists while retaining her signature sound. Her postfeminist sensibilities, rooted in self-expression and independence, carried through to her later albums and public appearances. At the 2023 Grammys, she to critics, accusing them of “ageism and misogyny.”

Diva provocatrix

Today, Madonna’s presence at Milan Fashion Week is emblematic of both her longevity and her continued authorship of the fame narrative. She’s still a model for what it means to inhabit the public sphere on one’s own terms. Unlike many successors, she hasn’t become her own tribute act. She’s refused to trade on nostalgia and strives to remain relevant. A figure whose demands, exacting nature and unyielding vision have shaped not only the entertainment industry but the very ways in which audiences understand and appreciate spectacle, Madonna evokes a reminder about the way we live — vicariously, voyeuristically, derivatively and by proxy.

Her legacy is inseparable from the media she mastered and, to be fair, was mastered by. Madonna didn’t merely reflect social and technological changes — she anticipated them, attempted to manipulate them and tried to force the world to respond. It did: From MTV to social media, from the controversy of Like a Prayer to the candor of Truth or Dare, she engineered a dialogue with audiences that has altered our relationship to celebrities. Many will not think this is such a good thing.

Madonna belongs in the same pantheon as Maria Callas (1923–77), Judy Garland (1922–69) and Barbra Streisand (b. 1942), all imperious figures feared as much as revered for their exacting standards and refusal to accept reality when it failed to conform to their visions. Like them, Madonna has attracted detractors as well as worshippers, her difficulty inseparable from her distinction. Yet she added something new to the tradition: Madonna was not simply a diva but a diva provocatrix, a performer who treated outrage as an artistic medium. While there are many contemporary stars of immense wealth and visibility, none appears willing — or permitted — to embody the risk, volatility and sheer force that once defined the type. Perhaps Madonna truly is the last of them.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of ]

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That world is largely gone. Since the US from the JCPOA in 2018 and, together with Israel, turned increasingly to unilateral kinetic action against Iran, Europe’s most tangible diplomatic success has become the stage on which its influence is steadily eroding. The massive US–Israeli on Iran launched on February 28, 2026, and the subsequent killing of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on March 1, marked not only the decapitation of the Islamic Republic’s leadership but also laid bare Europe’s strategic paralysis and its profound doubts about the way American power is now being applied.

The case for confronting Iran — and Europe’s unease about how it is being done

There is a serious, substantive case for confronting the Iranian regime, up to and including efforts to bring about its end. Effectively, the US and Iran have been in a shadow war since . Tehran’s network of proxies has killed more than American servicemen in Iraq alone and has US and allied bases across the Middle East.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now officially listed as a by the EU, has orchestrated or supported operations targeting civilians and infrastructure from the Levant to the Gulf. This is a regime whose leaders “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” and have backed those slogans with missiles, militias and terrorism. Ending the rule of a government that openly calls for the destruction of US and European partners and acts to that end is, in principle, a perfectly defensible strategic and moral objective.

Not only that, but Iran has developed biological weapons and can launch . also has sleeper terror cells in Latin America and could try to infiltrate Europe and the US, if it hasn’t already.

Many European policymakers, especially in Central and Eastern Europe, quietly, and sometimes openly, recognize the danger. For them, an Iranian regime willing and able to the Strait of Hormuz, attack EU-flagged vessels, destabilize Gulf monarchies and edge toward nuclear weapons is not an abstraction but a direct threat to European security and prosperity. But if the case for confronting Iran is strong, the way the US has chosen to wage this war, and the reasons President Donald Trump appears to have for doing so, are far more troubling to European eyes.

A personalized American war

In previous eras, American presidents who embarked on wars of this magnitude, however flawed their decisions, at least made an effort to answer two basic questions: Is this in the American national interest? And what is the political endgame? Trump’s approach is different. Because his administration is so thoroughly personalized, the key question appears to be: How is this in my interest? How will this shape my image as an actor on the world stage? Trump has always possessed a predator’s instinct for exploiting his opponents’ weaknesses. He is now deploying that instinct globally, probing for vulnerabilities he can exploit to glorify his own legacy. He has already pointed to the successful external pressure that helped topple President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela as a model he can replicate in Iran, overlooking the fact that the Middle East is an entirely different strategic and political landscape.

For Europeans, this is the heart of their discomfort. The war in Iran may be justifiable as a confrontation with a bloodthirsty state that has harassed Western interests for decades. But it is being conducted by a Washington that increasingly seems to substitute presidential ego for strategy, and media cycles for end-state planning.

Europe’s fractured response

European foreign policy toward Iran has undergone a dramatic transformation since the first missiles fell. For years, Brussels clung to the JCPOA as the embodiment of its preference for negotiated solutions. Even after the Trump administration reimposed sanctions in 2018, the EU3 tried to keep the deal .

That posture collapsed in late 2025. With Iran expanding enrichment and stonewalling inspectors, the EU3 the snapback of UN sanctions, effectively ending what remained of the JCPOA. By early 2026, European diplomacy had already shifted from salvage operation to damage control.

The outbreak of a US–Israeli war in 2026 accelerated this transformation. In a striking break with past caution, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has publicly for a “credible transition” in Iran that reflects the democratic aspirations of its people. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas Khamenei’s death as “an open path to a different Iran.” These are not the words of a bloc neutral on regime change; they are the vocabulary of a Europe that has, at least rhetorically, moved closer to endorsing it. Yet this new language masks deep internal fractures.

Member states are sharply split on how far to go in supporting the war and an implied regime-change agenda. Germany, under Chancellor Friedrich Merz, has largely avoided criticizing US strikes and stresses solidarity with Washington. Merz has gone so far as to that international law is becoming a thing of the past and that Israel and US tactics should not be criticized if Europe shares US objectives on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs. Berlin’s view reflects both long-standing Atlanticism and a sober recognition that a nuclear-armed Iran would be catastrophic for European security.

The UK, led by Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has aligned closely with Washington militarily and diplomatically. London has always allowed the US to use its bases in Cyprus for strikes on Iranian missile sites and frames its role as “defensive,” aimed at protecting shipping lanes and allied forces. The UK government initially to grant the US permission to use the Diego Garcia base for potential strikes against Iran, citing legal concerns. However, this stance was , and permission was later granted for limited, defensive and specifically targeted operations. Post-Brexit, the UK sees unwavering support for the US not just as a strategic choice but as a core element of its identity as a global actor.

France, while also a close US ally, has taken a more ambivalent stance. Paris has bolstered its regional military presence after its base in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) was by Iranian missiles, but it has been more outspoken than Berlin or London in insisting on respect for international law and a clear post-war political roadmap. French policymakers are acutely aware that France has economic stakes in the region and that there is a significant domestic debate over another Middle East war.

Spain and several Southern European countries have the war outright as a violation of international law. For them, the US–Israeli campaign against Iran looks alarmingly like previous interventions — Iraq, Libya, Syria — where Europeans paid heavily in terms of migration, terrorism and economic disruption without having a meaningful say in the original decision to use force.

Strategic risks: escalation, sea lanes and economic shock

This patchwork of responses has left Brussels struggling to speak with a coherent voice. On paper, EU institutions call for de-escalation, respect for international humanitarian law and a renewed diplomatic track. In practice, some member states are facilitating military operations while others denounce them, and the Commission’s own rhetoric edges toward support for transition in Tehran.

To Tehran and to many observers in the Global South, the current situation looks like another European double standard, as member states loudly preach international law in Ukraine, but quietly accept its creative reinterpretation in Iran.

Trump has presented the war as a low-cost, high-impact campaign in which air and cyber power can force political change in Tehran. Europeans with operational experience in the region are more skeptical. In the modern era, there are few, if any, examples where air power alone has toppled a regime and produced a stable successor. Even is not a true precedent, since in that case Libyan forces were on the ground advancing against Muammar Qaddafi. In Iran, by contrast, the regime’s security forces remain cohesive, and nationalist sentiment has been inflamed by the perception of an existential foreign threat.

Khomeini, for all his radicalism, always pulled back from directly provoking a full-scale US attempt to destroy the regime. He knew that the US had the capacity to do it. Today’s leadership in Tehran, decapitated but not defeated, has every reason to believe that it is already under such an existential assault. That removes any remaining incentive for restraint. The logical response, from their perspective, is to escalate as far as possible and to fight to the death.

Europe’s fear is that Washington has not fully grasped what that means. A regime that believes it has nothing left to lose can drag the entire region, and by extension Europe, into an escalating conflagration. If Trump is not prepared for that, Europeans argue, he owes his own citizens and his allies a frank explanation of the rationale, the risks and the endgame. So far, that explanation has not been forthcoming.

Europe on the front line of the consequences

The war has immediate operational consequences for Europe, particularly at sea. As Iran and its proxies intensify attacks on maritime traffic in retaliation for US–Israeli strikes, the EU is debating an expansion of its Red Sea naval mission, . An expanded mission could secure critical trade routes, especially for energy and container traffic transiting between Asia and Europe. Signaling European resolve might protect its own interests, rather than merely free-riding on US naval power. But the enlarged role could also deepen military entanglement, turning European ships into direct targets of Iranian missiles, drones and proxies.

Europe can’t easily proclaim a neutral, law-centric position while its vessels help contain Iran’s retaliatory capabilities. For some in Brussels, reinforcing Aspides is necessary to preserve Europe’s economic lifelines and credibility. For others, it is precisely the sort of incremental step that could transform the EU from wary observer into active belligerent in a war whose strategy it does not control.

European economic interests in Iran have already shrunk dramatically since the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, but they have not disappeared. Before sanctions snapped back, European energy giants and industrial firms — French, Italian, German and others — saw Iran’s vast gas reserves and large consumer market as major long-term opportunities. Even under , European companies and banks have remained attentive to potential future access, while member states like Italy, Greece and Spain track Iranian energy flows as part of their broader diversification strategies.

The war has revived Europe’s greatest nightmare: an energy crisis triggered by instability in the Gulf. Iran’s blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and its strikes on Gulf energy infrastructure have sent gas prices , doubling in a matter of days. For heavily import-dependent economies such as Germany or Italy, this is not an abstraction but a direct hit to households and industry.

Beyond energy, EU agencies warn of potential refugee waves of “unprecedented magnitude” if Iran’s population of is further destabilized. Europe still bears the political scars of the 2015 ; another influx triggered by a war it did not initiate but is seen as condoning could be politically explosive, strengthening far-right forces and deepening divisions inside the Union. In short, even as formal trade and investment with Iran have withered, Europe’s economic and societal exposure to instability in Iran and its neighborhood remains immense.

Europe’s strategic dilemma

This war crystallizes a broader shift in Europe’s perception of the US. On one level, the old dependency remains. The EU still relies heavily on American hard power to deter Russia, protect sea lanes and provide strategic enablers, from intelligence to logistics, that Europe lacks at scale. Many Central and Eastern European governments, in particular, view US power as indispensable.

On another level, however, the way Washington is using that power in Iran reinforces every European anxiety about an increasingly personalized, unpredictable America. The US appears less bound by multilateral procedures and legal constraints than by the impulses of its president and his political calendar. European interests are consulted late, if at all, and often treated as secondary to domestic political needs in Washington.

To some in Europe, the US now looks less like a guardian of order and more like a great power ready to launch regime-change wars whose costs will largely fall on others. The result is a dual sentiment in European capitals, a reluctant recognition that there is a strong case for confronting Iran and that only US military power can credibly do it, coupled with an equally strong fear that this power is being wielded without a coherent strategy and with little regard for European vulnerabilities.

The most frustrating aspect, from a European perspective, is that this conflict should have been precisely where the EU could make a constructive difference. With Tehran weakened but not destroyed, Arab Gulf states desperate for security and the US searching for a viable endgame, there is a real need for a diplomatic framework that can rein in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, address regional security and provide off-ramps to de-escalation. In the past, Europe’s ability to convene, mediate and design such frameworks was one of its few distinctive strengths.

Instead, by passively condoning the decapitation strike against Khamenei while refusing to engage openly with the regime-change implications of the war, Brussels has undercut its credibility. It now risks being seen as a moralizing actor that invokes international law when convenient, looks away when its allies violate the same norms and offers only vague calls for “dialogue” when hard choices are required. If the war ends with an unstable, embittered Iran and a shattered JCPOA framework, Europe will have lost not only influence in the Middle East, but also one of the last proofs that its model of power — legalistic, diplomatic, multilateral — can shape events.

The stakes for Europe’s strategic future

Uncertain wars rarely yield stable outcomes. Air strikes can decapitate regimes; they cannot, on their own, build legitimate successors. Iran’s leadership has every incentive to fight to the bitter end. The regime’s fall, if it comes, could unleash a wave of chaos, refugees and nuclear insecurity whose front line will be Europe, not the US. Iran itself could fragment. of Iran is made up of minorities, many of whom resent the Persian majority. There has long been an active and violent low-level insurgency by armed Kurdish groups (many based in Iraq) fighting for autonomy or secession.

For that very reason, diplomacy should not be dismissed. But neither should the reality that the diplomatic track is now intertwined with a war prosecuted by a Washington whose motives are, in European eyes, uncomfortably personal. Europe needs to reconcile three truths. First, there exists a powerful case for confronting an Iranian regime that has waged war by against the West for decades. Second, the way the US is currently applying its power in Iran is dangerously personalized and opaque. Finally, the EU cannot afford either moralistic passivity or automatic alignment, but rather must define and defend its own interests, even when that means resisting both Tehran and Washington.

Whether Europe rises to that challenge, or resigns itself to being a sidelined commentator on a war that will shape its own security for years to come, will be one of the defining tests of its strategic maturity. If Europe is serious about once again playing a serious strategic role in international affairs, this is the moment to put up or shut up.

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The current freeze draws a direct, haunting parallel to the 1992 Mykonos Restaurant assassinations. On that September night in Berlin, Iranian agents executed Dr. Sadegh Sharafkandi, the Secretary-General of the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (PDKI), alongside three aides.

In April 1997, after a that exposed the inner workings of the regime’s “Special Affairs Committee,” a German court took the historic step of naming the highest echelons of power — including Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and then President Hashemi Rafsanjani, among others — as the architects of the massacre. The EU’s response was swift: For the first time, every member state recalled its ambassador.

Yet, the resolve was fleeting. Within months, European officials were already rushing back to Tehran, desperate to resume the “Critical Dialogue” that had supposedly been suspended. Using the 1997 Iranian election of the “reformist” Mohammad Khatami as a convenient exit ramp for their principles, EU diplomats were soon seen seeking permission to re-enter Iran, effectively burying the Mykonos verdict under a mountain of new trade agreements. Today, however, that cyclical retreat seems impossible; the “reformist” illusion has shattered, and the door is being locked from the outside — an absolute blockade that remains impenetrable unless the regime undertakes a seismic, foundational reversal to dismantle its own political architecture.

The end of engagement

That 30-year hope — that trade and diplomacy could moderate the Islamic Republic’s behavior — finally died in the streets of Tehran over the last two years. In late January 2026, the EU closed a dark circle of history by formally the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organization.

It is a move of profound symbolic and legal weight: the very same IRGC and its shadow proxies that orchestrated the 1992 Mykonos murders have finally been branded with the label they earned three decades ago. This long-overdue alignment with Washington raises a haunting question: “What if?” Had Europe stood firm and declared the IRGC and its branches a terrorist organization alongside the US back then, the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East — and the security of the Iranian diaspora in Europe — might look fundamentally different today. Instead, 30 years of hesitation allowed the regime’s paramilitary arm to entrench its influence and refine its machinery of repression.

Now, the divorce is absolute. The EU has achieved energy dependence on Iran, cutting off the investments that once served as Tehran’s lifeline. The conversation has turned toward the “nuclear” option: the total of Iranianembassies across the continent. Influential Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) argue that as long as these missions are used to coordinate transnational repression, they have no right to exist on European soil.

De-platforming the regime: a parliament of fury

The physical manifestation of this decoupling is most striking within the halls of European power. In January 2026, European Parliament President Roberta Metsola took the extraordinary step of all Iranian regime officials and diplomatic staff from entering the Parliament’s premises.

“This House will not aid in legitimizing a regime that sustains itself through torture,” Metsola declared. This ban represents a jarring departure from the era of “appeasement diplomacy.” Not long ago, EU officials were lining up to meet their counterparts in Tehran, with female leaders often obeying regime orders to be during their visits. Those images of “veiled diplomacy” are now being replaced by a total eviction of the regime from the heart of European democracy.

This institutional ban provided the backdrop for even more visceral acts of protest. In a moment that defined the current session, Italian MEP Isabella Tovaglieri recently stood before the chamber and a photograph of Ali Khamenei. The collective anger was further cemented in February 2026, when the Parliament issued a blistering condemnation of the UN for sending a to the regime — a blood-stained insult to the estimated 35,000 Iranians killed in recent state violence.

Europe’s hard pivot

The landscape shifted irrevocably on February 28, 2026. The decapitating US and Israeli that claimed the life of Khamenei and his top military command have forced a hard pivot in European capitals. While the EU initially refrained from joining the kinetic phase of the assault, the regime’s response has made continued neutrality impossible.

In its final, agonizing throes, Iran has launched indiscriminate missile and drone strikes that targeted Gulf states and impacted European interests, viewing any Western presence as a fair target for its frustration. This unprovoked aggression against European assets has fundamentally altered the calculus in Brussels. Western leaders now realize that the IRGC is not a state actor to be contained, but a terminal threat to be neutralized. The “Critical Dialogue” has been replaced by an urgent necessity to counter the regime’s desperate and final acts of regional aggression.

The images of MEPs tearing up portraits of the Supreme Leader mark the funeral rites of a failed policy. Europe is finally standing on the right side of history; with the regime’s indiscriminate strikes on European interests having shattered the last shreds of diplomatic hesitation, Brussels is now forced to move beyond mere condemnation. 

The strikes of February 28 did more than remove a Supreme Leader; they removed the final barriers to a unified Western front, signaling that Europe will finally have to join the US and Israeli assaults to neutralize Iran’s remaining infrastructure. This shift also represents a long-overdue closure for the 1992 Mykonos assassinations; by with organized Iranian Kurdish forces on the ground to topple the regime, the US is finally helping to enforce a judicial verdict that was long deferred by European trade interests.

In this new geopolitical reality, Europe simply cannot afford to antagonize US President Donald Trump by standing against him or failing to provide the support his administration demands. Consequently, as Iran continues to lash out against the region and Western interests, the EU is no longer just “decoupling”; it is now preparing for the total collapse of the political architecture it once tried to save and aligning its strategic weight with the inevitable transition of power.

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This Devil’s Advocate is tempted to view the current crisis as something beyond politics in the sense that no set of political measures can address the causes and reestablish order. The obvious symptoms concern the economy, but the quandary Europe’s governments and populations are facing is more existentially challenging than mere economic dysfunction. We should see this as a spiritual crisis, in the sense that it implicates Europe’s spirit or soul. To borrow a metaphor from Europe’s historical past, it resembles a case of demonic possession.

We need to examine the patterns revealed by the symptoms. The first is the absence of any form of nuanced thinking. At the geopolitical level, this directly translates as the unwillingness and resulting incapacity to practice any recognizable form of diplomacy when reacting to a conflict. Classic diplomacy requires the careful and discreet investigation of chains of cause and effect accompanied by a serious effort to probe into the sources of all the concerned parties’ intentions and motivation. This leads to the formulation of hypotheses that can produce an informed judgment about the current state of play — obviously marked by tension — and the multiple possibilities of resolution. Investigation and nonlinear reasoning precede the formulation of a propositional framework that may lead to resolution. Judgment, specifically informed judgment, is part of the process and can be neither the starting nor the ending point.

What we see today is the opposite. Let’s consider the two major ongoing conflicts Europeans have been unable to even contribute to settling: Ukraine and the Israel–Palestine conflict. In contrasting ways, both represent a potential existential threat to European identity. The starting point used by most European leaders in both cases is a simplistic statement of peremptory judgment. Simplism reigns within a political system where it’s possible to take seriously the idea that, for example, Russian President Vladimir Putin is Adolf Hitler with a nuclear arsenal and that anyone who hints at a possible genocide on the part of Israel is antisemitic. Those who dare to entertain informed positions deviating from those simplistic views — people like Swiss military expert or UN rapporteur — may be “excommunicated,” which includes being literally deprived of status by banks, credit agencies and businesses.

Now, the notion of judgment can have two curiously contrasting meanings. We only need to think about the perceived difference of connotation between “exercising judgment” and “passing judgment.” Confusing those two meanings will inevitably lead to abuse, especially if the stakes are war and peace, or even an individual’s well-being, as in the case of Albanese and Baud. Exercising judgment refers to a patient process of weighing evidence to clarify pertinent facts, understand relationships, characterize motivation and eventually deliberate on a response or plan of action. This is a dynamic, open-ended process. Passing judgment brutally ends the process as it pronounces the final verdict. The verdict is a moment of stasis that only emerges at the end of the process of judging. It marks the point at which exercising judgment stops.

Judge not that ye be not judged

Regarding the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, European leaders have clearly preferred to skip the process and instead work from a preordained verdict. In the case of Ukraine, Europeans renounced from the get-go any effort at processing the evidence. From day one, four years ago this week, European leaders aligned with a preformulated verdict. It took the form of a narrative and read something like this: “Russian President Vladimir Putin, a criminal madman who enjoys the status of dictator (despite the fact that he was democratically elected), chose to realize his wildest, darkest fantasy and began a campaign aiming at the conquest of Europe. He began modestly by attacking ‘unprovoked’ a weak neighbor, who was minding its own business.”

This adopted narrative made available to the media in 2022 originated from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, not from Europe itself, even though exercising judgment about the status of Ukraine should properly have been the object of a European debate. But this entire episode and its latest developments, notably between Hungary and the European Union, proves that the messy process of debate, which requires exercising judgment, has yielded to the far more efficient habit of pronouncing verdicts.

History tells us that at least two very prominent European leaders in 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, read the available evidence in a different way and the US President of the time, George W. Bush, of their analysis. That might have led to a debate, but their protestations were duly ignored by Bush, “the leader of the free world” (a title generally understood to be the chief magistrate of the free world, responsible for rendering verdicts and sentencing).

Thirteen years later, in 2021, the newly-elected US President Joe Biden declared that the world was locked in a struggle between light and darkness, democracies and autocracies. A kind of geopolitical Super Bowl. As the leading non-dictator, Biden made the judgment call everyone else on the democracy side was expected to follow. He required we all agree that Putin is a criminal (“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”). There was no need to consider the Russian president’s plea to sit down and work out an architecture for European security, one that would begin by examining the concerns on all sides. Biden, the anti-autocrat, made it clear to all his friends and allies that they must not fall for Putin’s ploy. Like any self-respecting non-dictator, Biden could be certain that his own “judgment” is what all his wise allies would follow.

And follow they did. I can vouch for the fact that since February 2022, the dominant media here in France have been consistently preaching this verdict on Putin. And, with few other available sources to inform them, most French people are willing to believe it. Believing it, by the way, means refusing to rethink it unless provoked to do so by those same media.

For anyone who has paid attention to history and in particular French President Emmanuel Macron’s occasional homage to the doctrine of “strategic autonomy,” this may seem paradoxical. Barely three months after the invasion, Macron dared to stand up to the non-dictator in Washington by impertinently recommending a path through (horror of horrors!) diplomacy. “We must not humiliate Russia,” Macron , “so that the day the fighting stops, we can build a way out through diplomatic channels. I am convinced that it is France’s role to be a mediating power.” Macron had failed to understand that the non-dictator had dictated the final verdict and that the rest of Europe had dutifully aligned with it.

Since that time, Macron himself has understood that it was in his interest to align with the judgment of the non-dictator. He has since become perhaps the most vocal of the anti-diplomatic war party. He even took the initiative of France’s diplomatic corps “that he regards as elitist and homogeneous” — in other words, capable of exercising judgment independent of the verdicts of a democratically elected “” president.

Trump’s unprovoked invasion of the White House

In the three remaining years of Biden’s non-autocratic reign, everything seemed to be running smoothly towards the fulfillment of yet another forever war provoked and supported by the US, but this time designed specifically to exhaust Russia. All might have gone well had not the annoyance of a democratic election gone awry leading to the Blue non-dictator’s replacement by a Red non-dictator, current US President Donald Trump, who nevertheless affected the style of dictators. Before his invasion of the White House, Trump had promised to uninvade Ukraine within 24 hours.

That never happened, partly because the European leaders who had followed the persuasive tactics of the previous US non-dictator didn’t trust the new guy (who was, in fact, another old guy in two senses of the word: in age and due to the fact that he had already served four years as a “new guy”). But it wasn’t just that they didn’t trust Trump. They had committed to the previous non-dictator’s plan for their own future and even bought into the idea that sacrificing the health of their own economy was the kind of generosity that would permanently endear them to any Oval Office non-dictator, whom they could regard as their “.”

Over the past decade, I’ve repeatedly claimed that our civilization has developed an unhealthy taste for “hyperreality” as a substitute for reality. It has transformed our field of perception. Reality in a quantum universe is complex and messy, impossible to pin down. It plays out according to an inherent, intuitive, organic logic whose interplay we can perceive but not even hope to fully understand.

We have to get on with our lives and so we need others to break it down for us, reconstruct its components, combine them in new ways and simplify their underlying logic in ways that might make sense to us. This may come at the cost of distorting reality’s logic beyond recognition, but that’s no matter. We loyal citizens of the consumer society will not only passively consume it when it’s offered to us, but we’re usually happy to pay for the best version of it.

Politics in our democracies (i.e. non-autocracies) has become hyperreal. Trump himself is the ultimate figment of hyperreality who sums up all the deepest trends in US culture: superficiality, celebrity wealth, individualistic independence of collective meaning, greedy consumerism, belief in assertiveness as the highest virtue, disregard for history and context, narcissistic self-celebration, preference for win-lose logic over win-win logic simply because recognizing a winner is the whole point of competing. These trends do not stand at the core of US culture, but they have emerged powerfully from it, and they appear to have accelerated in recent decades.

Exorcising devils

People on both sides of the Atlantic have long understood that despite some common cultural sources the US and Europe are different. Following World War II, Europe became aware of the subtle ways in which its economy and culture were becoming Americanized. But there was always a sense of resistance. The project that led to the realization of the European Union exemplified the ambition to share things with the US but to affirm one’s difference. That tension still exists among Europe’s populations, but it has clearly been abandoned by its political leaders.

To the honest observers who study the complex reality of history, the simplistic rhetoric — to a great extent “made in the USA” — to which Europe’s political leaders appear addicted has penetrated most of its public institutions, including mainstream media. The rhetoric conveyed by leaders and media so far deviates from simple rationality that the metaphor of demonic possession appears an appropriate characterization of it. It is as if these people and their institutions were possessed by an unidentifiable parasite, a modern devil that requires some novel form of exorcism.

In the European tradition, demonic possession is traditionally described as a disease of the soul involving commerce with the devil, conceived as an intelligent being that seeks to control innocent humans, even overtaking the body’s normal metabolic processes. Europe has long been suffering from the disease that robbed it of its inherited sense of identity. The two European wars of the 20th century that immediately turned into world wars planted the seeds.

So it may now be time to wonder whether Europe, having lost its human autonomy, is in the hands of the devil, and if so, who might that devil be? Where should we look to find the diabolical presence? Is it a person, a cabal or a system? And if it’s a system, who maintains it and how do they become part of it?

These are questions we definitely intend to come back to… if only to begin to independently “exercise our judgment.”

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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US President Donald Trump, however, is not only pushing the historic turning point that Scholz put in motion in 2022 too far, but also sowing disruption in German domestic politics. In doing so, he is bringing the so-called “” back into the current geopolitical scene. This term is historically associated with European anxieties about �ұ�������Բ�’s strong tradition of militarism and nationalism.

The German question

After �ұ�������Բ�’s in October of 1990, fears emerged that the country’s central geographic position, industrial might and warmongering history could transform it into a potential threat to the rest of Europe. With the sudden strengthening of Germany, indeed, the delicate balance of power upon which the European had been built was turned upside down. A newly empowered Germany, it was believed, could always trigger back latent nationalistic instincts.

Not surprisingly, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher strongly such reunification, dreading that a too-powerful Germany could undermine European stability and endanger her country’s security.

To deal with these fears, �ұ�������Բ�’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl and French President Francois Mitterrand came up with the same answer: transforming the European Economic Community into a European . On this basis, the December 1991 of the European Union, approved in the Dutch city of Maastricht, came into being.

The reasons that had motivated both leaders in creating the European Union, however, were exactly the opposite. Kohl wanted to strengthen his country’s links with Europe to keep his fellow citizens’ nationalistic instincts in check, while Mitterrand wanted to strengthen Europe to keep Germany in check. 

Three decades after the emergence of the European Union, Scholz’s Zeitenwende did not raise fears among their fellow Europeans. With an aggressive Russia at the borders, the idea of a stronger military Germany was well received by them. If anything, European distress came not from a strong Berlin, but from a weak one. 

Trump 2.0’s actions, however, are turning things upside down by generating European anxieties about a Germany that could become militarily too strong and politically too nationalistic. In the words of historian and political scientist :

But left unchecked, German military dominance might eventually foster division within the continent, France remains uneasy about the fact that its neighbor is becoming a major military power … In the worst-case scenario, competition might return. France, Poland and other states could attempt to counterbalance Germany, which would divert attention away from Russia and leave Europe divided and vulnerable”. 

Trump’s three-lane avenue

But how is Trump turning things upside down? This takes shape through a three-lane avenue. The first lane propels NATO European members to invest up to of their GDP in defense. The second materializes by to abandon NATO, or, even without doing so, by threatening to disregard the alliance’s Article 5 — the cornerstone of collective security — thus sowing anxieties about America’s reliability. The third takes shape by legitimizing and seeking to �ұ�������Բ�’s ultra-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is considered an extremist organization.

The first and second avenues have converged, forcing European NATO members to make much larger defense disbursements while seeking European strategic autonomy. However, this is not as easy as it sounds. No other European country can match Berlin’s military expenditure, which by 2029 would budget $189 billion annually. That is, three times more than in 2022. In total, Germany plans to expend more than $750 billion on defense over the next four years. If this is accomplished, Germany would again become a great before the end of the decade.

However, with smaller economies, larger public debt or tight social welfare commitments, the rest of Europe will not be able to follow suit. Having the largest economy in Europe translates into much larger absolute , although, as a percentage of GDP, it could equal what smaller economies allocate to defense. Moreover, countries with higher public debt or tighter social welfare obligations, like France or Italy, have less fiscal space to raise defense outlays. As a result, while Germany was able to its debt brake to invest heavily in defense, many others cannot do the same. All of the above create the conditions for Germany becoming Europe’s military . At least in conventional military terms.

As if this were not enough to create a tremendous power imbalance in Europe, Trump’s third avenue lane aims at putting an extreme right party, the AfD, at the helm of Germany. As Deutsche Welle’s Hans Pfeifer :

The party is also becoming increasingly openly extremist. AfD officials use Nazi slogans, pose with their hands on their hearts in front of Adolf Hitler’s bunker, wear clothing from the mail-order catalogue of �ұ�������Բ�’s largest neo-Nazi organization, and call themselves the “friendly face of National-Socialism.”

Not surprisingly, AfD was as an “extremist” organization by �ұ�������Բ�’s intelligence services.

A military Gulliver under an extremist government

Although important sectors of the population see with fear the rise of AfD, opinion polls show that it has already Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc as the country’s strongest political force. Under those circumstances, the active support this party receives from the President of the US and top members of his administration plays an important role in legitimizing and normalizing it in the eyes of the German people. Specially relevant in this regard was the Trump administration’s of the validity of a 1,100-page report by the German intelligence agency, labeling AfD as “a proven right-wing extremist organization.”

The possibility of a European military Gulliver controlled by a “proven right-wing extremist” government is thus an important one, courtesy of Mr. Trump. If this materializes, a powerful bulwark against liberal Europe would emerge. The largest economy and military in Europe would be at odds with both the and , representing a major historical shift in post-1945 German foreign policy. If so, the “German Question” rather than Russian aggression would become Europe’s biggest problem.��

��Contrariwise, �ұ�������Բ�’s military strength will certainly not be a bulwark against an aggressive Russia. Indeed, AfD is as the most Russophile party in German politics, maintaining a friendly, mutually supportive relationship with the Kremlin.����������

After the first eight decades of continuous peace in Western Europe’s recorded history, Trump is actively sowing the seeds of upheaval.

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He reaffirmed the US commitment to NATO’s core deterrence mission and to collective defense principles. Even though phrased in transactional language of burden sharing, defense spending targets and monetary contributions, the underlying architecture was not repudiated, which implies that Washington does not intend to abandon Europe’s security umbrella. Rubio framed the relationship less as a community of shared liberal values and more as a strategic partnership contingent on reciprocity. The subtext was clear: Europe must invest more in its own defense and industrial resilience. The tone was firm but not dismissive.

Competition with China naturally remains the organizing principle. Europe was encouraged to align more closely with US positions on export controls, supply chains and technological safeguards, reinforcing the idea that transatlantic relations will remain increasingly linked to broader systemic rivalry. In short, Rubio sketched a future that is pragmatic, security-anchored and conditional — but not isolationist.

While US President Donald Trump’s at times bellicose rhetoric over the past year has focused on America being “taken advantage of” vis-à-vis US defense guarantees, to reconsider NATO commitments if allies do not meet spending thresholds and an “” framing that sometimes blurred into skepticism about multilateralism, Rubio’s remarks were notably more disciplined and less incendiary. He did not dwell on threats of withdrawal. He avoided language implying that alliance commitments are optional. Instead, he presented burden-sharing as a mutual-strengthening mechanism, not a precondition for protection.

That tonal shift matters. It reframes the debate from punitive leverage (“pay up or else”) to negotiated recalibration (“we need a stronger European pillar within NATO”). The substance — Europe must spend more — remains consistent, but the delivery was different: steadier, less theatrical, more institutional and in a sense, more believable.

Recalibration, not retrenchment

A year ago, Vice President JD Vance was more of long-term US commitments abroad, especially regarding Ukraine and broader European security. His framing leaned toward retrenchment and domestic prioritization, suggesting that Europe should assume primary responsibility for its own neighborhood and that US involvement should be sharply limited.

Rubio’s speech, by contrast, did not signal retrenchment. It implied recalibration, not retreat. While Vance emphasized constraint and the limits of American obligation, Rubio emphasized reform and restructuring within an ongoing alliance. The difference is subtle but significant: Vance’s approach reads as strategic narrowing; Rubio’s reads as conditional stewardship.

For Europeans parsing nuance, that distinction is consequential. It suggests internal variation within the Republican foreign policy ecosystem — between nationalist retrenchment and conservative internationalism. They are right to derive some comfort — but not complacency. NATO was not repudiated; US engagement was affirmed, not disavowed; the language of alliance endured; and there was genuine reason for hope.

But that comfort should be cautious because, of course, the ultimate direction of policy rests with the president. The speech did not restore a values-first framing; rather, it embedded the alliance within metrics and expectations. Domestic politics will continue to drive policy volatility and congressional funding debates, and electoral pressures and populist currents will remain structural variables. Europeans should therefore view the speech as evidence that a Trump administration may not seek a dramatic rupture — but they should not assume insulation from pressure or conditionality.

From tone to policy: the implementation test

If the Trump administration were to operationalize Rubio’s tone, five concrete steps would need to be taken. The first step would be to ensure budget clarity by sustaining or increasing funding for European Deterrence Initiative programs and NATO commitments to signal seriousness. The second step is institutional engagement, which requires the US to participate in high-level NATO summits, engage in routine consultations with EU institutions, issue coordinated communiqués and pursue meaningful diplomacy. Third is maintaining coherence in Ukraine policy by avoiding abrupt funding interruptions or unilateral concessions. Fourth is establishing structured US–EU dialogues on export controls and technology standards to demonstrate that alignment with China is more than rhetorical. Finally, the administration would need to eliminate sudden, public threats to withdraw from alliance obligations to ensure predictability.

Without these actions, Munich will be remembered as atmospherics rather than policy.

A post-romantic alliance

So, Rubio’s speech reflects a broader reality: The US is unlikely to abandon Europe, but it is equally unlikely to return to a sentimental conception of the transatlantic bond. The alliance is entering a post-romantic phase. It will be measured in capabilities, spending levels, supply-chain resilience and strategic alignment.

Europeans should neither panic nor relax. Instead, they should accelerate defense integration, expand industrial capacity and prepare for a more autonomous strategic role. Ironically, doing so would both hedge against US unpredictability and strengthen the alliance Rubio appeared to defend.

If the Trump administration translates Rubio’s rhetoric into institutional continuity and disciplined execution, transatlantic relations may stabilize at a new equilibrium — leaner, tougher, less rhetorical, but still intact. If not, Munich will join a long list of speeches that reassured allies briefly while structural rupture continued. The real test is what is funded, signed and sustained in Washington.

[Daniel Wagner is CEO of Country Risk Solutions and the author of numerous books on international relations.]

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Since the then-Prince’s decision to grant an to BBC television in 2019 to discuss his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, his life has been sliced open and examined forensically. The interview caused a reputational cataclysm, making Andrew appear aloof and indifferent. After that, the media have examined and interpreted his every gesture and treated every silence as evidence. The police have acted decisively and pitilessly. Where once a public would have looked away to avoid witnessing the impropriety, they have glared intently and without inhibition.

There’s no protective shield of deference, no instinctive reluctance to look too closely. Instead, there’s a degree of disclosure that would once have been unthinkable: Continuous, intimate and often unforgiving. The House of Windsor, once cushioned by mystique, is now consumed as spectacle — global spectacle. This transformation didn’t occur suddenly, nor can it be attributed to a spontaneous change in journalistic policy, the rise of the tabloids or global satellite broadcasting, though all these contributed to the cultural shift of the 1980s.

This transformation occurred when Diana appeared. Young, photogenic and emotionally legible, she didn’t merely join the royal family; she altered its relationship with the media and thus its visibility. When that changed, so did everything else. The protocol unraveled, and the monarchy has struggled to manage ever since.

Royal mystique

Before Diana, the royal family was presented like characters in a Noël Coward play: elegant, composed and emotionally self-contained. They were visible but inaccessible; ever-present yet remote; simultaneously touchable and untouchable. The media reported on ceremonies, births and funerals, but rarely intruded on private emotional affairs. Royals were not expected to reveal themselves. Their authority depended, in large part, on their opacity and mystique. They were less individuals than personifications of majesty.

Elsewhere, however, a new and more invasive form of journalism had begun to develop. In postwar Italy, freelance photographers adopted aggressive tactics to capture candid images of famous figures, most notably Elizabeth Taylor, whose life the media turned into a scandalous spectacle for audiences around the world in the 1960s. The paparazzi, as they came to be known, transformed the relationship between public figures and the media. Privacy became provisional, subject to negotiation or violation depending on commercial value. Yet Britain’s royal family remained largely insulated from this development. Even the publication of photographs showing in intimate circumstances with Roddy Llewellyn in 1976 represented a disturbance or a crack in the royal mystique — depending on perspective. The monarchy absorbed the shock and resumed its usual stately equilibrium.

Diana’s arrival coincided with wider cultural changes that would make such equilibrium impossible to sustain. The 1980s witnessed the rapid expansion of celebrity culture, fueled by global television, mass-circulation magazines and a growing appetite for personality-driven narratives. Fame itself was becoming democratized and commodified. Diana entered royal life not as a seasoned media strategist but as a young ���Բ�é�Գܱ� whose emotional openness aligned, perhaps unwittingly, with this newly-developing environment. The traditional reserve of royalty was alien to her: She allowed audiences glimpses of vulnerability, loneliness, uncertainty and emotional wounds, all the time offering a new kind of pleasure — guiltless eavesdropping.

Her closest counterpart was not another royal but iconic pop star Madonna, whose ascent during the same decade exemplified a new kind of fame built on continuous exposure, uninterrupted scandal and perpetual reinvention. Madonna’s attention-acquisition seemed to have a strategy, while Diana’s usually appeared reactive. Both women thrived by making common cause with a media that rewarded accessibility and a certain narrative tension. Both blurred the boundary between private experience and public performance. Diana didn’t overwhelm the media with drama and narrative; however, by making herself visible and accessible, she normalized a new conception of the monarchy as an august institution, but one that could be seen and understood through the same interpretive lens as celebrity.

Fairytale

Diana’s marriage to then-Prince Charles III was presented explicitly as a fairytale, not as retrospective embellishment but as contemporary cultural framing. On its wedding-day front page, the Daily Mirror described the occasion as “the fairytale wedding,” while publishers quickly consolidated the narrative in longer form, including a 1982 biography of Diana subtitled .

When the marriage began to unravel, the media did not abandon this narrative so much as invert it. Headlines lamented that “the fairytale is over,” preserving the story’s mythic structure even as its emotional valence shifted. Diana remained the innocent protagonist, while Camilla Parker Bowles (now Queen Camilla) — cast as “the other woman” — assumed the role of antagonist. The monarchy had been translated into the language of folklore.

Diana’s own actions reinforced this construction. Her willingness to cooperate with journalists, to communicate indirectly through carefully timed disclosures and, ultimately, to submit to the now-notorious with Martin Bashir in 1995 marked a decisive break with royal precedent. No member of the royal family had ever spoken so candidly, or so publicly, about intimate emotional pain. The interview did more than reveal personal suffering: It redefined expectations of the monarchy. Audiences no longer saw them as protected.

Bashir, it was later learned, had procured the Diana interview using ethically questionable methods. He would later conduct similarly revealing with Michael Jackson, another global figure whose life became inseparable from media scrutiny. While there is no moral equivalence between the two interviews, taken together, they suggest that, by the mid-1990s, royalty and celebrity occupied the same symbolic terrain. Both were subject to the same processes of exposure, interpretation and commodification. Diana stood at the center of this convergence. She was not merely its most visible casualty but its most consequential catalyst.

Her death in 1997 marked the end of her life but not the end of her influence. If anything, her absence intensified her symbolic presence. The extraordinary public grief that followed revealed the depth of emotional investment she had inspired. Millions mourned not simply a princess but a figure they felt they knew intimately. The monarchy, by contrast, appeared uncertain, its traditional reserve suddenly out of step with public expectation. The institution that had once defined the terms of its own visibility now struggled to respond to forces beyond its control.

The logic of celebrity

In the decades since , the media environment she helped shape has expanded and intensified. The rise of digital platforms has accelerated the circulation of images and narratives, while audiences have become active participants in the construction and dissemination of scandal. The royal family now exists in a system that rewards exposure and punishes concealment. Transgression is both condemned and consumed. Public figures are elevated, scrutinized and, when they falter, subjected to ritualized humiliation.

This dynamic has affected Diana’s sons. Prince Harry has adapted to the logic of celebrity, relocating to the United States and engaging directly with media institutions that his mother helped legitimize as sites of royal storytelling. His wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, brought with her an understanding of media culture shaped outside the constraints of monarchy. Together, they have navigated a world in which royal identity is still a constitutional status, but one that amplifies narrative consequence.

While some royals have adapted and evolved in the ecosystem, others have fared less successfully. Andrew, once secure within the protective structures of , has found himself exposed to the same unforgiving scrutiny faced by disgraced celebrities in other fields. His fall from public grace illustrates the extent to which royal status no longer guarantees insulation from reputational collapse. Despite maintaining his innocence, Andrew has been treated not as a prince apart, but as a public figure subject to the full force of media scrutiny and legal process.

In February, Mountbatten-Windsor was into custody by police following a raid at his Sandringham home, the episode captured by photojournalists. He is the first senior member of the royal family to be detained by authorities in circumstances of this kind since was taken prisoner in 1647.

The death of Elizabeth II removed the last enduring link to the era before this transformation. Her reign had provided continuity and an element of stability, preserving the appearance that the monarchy existed above media attention. Her successor, Charles — Andrew’s brother, of course — now presides over an ancient institution that must operate on a modern cultural landscape, one in which visibility is a necessity and can be a liability.

Diana’s legacy lies in the terrain she transformed: Her influence continues to shape how monarchy and media interact. The manner in which she conducted her life and her relaxed relationship with journalists meant that the distance between the monarchy and the media would diminish during her life and keep diminishing after her death. The consequences of this change continue to unfold. 

Would a more deferential media even approach a subject that could have alienated consumers as easily as it could have excited them? Andrew was never the most popular figure in the royal family, but some could have bridled at the sensationalism afforded his apparent errancy. It’s doubtful that a police force in earlier times would have whisked Andrew away from his home to a police station for questioning and returned him home in a manner befitting a bank robbery suspect. These are hypotheticals, but not unanswerable: No, in all cases. It’s difficult to imagine the Mountbatten-Windsor scandal unfolding as it has before, say, 1990. 

Audiences today are fascinated by rule-breaking but equally by its baleful consequences. Our curiosity isn’t natural but cultivated, and nowadays participatory, sustained by social media tech that allows constant observation and interaction. The royal family, once insulated by reverence, now exists as a permanent object of scrutiny, its struggles consumed as both cautionary parables but, more usually, plain entertainment. We’re enthralled by the prospect of an English prince entangled in an international web of patriarchal exploitation and leaked documents on investment opportunities.

Diana may be gone, but the conditions she helped create remain. She altered not only the monarchy’s relationship with the media but the public’s relationship with the monarchy. And perhaps the monarchy itself. The House of Windsor no longer exists as a realm apart. It is part of the same unforgiving system that governs all modern fame. Andrew’s case illustrates the final consequence of Diana’s revolution: monarchy no longer stands apart from celebrity culture. It operates inside it — exposed to its volatility, dependent on its visibility and vulnerable to its judgments.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of ,�� published by Bloomsbury.]

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The intellectual of the 21st century finds himself between a hammer and an anvil. On the one hand, there is freedom of choice and the broad availability of media representing all political orientations and formats, from full-fledged printed newspapers to bloggers with no professional journalistic training.

On the other hand, the emergence of a phenomenon of mass entry into journalism gives rise to autonomous branches of propaganda, whose breadth is equally vast: from old state newspapers to influencers who may lack strong analytical abilities, but who nevertheless possess inherited public trust from the past and a talent for engagement.

As a result, even such powerful authoritarian systems as President Vladimir Putin’s Russia are unable to control and turn into a single mouthpiece of propaganda not only liberal and opposition Russian media and opinion leaders, but even media loyal to the regime itself.

The resulting picture is this: numerous pro-Putin Russian bloggers, independent of federal channel institutions, are able to simultaneously convey different emotional tones to the actions of the authorities, creating meanings without crossing into the opposing camp.

Mythology from below: autonomous propaganda

One blogger, well-read in Russian history, may take Ivan the Terrible’s Oprichnina — as a result of which the tsar acquired the full scope of a punitive apparatus for terror against the elites of that time — and link it to the case when, in the early 2000s, Putin began a the oligarchs of the “” (a clan of businessmen united around Boris Yeltsin), in particular against Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who financed .

Without delving into the details, our fictional blogger may fervently compare Putin to Ivan the Terrible. And the image he creates of Putin as a “fighter against traitors,” or, in a more literary form, a “purifier of the Russian land,” has every chance to become fixed and crystallize into a myth.

Especially if one takes into account the of a monument to Ivan the Terrible in Vologda on November 4, 2025, and the prevailing attitude of the Russian people toward oligarchs. According to , 43% of Russians are unequivocally opposed to the presence of oligarchs in politics.

From another, more sober perspective, Khodorkovsky was simply a rather successful businessman who was in negotiations with , an international giant, for a $6.5 billion deal and a stake in his company. Putin’s actions, meanwhile, were more likely reactive behavior, provoked by the factors of the upcoming presidential elections, a strategy of political survival and personal prejudices against the oligarchic “Family.”

As a result, at that time, publications began to appear in the press, both international and Russian, with headlines such as “an attack on business.” All of this, to put it mildly, does not lead to investment or to easing the conduct of business in Russia.

Further on, from another intellectual angle but with similar convictions, a blogger may equate Putin’s rule in the economic sphere and neoliberalism, basing such judgments on a style of governance grounded in the suppression of elite groups in order to strengthen power.

Under former UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, these were trade union leaders and members of her party; under Putin, oligarchs and opposition parties. The resulting image is that of a tough, classical liberal. , one of the last reformers before the Russian Civil War, is also often invoked.

And once again, the fictional blogger leads the reader onto the pages of myth, where there is no place for truth about the relationship between the state and business without the analogies of myth-making.

Upon closer examination, the myth of Putin as an economic liberal, ready for harsh measures to rid the market of politicization, does not withstand the facts. Together with his community of security officials, the curtailment of the oligarchs’ economic power precisely in order to remain . Putin facilitated this through the destruction of Khodorkovsky, who financed the opposition, and through a strategy of winning elections by exploiting toward oligarchs.

As can be seen, in reality, Putin had no plan to construct an economic philosophy of market and law in the new Russia. And while neoliberalism and Thatcherism carry ideas of the primacy of the market over the state, Putin, wishing to preserve his security officials from manipulations against oligarchs, suppresses business for electoral success.

Through his real actions, Putin delivers the final blow to the myth, leaving only the image and a political-technological design.

Mythology from above: state propaganda

If in the previous case the myth arose “from below,” through the numerous interpretations of bloggers and commentators, thereby distancing us from the truth, there also exists a phenomenon opposite in its motivation — when a myth is constructed “from above.”

The myth is constructed through institutions that deliberately shape symbolic meaning. In the second case, the myth ceases to be merely an emotional narrative and becomes an instrument of political design. Let’s illustrate motivation with an example from art:

For genuine conservatives, the value of classical art lies in the traditions of painting. They will create or purchase works by those artists who strive to reproduce the techniques of the old masters and to make copies not for the sake of copying itself, but for the sake of preserving traditional techniques. Here lies a deep metaphor of symbolism that, in this case, explains the features of conservatism.

When repainting a work by an old master, we primarily strive to replicate the technical methods and the master’s tradition. Only afterward do we think of the painting as a copy. The opposite extreme is the purchase of so-called “kitsch” paintings. Such art often has only one aim: to oppose contemporary art while hiding behind the myth of the great art of the past, without any connection to the real traditions of that past.

Here we encounter a new function of myth, also inherent in politics: an appeal to nonexistent traditions. To myths of forgotten customs, resurrected by propaganda and appearing morally outdated for the modern world. A tradition that does not unite contemporary people is a dead tradition. In politics, such an approach, with its appeal to ancient traditions, is considered crudely nonconservative.

In the case of Russia under the authoritarian rule of Putin’s regime, this practice shifts into the mode of propaganda. Since the time of Yeltsin, the appeal as a “centuries-old tradition” has ignored the fact that the institutional fabric of the Russian Church was destroyed in the 20th century, and that the religious practice of the majority of Russians today does not correspond to the model presented by the authorities as a “historical norm.”

After the Revolution of 1917 and the persecution of the Church, people, in order to survive, were forced to remain silent about their past and their family religious traditions. And despite the restoration of churches after World War II, Orthodoxy in the USSR remained largely within , with a loose and selective set of religious rules.

This made it possible to preserve Orthodoxy: according to surveys, about of Russians identify as Orthodox. However, only 10% attend religious services at least once a month. Among the youth, the connection to religion is even more ephemeral: fewer than 34% of those aged 18–25 consider themselves Orthodox.

This delivers a visible blow to the myth of Russia’s religious tradition. For a tradition that does not unite contemporary people slowly dies. Today’s reality is such that religion occupies a symbolic, but not a practical, place in the spiritual and personal enrichment of Russians.

Result: a political institution is created that, as a result of its history, has lost the ability to rely on tradition. It now stands on an imitation of tradition, which does not lead to the unification of society.

Philosophical result: the creation by the authorities of a myth of traditions is dangerous, first of all, because it substitutes the concept of “tradition” with myth. As a result, an illusion of a strong society rooted in tradition is created. In reality, however, dead traditions hinder the formation of human associations and, subsequently, of civil society.

The absence of “civil society” plays directly into the hands of any dictator or autocrat of the Putin type. Today, thanks to the illusion of a strong, traditional society created in Russia, propaganda can justify even the most horrifying adventures, such as the war in Ukraine, which under the pretext of “protecting the Russian Church and language,” without taking into account the reality of traditions in Ukraine and relying solely on the myth created within Russia.

Reflections on the method of symbolism

The paradox: by recognizing myths of perception, formed at different levels of propaganda (systemic media, bloggers), as false, we risk endangering other people’s right to the otherness of judgment.

At the same time, an unspoken law of intellectuals states that emotions derived from figurative creativity correlate only weakly with a realistic understanding of politics, since they are instruments for creating myth. Thus, a question arises from this paradox: how are we to seek truth in a world where an established myth of perception intertwines with the political tradition of symbolism and the right to dissent?

We cannot eliminate emotions and personal judgments from the linguistic practice of politics. As , politics is the highest sphere of the community. By a political community, Aristotle understood a union of people that includes all smaller unions and exists for the sake of the highest good. After all, what is good in one action for a single individual can become a potential good for the entire state.

Yet emotions and symbolic thinking, surprisingly, can also lead to good. For example, by reinterpreting what is happening through art, we can generate new, interesting perspectives and methods of inquiry. But can we also reinterpret it for the highest union itself, for the understanding of the political?

For practice, let us consider an example of a thought experiment using the method of symbolism. Through a method of topologizing the categories of history, sociology and politics, we combine them with metaphors from art, which replaces, in our consciousness, definitions of political categories with images, opening the path to pure cognition of the features of the object under analysis. Let us begin the experiment and take musical genres as metaphors:

Russian waltzes are regime propagandists. Russian marches are the right-wing opposition. Russian absurdist theater is the left-wing opposition. Historically, the theater of the absurd was in Russia and arrived there from abroad. In the same way, the Russian opposition, hiding abroad from Putin, loses trust within the country.

The result of the symbolic analysis: we obtain a new characteristic of the left-wing opposition in Russia (distrust on the part of Russians) while reflecting on musical genres. Such an analysis can also be applied to more complex phenomena. Its main goal is to help thought look at old things through new concepts, which fits perfectly into the work of the intellectual.

And in answering the question of this section, it is necessary to view the task of “debunking myths” without the prism of myths themselves. In a world of information as fast and fluid as shifting sand, it is difficult to get to the truth simply by discarding false options.

The modern intellectual needs not so much a new method as a new strategy of work, a strategy for preserving concepts and ideas. And in order to protect oneself from crisis while doing so, the method of symbolism described above helps to develop ideas through a strategy of acquisition without destruction.

Politics: The path of creativity

The duty and principal challenge of Eastern European conservatives lies in whether they are able to reinterpret the myth of Putin in such a way as to cleanse it of falsehood, while at the same time preserving a space for symbolic thinking, without losing creativity and tolerance for ideas.

In other words, to protect conservatism from the danger of turning into a mythical cult, which threatens our desire to preserve the intellectual tradition of symbolism represented by multifaceted images ranging from Hobbes’s Leviathan to the Ship of Theseus.

Thanks to this tradition, conservatism retains the deep inner meaning of literature and the depth of imagery. In contrast to this symbolic method stands the desire to simplify and fix the image of the political in a way that would be convenient for propagandists, for example: “Putin is the savior of Europe” or “Putin is the defender of traditional values.”

The duty of Russian thinkers, meanwhile, is to free Orthodoxy from the propagandistic myth of an “eternal tradition” and to grant it the respect it deserves within the framework of a real tradition of memory and respect for the past.

[ edited this piece]

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Though evoked as early as his January 2025 inauguration, US President Donald Trump began 2026 by making Greenland the scene of his latest geopolitical psychodrama. He confirmed a personal ambition many had written off as simply wacky. The master of the Oval Office threatened to militarily capture a vast piece of European territory, apparently to satisfy his appetite for (living space).  

Or should we call it Wirtschaftsraum (economic space), because most people don’t see Greenland as a space for living? Unlike or even , it seems unlikely that the great New York real estate mogul addicted to orange makeup has a plan for building another of his stunning beach resorts on Greenland’s arctic shores. Looking back, it’s relatively easy to understand why Adolf Hitler felt somewhat confined between �ұ�������Բ�’s post-World War I borders. But can a credible case be made that the United States lacks either living or economic space?

None of the Europeans in the hall in Munich failed to understand the reason for Ischinger’s feeling of reassurance. At the same conference in 2025, newly installed US Vice President JD Vance delivered a that shocked and humiliated the audience. It played out as a frontal assault on Europe’s social, political and economic culture.

The dominant mood in the room was apprehension. After the Greenland episode, many Europeans had decided that the Trump administration had become dominated by what California Congressman Ro Khanna has “the Epstein class.” The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein this epithet as Khanna’s term for “the rich and powerful people who act and think like they’re above the law and, and perhaps above morality.” In other words, a den of demons singing to the same hymnal as sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The Europeans were thus in dire need of the very relief and reassurance Ischinger acknowledged. Rubio obliged them by repeatedly reminding his audience that Europe and the US were yoked “together” — a word that appeared 28 times in his speech — by a “shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.” (Impertinent question for the Epstein class: Do heirs always fall?)

Rubio’s superficially reassuring clichés

If each of the items in Rubio’s list of factors of togetherness had anything like the force he attributes to them, his argument might sound not just reassuring but even convincing. Alas, no one needed to be convinced, it was enough to be “reassured.” At one point, when the US Secretary of State rhetorically asserted that “we will always be a child of Europe,” the audience broke into applause. For a brief moment, they may have felt comforted by the idea that Rubio had put them in the role of “,” a term NATO chief Mark Rutte had previously applied to Trump.

But do any of Rubio’s claims about a shared cultural and political identity stand up, even to superficial scrutiny? He invokes a sense of “shared history,” but how much of that history has been truly shared? When you think about it, what does the sharing of history mean? The US shared much of its history with native American tribes and with African slave traders. But has that translated into a sense of mutual purpose among the participants? Much of the history “shared” by the US and Europe — but also among the European nations themselves — has been dominated by war, rivalry, suspicion and competition for empire. Shared conflict creates familiarity, but it rarely produces unbreakable bonds or the sense of being united in a common vision of the future.

Throughout the speech, Rubio stresses the religious bond. But is it logical to claim that the constitutional separation of church and state in the US combined with what everyone recognizes as the radical and practically total of nearly all European nations can signify a sharing of “Christian faith” across the Atlantic ocean? Yes, you can find churches that built over many centuries, but if only a smattering of the faithful visit them for anything other than touristic reasons, and if their faith turns out to manifest itself as little more than a compulsive repetition of inherited habits, can any rational observer take the existence of a transatlantic civilization united by the Christian faith seriously?

Just like Vance a year ago, Rubio berates the practice of welcoming immigrants, suspected of diluting the purity of the “civilization.” What he’s hinting at here and elsewhere in his speech is what he perceives as the racial identity associated with European roots: whiteness. Rubio cites his own case: the man everyone identifies as the scion of a Cuban family, who can prove his legitimacy by tracing his ancestry back to two European sources Piedmont-Sardinia (Italy) and Saville (Spain).

Is Europe a thing?

Then there’s his evocation of “culture, heritage, language, ancestry.” What does that mean in today’s European context? Even after constituting itself initially as a “Common Market” and then as the “European Union,” the concept of Europe remains that of a collection of geographically contiguous nations. It represents a bewildering diversity of elements, so much so that the “Union” is perceived effectively and embarrassingly for its own citizens as little more than a sprawling and generally annoying bureaucracy.

Is the idea of defense the only key to creating a sense of European unity? That seems to reflect the dominant thinking of the current generation of leaders. The Russia–Ukraine conflict has revealed that the only identifiable force preventing the Union from falling into political incoherence is its nations’ historical dependence on the US nuclear umbrella and the dollar. The wizards of Europe created the euro in the hope of rivaling the dollar, but that experiment has . To former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis: Europe is “a continent united by different languages” and “divided by a common currency.”

Rubio’s mission was to convince his audience that the European relationship with the US is reassuringly solid. Ischinger appears convinced, but are the rest of his colleagues in the room? Trump 2.0’s frankly aggressive policies and unpredictable actions across the globe have more than raised eyebrows. European leaders increasingly allude to what should appear obvious: that the vaunted Union has lost its footing. It is held together by the fragile ropes of its increasingly bloated and undemocratic bureaucracy. From a geopolitical point of view, the 27-state confederation based in Brussels, Belgium, functions primarily as a motley collection of US vassal states. It’s the strings that tie the nations to Washington that keep the idea of Europe alive.

That may explain why the idea of “strategic autonomy,” initially formulated by General Charles de Gaulle, has once again come to the fore. France’s lame duck President Emmanual Macron first evoked the ambition of achieving Europe’s strategic autonomy after only a few months in office back in 2017. He occasionally returns to the concept, though framing it as an aspiration rather than a viable program. But the concept is desperately needed, even if no one seems capable of implementing it. At the same Munich conference, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz that Washington’s “claim to leadership is disputed, perhaps squandered.” Who can replace the leader?

Unless we conclude that Europe’s current “leaders” (who don’t even lead their own nations) are as brainless in reality as the rhetoric they feel continually obliged to spout in public, reaffirming their liberal “values” and commitment to noble causes, it’s doubtful that many of them would echo Ischinger’s feeling of being “reassured” by Rubio’s concentrated but slightly disguised assault on their political culture.

Two incompatible systems at the core of a single civilization?

Rubio’s tone was tepid in comparison to Vance’s, but in some ways his speech was more aggressive. On two occasions, he excoriated a bugbear he calls “massive welfare states,” as if to say to the Europeans: “How foolish of you to impose universal healthcare on a population that doesn’t deserve it?”

Personal insecurity is the psychological pillar of the US economy. It explains American greatness just as the welfare state explains Europe’s inconsequentiality. Most Americans take that as common sense, but even the current roster of inept European leaders understand that the price of stability everywhere in Europe is the maintenance of the web of safeguards the European nations have provided for a population otherwise exposed to domination and exploitation by the Epstein class that rules the US.

Europe is currently locked into a lose-lose scenario that was created by US President Joe Biden’s administration and sealed by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s impromptu visit to the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv in the spring of 2022. That was the decisive moment when BoJo gave instructions to a captive Ukrainian regime to cancel an initialed peace agreement and prolong a war it could never win. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy no doubt assumed that with the might of NATO behind him, victory was assured. What he was prevented from understanding is that Washington felt no urgency about their mission. What they wanted was regime change in Russia, even if it required years of combat and millions of casualties. Biden made it clear when he repeatedly insisted that it could last “as long as it takes.”

The nasty surprise for the Europeans came last year when, having wholeheartedly acted as loyal vassals to Washington, their “benign” overlord, Biden, was replaced by the “malignant” Trump, who promised to end the war within 24 hours, essentially by recognizing the reality on the ground: Ukraine’s military defeat. To prove they weren’t the vassals of a diabolical transatlantic leader, they had to demonstrate to one another that they remained faithful to the agenda of their former angelic overlord, Biden. That inevitably aggravated the sentiment not just of having lost their compass, but also of being nobody’s masters, not even of their own populations.

In such circumstances, should we be surprised that the of France’s Macron stand at 16%, �ұ�������Բ�’s Merz at 21% and UK’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer at 23%? Should we similarly be surprised that despite a concerted effort to inspire fear of the Russian bear invading Europe — a message enthusiastically endorsed and amplified by Europe’s mainstream media — support for increased defense spending in France has from 40% in 2025 to 28% and in Germany from 37% to 24%?

Ischinger may feel reassured, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that European leaders are in a bind. They have lost all credibility with their own electorates. They have been pushed by interests beyond their national borders to commitments that make little sense. They remain stuck in a viral, often hysterical hatred and fear of an imaginary enemy that obliges them to prolong their commitment to a war that has already undermined their own economies and destroyed Ukraine, the object they were recruited to rescue. At the same time, their populations have come to perceive the US — the commanding presence in NATO — as a dangerous adversary.

Ischinger’s first question to Rubio was about US commitment to Ukraine. Rubio predictably waffled a meaningless, “reassuring” response. Europe now finds itself in the most awkward situation, abandoned by the US while still taking orders from Washington about who they should hate and refuse to do business with: Russia and China. Talk about Scylla and Charybdis or, more colloquially, a rock and a hard place.

And speaking of rocks, now they’re being invited to feel reassured by the comforting fact that Rubio only throws rhetorical rocks and not physical bombs at them.  

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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This geological has directly fueled the Trump administration’s Arctic Agenda. By viewing Greenland through the lens of a revived Monroe Doctrine, the US seeks to assert total dominance over the Western Hemisphere, treating the island not as a sovereign partner but as a defensive Golden Dome against Russian and Chinese polar expansion. The recent March 2025 general in Greenland highlighted the tension of this new reality. While the rise of the Demokraatit party signaled a population seeking economic pragmatism, they find themselves caught in a vice: the more valuable their land becomes to the global economy, the more it is targeted by a predatory “” that seeks to strip away their agency.

As Greenland opened its new international airport in Nuuk in late 2024, it symbolized a nation attempting to build its own . Yet, this “Arctic Bridge” is being under the shadow of an imperial script that demands ownership as a prerequisite for security. This transition from a climate-vulnerable territory to a high-stakes strategic prize leads us to a darker transformation: the systematic dehumanization of the Arctic theatre itself.

From partner to asset: the dehumanization of the Arctic��

The gaze toward Greenland represents a departure from the transactional rhetoric of a businessman; it is the language of Napoleon Bonaparte, a return to the era of territorial conquest and the establishment of a militarist mentality. By characterizing as a vast, empty expanse, a terra nullius, the President of the US, Donald Trump, ignores the democratic will of a living society. This rhetoric is the hallmark of – military imperialism. It seeks to transform a nation into a theatre of operations, a strategic asset to be seized rather than a partner to be engaged.

The stakes reached a fever pitch in early 2026, when the threat of unilateral annexation and the imposition of massive tariffs on the European Union turned a diplomatic spat into a global security crisis. If a United States administration were to unilaterally occupy a territory belonging to a NATO member, it would not merely be a diplomatic crisis; it would be the last nail in the coffin of international relations as we know them. Such an act would render the United Nations Charter obsolete, returning humanity to a state of nature where power is the only valid currency.

In this context, history offers a bitter lesson on the damage of occupation and the psychic scars of militarization. The tragedy of the 20th taught us that when a state prioritizes strategic depth over the ethical recognition of other peoples, the result is the dehumanization of both the occupier and the occupied. Adolf Hitler’s expansionism began with the erasure of borders and ended with the erasure of human life.��

Moreover, occupation does more than seize land; it installs a rigid, militarist curriculum into the culture. It replaces the organic development of a society with a “discipline” dictated by the needs of a foreign war machine. An instance in the case includes the establishment of bases and the influx of troops slowly erodes the indigenous social fabric, leaving behind a dependent population whose primary function is to serve a logistics chain.

This towards annexation indicates a fundamental shift in the�� American psyche — a transition from a republic protected by oceans to an empire defined by its reach. When a superpower begins to view the Arctic not as an ecological or a sovereign home, but as a on a digital map, the human element is effectively deleted. This is the re-territorialization of the world, where the nuances of Greenlandic culture and the hard-won autonomy of the , referred to as the Government of Greenland, are treated as minor obstacles to be bypassed by executive fiat.

​The sovereignty trap: Resisting the Militarist Mentality in the high north

The philosophical dilemma of the 2025 political landscape is that Greenlanders seek independence to gain a voice, not to exchange one supervisor for a more aggressive master. Polling suggests that while many wish to secede from Denmark, an overwhelming of Greenlanders reject joining the United States.

Moreover, their alternative is a desire for a peaceful, multilateral existence alongside Canada or Norway, nations that respect the delicate equilibrium of Arctic . The prospect of an American security that looks like an occupation is not an alternative; it is an extinction of the Greenlandic political project.

If the world allows the military logic of the Great Powers to override the democratic aspirations of the people, we are entering a “newer version” of imperialism, one that uses the tools of modern technology to enforce ancient tyrannies. The people of Greenland may wake up to find their country ruled by a power that views their home as a stationary aircraft carrier.

On a concluding note, the future of humanity depends on our ability to reject this return to the “militarist mentality”. If international law cannot protect a peaceful island of 57,000 people from the whims of a superpower, then international law does not exist. The perennial question that remains, therefore, is whether or not the Arctic will be a to a new era of global cooperation, or will it be the site where the ideals of human rights and sovereignty are finally buried in the ice.

[Ainesh Dey edited this piece.] 

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It should come as no surprise, therefore, that in 1917 Denmark also the Danish West Indies (now the US Virgin Islands) to the United States. Nor is America the only nation following Trump’s Arctic strategy; for in 2011, China had also attempted to a large chunk of territory in Northeast Iceland.��

But this is where the similarities end. In the case of what is now the US Virgin Islands, Denmark was compensated financially for this loss. By contrast, China’s attempted foothold in the Arctic Circle was more subtle than Mr. Trump’s current attempt. Firstly, China did not try to buy the entire country. Secondly, after the offer of purchase was rejected, it attempted to enter into a lease instead. Thirdly, China ran the offer through an interlocutor, namely a shadowy state-owned enterprise (SOE), to make the overture less brazen or politicized. Fourthly, China couched the offer in the form of an economic investment, which was good for an otherwise economically neglected region of the country. And lastly, when all of these attempts failed, the Chinese quietly walked away.

Domestic and international risks of Trump’s assertive approach

For an individual with a background in real estate and a reputed expertise in deal-making, Mr. Trump’s overly assertive actions have currently made him appear like the robber baron Henry Potter in Frank Capra’s (1946). Crucially, his actions threaten not only his popularity at home but also US geopolitical security. in the US indicates that a huge majority of Americans do not approve of his threats against a long-standing and loyal NATO ally.

At the same time, even though the United States maintains the globe’s foremost armed forces, China is not far behind. According to the , the People’s Liberation Army “is the world’s largest military” with some two million active-duty personnel. Consequently, despite Mr. Trump’s boasts of US military dominance, it surely makes strategic sense, given China’s rising power, for him to maintain his European military alliances. They are not insignificant, with the UK, France and Italy all ranked as global military powers. If one imagines US-China relations as a poker game with both Trump and Chinese Supreme Leader Xi Jinping likely holding similar flushes, the NATO alliance gives the Americans a Royal Flush.

The question remains, therefore, how Mr. Trump can achieve his ambition now without damaging himself further and the US’ global dominance. Whilst some commentators at Davos 2026 were reassured when he that “I won’t use force” to take Greenland, he simultaneously reminded the audience that he had the capacity to take the island easily: “We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be frankly unstoppable.” Such a statement appears not a world away from the not-so-veiled threats that Italian Dictator used when he spoke to the Italian parliament on January 3, 1925: “Italy, Gentlemen, wants peace … we will give it with love, if possible, or with force, if necessary.”

A more strategic and diplomatic alternative: referendum and financial incentives

Given his determination post-Davos to seek “” to obtain Greenland, as well as his real estate background, Mr. Trump might want to try a different approach to the situation instead, beginning with asking Denmark to fast-track a referendum on Greenland independence and then to offer each and every Greenlander an extremely generous financial inducement to vote for annexation to the USA. He could, in other words, make the Greenlanders a proposal that they won’t want to refuse, as opposed to threats of invasion and a Mafia-like intimidation which they “.”

Critics would certainly and rightly accuse Mr. Trump of bribery, but, given his transactional nature, there is a financial soundness in this approach. However, to soften accusations of crassness, Mr. Trump might also want to offer all Greenlanders US citizenship and representation in both Congress and the Senate. In fact, he could use this opportunity to entirely rethink the representation of all unrepresented peoples in US overseas territories, such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa, and offer them all voting rights in Congress and the Senate as well as for the Presidency.

To help win the Danes over, not only could he try to convince them of the economic sense of this proposal, saving them an estimated in subsidies, but he should additionally offer Denmark compensation for the loss of Greenland, either by direct cash injections or as a percentage of mining rights for a certain period of time. Regardless of the way in which the vote goes, overnight, Mr. Trump’s reputation would go from accusations of fascism to shrewd negotiator. He could then make history before the midterms, rather than be history after them.

Plan B: pursuing partial acquisition instead of full takeover

Should the vote in Greenland, despite all of the above, still go badly for Mr. Trump, instead of issuing more threats, he could try Plan B and follow the Chinese playbook in Iceland: attempt to buy not the whole country but only a piece of it. Indeed, after his Davos speech, he was reputedly having this very conversation with NATO, looking for territory akin to the British bases in today.

Europeans might cry foul at recent events, but the UK followed a similar sale strategy when it excised the Chagos archipelago from Mauritius in the latter half of the 20th century. What is more, it treated the Indigenous population terribly by exiling everyone living there without their consent and with very little compensation. Ironically, these atolls were purchased for use as a military base, namely Diego Garcia, the very same base that Starmer wants to return to Mauritius and that Trump is now calling a strategic error. It seems that the past has a way of haunting the present.

If Mr. Trump insists on his ambition, it is Greenlanders, however, who need to decide what is in their best interests, not NATO and not Denmark, and not under duress. Mr. Trump, in the meantime, also has to decide now what the history books will remember him as: Democratic Don, or an /Godfather-like Don Don.

[ edited this piece.]

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The core of the Western Alliance since 1949, Europeans and Canadians find themselves faced with a new harsh reality, sandwiched between two hostile or unreliable powers, Russia and the United States. In such a scenario, a passive Europe might degenerate into a mosaic of fiefdoms: some under Russian influence, some under American pressure, some drifting toward China. Canada has already begun to in that direction. Faced with that prospect, Europeans — and especially Germans — will reluctantly choose rearmament. They will become “normal” powers again.

How would Germany, specifically, behave if the Atlantic alliance erodes or collapses under the strain of Trumpist nationalism and willful unpredictability in Washington? How would Berlin recalibrate its alliances and buffers, its place inside — and eventually beyond — the European Union? To answer that, we have to go back to the last time Germany confronted an unpoliced, anarchic system of great-power rivalry: the decades before the First World War.

A historical pattern emerges

Historians of Germany will recognize a pattern in what we are witnessing today. For three decades after German unification in 1871, Otto von Bismarck played the role of an unsentimental manager of order: a ruthless tactician in war, but once his aims were achieved, a conservative balancer who tried to prevent the system from blowing up. His successor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was the opposite — impulsive, vain, narcissistic and prone to grand, erratic pronouncements that frightened friends and emboldened rivals. He wanted every day to be his birthday, one wag quipped.

Today, the contrast between the relatively steady — some would say too weak, but in any case — order-preserving foreign policy of the Obama and Biden administrations and the unpredictability of Trump’s rhetoric and statecraft looks eerily like that earlier shift: from Bismarck to Kaiser Wilhelm II.

, the Prussian statesman who created the first unified German nation-state in the 1860s and 1870s, offers a blueprint for how a rising power behaves when it feels insecure — and what it does once it has secured itself. Between 1864 and 1871, he engineered three short, brutal wars: against Denmark to seize Schleswig-Holstein; against Austria to push it out of German politics; and against France to complete unification and proclaim the German Empire at Versailles. These wars were not mindless aggression but calculated moves to solve what Bismarck saw as �ұ�������Բ�’s structural vulnerability: a fragmented nation in the middle of Europe, surrounded by stronger imperial powers.

After 1871, Bismarck declared that the new Germany was a “satiated” power. Having achieved unification and key territorial gains, he pivoted from conquest to preservation. His greatest fear now was encirclement: a coalition of hostile powers aligning against Germany. He responded with an elaborate web of alliances and treaties to freeze the system in place. In the 1860s, he used force to create a power; in the 1880s, diplomacy to preserve it. The lesson is clear: rising powers fight to secure their position; if they are prudent, they then try to declare the game over. But the game never ends. 

When Bismarck falls, someone else sits in his chair.

Wilhelm’s gambit

When dismissed Bismarck in 1890, the logic of German foreign policy shifted. The with Russia lapsed. Naval competition with Britain became an obsession. Colonial adventures, Balkan crises and the Wilhelm’s own erratic public outbursts replaced Bismarck’s cold calculation.

Wilhelm’s bombastic and often irrational statements — the famous Daily Telegraph and the two were only the two best-known examples — alarmed allies and adversaries alike and convinced many that Germany was unpredictable and dangerous. Historians now see Wilhelm’s mixture of insecurity, vanity and impulsive rhetoric as a major factor in the chain of miscalculations that led to 1914.

The result was not a master plan for world domination, but something more banal and more dangerous: anarchy unmanaged. Arms races accelerated, alliance commitments hardened and each crisis was “resolved” in ways that preserved the appearance of peace but eroded trust. When the heir to the Austrian throne was assassinated in Sarajevo, there was no trusted arbiter, no accepted enforcer of rules. The dominoes fell in the dark.

This is what international relations theorists mean by anarchy. Kenneth Waltz, in his Theory of International Politics, does not use the term “anarchy” for chaos but for the structural fact that there is no world government, no global police. States exist in a self-help system. Hedley Bull, in , made the same point more gently: there is an international society of states, but no sovereign above them. Without a superordinate authority, states must balance, arm and pre-empt to survive. Miscalculation is built into the environment.

�ұ�������Բ�’s insecurity in such a world was not imaginary; it was the central fact of the European order. Once Berlin believed that Russia was mobilizing and that France would join, Bismarck’s nightmare — a two-front war against an encircling coalition — moved from theory to calendar. War became thinkable, and therefore likely.

From a purely foreign policy perspective, Hitler’s incorporation of German-speaking territory into the Third Reich up until 1938 looked Bismarckian. Had he stopped there and announced that Germany was satisfied in terms of any further demands, he would possibly have gone down in history as a second Bismarck, this time establishing a Pan-Germanic state, rather than a smaller Germany under Prussian domination. But his fanatical racism and megalomania led to a rebalancing of other powers against him, the destruction of Germany and all the accompanying horror of World War II.

The postwar bargain

The generation that designed the post-Second World War order — American diplomat George Kennan, US Army Chief of Staff George Marshall, US Secretary of State Dean Acheson, European statesman Jean Monnet, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer — understood the structural problem that had produced 1914 and 1939. Europe by itself could not solve “the German problem”: how to keep the central power rich, integrated and secure without allowing it to dominate the continent.

The solution was an audacious two-level bargain. At the European level, Western Europe built institutions — the Coal and Steel Community, the Common Market, the European Union — to bind Germany into a web of mutual dependence and make war between France and Germany “not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible,” as French Foreign Minister put it.

At the transatlantic level, the US did something no previous great power had done: it stationed large combat forces permanently in Europe and promised, in effect, to risk nuclear war for allies whose territory it did not covet. Through NATO, Washington offered a hierarchical but broadly benevolent order. The United States would act as the security provider of last resort, the de facto police force of the North Atlantic area.

In Waltz’s terms, the system remained anarchic — there was still no world government — but the presence of a dominant, relatively benign hegemon softened anarchy for its friends. Smaller and medium powers did not have to arm to the hilt. They did not need to carve spheres of influence because American naval predominance and liberal economic rules underwritten by Washington secured access to markets, sea lanes and raw materials.

Germany, in this system, could afford to be “abnormal.” It could renounce nuclear weapons, keep defense spending modest, and cultivate an identity as a “civilian power” and “trading state.” It built cars, machines and chemicals rather than aircraft carriers and ballistic missiles. The postwar “economic miracle” depended on that order, and so did political normalization. The Germany we know — democratic, export‑driven, allergic to nationalism — is a product of the US‑dominated liberal order, not a timeless essence of the German soul. The question is how long such an abnormality can survive if the order that sustains it decays or turns hostile.

Trump and the rebirth of Wilhelm II

Enter Trump — and, as Davos reminded Europeans this week, a US that increasingly resembles Wilhelm’s Germany: still powerful, but led by a man whose impulses and public statements are so erratic that no one can be sure what he will do next. Trumpism’s challenge is not merely that an American president insults allies or demands more European defense spending.

The deeper challenge is that Trump rejects the very logic of the post-1945 order. He sees alliances as protection rackets. He does not believe in a community of democracies or in “the West” as anything more than a slogan. He has repeatedly authoritarian leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, and treated the EU as an economic enemy. on European steel and aluminum, threats against German cars, the talk of “” Greenland from Denmark, and now an unhinged Davos performance in which he hectored and threatened Europeans are not isolated episodes. They signal a worldview in which might makes deals, not rules. Like Wilhelm II’s outbursts, Trump’s speeches are not just embarrassing; they are structurally destabilizing, because they make it impossible for allies to take American commitments at face value.

If a president with letting Russia “do whatever the hell they want” to allies that do not spend enough, muses about from NATO or treats as optional, he effectively breaks the alliance, whether or not he formally leaves it. Even if a future American president signals a return to the era of the Pax Americana, the memory of how quickly that commitment can be broken will not fade. Waltz’s abstraction — anarchy — ceases to be a seminar concept and becomes a lived condition. If Germany no longer believes in the permanence or good faith of the American security guarantee, it must relearn the lessons of Bismarck and Wilhelm II. It must ask how to survive in a world with untrustworthy great powers to its east and west.

Economic relations and hedging

The Davos meetings underscored this new mood from another angle as well. In a widely noted intervention, former Bank of England governor and now Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that international economic relations can no longer rest on a simple community of “shared values.” Instead, he suggested, they are becoming layered and differentiated: at one end, deeply integrated ties with genuinely like-minded partners; at the other, arm’s-length, heavily transactional relationships with states whose values diverge. If the US is no longer a reliable, value-based partner, Carney implied, Europe and Canada will have to treat it much as it has historically treated authoritarian or quasi-authoritarian powers: cooperate where necessary, but hedge, compartmentalize and never entrust vital interests entirely to Washington’s goodwill.

In the near term, German responses will be constrained by history, law and political culture. The Basic Law, the trauma of the Nazi past and decades of antimilitarism still matter. No one in Berlin will announce a German bomb tomorrow. Instead, the first phase of adjustment will occur within the EU and NATO, even as the spirit of those structures changes.

We already see the outlines. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Chancellor Olaf Scholz a Zeitenwende, a turning point, and announced a €100 billion fund to modernize the Bundeswehr (the German armed forces). Germany has to meet NATO’s 2% of GDP benchmark. German industry is rapidly expanding arms production. Berlin is knitting itself into a denser web of cooperation with Poland, the Baltic states and the Nordics. With Finland and Sweden now in NATO, a northern and eastern security belt is forming with Germany as a central hub.

All of this happens under familiar EU and NATO logos, but the underlying strategy is shifting. These arrangements are less about reinforcing an American-led “European pillar” and more about hedging against American withdrawal or caprice. A serious turn to self-reliance implies large conventional forces for territorial defense, deep stocks of ammunition and fuel, integrated air and missile defenses, and indigenous capacity in critical technologies such as cyber, space and AI so that the United States cannot simply cut Europe off.

If pushed far enough, Germany, Britain, France and Poland may feel compelled to consider nuclear options — whether through an explicitly “Europeanized” French deterrent or, eventually, German participation in nuclear decision-making independent of Washington. In this first phase, Germany remains formally inside the post-1945 order, but it is already behaving like a middle-sized military power preparing to act in an anarchic system.

Domestic politics and polarization

Foreign policy, however, does not emerge from theory alone. It is filtered through domestic politics. Here, the German picture is troubling. On the far right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has grown from a protest party into a major force, vying in some polls for and now the strongest opposition in the Bundestag — an echo, structurally if not (yet) morally, of the Nazi Party’s leap in 1930. On the far left, parts of Die Linke and other groups remain deeply suspicious of NATO and the United States, often rationalizing Russian behavior. They oppose arms deliveries to Ukraine and demand negotiations that would, in practice, freeze Russian gains.

What is striking is that both extremes converge on a pro-Putin, anti-American position. The AfD on Russia, opposes military aid to Ukraine, and demands the removal of US troops and nuclear weapons. Segments of the left insist (ahistorically) that NATO expansion “provoked” Russia and present distancing Europe from Washington as the path to peace, while treating China’s cynical “peace plans” with naive and unwarranted seriousness. These forces remain minorities, but if Trump or a Trumpist successor continues to insult Germany, impose tariffs and flirt with Russian power, they will grow. Every act of American bullying confirms their narrative that the US is not a benevolent hegemon but a predatory empire.

For a time, Germany will try to square the circle: remaining in the EU and NATO while building the capacity to act alone if necessary. But there comes a point where form and substance diverge too far. If Washington openly questions Article 5, withdraws troops, weaponizes the dollar against German industry, and leaves Europe squeezed between Russian aggression and American caprice, Berlin will face brutal choices. It can cling to a hollow alliance and hope for a better US president. It can push for full European strategic autonomy with Germany at its core. Or it can act as a semi-detached middle power, hedging between blocs, cultivating ties with Russia and China, and building unilateral capabilities — possibly including nuclear ones — to ensure it cannot be coerced.

None of these options is attractive. All are worse than the post-1945 arrangement in which Germany could be both powerful and constrained, rich and modest. That is precisely the point. The liberal order, for all its hypocrisies, made possible a world in which Germany did not have to be a “normal” power — and in which its neighbors, and Americans, did not have to worry about German ambitions, because Germany had no structural incentive to develop them. The death of that order does not bring justice or freedom. It brings back normality — and normality for Germany has twice meant catastrophe for Europe.

Trumpism’s misguided strategy

Trump and his advisers believe they are correcting a historic imbalance. Their story is simple: America has been exploited by rich allies who free-ride on its defense while undercutting it on trade. Force the allies to pay up, threaten them with abandonment, bully them with tariffs, and they will finally behave.

That story is naïve. It misunderstands alliance politics: states do not accept permanent dependence on an unreliable protector. If they fear abandonment more than entrapment, they rearm and realign. It underestimates the structural consequences of American withdrawal: German and Japanese rearmament in response to Trump is not burden-sharing but the emergence of potential counterweights. Japan’s main concern is defending itself against China, with the First Island Chain as its central focus. But the uncertainty Trump has created has accelerated its militarization efforts.

The Trump doctrine ignores domestic blowback by humiliating and endangering both Germany and Japan. In doing so, the US strengthens precisely those forces that want to end the Atlantic alliance and align with Russia or China. And it miscalculates the long-run costs to the United States itself.

For three-quarters of a century, America has purchased unprecedented influence, security, and prosperity at a remarkably low price by underwriting an order in which Germany and Japan were rich, disarmed and firmly anchored in the West. To throw that away for short-term posturing is not realism. It is vandalism.

The great achievement of the American-led order after 1945 was that Germans, and their neighbors, did not have to think in Bismarckian terms: buffers, spheres, deterrence. The great danger of Trumpism, amplified in Davos and elsewhere, is that it makes such thinking rational again. We still have time to choose otherwise. Americans can decide that the modest costs of sustaining a liberal order are far lower than the enormous costs of confronting a rearmed Germany, a resentful Europe, a rising China and a revanchist Russia all at once. Germans can decide that rearmament should happen inside a revitalized Atlantic framework, not in a lonely space between hostile empires.

But to make those decisions honestly, we must stop pretending that Germany will remain forever what it has been since 1945: a gentle economic giant that declines to act like a power. In a world where the sheriff holsters his badge or, like Wilhelm II, fires wildly to impress the crowd, there are no such giants. There are only states, some large, some small, all arming as best they can. If we insist on dismantling the order that made an abnormal Germany possible, we will get the normal Germany that history teaches us to expect. And then we will discover, too late, that the world we walked away from was not a burden but a bargain.

[ edited this piece.]

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Moscow’s strategy blends with nonmilitary coercion. Alongside battlefield offensives, Russia has employed , systematic , and calibrated . Its revised nuclear doctrine, lowering the threshold for nuclear use against non-nuclear states supported by nuclear powers, is designed to constrain NATO decision-making and deter more decisive Western military assistance. The objective extends beyond controlling Ukrainian territory. It is a deliberate effort to weaken the principles of sovereignty and self-determination that have underpinned European security since the end of the Cold War.

Western Strategy Under Strain

The conflict has also exposed structural weaknesses in Western strategy. , while politically significant, have not decisively degraded Russia’s capacity to sustain the war. Loopholes in oil , the continued operation of a “” and sustained demand from nonaligned states have allowed Moscow to stabilize its war economy. Meanwhile, incremental and delayed arms deliveries, though essential for Ukraine’s defense, risk signaling hesitation rather than resolve, feeding long-term fatigue and eroding deterrence.

NATO now faces its most consequential credibility test since its founding. The alliance has reinforced its eastern flank and adopted a revised , yet persistent constraints remain. Uneven defense spending, divergent political priorities among member states and fears of escalation continue to limit collective effectiveness. Russia exploits these vulnerabilities through , cyberattacks, airspace violations and disinformation campaigns, probing for hesitation and testing whether NATO can translate consultations under Article 4 or, in a crisis, commitments under Article 5 into unified action. Deterrence has not collapsed, but alliance cohesion is under visible strain.

The stakes extend far beyond Ukraine. If territorial conquest by force is normalized, NATO’s security guarantees to the Baltic states, Poland and Central Europe would be fundamentally weakened. Russia’s deepening cooperation with and its alignment with in the Middle East further underscore a strategy aimed at stretching Western attention and diluting its ability to manage multiple crises simultaneously.

The Imperative for NATO Credibility

For NATO, the lesson is unambiguous. Credibility cannot rest on rhetoric alone. It requires accelerated force mobility, binding defense investment commitments and a demonstrated willingness to impose costs on Russia that exceed its capacity to absorb them. Deterrence ultimately depends on shaping adversary expectations. If Moscow concludes that the alliance is prone to delay, division or risk aversion, the likelihood of further Russian adventurism will rise.

Ukraine has thus become the frontline defense of the Euro-Atlantic order. Russian now extend well beyond Ukrainian territory, directly and targeting European political cohesion. Proposals for alternative “security guarantees” outside NATO lack the binding authority and deterrent weight of Article 5, while fragmented responses and political ambiguity increase Europe’s vulnerability.

The war in Ukraine is therefore not approaching a diplomatic off-ramp; it is approaching a strategic verdict. If the West responds with hesitation, ambiguity or managed decline, Moscow will draw a clear lesson: that hybrid coercion works and collective defense can be bent without being broken. Ukraine’s fate will then become a precedent, not an exception. The erosion of the Euro-Atlantic order would follow not through sudden collapse, but through accumulated concessions that normalize aggression and hollow out deterrence. This war will not only determine borders on Europe’s map, but it will also decide whether power or principle governs European security in the decades ahead.

[ edited this piece.]

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It is against this backdrop that recent remarks by Moldova’s President Maia Sandu on briefly reignited discussions of reunification with Romania. While this normally would mean political suicide, at least if you are not representing rather fringe parties, the fact that Sandu is�� for reelection��may have played a role in her willingness to speak more freely.

Yet external threats shape her perspective, which holds that developments around Moldova and globally must be taken into account, and that it is increasingly difficult for small countries to survive as democracies and remain sovereign, with the Russian Federation as the principal threat.

This is where context becomes crucial. The Kremlin has unsettled every security assumption between the Baltic and Black Seas.��, wedged between Ukraine and Romania, finds itself in an especially precarious position. These geopolitical shifts have elevated debates that were previously confined to expert circles. Former fringe concepts now register as remote safeguards amid the looming danger of a stalled integration.��

Shared history

Moldova-Romania ties trace to medieval principalities, later unified to the Kingdom of Romania in 1881, with the exception of Bessarabia, as the region between the Dniester and the Prut was called then, which was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. Following the empire’s collapse in 1917, Moldova’s first parliament, the , proclaimed independence and, faced with Bolshevik incursions as well as internal instability, requested Romanian military support in January 1918. The subsequent in April to join a union with Romania was therefore less an expression of national sentiment than a response to an immediate security vacuum. The arrangement endured until the Soviet reannexation via the .

Many Moldovans possess multiple citizenships, including Romanian passports which are relatively straightforward to obtain due to liberal naturalization policies for those with ancestral ties to pre-1940 Romania. Around����already have Romanian citizenship, yet this dual status has not translated into majority support for reunification. ��consistently show that support for unification in Moldova fluctuates and remains below a stable majority, with����reunification according to August 2025 polling. Romanian discourse juxtaposes cultural affinity against prospective economic, political and security burdens. What has changed is not the basic likelihood of reunification, but the political acceptability of discussing it openly.

EU integration as the primary path

For Moldova, the primary strategic project remains EU integration as a sovereign state. Candidate status and the opening of��accession negotiations��anchor the country’s political class and civil society in a long-term framework that promises institutional reform, economic modernization and a firmer place in the European legal and security space. Sandu herself����that most Moldovans do not share her personal support for reunification, stating that EU integration is a “more realistic objective.”

Reunification with Romania is not a substitute for this trajectory. It is framed as a backup option in case that path becomes blocked beyond repair — by Russian pressure, internal destabilization or a breakdown of Western political will. 

The security logic behind this contingency thinking is straightforward. If Moldova were to unite with Romania, its territory would, at least in principle, become part of a��NATO ��and thus fall under NATO’s collective defense umbrella. At a time when Russia has demonstrated a willingness to use force and coercion against its neighbors, the promise of collective defense has obvious appeal. But this line of reasoning quickly runs into hard legal and political realities.

The Transnistria complication

The first hard reality is��Transnistria, the breakaway region on the left bank of the Dniester River, where a��small Russian ��and a frozen conflict have persisted since the early 1990s. NATO has traditionally����importing unresolved territorial disputes into the Alliance. Any attempt to extend collective defense automatically to territory that includes a Russian military footprint would force allies to confront the question of whether they are willing to underwrite, with their own security guarantees, a conflict they did not create and do not control. In practice, a reunification scenario would almost certainly require some form of legal or territorial clarification that excludes Transnistria from the area covered by collective defense, at least initially. Otherwise, the very thing that makes unification attractive from a security perspective could end up blocking it.

The second constraint lies not in eastern Moldova, but in Western capitals. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, debates on burden-sharing and diverging threat perceptions had revealed tensions within NATO. Recent crises have deepened doubts about the long-term reliability of US security commitments, not only through rhetoric but via concrete standoffs — such as the recent����caused by US President Donald Trump’s annexation threats — that forced Europeans to confront how vulnerable the Alliance can be to domestic political swings in Washington. Collective defense remains the cornerstone of European security, but its credibility is no longer treated as an unshakeable constant.

Why Article 42(7) matters more

This is why, in discussions about Moldova’s long-term security, the EU’s mutual assistance clause —����of the Treaty on European Union — has become more salient. On paper, its language is more categorical than NATO’s Article 5, obliging EU member states to provide “aid and assistance by all means in their power” if one of them is the victim of armed aggression.

Unlike NATO, this obligation extends to EU member states that are militarily neutral or nonaligned, such as Austria, Ireland or Cyprus. A Moldova–Romania union would therefore not only tie Moldova’s fate to NATO; it would insert Moldovan territory directly into the EU’s legal and political framework for mutual defense.

Why this is not German reunification

The inevitable comparison is with��German reunification��in 1990, but the differences are more instructive than the similarities. German reunification took place at the end of the Cold War in a permissive international environment, underpinned by the comprehensive�� with all major powers and by clearly defined borders once the relevant treaties were signed. There were no unresolved territorial conflicts on German soil, Soviet troops withdrew under negotiated terms and popular support for unification was overwhelming and clearly expressed through the��March 1990 , which functioned as a de facto referendum on unification.

Moldova faces none of these conditions: Russia is an active spoiler, not a cooperative partner; Transnistria remains unresolved; and public opinion on unification is deeply divided. German reunification succeeded because international law, great power consensus, popular will and territorial clarity aligned. In Moldova’s case, all four are absent or contested. The comparison serves less as a roadmap and more as a reminder of how rare and contingent successful peaceful unification actually is.

Internal obstacles remain

Even so, reunification would not magically erase Moldova’s internal and regional complexities. Transnistria is only one of several pressure points.��, an autonomous region in southern Moldova with a predominantly Turkic and Orthodox Christian population, has consistently exhibited stronger pro-Russian political and media orientations than the rest of the country. In a��, which has no constitutional or international legal standing, Gagauz voters overwhelmingly backed closer ties with the Russia-led Eurasian Economic Union and signaled that, in the event of Moldovan unification with Romania, they would prefer a different geopolitical alignment and become independent.

For Moscow, both Transnistria and Gagauzia are less about direct annexation than about political leverage: tools to fragment public debate inside Moldova, complicate decision-making and constantly threaten to turn any major strategic choice into an internal legitimacy crisis.

The identity question

The domestic dimension matters at least as much as the geopolitical one. Unification is not only a foreign policy decision; it is an identity project. Many Moldovans hold overlapping or ambivalent identities — Moldovan, Romanian, European, post-Soviet — shaped by family histories, language, education and media consumption. A rushed or elite-driven unification process that disregards this diversity would risk destabilizing the very democracy it aims to protect. Conversely, an honest, pluralistic debate about unification can serve as a barometer for how Moldovan society understands its past and imagines its future.

From a Romanian perspective, the calculus is equally complex. Reunification would entail extending social, infrastructural and security commitments to a significantly poorer neighbor with unresolved territorial issues and a volatile security environment next door. While parts of Romanian society and sections of the political class are emotionally and historically invested in the idea of a “second union”, governing elites must weigh this against fiscal reality, EU-level politics and the risk of becoming a front-line state in an even more direct way than today.

Europe’s test case

Seen from Brussels, Berlin or Paris, Moldova’s potential reunification with Romania is less a question of historic justice and more a test case for the flexibility and resilience of the European order. If the EU and NATO are unable to provide small, vulnerable democracies with credible paths to security and prosperity, alternative scenarios — however risky or imperfect — gain salience. The unification debate is therefore as much a mirror of European uncertainties as it is a reflection of Moldovan and Romanian aspirations.

For now, Moldova’s most realistic and most democratic path remains the one it is already on: gradual��EU accession��as a sovereign state, combined with efforts to strengthen resilience, reform institutions and reduce vulnerabilities to Russian coercion. Reunification with Romania is unlikely in the near term, but Sandu’s podcast remark has moved it from the realm of the unthinkable to the realm of the discussable. That shift, in itself, is politically significant. It signals that in an era of war and systemic competition, even long-settled questions of borders and statehood in Europe are being quietly reopened — not by nationalist dreamers, but by those looking for ways to keep fragile democracies alive.

[David Smith first published a similar piece in .]

[ edited this piece.]

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A past believed to be buried

For many years, far-right parties were either banned or severely punished by society, resulting in extremely low vote shares. In some cases, states dissolved them outright: Greece’s neo-Nazi was shut down by judicial order, and the in the Czech Republic was dissolved by the courts — reflecting Europe’s long-standing resistance to extremist movements in the post-war era. But in recent years, racism once thought to be buried has resurfaced — and in some European countries, has even translated into electoral and governmental power.

However, the postwar rejection of fascism was neither uniform nor absolute. In several European countries, pro-Nazi sympathies did not disappear with military defeat. Former Nazi officials to hold positions in West and East Germany, as well as in Austria, while Southern Europe remained under authoritarian rule for decades. Greece’s military junta of the late 1960s, for example, with explicit fascist sympathies.

Cold War divisions further shaped this continuity. In Western Europe, anticommunism often took priority over full de-Nazification, leading to political compromises. In Eastern Europe, fascism was replaced not by liberal democracy but by Soviet-backed authoritarian regimes. What defined the postwar era, therefore, was not the eradication of fascist ideas, but their temporary political containment — one that weakened as historical memory faded.

Observers are now asking themselves this question: Under what conditions has the old nightmare returned?

After World War II, the devastation caused by racist ideologies like Nazism and fascism remained painfully vivid for surviving Europeans. For those who had witnessed concentration camps, gas chambers and inhuman atrocities, fascism was a horror meant to remain forever buried. But as time passed, this memory slowly faded.

Today, for younger generations who did not experience the war — and thus cannot the consequences of such ideologies — fascism has transformed into a rhetoric of “strength” and “protection,” stripped of its true danger. Yet Europe’s far-right surge in the mid-2010s cannot be explained solely by this generational gap.

The migration wave that reshaped Europe

One of the strongest drivers of the far right’s rise is the issue of irregular migration. After the Arab Spring, a massive wave of migration from Africa and Asia reshaped Europe’s demographic landscape. With this shift came rates and social tension in several European capitals, fueling deep frustration among native populations.

Generous for migrants, citizenship policies and over voting rights — combined with rapid demographic change — have triggered widespread backlash. Many citizens believe they are “losing their country,” and this anger has helped elevate far-right parties to power through elections.

Far-right movements have successfully transformed these policy debates into narratives of cultural displacement and economic injustice. Welfare systems, housing shortages and labor market competition are frequently framed as zero-sum struggles, in which migrants are portrayed as beneficiaries at the expense of native citizens. This framing has proven particularly effective during periods of economic uncertainty and political fragmentation.

In recent elections, far-right parties have become governing forces or coalition partners in of the EU’s 27 member states. Even more strikingly, �ұ�������Բ�’s AfD (Alternative for Germany) has achieved , while traditionally social-democratic countries such as and Finland have seen far-right movements closer to power than ever before.

However, migration alone does not explain the far right’s growing appeal. Economic insecurity, rising living costs, housing shortages and declining trust in political institutions have also contributed to voter disillusionment across Europe. In many cases, far-right parties have capitalized on frustration with political elites rather than offering coherent ideological alternatives.

Moreover, Europe’s far-right landscape is far from unified. While these movements often share anti-immigration and nationalist rhetoric, they on issues such as relations with Russia, the EU and economic policy. Poland offers a clear example of this fragmentation, where right-wing forces compete with one another rather than forming a cohesive ideological bloc.

A resurgence of antisemitism

Another factor fueling the far right is the rise of . Israel’s assault on Gaza has intensified negative perceptions of Israel and Jews across Europe. The scale of in Gaza has reignited historical antisemitic undercurrents, which far-right parties have exploited for political gain.

However, the resurgence of antisemitism in Europe cannot be explained by the Gaza war alone. Multiple forces have converged to produce this trend, including the spread of online radicalization, conspiracy theories and political polarization. Social media platforms have accelerated of antisemitic narratives, often detached from historical context and amplified through algorithmic echo chambers.

Antisemitic dynamics in parts of Eastern Europe are also shaped by decades of Soviet rule. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union officially condemned antisemitism while promoting state-sponsored “,” which often blurred into hostility toward Jewish identity itself. This rhetoric persisted after the collapse of the USSR, leaving behind a political culture where suspicion toward Jewish institutions, cosmopolitanism and liberal pluralism could be expressed indirectly. While contemporary far-right movements are not direct continuations of Soviet ideology, this legacy helps explain why antisemitic narratives in post-communist societies often differ from those in Western Europe.

Disturbingly, anger toward Israel has sometimes morphed into open sympathy for Nazi imagery, particularly among younger generations. reappear in public spaces, from European cities to American schools, whereswastikas , Nazi gestures are replicated without understanding their meaning and fascist symbols are increasingly normalized.

The decline of the center

However, the erosion of centrist politics has not been uniform across Europe. While countries such as France, Italy, and parts of Eastern Europe have experienced and the hollowing out of traditional center-left and center-right parties, others — such as Denmark and the Baltic states — have maintained relatively stable political systems despite growing pressures.

In some Nordic states, far-right parties have moved beyond fringe politics and now influence governing coalitions. In Finland, the nationalist is part of the ruling coalition alongside the conservative National Coalition Party, giving it a direct role in shaping government policy. In Sweden, the , a party with a history of nationalist and anti-immigration politics, support the center-right government and help set its legislative agenda.

Where centrist politics has weakened most, it has often failed to address economic inequality, housing crises, and cultural anxieties in a credible way. In these environments, centrist parties are frequently as technocratic, distant or overly aligned with elite interests, leaving space for populist actors to present themselves as authentic alternatives.

Rebuilding the political center will require more than rhetorical appeals to democratic values. It demands concrete policy responses to economic insecurity, clearer migration governance and renewed efforts to reconnect political institutions with everyday social concerns. Without such reforms, centrist politics risks further decline — even in countries where it has so far remained resilient.

Together, these developments reveal the steady collapse of centrist politics in Europe. Continued , geopolitical crises and populist manipulation suggest that the far right’s momentum is unlikely to fade soon.

As once warned, “Fascism is still around us, and it sometimes appears wearing civilian clothes. Fascism can return under the most innocent disguises. Our duty is to unmask it and point out its new forms wherever they may appear.”

[ edited this piece]

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A handful of racist gestures posted by Miss Finland and members of the Finns Party — East Asian facial features through a slanted-eyes trope — triggered an international backlash of remarkable speed and scale. Within days, Finnish embassies in China, Japan and South Korea formal apologies. Finnish Prime Minister Petteri Orpo publicly the state from the conduct of its own parliamentarians, stating unequivocally that racism had no place in Finnish society. The response was swift, but the damage was already measurable.

Finnish airline Finnair of consumer backlash in Asian markets. Finland’s Minister for Economic Affairs acknowledged reputational harm to tourism and trade. Chinese and Japanese media the episode not as a fringe scandal but as a test of Finland’s values. In Brussels, Finnish Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) cautioned that diplomatic capital built on trust can evaporate far faster than it accumulates. Soft power, once dented, does not rebound easily.

This was not merely a domestic political embarrassment. It was a foreign policy event.

When domestic failures become diplomatic liabilities

In an era of instant amplification, internal social failures migrate rapidly into the international arena. For countries such as Finland — newly inducted into NATO, deeply reliant on rules-based multilateralism and economically intertwined with Asia — moral credibility is not ornamental. It is strategic. When a state’s brand is on inclusion, any contradiction resonates louder abroad than at home.

The deeper discomfort lies in the fact that this did not emerge in isolation. Amnesty International has repeatedly that Finland struggles with structural racism, describing it as among the most racist countries in Europe in terms of lived experience. Surveys cited by Yle show that nearly of Finns now recognize racism as a serious societal problem, a sharp increase over five years. Black residents report some of the levels of harassment on the continent. These realities sit uneasily beside Finland’s global reputation for fairness.

The contradiction exposes a familiar illusion in advanced democracies: that high development immunizes societies against prejudice. It does not. Racism adapts. It becomes quieter, coded, sometimes joking, sometimes dismissed as childish. Yet when projected through the megaphone of social media, even casual prejudice acquires geopolitical weight.

Racial innocence and the limits of Nordic exceptionalism

History matters here. Finland, like much of Europe, has often imagined itself outside colonial entanglements. Yet historians increasingly note Finland’s participation in movements and its absorption of racial hierarchies in European modernity. The idea of racial innocence has functioned less as truth than as comfort. The scandal cracked that veneer.

Comparisons across the Nordic region reinforce the point. Sweden’s with far-right normalization, Denmark’s cases and Norway’s debates over Indigenous all reveal similar tensions beneath progressive surfaces. Globally, France and the UK continue to grapple with colonial legacies that complicate their human-rights advocacy. Finland’s experience fits into this wider pattern: development without deep reckoning leaves unfinished business.

What distinguishes this episode is its international reverberation. Asian reactions were not symbolic. Commentators in Beijing and Seoul the scandal as indicative of a broader European blind spot toward anti-Asian racism. For Asian publics, gestures that echo a century of humiliation resonate deeply. Trade figures and diplomatic alignments do not insulate against cultural insult. On the contrary, economic interdependence amplifies sensitivity.

This is where the foreign policy lesson sharpens. Values are not merely proclaimed; they are performed. For small and middle powers, particularly those that rely on coalition-building and normative leadership, domestic conduct becomes external messaging. Every parliamentarian, every public official, becomes an informal diplomat.

From apology to accountability

Finland’s response has been earnest. Ministers have undergone anti-racism training. Parliamentary leaders issued strong condemnations. The Finns Party signaled internal disciplinary measures. Finland remains by the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the EU’s anti-racism action plans. These frameworks matter, but credibility depends on implementation, not signatures.

Study increasingly links social inclusion with sustainable development. Studies published in argue that racism economic resilience, institutions and corrodes trust — the very foundations of sustainability. The UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Global Alliance Against Racism discrimination as a systemic risk, not a moral footnote. In that sense, addressing racism is not ancillary to development; it is central to it.

There is an opportunity here, albeit born of embarrassment. Finland possesses the institutional capacity, educational depth and international goodwill to turn this episode into a demonstration of democratic self-correction. Genuine curriculum reform, empowered equality watchdogs and enforceable political codes of conduct would signal seriousness. More importantly, sustained engagement with Asian partners — through cultural exchange, academic collaboration and honest dialogue — could transform apology into partnership.

Across the Asia–Pacific, the lesson lands with particular force. This is a region stitched together by migration, memory and mobility, where history travels alongside trade and identity moves faster than policy. Societies from Northeast Asia to the Pacific Islands have learned, often painfully, that cultural slights are never contained within borders. They echo through shipping lanes, student exchanges, defense dialogues and boardrooms. 

Diplomacy in Asia-Pacific is sustained not only by strategy papers but also by acknowledgement, dignity and a quiet assurance of mutual respect. As a result, it is vital to establish an effective accountability unit to investigate officials’ misconduct, as well as to implement mandatory anti-bias training throughout the government. In addition, consider a focused cultural diplomacy and investment package based on a recovery in partner trust, trade and tourism.

Dignity as strategy in a post-insulated world

When racism surfaces — whether in Europe, North America or within the region itself — it unsettles far more than domestic politics. It shakes confidence in partnerships painstakingly built over decades. In a region where trust is cumulative and memory is long, moments of disrespect are not quickly forgotten. Strategic alignment may open doors, but cultural empathy keeps them open. Without it, even the strongest alliances begin to feel brittle, exposed to the slow erosion of credibility and goodwill that no amount of economic interdependence can fully repair.

The age of domestic insulation has ended. A gesture in Helsinki can unsettle boardrooms in Shanghai and ministries in Tokyo. Foreign policy now begins at home, in the mundane ethics of everyday conduct. States that fail to grasp this reality will find their influence shrinking in ways that statistics cannot immediately capture.

Finland’s moment of reckoning is therefore not uniquely Finnish. It is a mirror held up to all societies that pride themselves on progress while underestimating the persistence of prejudice. The question is no longer whether racism damages international standing. The evidence is conclusive. The question is whether moments of exposure become catalysts for renewal — or merely footnotes in a longer pattern of denial.

In a world bound tightly by perception as much as power, dignity has become a strategic asset. Once lost, it demands more than an apology to recover. It demands transformation.

[ edited this piece.]

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This is not a new story. The foundations of ���Dz��Ծ���’s military industry were laid during socialist Yugoslavia, when more than half of the Yugoslav People’s Army’s arms and ammunition were produced in what is today Bosnia and Herzegovina. Facilities established between 1948 and 1951 were concentrated in the republic, reflecting both geography and the federation’s emphasis on industrial depth and redundancy. Although the wars of the 1990s severely damaged this infrastructure, they did not erase the skilled workforce, institutional knowledge or manufacturing culture on which the sector was built.

Revitalization of ���Dz��Ծ���’s defense industry

Over the past decade,���Dz��Ծ���’s has undergone a steady, largely overlooked revival. The sector today employs several thousand workers across more than 20 companies, spanning state-owned incumbents, mixed-ownership firms and a growing private segment. Producers such as Pretis Vogošća, BNT Novi Travnik and Binas Bugojno have scaled up the output of high-demand munitions, particularly 155 millimeter artillery shells. BNT alone has potential annual production capacity in the hundreds of thousands of rounds — figures that, if sustained, place Bosnia among the more consequential secondary producers on Europe’s periphery.

The industry is almost entirely export-oriented. More than 80% of ���Dz��Ծ���’s arms and ammunition output is sold abroad, reaching over 40 countries. In the first two months of 2025, Bosnia and Herzegovina military equipment worth €46.6 million — double the value for the same period in 2024. Likewise, total military exports in 2025 reached around 400 million Bosnia-Herzegovina Convertible Mark (€200 million), up 100 million Bosnia-Herzegovina Convertible Mark from 2023.

Early 2026 trends suggest export values could significantly exceed previous years. While the country does not produce complex, high-end systems, its specialty in bombs, grenades, mines, rockets, ammunition and related components has made it increasingly relevant in conflicts where consumables are in high demand.

���Dz��Ծ���’s dual role in defense and geopolitics

���Dz��Ծ���’s renewed relevance is also geopolitical. The country sits at a strategic crossroads between its Euro-Atlantic aspirations and persistent Russian influence in parts of its political system. While not a NATO member, Bosnia is a partner country and an to Ukraine’s war effort. Its defense industry occupies a distinctive niche: few European producers retain the technical capacity to manufacture both NATO-standard and Soviet-caliber arms and ammunition at scale. This dual compatibility has allowed Bosnian firms to serve a diverse customer base spanning NATO states, the Middle East, Africa and other markets — while remaining adaptable to shifting battlefield requirements.

This strategic utility has not gone unnoticed by the US. US firms have emerged as some of the largest buyers of Bosnian ammunition, quietly but firmly embedding the country in Western supply chains. While Bosnia does not officially export arms to Ukraine, deliveries are routed through intermediaries, allowing its factories to contribute materially while navigating domestic political sensitivities. US investment has been central to this process: is one example.

The US-based defense company purchased majority stakes in two Bosnian armaments companies, Pretis and Binas. With a $100 million capital injection into Sarajevo’s Pretis factory, the company has already brought forward upgrades it couldn’t have afforded on its own. Joe Wallis, the company’s CEO,:

To be honest, we didn’t come to BiH because it was the easiest place to operate. We came because it made sense; strategically and personally. What we found here was a depth of expertise, real industrial capability, and a work ethic that frankly impressed us. These are qualities you can’t fake, especially in sectors where precision and trust are non-negotiable. This wasn’t a fly-in, sign-a-deal kind of situation. We spent time here. We met the people, walked the floors, and looked at the long-term. And what we saw was a country that deserves investment, not just interest. That’s what brought Regulus here—and what’s keeping us here.

Emerging defense industries in the Western Balkans: a strategic asset for Europe

The broader Western Balkans also stand poised to contribute to Europe’s defense-industrial resurgence. According to a by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Albania is reviving production of explosives, small arms, ammunition and drones, while entering a joint venture with the UK for armored vehicles. Kosovo and North Macedonia are with Turkish firms to develop ammunition and propellant capabilities and to seed domestic drone ecosystems. Cost competitiveness and proximity to European markets are clear advantages: output can be priced below Western equivalents and delivered rapidly. With predictable demand signals and modest investment, these facilities could help plug bottlenecks in EU and NATO supply chains.

This industrial and regional relevance aligns closely with Europe’s own strategic ambitions. The European Commission’s 2025 White Paper on European Defence, , identifies concrete industrial priorities, four of which map directly onto Western Balkan strengths.

First, Europe aims to produce at least two million large-caliber artillery rounds annually, creating immediate demand for existing production lines in Bosnia and neighboring states. Second, investment in artillery systems themselves opens space for licensing, modernization and scaling production from proven regional manufacturers. Third, drones and counterdrone systems — while high-end unmanned aerial vehicles remain the domain of larger original equipment manufacturers — offer opportunities for cost-effective intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, as well as for loitering platforms. Fourth, expanding capacities for propellants, explosives and munitions aligns with both EU supply needs and ���Dz��Ծ���’s demonstrated export strengths.

Here is where Ukraine comes into the picture. Politically, the Western Balkans have largely condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Several countries in the region have also providedtangible : Albania donated Mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles along with small-arms and mortar ammunition, Montenegro contributed naval and artillery munitions, Kosovo supplied vehicles, ammunition packages and hosted training activities, while Serbia — though publicly avoiding direct military aid — has been widely reported to have supplied substantial ammunition via third parties, with open-source estimates reaching up to €800 million by the end of 2024. Bosnia itself has channeled significant volumes of ammunition to Ukraine through intermediaries. Taken together, these contributions represent niche but nontrivial support streams, particularly valuable during the early phases of the conflict when Soviet-standard systems were at a premium.

Bosnian American political analyst sees a lot of potential in Bosnia supplying Ukraine’s military: 

But for the purposes of the question of Ukraine’s needs at this time, all of the relevant firms are located in the Federation entity. And these are firms that produce munitions and specifically large caliber artillery munitions, in particular 155mm shells, the NATO standard artillery caliber. You have at least two firms that are producing the shells sort of tutto completo, and then another two firms that are producing various components for these shells. You also have another company there, Igman, which does not produce artillery shells, but is producing large quantities of small arms munitions.��

Overall, the Bosnian defense industry is valued at several hundred million dollars — potentially even a billion, depending on valuation — an impressive scale for a country of its size.

Bosnia is not about to become Europe’s arsenal. But in an era defined by attrition warfare, logistical pressure and the need for resilient industrial throughput, secondary producers matter more than ever. ���Dz��Ծ���’s defense industry has demonstrated the ability to meet NATO standards, scale output and absorb targeted investment. What it has lacked until now is sustained strategic attention. If the trajectory of US engagement, EU interest and regional industrial expansion continues, ���Dz��Ծ���’s quiet rearmament may emerge as one of Europe’s most consequential, if least noticed, security stories.

[ edited this piece.]

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The authors of works acknowledged as belonging to the canon were thus metaphorically canonized. No one expected these fundamentally secular writers and thinkers to exhibit any form of manifest saintly behavior in their personal lives. Nevertheless, their commitment to reasoning and an analysis of the “European soul,” their quest for some form of moral understanding of human relations and analysis of the rules and customs of civilized society gave them a legitimacy most other public figures could only envy. Their status as “spiritual” contributors to the construction of the general population’s worldview positioned them only a notch or two below Scripture itself. Most people believed that such authors lived and reasoned on a higher plane than they could ever attempt to do themselves.

The late 20th century marked a turning point in the West’s perception of its own status as a civilization and the moral value of its writers. Modernism in literature and painting in the first half of the century, accompanying and reflecting the trauma of two incomprehensible world wars initiated by nations that had acquired the most prestigious literary and artistic credentials, set the stage for the marginalization of the canon and everything associated with it. The modernist movement broke down the accepted patterns and models, distorting inherited perspectives (literally, in the case of painting). It called into question almost all the background assumptions that reassured educated Westerners that the assumptions about human behavior regulating their society were fundamentally virtuous.

In the second half of the 20th century, postmodernism ever more radically and analytically “deconstructed” even the traces of those assumptions. Other forces were at work, notably industrial and commercial ones, as the post-World War II West morphed into a civilization of consumption.

Despite the growing challenge to traditional literary and “civilizational” values, in the second half of the 20th century, figures like F.R. Leavis, Lionel Trilling, and Harold Bloom treated the canon as relatively settled: Homer, Plato, Plutarch, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and so on. To be educated meant knowing these works. The canon served as cultural currency among elites and shaped what “literary” meant.

In 2026, not many people refer to or think about “the canon.” Literature itself has become superseded by and largely assimilated into the general area of “entertainment.” Since the advent of modernism, European literature in the 20th and 21st centuries toned down its ambition compared to the 19th century and the centuries that preceded it. Whether we’re considering writers deemed literary giants such as Marcel Proust, James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Robert Musil, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Rainer Maria Rilke, their production has left few lasting effects on the general culture. It has not seriously impacted society’s worldview.

Understanding Europe’s current existential crisis

In Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum this week, Europeans have been putting on display the confusion and angst provoked by a history of slow cultural decomposition that has suddenly been brought explosively to the fore by what they increasingly see as the betrayal of their spiritual (but especially economic) heir, the United States newly incarnated for a second time by President Donald Trump. Europe is living its “E tu Brute” moment.

Europe spent centuries building competing empires. Then, with their economies in shambles at the end of World War II, they had no choice but to bequeath the aggregate of their global overseas possessions to the young transatlantic republic that had escaped the war not just unscathed but strengthened by its dominant industrial power. Soon after, the age of European colonies gave way to a new neocolonial world order, in which it wasn’t so much the American nation as the American dollar that gave the orders and called the shots.

A decade before the end of the millennium, history was shaken anew by the collapse of the Soviet Union. The 21st century saw the somewhat surprising but historically logical beginning of a self-induced decline of the now uncontested leader, the US. Its economy and worldview, built on the precarious foundation of military-industrial complex, depended on the perception of existential threat: communist during the Cold War, Islamic terrorist under George W. Bush and inchoately multipolar from 2014 onwards. The US was losing its bearings. Europe tried uncomfortably to adapt and  began dislocating. 2016 saw the ambiguous triumph of Brexit in June and Trump in November, signaling changes and legitimizing a populist worldview neither the established leadership nor the legacy media was capable of making sense of.

Where are today’s literary and philosophical saints, writers capable of reviving and complementing the canon and leaving indelible traces in Western culture? The greats of the 20th century listed above (Proust, Joyce, Eliot, etc.) left no lasting heritage of ideas, concepts and memes. They decomposed ideas and associations instead of composing them. The ultimate irony is that if we look for metaphors to help us understand our own contemporary social and political drama, we must return to writers popular in or around the 19th century.

Four of those writers come to mind: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mary Shelley, Hans Christian Andersen and Alfred Jarry. Let’s remind ourselves of their contribution to understanding our Western civilization of the 21st century and look at the insight they provide.

From Goethe to Jarry and on to Davos 2026

Goethe published his poem, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” three years before the beginning of the 19th century and his monumental Faust, Part Two in 1832. The simple narrative of the early poem prefigures the history of the West’s culture of technological development over the past two centuries. The apprentice learns a spell that gives him the power to get inanimate objects to carry out tasks he is expected to do, but lacking the counterspell, he cannot stop the process he has initiated.

This is a moral tale everyone can relate to that leaves us to meditate on what it means to pursue convenience based on partial knowledge and motivated by impatience. Applied to an example such as nuclear energy, which we impatiently developed not to better understand what it was and how it might be harnessed, but for the purpose of human destruction justified by the “noble” objective of ending a war. It did end the war in Japan, at considerable moral cost, but it also produced the arms race, which poisoned our politics and distorted our economy during the Cold War is reaccelerating even today.

The hero of Goethe’s Faust, inspired by an earlier work of the canon — Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century drama, “Doctor Faustus” — is motivated by his desire to understand “what holds the world together in its inmost folds.” To make that leap in human intelligence he sells his soul to the devil.        Faust’s tragedy begins when he mistakes power over the world for reconciliation with it. He embarks on a process whose success in growth and ambition is commensurate with the amorality found at its core. The parallels should be obvious with the ensuing history of the technological revolution now coming to a head today with the AI revolution.

Goethe was a true visionary and a committed “modern” thinker. He understood the morality of the work of the devil, but instead of condemning it, he sought to make it profitable, drawing his own moral conclusion that by optimistically continuing to seek understanding, we might achieve clarity. “Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen.” (“Whoever strives with constant effort, him we can redeem.”) If he were to look at the world today, he would recognize the very processes he described, but I suspect he would see some of today’s striving to be suspect, to the devil’s advantage.

Mary Shelley was far less indulgent with the notion of striving than Goethe in her Gothic 1818 novel, Frankenstein. Like Faust, Victor Frankenstein seeks total access to meaning and rejects mediation, patience and finitude. What he produces artificially imitates nature while failing to recognize what it reveals about nature. What Frankenstein proudly creates escapes any control, but the doctor takes no responsibility for what ensues. Many might see that as a description of where we are today with AI.

The final meme in our list appeared in 1896: Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, a madcap remake of Shakespeare’s Macbeth complemented by elements of pastiche of Hamlet, Richard III and even The Winter’s Tale and Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. In other words, Jarry knew the canon and played with it. The play’s plot featuring a sanguinary, bombastic, narcissistic king was so far out and over the top, so dissonant in terms of contemporary aesthetic standards, that some view it as the opening volley of 20th-century modernism. In its way, it was announcing the impending end of the 19th century’s era of peace and rational industrialization less than two decades before the start of World War I.

Why should we return to Ubu Roi today? No one imagined that such a parody of misuse of political power could ever be found in nature, especially in the context of Western democracies. South African author Jane Taylor the eponymous hero of the play in these terms: “The central character is notorious for his infantile engagement with his world. Ubu inhabits a domain of greedy self-gratification.” We don’t have to seek very far to see the astonishing parallel in today’s news.

We’re just left wondering how many deals Trump has done with his version of Mephistopheles.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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These are the words of a woman who was, for more than 30 years, coerced into having sex with multiple men, while the man who controlled her photographed and filmed the encounters. She was threatened if she refused, though precisely how was never fully spelled out in court. The abuse followed a grim routine: cars, hotels, secluded woodland. Several times a week. Year after year. Decade after decade.

This is not a Victorian melodrama or a cautionary tale from a distant culture. It’s a contemporary , recently tried, exhaustively evidenced and adjudicated. The man responsible has now been imprisoned for life. The woman, finally free, says she no longer knows who she is.

It’s difficult to read this without a sense of disbelief. Not because such abuse exists; that is depressingly and appallingly beyond dispute. But because of its duration and apparent invisibility. How does one person compel another adult to engage in acts they find abhorrent, repeatedly, for over 30 years, without chains, drugs or physical confinement? How is this possible?

A perverse Stockholm Syndrome

My initial temptation was to reach for explanations that preserve assumptions about human autonomy. Perhaps the woman was dependent on drugs, and her tormentor controlled her supply. Or maybe she suffered from untreated mental illness or severe cognitive impairment. In both scenarios, she was, in some sense, incapable of understanding what was happening to her and thus not inclined to do anything to change it.

These explanations are not frivolous. They reflect an intuitive need to anchor such cases in obvious forms of vulnerability. But, in this instance, they don’t work: No evidence of drug dependency was introduced at trial; no diagnosis of learning disability was advanced. The court proceeded on the basis that this was a woman who, in formal terms, was a sentient adult capable of consent and yet whose consent was somehow rendered meaningless or, at best, ineffectual.

The real force of the case is its apparent ordinariness: Nothing about it depends on extraordinary pathology. The abuse didn’t happen in a basement or a makeshift dungeon. It took place in spaces that were mundane, transient and socially transparent: cars, hotel rooms, countryside lay-bys. The perpetrator didn’t need constant violence or even the threat of violence. He needed time, routine patterns and control over consequences.

This is why this case is so unsettling. It doesn’t even let us reassure ourselves that freedom, once established, is lasting or self-perpetuating. It forces us to confront the possibility that freedom can be taken away, gradually, invisibly and without spectacle. And right under our noses — so we don’t notice it vanishing. 

We hear much of , in which people who are held captive, over time, become comfortable with their captivity and even identify positively with those who hold them. It’s a perverse development, perhaps, but in the process, the captives surrender what once passed as their power to speak, act or even think as they want; they give up their volition.

Agency

This brings us to the concept of agency, a term that does a great deal of heavy lifting in contemporary discussions of women’s lives. We are frequently reminded that women have agency. They choose. They decide. They act. The insistence on agency has been politically necessary, a corrective to fallacies that portrayed women as passive, dependent or merely responsive to men.

But there’s danger here. When agency is treated as a universal possession rather than a socially conferred capacity, it loses its analytical edge. Worse, it becomes accusatory: If women have agency, then failure to act can begin to look like failure of will, judgment or even courage.

Agency, properly understood, is not an inner resource that individuals carry with them regardless of circumstance. It is a condition created and sometimes withdrawn by cultural, institutional and relational environments. Those environments distribute possibilities unevenly. They make some actions thinkable and others unthinkable; some exits imaginable and others pipedreams.

In the case I’ve outlined, the woman did not simply “fail” to leave. She occupied an insular social world in which resistance carried consequences she believed she could not survive, while compliance became the least damaging option available. Over time, that world was normalized. Her abuse was “normal.” The idea of escape was unthinkable.

If the concept of agency is to remain socially and politically useful, it must be capable of accounting for this. Otherwise, it risks becoming a slogan rather than an analytic tool.

Abuse disguised as intimacy

It would be comforting to treat this case as a grotesque anomaly. But it is not without precedent. Its most fabled case is George du Maurier’s 1894 novel , in which the controlling and mesmeric manipulator Svengali wields a sinister power over a young Parisian orphan girl. There are more recent, real-life cases.

drugged his wife repeatedly and arranged for strangers to have sex with her, recording and photographing the assaults. Around 70 men were eventually implicated. The case shocked France not just for the abuse, but for how long it was orchestrated without detection (2011–20).

In a man reportedly drugged and filmed his wife over 15 years, using secrecy and routine to sustain his long-term control. South Korea’s notorious Case involved victims who were coerced into recording sexual acts, often under threats or blackmail. One of the most harrowing cases took place among a in Bolivia: In 2009, a group of men were rounded up and convicted of the rape and sexual assault of 151 women and girls, including small children.  

Some of the cases involved drugs and physical assaults; other cases involved women being “shared” in ostensibly intimate relationships, their compliance sustained through intimidation, humiliation and the threat of exposure rather than brute force. What they shared was not violence alone or even its threat, but length of time. The violations were habitually repeated over and over again, so that they became routinized and eventually regular features of the social landscape. The victims probably appeared to outsiders as complicit in their own exploitation, and this is precisely why intervention failed to materialize.

I’m making a deeply uncomfortable observation, and it must be handled carefully. To say that a victim becomes implicated in their captivity is not to say they desire, less still endorse it. It is to recognize that survival in unusually constrained circumstances often requires forms of cooperation that, from the perspective of outsiders, resemble consent.

Indeed, a common rhetorical question directed at victims of domestic violence is the blunt and accusatory: “Why didn’t she leave?” Rape victims are often subjected to a similar, implied blame. Their actions are anatomized after the fact: if she froze, if she didn’t scream or if she refused to fight back, she’s assumed to have somehow induced the assault. Women already face deep-rooted scepticism when reporting sexual violence. Often, that scepticism is loaded with assumptions about consent and by narrow expectations of how a “real” victim ought to behave.

This dynamic is not confined to heterosexual relationships. Comparable patterns can be observed in same-sex relationships, in cults, in abusive workplaces and in situations where women exercise power over men. Even consensual BDSM relationships, when viewed without context, can appear indistinguishable from exploitation to outsiders. The difference lies not in surface behavior, but in the presence or absence of exits.

Some readers may have seen the recent Harry Lighton film (2025) about a queer relationship in which one man becomes “happy” (his word) to operate not just submissively but servilely, while outsiders, like his mother, recoil at the apparent abuse he’s prepared to take. Abuse does not always announce itself as “abuse.” Sometimes it looks like accommodation or habit. Or even more unfathomably, intimacy.

Captivity and freedom

The final, and perhaps most troubling, implication of the main case is that many similar situations may — no, I should be clearer, will — never come to light at all. The idea that victims eventually realize what’s happening to them and leave is a consoling piece of fiction. After decades of routine coercion, there is usually no epiphany waiting to happen. Just a continuation.

The woman at the center of this case didn’t wake up one morning after 30 years and have a lightbulb moment when it dawned on her that what was happening to her was just plain wrong. The conditions that had shaped her life for so long didn’t disappear. What actually changed was not her clarity of vision, but the collapse of the structure that had contained her.

Sociologists use the term “” to describe the process by which moralities, norms and identities acquired in childhood and adulthood are displaced, often following a momentous or disorienting experience.

Such replacements are inherently fragile. The conception of reality they sustain can be destabilized by even fleeting encounters with alternative ways of understanding the world. It’s likely that those subjected to long-term exploitation have their casual social contacts quietly restricted. A conversation in a shop, a bar or a workplace may be enough to unsettle a relationship whose assumptions are otherwise rarely questioned. In this case, the woman’s bond with her tormentor was eventually broken, perhaps through just such unguarded encounters that allowed her, for the first time in decades, to see her situation anew.

That’s why these cases should stop us in our tracks. Not because they are shocking or hideous, but because they expose the fragility of assumptions we prefer not to question. Agency is real, but remember: it is also uneven. Freedom exists, but it always has limits. And some forms of captivity are so thoroughly normalized that they persist for a lifetime without ever being known.

The woman now says she is free. Perhaps. It’s a beginning. But the more pressing task is collective: to develop ways of thinking about power, coercion, consent and, most critically, agency that are capable of recognizing such situations before they harden into decades.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of ]

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After initially disagreeing about whether Robertson’s rhetoric should be called propaganda, when I invited Claude to explore more of the context, the chatbot concluded: “This does look like propaganda.”

I mention this simply to underline the point that an important ingredient of any constructive dialogue is the willingness to go further and deeper into context. I’ll even be so bold here to point out, concerning the very issue Robertson’s propaganda addresses, even before the invasion of Ukraine four years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin an examination of context with a call for direct negotiations with the United States and NATO to establish a European security architecture that could set new rules. However, US President Joe Biden’s administration saw the examination of context as unnecessary or simply unwanted. The number of dead Ukrainians and Russians since that refusal is estimated at somewhere around two million.

At the end of Part 1, after concluding Robertson’s fearmongering was potentially dangerous propaganda, Claude turned the question back at me, requesting my advice for countering the effects of such rhetoric, which has become the standard discourse among Europe’s political leadership. The chatbot concluded with this question: “What would you call the appropriate response to this kind of threat construction?”

I followed up with a new prompt:

“To answer your question, I would refer to the kind of geopolitical realism we associate with thinkers like John Mearsheimer. But realism doesn’t stir up people’s emotions. So, my deeper question would be this: Why do governments in liberal democracies not listen to and take seriously the analysis of historical realists? It appears not only that they don’t listen, they quite simply refuse to engage with their arguments. Isn’t this a good reason to doubt the ability of our so-called democratic institutions to practice anything resembling democracy, a concept that assumes serious debate may not only take place but must be an essential ingredient of governance?

You’ve identified a profound democratic deficit that goes beyond this particular instance of threat inflation.

Why realist analysis gets excluded:

The marginalization of realist perspectives like Mearsheimer’s isn’t accidental—it’s structural. Realist analysis tends to:

• Challenge the moral framing that justifies interventions (“spreading democracy,” “defending values”)
• Emphasize limits to what military power can achieve
• Acknowledge legitimate security interests of adversaries
• Counsel restraint and accommodation rather than expansion and confrontation
• These positions are deeply inconvenient for:
• Defense industries that profit from threat maximization
• Political classes that derive legitimacy from moral crusades
• Bureaucracies (NATO, defense ministries) whose budgets and relevance depend on perceived threats
• Media ecosystems that thrive on dramatic narratives of good versus evil

The absence of genuine debate:

What you’re describing—the refusal to even engage with realist arguments—is perhaps more troubling than simply disagreeing with them. When Robertson-style threat construction goes unchallenged in mainstream political discourse, when Mearsheimer’s warnings about NATO expansion are dismissed rather than debated, we’re not seeing a contest of ideas. We’re seeing the enforcement of orthodoxy.

This suggests several things about our “democracies”:

Public deliberation as theater: The debate that occurs is largely within acceptable parameters. Positions outside those parameters (realist skepticism about threat inflation, questions about alliance commitments, cost-benefit analysis of confrontation) aren’t defeated in argument—they’re simply excluded from serious consideration.

Capture by institutional interests: The foreign policy apparatus operates with considerable autonomy from democratic accountability. The expansion of NATO, the decisions that led to current confrontations—these weren’t subject to robust public debate. They were presented as technical necessities or moral imperatives by experts.

Manufactured consent: When someone like Robertson speaks, he’s not making an argument to be evaluated. He’s manufacturing a permission structure for predetermined policies. The goal isn’t deliberation but emotional mobilization—getting populations “worried” enough to support expanded military budgets.

The realist critique matters precisely because it’s excluded:

Mearsheimer’s analysis of NATO expansion predicted the current crisis with remarkable accuracy. The fact that this doesn’t lead to retrospective re-evaluation, but rather to his further marginalization, tells us something important: the system isn’t designed to learn from errors that would implicate its core assumptions.

A genuine democracy would feature:

• Serious debate about whether Robertson’s threat assessment is accurate
• Cost-benefit analysis of military buildups versus diplomatic alternatives
• Accountability when threat predictions prove unfounded
• Space for dissenting expert opinion in policy formation

Instead, we get:

• Moral panic presented as analysis
• Dismissal of contrary views as appeasement or naivety
• Ratcheting commitments without public deliberation
• Post-hoc rationalization when policies fail

Your deeper question about democracy:

You’re right to be troubled. If “democracy” means procedural legitimacy (elections, institutions) but excludes substantive debate about fundamental questions of war and peace—if it systematically excludes perspectives that challenge elite consensus—then it’s democracy in form but not function.

The realist perspective is dangerous to power precisely because it:

• Denaturalizes “threats” by showing how they’re constructed through policy choices
• Reveals costs that moral framing obscures
• Suggests alternatives to confrontation
• Implies that elite decision-making may have created the very dangers now used to justify further escalation

This is why engagement is refused. Genuine debate would risk exposing that current trajectories serve institutional interests rather than security, and that alternatives exist but are politically inconvenient.

What does this imply?

If democracies systematically exclude realist analysis from serious consideration, particularly when it challenges military expansion and threat inflation, then foreign policy operates in a space largely insulated from democratic deliberation. Citizens are mobilized to support decisions already made, not consulted about whether to make them.

This doesn’t mean democratic institutions are worthless, but it does mean their democratic character is severely compromised in domains where organized interests (defense, bureaucratic, geopolitical) are strong and public attention is weak or easily manipulated.

Your doubt seems well-founded. The question becomes: what mechanisms could force genuine debate, or is the structure itself resistant to the kind of deliberation democracy theoretically requires?

Dealing with the “bleakness” of today’s politics

Our conversation continued.

“Earlier you asked me ‘What would you call the appropriate response to this kind of threat construction?’ 

I would suggest that the best response I’ve seen is Lord Robert Skidelsky’s direct commentary on Robertson’s rhetoric, which you can read . But not even Skidelsky has an answer to your question about whether the structure of our supposedly democratic institutions is resistant to what you call ‘deliberation democracy.’ I believe a lot of people are thinking about this issue and wondering about whether there is an answer. Emmanuel Todd, for example, believes that this reflects a crisis of faith in the secularized West, not religious faith, but what he calls ‘anthropological faith.’ That means that until a faith that motivates people to believe in their values is reinvented, there may be no solution.”

I’ll read Skidelsky’s response to see how he addresses Robertson’s rhetoric. Thank you for sharing Skidelsky’s piece—it’s a far more substantial and systematic dismantling of Robertson’s position than what typically appears in mainstream debate. His approach demonstrates what genuine deliberation might look like.

What Skidelsky does effectively:

He doesn’t just identify the logical flaws in Robertson’s threat assessment (as we did), but traces the underlying geopolitical assumptions and historical context that make the threat construction implausible. His points about:

• The internal contradiction of Russia being simultaneously failing and existentially threatening
• The political (not legal) nature of the Budapest Memorandum and the broken Ukrainian commitments that preceded Russian violations
• The arbitrariness of borders and the absence of mechanisms for peaceful adjustment
• The Monroe Doctrine parallel exposing Western hypocrisy about spheres of influence
• Military Keynesianism as the hidden economic driver behind rearmament

These are arguments that require engagement. They can’t simply be dismissed as “appeasement” or naivety. Yet as you note, they’re largely absent from mainstream political discourse—not refuted, but excluded.

On Emmanuel Todd’s “anthropological faith” thesis:

This strikes at something deeper than institutional reform. Todd’s argument—if I understand your reference correctly—is that the West has lost not just religious faith but a broader belief structure that gives meaning to collective sacrifice and shared values. Without this animating faith, institutions become hollow shells susceptible to capture by narrow interests precisely because no broader civic commitment restrains them.

This would explain why:

• Democratic procedures persist but democratic substance (genuine deliberation, accountability to public interest) atrophies
• Threat construction fills the void left by loss of positive collective purpose
• Elites can manufacture consent because populations lack the cohesive alternative worldview needed to resist

If Todd is right, the problem isn’t fixable through better procedures or more access to dissenting voices. It requires cultural/spiritual renewal—what you call reinventing the faith that motivates belief in values.

The bleakness of this diagnosis:

This suggests the crisis runs deeper than corrupted institutions or captured media. It’s a crisis of meaning in which democratic forms survive but the anthropological substrate that once animated them—shared beliefs about human dignity, collective purpose, truth-seeking—has eroded.

In this reading:

• Robertson’s propaganda works not because it’s clever but because it fills a vacuum
• Realist arguments fail to gain traction not because they’re wrong but because they require a civic maturity and historical consciousness that has dissolved
• The exclusion of debate isn’t a conspiracy but a symptom of civilizational exhaustion

Where does this leave us?

If the problem is anthropological faith, then:

• Institutional reforms (more transparency, electoral changes) won’t address the root cause
• Exposing propaganda (as Skidelsky does) is necessary but insufficient
• The question becomes: can such faith be “reinvented” deliberately, or does it emerge only organically from historical circumstance?

Todd’s pessimism (if it is pessimism) may be that you can’t engineer a renewal of collective meaning through policy. Faith—whether religious or civic—isn’t manufactured by elites but arises from lived experience and cultural regeneration that may take generations, if it comes at all.

This makes your article’s documentation of democratic failure even more important. If we’re in a period where genuine deliberation has become impossible due to deeper cultural exhaustion, the task is to preserve the record—to document what was lost, so that if/when renewal comes, there’s a blueprint for what democratic discourse once meant.

Your conversation with Claude becomes, in this light, not just analysis but preservation: showing what reasoned debate looks like when it’s still possible, even if only between a human and an AI.

Digging into Claude’s reasoning methods

Although I didn’t provide Claude with the link to Todd’s (in French), I was surprised to discover the accuracy of the chatbot’s “interpretation” of what Todd was saying. This prompted me to ask one more question:

“I gave no link to Todd’s thesis. I was therefore surprised by the accuracy of your interpretation of it, how closely it corresponds to Todd’s reasoning. Is that the result of logical inference based on my short description or the fact that you have access to data concerning Todd?”

It’s primarily logical inference from your description, though I should be transparent about what I might know.

From your description alone, the phrase “anthropological faith” combined with your context (secularized West, values requiring reinvention, crisis deeper than institutional) strongly suggests:

• Something more foundational than political ideology
• A substrate of meaning beneath conscious beliefs
• Cultural/civilizational rather than individual psychology
• The kind of shared worldview that makes collective action coherent

This pointed toward a thesis about the erosion of tacit assumptions that once made Western civic life functional—even after explicit religious belief declined.

What I might have encountered in training:

I may have some familiarity with Emmanuel Todd’s work—he’s a prominent French demographer and anthropologist who has written about family structures, civilizational patterns, and Western decline. If I encountered his arguments about anthropological structures (family systems, inheritance patterns, unconscious cultural logic) shaping political possibilities, that would explain why my interpretation felt accurate.

But I cannot recall specific texts or arguments with confidence. I wasn’t consciously drawing on stored knowledge about “Todd’s thesis on anthropological faith in the secularized West”—I was reasoning from your description.

The interesting question this raises:

If my interpretation was accurate based on minimal information, it suggests either:

1. The logic of the argument is compelling enough that independent reasoning arrives at similar conclusions
2. I absorbed something about Todd’s framework during training that surfaced as “inference” rather than explicit recall
3. The diagnosis (loss of meaning-substrate in secular West) is sufficiently widespread in contemporary thought that multiple thinkers articulate similar versions

This raises many fascinating questions that I hope to deal with in another series of pieces. In Part 3, we will look at a historical case from nearly 30 years ago that throws a very direct light on the issue of democratic integrity and propaganda.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Propaganda Test: What AI Reveals About Democratic Discourse (Part 2) appeared first on 51�Թ�.

One of the known recipes for reducing political confusion is to designate and focus on a threat, preferably one that can be framed as existential. If no easily identifiable threat is available, it’s always possible for enterprising leaders to create one. The next step is to convince the public of its existential gravity. It’s a game that has often served in the past. Politicians, and European politicians in particular, fully understand its utility.

They know it can work on one condition: that a complicit media agrees to play the same game. Europe’s media long ago discovered the two major advantages associated with playing that game. Publicizing threats attracts eyeballs and generates emotion. Echoing and adding to the credibility of fearmongering by government authorities ensures continued access to the carefully prepared evidence of an enemy’s evil-doing. And in a fine-tuned government-media system, critiquing manicured evidence means not just being left out of the loop but carries the risk of being branded as an accomplice of the enemy.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter has been militating for a return to the kind of nuclear arms controls that recent regimes have gleefully abandoned. Ritter is now paradoxically, almost nostalgically, for a “New Cold War” to revive our interest in reducing apocalyptic risk. He’s hoping to see “mainstream media altering its coverage of Russia” to influence their “masters in government” who “need to focus on real solutions to real problems, and not pretend solutions to manufactured problems.”

Needless to say, the lead author of the UK’s Strategic Defence Review and former NATO chief Lord Robertson recently gave what Ritter would easily recognize as his “manufactured” of the problem that Europe’s most prominent leaders appear obsessed with:

“So we need to be worried as a country as a whole that if Russia got the space to reconstitute its armed forces—and it’s already doing so—but if it could on a grander scale, then clearly the rest of Europe is in danger. If I lived in Moldova or Armenia or Azerbaijan, I would be very, very worried about the possibility of a deal being done that left Russia with its forces intact and with at least some prize to be gained from Ukraine.”

If the mainstream media can’t respond to or query this kind of manufactured reasoning — built on unsupported suppositions — I was comforted to read Lord Robert Skidelsky’s titled, “Ukraine – the delusion of the warmongers.” Aware of those two contrasting positions, I wondered whether an AI chatbot might permit us to go a bit further and deeper into the issue two British peers of the realm were debating. I thus addressed a prompt to Anthropic’s Claude that began with the quote from Lord Robertson in the preceding paragraph, followed by my own thoughts:

“Now Lord Robertson’s rhetoric appears to me to contain numerous logical shortcuts starting with a hypothetical formulation that bears no real resemblance to reality (‘if it could on a grander scale…’). Even that gratuitous hypothesis does not fatally lead to the conclusion that ‘Europe is in danger.’ Another obvious flaw in Robertson’s method is the cultural arrogance of attributing attitude or emotion to people of another culture.

Can you help me analyze how this rhetoric produces pure propaganda, or contradict me if you think I’m wrong in qualifying it as such? This is of course an argument for rearmament on a major scale, which aims at convincing the population at large to support (and fund) the effort.”

You’ve identified some genuine rhetorical features worth examining. Let me analyze the structure of Robertson’s argument and where you might be right—and where the characterization as “pure propaganda” might be overstated.

Legitimate concerns you’ve raised:

The logical chain does contain gaps. Robertson moves from “if Russia reconstitutes forces on a grander scale” → “clearly the rest of Europe is in danger” without establishing:

• What specific capabilities would constitute this threat
  
• Why reconstitution necessarily implies aggressive intent toward NATO members
  
• What countervailing factors might prevent such expansion (NATO’s own capabilities, economic constraints on Russia, diplomatic mechanisms)

The “if I lived in Moldova…” construction is indeed presumptuous. He’s attributing fears to populations he doesn’t represent, which can serve to ventriloquize justifications through imagined others. This is a common rhetorical move—speaking for vulnerable parties to lend moral urgency to one’s position.

The hypothetical framing (“if Russia got the space…if it could on a grander scale”) creates a scenario that may or may not materialize, then treats the dangers of that scenario as if they’re established facts requiring immediate action.

Where “pure propaganda” may overstate it:

Robertson is offering a strategic assessment, not fabricating facts. Reasonable defense analysts disagree about:

• Russia’s reconstitution timeline and capacity
  
• The implications of various Ukraine settlement scenarios
  
• Threat assessment to non-NATO states bordering Russia

His argument represents a position in an ongoing policy debate rather than manipulative distortion of reality. Other informed observers argue for restrained military spending, emphasizing economic tools or diplomatic engagement—but that doesn’t make Robertson’s view propaganda merely because it supports one policy outcome.

The Moldova/Armenia/Azerbaijan reference, while presumptuous, isn’t entirely baseless—these countries have experienced Russian military pressure or presence. Whether their populations share Robertson’s specific fears is another question, but the geopolitical vulnerability isn’t invented.

The rearmament context:

You’re right that this argument supports major rearmament, and that creates incentive for threat inflation. This is worth scrutinizing. But the existence of policy implications doesn’t automatically render threat assessment propagandistic—otherwise all security policy arguments would be propaganda.

A more precise characterization:

Rather than “pure propaganda,” this might be better described as:

• Threat maximization within bounds of plausible scenarios
  
• Selective emphasis on dangers over mitigating factors
  
• Advocacy framed as analysis
  
• Use of vulnerable third parties to add moral weight

It’s rhetorically engineered for persuasive effect, certainly. Whether that crosses into propaganda depends partly on whether Robertson believes his own assessment or is cynically manipulating public opinion, and whether the underlying factual claims are defensible.

What would you need to see in the argument to consider it a good-faith strategic assessment rather than propaganda?

Claude’s analysis was eminently fair, informative and clearly “balanced,” an excellent contribution to the debate. But this happened to be a case of me knowing more about the context than Claude, who had made no effort to trace the quotation. I therefore followed this up with a new prompt:

“Excuse me, but the points Robertson tries to make just before the passage I cited appear to me — and I would think to any rational person — to be close to a form of delirium. Here is what he says: ‘We need to be very, very worried about how this ends up, because we are under threat as well. It’s quite clear from the Russian press and the Kremlin-controlled media that we, the United Kingdom, are being seen as a proxy for America. It’s inconvenient to attack America on a broad scale because of the relationship between Trump and Putin, so we, the United Kingdom, are in the crosshairs. Relentlessly, the Kremlin media is attacking ‘the Anglos’, ‘the UK’, ‘the English’.’

In other words, Lord Robertson wants people to believe there is evidence that the UK is about to be attacked. Worse, he’s implying that if we don’t utterly neutralize Russia’s military capacity, all this will come to pass. Do you still maintain that this may not be propaganda?”

You’re right to push back on my initial framing. Reading this additional context significantly changes the picture.

Robertson is making an extraordinary claim: that because Russian state media criticizes the UK harshly and positions it as an American proxy, the UK is therefore “in the crosshairs” as a target for attack. This logic is profoundly flawed:

The rhetorical sleight-of-hand:

Hostile rhetoric in state media ≠ imminent military threat. By this standard, dozens of countries would constantly be “under attack” based on how they’re portrayed in adversarial media. Russia’s media has called various countries all manner of things for years without it predicting military action against NATO members.

He’s conflating verbal hostility with actual military danger, then using that conflation to argue the UK specifically faces existential threat requiring dramatic militarization.

The implicit logic is indeed alarming:

If Russian media criticism = being “in the crosshairs” = justification for massive rearmament and total military neutralization of Russia, then he’s essentially arguing for perpetual confrontation based on propaganda analysis rather than actual military capabilities or intentions. This creates an unfalsifiable threat: any Russian criticism becomes evidence of danger.

The Trump-Putin relationship aside:

The notion that Russia attacks countries based on who is “convenient” given Trump’s relationship with Putin, and that this makes the UK the substitute target, is speculative psychology presented as strategic analysis. It’s not grounded in how states actually make decisions about military action against nuclear-armed NATO members.

This does look like propaganda:

You’re correct that this appears designed to manufacture a sense of imminent danger that isn’t supported by the evidence presented. The UK facing Russian military attack would trigger Article 5—this is categorically different from Russia’s actions in non-NATO states. Robertson elides this distinction entirely.

The cumulative effect—threat inflation based on media rhetoric, imagined attack scenarios, claims to speak for vulnerable populations, and the implicit demand for military buildup to “utterly neutralize” Russia—does read as advocacy dressed as threat assessment, designed to generate fear supporting a predetermined policy conclusion.

I was too cautious initially. What would you call the appropriate response to this kind of threat construction?

I had no trouble agreeing with every point Claude made but was ready to go into more detail. I nevertheless decided to respond to Claude’s question asking me for advice and penned the following prompt. (Claude’s response will appear tomorrow in Part 2.)

“To answer your question, I would refer to the kind of geopolitical realism we associate with thinkers like John Mearsheimer. But realism doesn’t stir up people’s emotions. So, my deeper question would be this: Why do governments in liberal democracies not listen to and take seriously the analysis of historical realists? It appears not only do they not listen, they refuse to engage with their arguments. Isn’t this a good reason to doubt the ability of our so-called democratic institutions to practice anything resembling democracy, a concept that assumes serious debate may not only take place but must be an essential ingredient of governance?”

At this point, it’s worth noting that the conversation organically generated a dramatic structure that emerged through the discovery, revelation and development of context. The introduction of new evidence changed Claude’s appreciation of my initial claim. This process of adjusting the focus allowed us to move from a very concrete incident — the publication of Lord Robertson’s opinion — to something more abstract and universal: the apparently compromised integrity of democratic institutions.

In Part 2, we dive into a serious analysis of what appears to be the degraded state of public policy making and what this means for the future of democracy.

Your thoughts

Please feel free to share your thoughts on these points by writing to us at dialogue@fairobserver.com. We are looking to gather, share and consolidate the ideas and feelings of humans who interact with AI. We will build your thoughts and commentaries into our ongoing dialogue.

[Artificial Intelligence is rapidly becoming a feature of everyone’s daily life. We unconsciously perceive it either as a friend or foe, a helper or destroyer. At 51�Թ�, we see it as a tool of creativity, capable of revealing the complex relationship between humans and machines.]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Propaganda Test: What AI Reveals About Democratic Discourse (Part 1) appeared first on 51�Թ�.

But this apparent calm risks masking a more uncomfortable reality. The euro zone is drifting back toward a deflationary equilibrium through institutional stagnation, structural slack and weak core demand. The disinflation process may not end neatly at target. It may overshoot and become difficult to reverse.

The deeper problem is not primarily about the ECB’s competence, but about Europe’s political economy. Since the sovereign-debt crisis of 2011–2012, the currency union has relied heavily on the central bank as a stabilizer while failing to build the fiscal institutions needed to respond quickly and forcefully to shocks. Monetary policy has become the system’s default shock absorber; fiscal policy, by contrast, remains constrained by high debt, fragmented politics and slow collective decision-making. That mix tends to produce policy responses that are late, contested and too small — a classic recipe for chronic underdemand and renewed disinflation.

Why the past still matters

The euro crisis a decade ago was not so much solved as deferred. The ECB’s interventions, beginning with the commitment to do “whatever it takes” and later reinforced by bond-purchase programs, bought time. But that time was not used to reduce debt overhangs in high-debt countries or to complete a fiscal architecture capable of stabilizing demand when national fiscal space is limited.

The result is a structural asymmetry that has haunted the euro zone ever since. When shocks arrive — an energy spike, a banking wobble, a pandemic, a geopolitical rupture — national budgets in high-debt states are constrained, while European Union-level action is negotiated slowly. Economists can sometimes agree to joint borrowing, but typically only after delay and dilution. In macroeconomic terms, this produces an equilibrium in which demand support is systematically undersupplied.

In other words, Europe’s fiscal-governance debate is not mere constitutional theater. It shapes the inflation process itself. A system that cannot mobilize timely stimulus tends to generate persistent slack, which is disinflationary. If it endures, it becomes self-reinforcing as wage growth cools and inflation expectations drift down.

Slack moves to the core

What makes today’s environment especially dangerous is where the slack is concentrated. After the sovereign-debt crisis, Germany — the euro zone’s anchor economy — was still growing solidly, acting as a demand engine for the rest of the bloc. Strength in the core partly buffered weakness in the periphery.

That dynamic has now reversed. Germany is struggling. According to the European Commission’s economic for Germany in November 2025, following two consecutive years of contraction, the economy was expected to stagnate in 2025, with only a modest recovery projected for 2026–2027. That is a grim profile for the euro zone’s largest economy, and it matters because �ұ�������Բ�’s weakness is not contained within its borders.

After a sharp rebound in activity during the second half of 2020 and 2021 following the initial Covid-19 shock, the German economy has entered a period of protracted stagnation. Real GDP in Germany is only marginally higher today than before the pandemic, in stark contrast to other large euro-area economies, where output has moved decisively above pre-pandemic levels (France: +3.8%; Italy: +4.7%; Spain: +4.7%). From a longer-run perspective, part of this divergence reflects catch-up elsewhere, as Germany had grown relatively strongly in the years preceding the pandemic.

Nevertheless, the chart below shows that this historical context does not explain away �ұ�������Բ�’s current weakness: Even after accounting for earlier outperformance, Germany has failed to generate post-pandemic momentum while its peers have resumed sustained expansion. This points to a deeper and more persistent drag on euro-area demand emanating from the core.

It transmits through two channels: First, the real-economy channel. Germany sits at the center of Europe’s manufacturing and supply-chain network. When German firms cut investment and orders, the shock ripples through suppliers across Central Europe and beyond. Weak German demand becomes weak European demand.

Second, the institutional channel. Germany remains pivotal to euro-area fiscal politics. A weak Germany does not become a fiscal locomotive, but more likely a cautious one. Domestic political constraints, fiscal rules and coalition politics can all make ambitious demand support harder rather than easier — precisely when slack is spreading. Short-term data reinforce this picture. At the end of 2025, the euro zone’s manufacturing sector slipped deeper into contraction, with weak orders and continued price discounting, according to Reuters’ coverage of the Hamburg Commercial Bank Eurozone Manufacturing . The survey singled out Germany as the weakest large economy covered. A separate Reuters showed German manufacturing ending 2025 in a deepening downturn, driven in part by collapsing export orders.

If disinflation is returning to Europe, the geography matters. This time, it radiates from the core, not the periphery.

A note on measurement: output gaps are slippery

Any discussion of “slack” invites a methodological fight. Output gaps are commonly measured as the difference between actual GDP and “potential output,” but potential is unobservable. Many official estimates rely on time-series filters that track actual GDP too closely. In prolonged downturns, potential output is revised down alongside actual GDP, producing deceptively small gaps precisely when underperformance is persistent.

This is not a technical footnote. If slack is underestimated, stimulus will almost certainly be too timid.

Recent academic work has tried to address this problem. “Measuring the Euro Area Output Gap,” a 2025 by researchers Matteo Barigozzi, Claudio Lissona and Matteo Luciani, uses a nonstationary dynamic-factor model on a broad dataset. It argues that since the sovereign-debt crisis, euro-area slack may have been mismeasured, with structural constraints playing a larger than cyclical weakness alone.

The broader lesson is not that any single estimate is definitive, but that debates about slack quickly become debates about methodology. For policy analysis, transparency is preferable. Comparing actual GDP with a simple pre-COVID trend while acknowledging its limitations can be a more intuitive way to illustrate persistent demand shortfalls.

From low inflation to deflationary dynamics

Low inflation is not deflation. But the euro zone has lived through the process by which disinflation becomes entrenched. Persistent slack restrains wages, weakens firms’ pricing power and gradually pulls down inflation expectations. Once expectations drift, real interest rates rise even if nominal rates are cut, because inflation falls faster. Monetary policy becomes less potent precisely when it is most needed.

Late-2025 manufacturing data hint at this dynamic. Weak demand coincided with continued price cutting even as some input costs showed intermittent pressure, according to Reuters . This combination of soft demand, cautious firms and discounting behavior is the kind of microeconomic texture that can pull inflation down over time, especially when growth is already weak.

Macro projections point the same direction. The ECB’s September 2025 highlighted subdued foreign demand into 2026. The European Commission’s Autumn 2025 Economic likewise described modest growth and slowing potential output, with the euro area “broadly mirroring” a low-growth profile through 2027.

The risk, then, is not imminent collapse. It is a slow institutional drift into a world where weak demand becomes the default and inflation repeatedly undershoots.

Policy constraints in a weak global environment: what the ECB can’t do alone

The ECB still possesses powerful instruments. But recent experience has reinforced a hard constraint: monetary policy cannot reliably compensate for chronic fiscal shortfalls. Near the effective lower bound, easing works mainly through expectations, credit spreads and asset prices — channels that weaken when firms are pessimistic and governments are tightening rather than supporting demand. The ECB clearly reflects these limits in its own assessment of subdued demand and weakening inflation dynamics in its staff macroeconomic projections.

Fiscal policy, therefore, is the missing leg of stabilization. Yet across much of the euro zone, it remains constrained by high public debt and political resistance to deeper fiscal integration.

Even after the pandemic-era innovations, EU-level fiscal instruments remain too small, too conditional and too slow to counter large macroeconomic shocks.

This institutional bias toward insufficient stimulus gives the euro area its deflationary tilt: Demand support arrives late, at limited scale and often only after private-sector weakness has already become entrenched.

The global backdrop makes this constraint more binding. Europe’s drift toward low inflation is not occurring in isolation. Many major economies remain below their pre-pandemic growth trajectories. Persistent global demand weakness and slowing medium-term growth are documented in the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic , October 2024.

That removes an old escape valve. In earlier cycles, sluggish internal demand could be partially offset by strong foreign absorption. Today, with global slack widespread, domestic policy paralysis becomes harder to disguise — and its macroeconomic consequences harder to reverse.

What would prove this view wrong?

Europe is not facing a new crisis, but something more insidious: a gradual return to a low-inflation equilibrium driven by weak demand, fiscal inertia and a weakening core.

A deflation trap is not inevitable. This argument would be overturned by any of these three developments:

First, a genuine, scalable fiscal stabilization capacity at the euro-area level — one that can be deployed quickly, without prolonged wrangling, when shocks hit. This would require more than ad hoc crisis instruments. It would mean a standing fiscal mechanism with sufficient size, automaticity and political legitimacy to act counter-cyclically, especially in member states with limited national fiscal space.

Second, a sustained revival of German domestic demand, driven by investment and consumption rather than only temporary public-spending bursts. A potential caveat is �ұ�������Բ�’s shift toward higher defense spending. In principle, rising military outlays could support domestic demand and soften disinflationary pressure in the euro-area core. In practice, defense spending translates into activity slowly: Procurement cycles are long, capacity constraints bind, and a meaningful share of spending leaks abroad via imports. Unless defense rearmament is paired with a broader, investment-led fiscal pivot — at scale and with speed — it is unlikely to offset structural slack.

Third, a durable rise in euro-area wage growth and inflation expectations under a genuinely symmetric policy regime — one in which undershooting the inflation target triggers as forceful a response as overshooting. Absent such symmetry, disinflation risks becoming self-reinforcing, pushing real interest rates higher and entrenching low-inflation dynamics.

Without these shifts, Europe’s institutional configuration is likely to keep producing the same macroeconomic outcome: chronic underperformance and a persistent pull toward low inflation.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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I was beyond excited. I had come to Ukraine to see friends. This trip was about showing solidarity, having my feet on the ground during the war — an expression of real love for Ukraine and Ukrainian friends. Since December 2022, I had not seen any of my friends in Ukraine. 

When the October 7 attacks in Israel happened in 2023, I became consumed with advocacy for Israel and the hostages. My work in Ukraine was effectively halted. I stayed in touch with friends on Signal and WhatsApp, a poor alternative to being in person. Now I was finally coming back for a short weekend to Ukraine.

Surviving the night

At 12:45 AM, not even an hour after arriving at the Hilton, a friend called me to tell me that a massive Russian attack was anticipated. Translation — we were in for a long night. I showered and shaved quickly. I had arrived from Boston after a 24-hour journey, yet I was not even tired. I was elated to be back in Ukraine. At 1:21 AM, all hell broke loose. The first sirens blasted on my phone and outside. But I was astoundingly calm. This is a drill I know well, both in Ukraine and Israel.

When I checked into the Hilton, I asked for directions to the shelter, so I was prepared. There were two options: the subway across the street or the parking garage attached to the Hilton. I chose the garage. I texted my husband, Jack, and told him not to worry, in case he saw the news of an attack.

An hour after the attacks started, we were still in the shelter, and the alarms were not subsiding. This seemed unusual. I posted on social media that something seemed out of the ordinary — there was no sign of an all-clear. The air alarm app on my phone showed all of Ukraine “red,” meaning under alert. That effectively means that 30 million people were in shelters or taking cover in any manner possible. But we did not have more news.

I stayed in the shelter most of the night. The crowd was a random collection of visitors, diplomats and aid workers. At 4:30 AM, I went to my room. The alert was not over, but we also did not have any clear news. It was only around 7:30 AM when I was able to see the news reports. Kyiv was absorbing one of the largest waves of drones and missiles of the war. Russia had close to 500 drones and dozens of powerful missiles.

We had an all-clear only that Saturday evening, but in the afternoon, I went with friends to survey some of the damage to the apartment buildings. I helped shovel rubble with a group of Ukrainian men, while air raid alerts were still sounding. We moved our location a few times to avoid drones, which were circling Kyiv all day. By all accounts, for a war with many dozens of bad days, December 27 stood out because of the concentration of firepower at Kyiv.

The all clear came at 6:00 PM, close to 17 hours after the attacks started. That evening, several friends joined me for dinner at the Hilton. We talked about more than the war. It was great. I was meeting Valeriya, the new wife of my friend Roman, for the first time. My filmmaker friend Dima and his wife Bella, a gifted photographer, were with me. Very much like in Israel, we had a gap with no sirens, and we seized it for an evening of being together. It was like the war did not even exist for a few hours.

Why Ukraine matters

I am not Ukrainian. So why do I care about this country?

Ukraine is an extraordinary place. My mother-in-law, Ruth, was a child Holocaust survivor from Rivne, in Western Ukraine. I am a Russian speaker. I am also an attorney who has represented political opponents of Russian President Vladimir Putin. I see Russia as on par with Hamas, Iran and other states that support terror.  

I had the opportunity to serve Ukraine in a volunteer capacity in 2022, during the first year of the war. I got to know the country very well. Ukraine is vast. The people are exceptional, defined by an adaptability and agility that also defines Israel and Israelis. I felt very much at home with Ukrainians from the first time I crossed the border. And I fell in love with Ukraine. The country has issues, but also exudes a self-awareness about its own imperfections. Ukraine is a place of extraordinary bravery, history and vastness. I have driven the country from the Polish border to the eastern front and have gotten to know Odessa and the south.

I also understand Ukrainians who fear that relinquishing land to Russia will only amplify the vulnerability of the entire country. This war has been brutal for Ukrainians. They deserve protection from the international community. Russia’s war in Ukraine is unlawful. 

As an Israeli-American, I identify with the wish to be a democracy and to defeat more powerful, aggressive neighbors.

Russia continues to target civilian infrastructure with impunity, including but not limited to apartment buildings, schools and hospitals. This tactic has transformed the war from being one between two states to being one where Russia is at war with average, civilian Ukrainians. 

In my opinion, Russia’s objective is to erase Ukraine. Ukrainian families across the country are vulnerable to attacks from drones and ballistic missiles. And Ukrainians are skeptical about Europe or the US really backing up any security guarantees with a peace deal.

As an American, Israeli and Jew, I stand with Ukraine.

This is the war of our generation. Ukrainians deserve good allies. That’s why I was there. And it is why I will go back.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Russia’s December 27 Attack on Kyiv: A Personal Account appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Moldova does not border Russia. Nonetheless, Moldovans feel threatened by Russia. In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, there were concrete concerns that Russia would deem Transnistria, a pro-Russian breakaway region of Moldova, as part of , the historical name used during the Russian Empire to denote what is today large sections of southern Ukraine and Transnistria. Following the invasion, unconfirmed rumors circulated, with Russia warning Moldova’s President, Maia Sandu, that Russian troops would (the self-declared, unrecognized capital of Transnistria) within a couple of days and that she should leave the country to ensure her personal security.

Moldova is an of democracy, bordered by Ukraine, Romania and Transnistria. On the one hand, the of Transnistria has taken a backseat to the Russia–Ukraine war. On the other hand, Moldova is a for EU membership, with potential membership by 2028 or 2029. In a region often described as the new “powder keg” of Europe, Moldova’s sustainable growth and security should be a primary concern for US policymakers. 

In particular, security guarantees for Moldova need to mirror those for Ukraine. These guarantees need to be a fundamental part of any lasting peace arrangement between Russia and Ukraine. Absent these guarantees, Moldova could become a new battleground for Russia, which has shown in the current war with Ukraine that it will assert its power on the borders of Europe, obstructing political, economic and social aspirations of former Soviet states to align with the US and the EU.

Moldova and the fear of the growing threat of Russia

Security in Moldova is fragile, making it a potential flashpoint. Wedged between Ukraine and Moldova, Transnistria hosts Russian troops. The current number of troops is not certain, but estimates suggest there are approximately Russian troops in Transnistria. Additionally, Russia has its intentions to expand this presence. The US also views Russian military presence as an for preventing Moldova from joining the West. Indeed, any military conflict on Moldovan territory could thwart the country’s aspirations to integrate into Europe.

In addition, Russian propaganda exploits Moldova’s challenges with economic development and public acknowledgement of corruption. Russian media builds a fake narrative of Moldova as a failed state that needs to “reunite” with Mother Russia and its “traditional” values. The reality is quite different. Moldova scores a respectable position of 76 of 180 countries on Transparency International’s , ahead of Albania, South Africa and India. For context, Malta and Romania tie for 65 of 180 on the Index. And Moldova is increasing the scope of its bilateral relationship with the US, casting its lot for a with the West. 

Although of Moldovans declared that their language is Romanian, Russian is still widely spoken throughout various regions. This increases concerns with many Moldovans that Russia may seek to replicate its strategy in Eastern Ukraine of exploiting a Russian-speaking minority to justify dividing and conquering the country. One cannot discount the psychological impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the people of Moldova. Russian troops at the border of Moldova amplify national security concerns for Moldova. Simply put, Russian power is visible to Moldovans.

According to the for the Study of War, Russia actively sought to derail elections in Moldova in 2025 precisely to block its integration into democracy and Europe. This should be cause for real concern for the Trump Administration when evaluating and mitigating the risk of additional conflict in the region. The broadly accepted local sentiment is that last year’s elections in Moldova, which provided a mandate to pursue EU membership and to continue to integrate Moldova into Europe, could be considered as a turning point in the history of the country, demonstrating its choice toward the West, democracy and Europe. This fragile feeling of victory could easily be lost if there are no security guarantees for Ukraine and if the local population is led to feel insecure because of an increased threat from Russia. 

In the meantime, Russian troops in Transnistria threaten regional stability and demonstrate Russia’s intent to assert its interests. Covert election interference by Russia, while less visible, threatens the democratic process in Moldova. 

Peripheral vision on the regional level means securing Moldova

In negotiating a deal between Russia and Ukraine, the Trump team needs peripheral vision about the region. This means having a plan for Moldova as well as for countries in similar predicaments, such as , where Russian aggression is also tangible and disruptive to democracy.

Miscalculating the scope of security guarantees could leave Moldova in limbo, undermining any potential long-term cessation of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine. Geography matters here. Moldova is a short drive from Odessa, one of Ukraine’s key ports on the Black Sea. Destabilizing Moldova would be one way for Russia to undermine any lasting peace arrangement. This makes it urgent for the US to involve Moldova as a direct stakeholder in any deal. In addition, enabling a continued presence of Russian troops located in Transnistria could also pose a military threat to Ukraine, especially Ukrainian military forces in Odessa, which is Ukraine’s lifeline on the Black Sea.

The US must be prepared to have skin in the game to protect Moldova

Putin’s team knows Russia’s long game, which is destabilizing its neighbors to prevent them from integrating into Europe. American policymakers and negotiators must understand the degree to which Moldova could become the site of a future war with Russia.  

Any negotiation with Ukraine must result in permanent and workable security guarantees for the entire region. This means Americans need to have real skin in the game, potentially to go to war with Russia when those guarantees come due, in the event of a Russian invasion of Moldova through Transnistria. Slicing Moldova out of a final agreement with Ukraine may expose the region to more armed conflict.

Moldova’s future and the requirements for peace

Recently, on the 34th anniversary of Moldova’s independence, Secretary of State Marco Rubio that “The United States and Moldova share a clear-eyed commitment to building a safer, stronger, more prosperous future.” This indicates a promising position for Moldova within the Trump Administration’s vision for the region.

Moldovans want their future to be directed westward, as part of Europe, and in a strong bilateral relationship with the US. The only sustainable way to achieve this is to carve out specific, actionable security guarantees for Moldova. 

Russia would like to obstruct Moldova’s gravitation westward and would have to pay a hefty price for any increase in troops in Transnistria. Anecdotally, Russia appears to have been impervious to economic pressures created by its war with Ukraine. Indeed, economic sanctions are inconvenient to Russia, but not a real deterrent, unless oil exports are .

But Russia may be more vulnerable with the recent of Venezuela as a strategic partner, potentially exposing Russian President Vladimir Putin as an emperor without clothes.

Now may be the time for the Trump Administration to press Russia at the negotiating table. If peace between Ukraine and Russia can be achieved, it will come after arduous work by professional negotiators who know the region, Moldova’s security position included. 

The stakes are high. Americans need an all-star negotiating team that can factor into any lasting deal real security for Moldova, Ukraine’s small neighbor to the west, and a democracy aspiring for full integration into Europe. We need to think of Moldova as a in any final peace deal, with Ukraine and Moldova having a secure place in Europe.

[ edited this piece.]

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And I found that a serpent was coming towards me. It was thirty cubits in length, and its beard was more than two cubits in length, and its body was covered with gold scales, and its eyebrows were of pure lapis lazuli…

And it opened its mouth to me, as I was lying flat on my stomach before it, and it said unto me, “Who hath brought thee hither? Who hath brought thee hither, O miserable one?”

That is from the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the oldest complete story that has come down to us from antiquity. It was written in Hieratic during the Middle Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, and I read it in the original Egyptian from the comfort of my bed, four thousand years after it was written.

Reading an ancient story is an experience unlike any other. It is a glimpse into the mind of an alien — utterly foreign, yet oddly familiar. A yawning gap of time, culture and language divides me from the author, but I read his tale nevertheless, and I marveled when the sailor encountered the serpent god with eyebrows of lapis lazuli.

I’ve often felt the pressure to better myself, and I occasionally crack a technical manual or a literary classic in my spare time in deference to that pressure. I’ve known colleagues whose hobbies are essentially identical to their work — Nothing would depress me more, though I’d probably be better at my job.

Instead, my hobbies are almost militantly useless. I write a blog in which I the hot-dog-ness of various sandwiches, and spin density waves if they were made of guinea pigs. The only foreign languages I speak are Latin and Ancient Egyptian, into which The House of the Rising Sun (so useful). The history books I love best are the furthest removed from my own time. In general, my delight in a hobby is inversely proportional to its utility.

But despite, or perhaps because of, the unavoidable pressure to be productive that pervades modern life, I feel that my useless hobbies are not only personally valuable, but essential to a life well-lived, and I think the ancient philosophers tend to agree with me.

Crawling in the mud: Zhuangzi and ��ú��é��

��ú��é��, nonaction in accord with the natural flow of the universe, was praiseworthy to the Daoist sage Zhuangzi, born 2300 years ago in ancient China. Zhuangzi was renowned across China for his wisdom, and his counsel was greatly desired by the political elites of the time. When the duke of Qi, one of many desiring wise counsellors, invited Zhuangzi to become his chief minister, his messengers found the old sage fishing among the river reeds. Upon receiving this job offer, Zhuangzi did not look up from his rod and :

“I have heard that there is a sacred turtle in Chu that died three thousand years ago. The duke keeps it in a casket wrapped in cloth and has placed it in a temple. May I inquire whether the sacred turtle wanted to be dead and to have its bones venerated by man? Or was its intention to stay alive and crawl around in the mud, dragging its tail?”

“Naturally,” replied the messengers, “it hoped to crawl around in the mud, dragging its tail.”

“Go home,” said Zhuangzi, “I also want to crawl around in the mud, dragging my tail.”

The serenity of Epicurus

, too, understood the value of nonproductive pursuits. He was a Hellenistic philosopher who suffered from chronic pain all his life, and perhaps fittingly, developed a philosophy focused on pleasure and pain. To Epicurus, what is true pleasure? True pleasure is not the fleeting pleasures of wealth, rich food and debauchery, but a restrained, mental satisfaction that lingers, like heat from the embers of a hearth. True pleasure is the absence of pain and freedom from unnecessary desires.

This pleasure comes with freedom from the desire for wealth, freedom from the fear of death and of the gods, the bond of the tight-knit community and from pure intellectual exploration — this pleasure is serenity, ataraxia in Greek. The fear of death was simply one more pain to overcome in the life of Epicurus, and so his followers wrote thusly on their tombstones: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — I was not, then I was, I am no more, I do not mind. 

Epicurus reminds us that the pursuit of wealth does only so much to decrease the pain of life. For indeed, what shall it profit a man, to gain the world but lose his soul?

Aretḗ and the joy of useless excellence

But for me, there is still more to life than ��ú��é�� and ataraxia, for there is pleasure too in purpose. Former US President John F. Kennedy, another great philosopher, spoke to this purpose when he of the Apollo moon mission that we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win.

Indeed, to strive for one’s excellence, for one’s �������ḗ, in any field of human endeavor, for no practical benefit whatsoever — this is the highest pursuit of man, his virtue par excellence, and his greatest good. To strive for mastery in a field, regardless of practical benefit and indeed in spite of it, is a noble and fulfilling pursuit.

So why do I waste my time? To exist in non-action, to be free of the burden of utility, to find ataraxia, to strive for something difficult, yet not lose myself in pursuit of material gain, and because ultimately, it is my time to waste.

In the words of Seneca, omnia aliena sunt, tempus tantum nostrum est — All else is foreign to us, only time is ours. And I intend to spend mine generously, spiced with those useless hobbies that bring me joy.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The problem is that this tendency continues reliance on arms controlled by foreign governments, hinders the development of European-made products and, as many have found, means very long wait times.   

Last September, Lockheed Martin the largest order of Patriot missile defense interceptors in the company’s history. For a whopping , the US Army signed a multiyear procurement contract for 1,970 PAC-3 MSE missiles designed to intercept ballistic and cruise missiles, aircraft and hypersonic threats. Major General Frank Lozano, Program Executive Office Missiles and Space, signing a contract extending to 2026 enables “the Army to procure a larger quantity of missiles for more rapid delivery, thus filling our inventory faster.”����

Lockheed has sped up production to fill this order, but non-American customers should be worried — especially European countries, as the continent races to increase the EU’s defense capabilities with the growing threat from Russia. The US foreign military oversees the sales of such technology and can divert defense goods at will. 

Switzerland learned this in July when told them that the five Patriot systems they ordered from Raytheon in 2022 would now be going to Ukraine, with the new delivery date unknown. The wait might be long, as Germany to buy two new Patriots ($1 billion apiece) to donate to Ukraine in exchange for getting priority for the production of new systems.��

Countries that source off-the-shelf products from outside Europe, mainly from the United States, justify this by claiming that it is faster. But this position is clearly an obstacle to the development of sovereign European solutions, and the argument of availability, as Switzerland has learned, is not bulletproof.

Hindering EU projects

Returning to von der Leyen’s , one of the main problems with EU Member States supplying armies with non-EU products is that it threatens European defense projects under development and lowers demand for products already available, thus reducing production rates and increasing prices. This perpetuates a cycle of dependence on foreign industry and foreign governments.��

As countries rapidly seek to build air defense capabilities, the Patriot system illustrates this conundrum. As Germany and Switzerland place orders and EU countries buy them for Ukraine, Denmark recently that it has instead selected its European equivalent, the SAMP/T NG air defense system from the EUROSAM joint venture between MBDA and Thales. Equipped with the Aster family of missiles, which was recently used in combat, the system has just received an upgrade with a successful live-fire test.��

Given the US Army’s recent order for Patriot missiles, the off-the-shelf argument for buying the Patriot system was problematic. Prior to Denmark’s decision, Danish defense analyst Hans Peter Michaelsen , “I expect Denmark to choose European, partly because it will ensure faster delivery. There is an enormous queue for the Patriot missile system. It would also be a strong signal from Denmark that we support the European defense industry, which needs to ramp up.”��

Moreover, the value-for-money argument was essential. The Patriot and SAMP/T systems have almost identical uses, capabilities and tested success rates, with the European system outperforming in some areas. But the SAMP/T costs a third less than the Patriot. Following Denmark’s decision, Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen , “This is not a rejection of Patriot, it is a selection of what is best.”

The Ukrainian/Russian conflict also highlights the need for EU Member States to equip themselves with deep precision strike arms capable of medium- and long-range hits. To this end, MBDA is developing its Land Cruise Missile () as “part of an effort to establish a sovereign European capability for ground-based precision strike systems”. Based on the battle-tested MdCN (Missile de Croisière Naval), LCM is to be tested between 2027 and 2028 and is considered a potential component for the multinational European Long-Range Strike Approach () initiative.��

However, several EU countries are considering solutions outside Europe. The Netherlands is nearly 200 Tomahawks of various versions for its surface vessels, and Germany is currently buying American Typhon systems equipped with Raytheon-produced Tomahawk missiles, arguing that this option will be quicker. However, the lack of orders from the US government in recent years has resulted in a reduction in production capacity, leading to longer delivery times.��

Missile specialist Fabian Hoffmann , “Unsurprisingly, US Navy Justification Books list a total lead time of 2.5 to 3 years for newly ordered Tomahawks. Germany would also face competition for building slots with US-based and foreign customers and would initially be placed at the back of the queue.”��

The problem is not just with US defense companies. The purchase of Starliner drones that Switzerland ordered from Israel’s Elbit Systems in 2015, with an expected delivery date of 2019, has still not all arrived. In 2023, “decided to focus its production capacities on the war effort against Gaza, postponing delivery to the end of 2026”. And the ones that have been delivered do not work as advertised. Legal action has been filed, but if Bern pulls out of the deal, they lose and risk counterclaims from Elbit.��

Denmark also had with an Elbit delivery when the country ordered 19 ATMOS 2000 self-propelled guns and eight PULS rocket launchers. When Denmark donated 19 of its Caesar artillery systems to Ukraine, it was expected that Ukraine would reorder from the French manufacturer Nexter, but Denmark instead purchased from Israel, claiming it would be quicker. “Now Danish officials regret the decision” because the systems they ordered are incompatible with their IT systems and will take three times longer than expected to integrate. Plus, the Danish Armed Forces do not have the associated ammunition and infrastructure, which could cost them an additional .��

No strings attached

Another problem with buying armaments from abroad is that countries are not autonomous regarding when/if they can be used. Ukraine learned this the hard way as its army was restricted from using missiles in its arsenal to counterattack Russia, despite being pummelled by Russian missiles. 

The New York Times , “The United States, Britain and France have provided small batches of ballistic and cruise missiles, but their use is restricted so that they cannot be used to strike major Russian cities like Moscow.” Ukraine has therefore funneled money into developing its own deep strike cruise missiles, no strings attached.��

Ultimately, urgently filling strategic gaps through off-the-shelf purchases may be legitimate, provided that these acquisitions meet all the strategic objectives pursued. The aim is therefore to stock European shelves with European products that meet the need, strengthening both European armed forces and European industries. 

The think tank deems this feasible: “development cycles can accelerate substantially in moments of dramatic increases in defense spending and reprioritization of defense, while production costs should fall substantially … Europe thus has a chance to rearm and reduce its dependence on the US within the requisite timeframe, but only if it can undertake major reform of both the demand and the supply side of the defense market in Europe”. The focus should then be on creating enough demand for the EU industrial base to be able to become Europe’s sole defense provider.��

( edited this piece)

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Foreign intelligence networks in the EU

It is an open secret that foreign intelligence networks operate widely in the EU, exfiltrating valuable information and distorting the workings of��democratic institutions. The scale borders on absurdity: Belgian security officials that some embassies are one-fifth intelligence. , “[i]ntelligence agencies have been sounding the alarm that authoritarian networks are using espionage tactics to gain political, military and diplomatic advantages across Europe” — an assessment borne out by a succession of scandals that have left deep, unaddressed wounds in Europe’s democratic institutions.

From scandals to brazen to operations against , foreign interference has become a fact of European life. This is the direct result of a structural flaw that Europe has refused to correct: the lack of a purpose-built central capacity to defend the EU against hostile intelligence work.��

To be clear, Europe’s problem is not a lack of intelligence agencies; France alone has six, but they all have a to protect national institutions, not EU ones. While Belgium technically has jurisdiction, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) immunity is the country’s to police the hemicycle. It is hard enough to enforce the rules against , but foreign-directed subversion requires dedicated counterintelligence capabilities that Europe simply does not possess. European counterintelligence rests on structures which operational or enforcement powers; the European Union Intelligence and Situation Centre (EU-INTCEN) has been as “merely a mixing bowl of liaison officers.”

Scandals and limitations

The limitations of Europe’s fragmented intelligence architecture were laid bare during the terrorist attacks of the 2010s, most notoriously the Paris attacks of November 13, 2015 — the in Europe that decade. The were legion. Before the attack, various agencies in France knew the attackers had been radicalized but failed to communicate amongst themselves; meanwhile, Belgian failures to share information with EU partners allowed the ringleader to evade Greek authorities before the attack and for the only surviving attacker to flee France in the aftermath.��

Europe’s spy agencies have even come perilously close to the worst-case scenario, as seen in the of Russia’s infiltration — verging on takeover — of Austria’s domestic intelligence agency. The penetration was so complete, and its failures of such , that the agency was .

In a testament to how long Europe allowed its heartland to become a staging ground for Moscow, Russia’s operations in Austria are now so well-known that they merit a dedicated .��The same counterintelligence fight extends throughout the rest of Europe, with similar high-level intelligence agency breaches from to .

This permeability is being thoroughly exploited, but the public is only beginning to understand how deeply European institutions have been compromised. The outrageous case of Latvian MEP Tatjana Ždanoka, exposed in January 2024 by�� as a Russian Federal Security Service asset, poses two questions: why would such a revelation come from investigative journalists, not European security services, and how is it possible that Ždanoka was allegedly reporting to Moscow for two full decades before being discovered?

But what truly showed the frailty of the system is the fact that Ždanoka remained an active MEP for six months after the allegations became public, facing only a nominal fine of , or five days’ parliamentary allowance. This scandal was closely followed by another related to Russian influence in Parliament (revolving around the now-sanctioned network) that further illustrated how is eroding European democracy.��

These are isolated . In 2024, an advisor to Maximilian Krah, far-right MEP of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party and of the China-EU Friendship Group, was on charges of spying for China as part of a espionage operation. The did not begin or end with Krah; in the same month, it emerged that another AfD candidate, Petr Bystron, of accepting €20,000 to spread Kremlin propaganda. The prior year, Krah’s involvement in a “” for China had already been revealed, and he had been “over alleged payments from sources close to the Kremlin.” At the time of this publication, both and remain active MEPs.��

But none of these scandals is as well-known as , which uncovered that MEPs (including the ) and their staff had accepted cash bribes from Qatar, Morocco and Mauritania. Qatargate exposed both blatant corruption and the of Europe’s defenses: nearly three years on, no one implicated in the case is behind bars, and the more recent may be headed down . The stagnant, opaque response speaks to the need for an EU-level counterintelligence service nearly as much as the scandals themselves.

Internal divisions and the EU’s security crisis

Why, when faced with such overwhelming evidence, can the EU not form a coherent policy response? One answer is that internal threats have compromised unity. Some Member States have deployed advanced spyware against political opponents, including EU officials, while others have degraded the collective security of Europe by tolerating the operation of hostile intelligence services on their soil. Traces of Pegasus, Candiru and Predator spyware have been found on MEPs’ devices, which may have originated from both governments. The Hungarian national intelligence service has also wiretapped and hacked EU officials, cementing Budapest’s role as pre-eminent spoiler under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.��

Europe now faces a dual crisis of vulnerability and mistrust. The brought this debate into the open, but like the EU reports on and , it has been followed by resounding inaction. Clearly, Europe does not need more reports; it needs actual capacity — in this case, a purpose-built counterintelligence institution with a proactive mandate and enforcement capabilities.��

Critics warn that former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö’s vision of a more integrated European intelligence structure threatens national sovereignty. But nothing erodes sovereignty faster than letting foreign powers buy, blackmail or infiltrate their way into Europe’s political process. The risks surrounding American intelligence cooperation are real, but they have become a convenient distraction from the harder work Europe must do at home.

Freezing out the United States is a defensive gesture, not a strategic solution. What Europe truly needs is a joint counterintelligence body with the authority to investigate malign activity across borders and initiate arrests, giving Europe the moral authority to raise concerns of compromise with intelligence partners when necessary. 

Most will say that political realities make such reform impossible, but those political realities have been engineered by the very infiltration and exploitation that reform would combat. To resist change now is to concede the success of a subversion project still in progress. The question is whether action will come in time to prevent not only the next catastrophic breach, but the complete loss of faith in the European system of governance.

[ edited this piece.]

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At the height of her global adoration, Bardot was revered in France. President Charles de Gaulle famously remarked that her contribution to French exports rivaled that of French automobile manufacturer Renault. From 1969 to 1972, she as the model for Marianne, the symbol of French liberty and the Republic. And in 1985, she was France’s highest honor, the Légion d’Honneur. As her looks faded and film roles dried up, however, she morphed into a very different kind of figure — one some continued to adore, but others found deeply repugnant.

And God Created Woman

Parisian grew up in a Roman Catholic family. Her father was an industrialist; her mother, a dance enthusiast, enrolled Brigitte in classes. She performed well enough to gain admission to the National Superior Conservatory for Music and Dance in 1947. As a teenager, she began modeling for fashion magazines. She married film director Roger Vadim in 1952 and made her screen debut in Jean Boyer’s Le Trou Normand that same year. Among her early appearances was a small role in the British comedy Doctor at Sea (1955).

The following year came (Et Dieu… créa la femme), Bardot’s breakthrough. A decade before Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., Bardot played an uninhibited 18-year-old, widely labelled a “nymphet” at the time. She soon acquired the epithet “.” This was the mid-1950s, when the term “objectification” was used almost entirely in literary criticism rather than feminist discourse. (As in “the author objectifies the character’s emotions perfectly.”)

Nothing succeeds like scandal, and the 1950s were no exception. Religious and censorship groups, especially in the United States, were outraged by Bardot’s on-screen sexuality — outrage amplified when it emerged she was having an with her married costar Jean-Louis Trintignant. Parallels with her contemporary , whose affair with Richard Burton made her tabloid prey, are obvious. Both women were vilified.

Bardot herself acknowledged that her fame rested more on image than craft: “I started out as a lousy actress and have remained one,” she once . Perhaps this is why she turned briefly to singing. In 1967, she recorded Je t’aime… moi non plus with her then lover Serge Gainsbourg — a provocative song that seemed to eavesdrop on lovers in flagrante. Bardot asked for the track to be withdrawn; the version released — and made notorious — was recorded later by Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin in 1969.

Bigotry

In the 1970s, Bardot to animal welfare. A committed vegetarian, she fulminated against what she regarded as needless cruelty in practices ranging from seal-culling to the horsemeat trade. Halal slaughter, which does not require stunning, became one of her particular targets.

She campaigned vigorously, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the Welfare and Protection of Animals in 1986 and raising substantial funds, including half a million dollars from auctioning her jewelry. She wrote protest letters to world leaders, including China’s Jiang Zemin and Denmark’s Queen Margrethe II. Today, celebrities regularly wander into ethical and political terrain; at the time, Bardot’s activism felt more startling. And she didn’t stop there. In 1992, she Bernard d’Ormale, a former adviser to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the far-right Front National, and began publishing her views.

Bardot repeatedly France’s immigration policy, with particular hostility toward Muslims. She was convicted five times of inciting racial and religious hatred. Like Taylor, Bardot was an independent, self-willed woman who cared little whether she was loved or hated. Unlike Taylor, Bardot veered into far-right politics and unapologetic Islamophobia. As the only French celebrity openly to defend the far right, she must have realized how much this damaged her reputation. Perhaps this motivated her decision to live her final years reclusively in St Tropez, where she died.

Arts and artists

So how do we parse La Bardot? In the 1960s, she had few, if any, rivals as a symbol of female sexual liberation, and at the time, this felt revolutionary. Simone de Beauvoir her “the locomotive of women’s history.” Today, many would say she also played too willingly into male fantasy. Her animal-welfare campaigning achieved real legislative impact; her bigotry caused real harm. Both statements are true.

Can anyone who lived through the 1960s remember Bardot simply as the cinematic siren without wondering whether the bigotry was always there, merely lacking expression? And even if it was, would it have provoked the same response then as now? Simply “backtracking,” as has done, is an easy option. The harder question is whether we can meaningfully separate art (in the broadest sense) from the artist. Bardot emerged at a time before women were widely encouraged to free themselves from domestic subservience. appeared only in 1963, yet the values she later embraced leave her firmly on the wrong side of history.

Perhaps the more unsettling truth is that Bardot forces us to confront our own complicity. We didn’t merely consume her image; we helped manufacture it. The erotic fantasy she embodied was fed by studios, journalists, politicians and audiences who thrilled in her transgression while quietly accepting the cultural status quo that made such fantasies necessary. Bardot didn’t invent misogyny any more than she did spectacle, but she allowed herself to be a convenient vessel. In reassessing her, we are not only re-evaluating an individual’s life; we are examining the culture that first exalted her, then recoiled in horror when she revealed that the conservatism and cruelty embedded in that culture were hers as well. We arrive at similar conclusions when listening to Michael Jackson, R. Kelly or Sean “Diddy” Combs.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of the book .]

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A recent coauthored by Wharton accounting professor , titled “Transparency and Real Effects of Climate Stress Tests for Banks,” shows how regulators’ mandated climate stress tests increased transparency at European banks in their reporting of climate risks and led to a reduced climate risk exposure in their loan portfolios. Next-order effects extended to the high-risk borrowers of those banks, which were forced to adjust their investment strategies.

Hail’s coauthors are three experts from the University of Mannheim in Germany — , chair of the business administration and accounting department, and doctoral students and . They analyzed data from the 230 largest European banks from 2017 to 2022. These banks account for a large share of total lending in the European market.

“The stress tests could act as change agents for banks to become more aware of climate risks in their portfolios, and to integrate them into their financial risk management,” said Hail. “Ultimately, climate risks affect a borrower’s financial situation and are thus equivalent to the common credit risk.”

Regulators are using climate stress tests instead of imposing direct mandates to curb lending to high transition-risk borrowers, he noted. “With heightened awareness and better data, we expect incentivized banks to expand transparency, adjust lending standards, and reduce their loan exposure to climate risks,” the paper stated.

Not all banks are equal

European banking regulators started to introduce climate stress tests from 2019 onwards, which required banks to methodically collect data and measure the climate risk in their lending portfolios. The study’s sample of 230 banks was made up of 55 banks that were subject to the climate stress tests, which formed the “treated group” in the analysis. These banks are typically the largest financial institutions in an economy. The remaining 175 banks served as the “control group.” The authors tracked changes in transparency about climate risks between the two groups, both before and after the climate stress test mandate.

An increase in transparency was evident in just about half of the 55 banks of the treated group. These were banks that already had a history of commitment to climate issues, such as having dedicated board committees for ESG issues, faced market-based pressure from outside investors and analysts to become climate-conscious, or were exposed to substantial climate risks in their portfolios.

A Climate Disclosure Score developed by the authors shows that after the stress tests, banks with such market-induced incentives — the paper referred to them as “committed banks” — increased their transparency by between 16% and 18% relative to the remaining banks. The effect translates into about six new disclosure items on their climate risk exposure and how they handle the climate risks in their lending portfolios.

But the effects did not stop with more transparency. Committed banks also actively managed their climate risk exposure and shifted their lending from long-term to short-term maturities for borrowers with high climate risks.

Constraints on high-risk borrowers

Next, the study focused on the stress-tested banks’ borrowers, totaling about 66,000 mostly private corporate clients, and analyzed their financing and investment strategies. Here, the paper tests regulators’ commonly held assertion that by forcing banks to be more transparent, the climate-risk policies would trickle down to bank borrowers and lead them to adjust their operations to a low-carbon economy.

The authors found that committed banks subject to climate stress tests — and only those — imposed funding and investment constraints on high-risk borrowers that faced significant risks in transitioning to low-carbon operations. Such high-risk corporate borrowers reduced their total and long-term loan financing, which in turn hampered their growth prospects and investment activities.

“We clearly see a link between banks being more conscientious about their lending to borrowers with high climate risks and these borrowers being constrained in their growth,” said Hail. “But we only find these effects for a small subset of banks that have good reasons to implement changes.” For the other banks, the study finds no evidence that they start more actively managing their climate risks in their lending portfolios. Rather, to the contrary, there are signs that these banks tried to gain business from their competitors.

One unintended outcome of the climate stress tests at committed banks could be that high-risk borrowers take their business to less committed and less tightly regulated banks, Hail said. Indeed, the study finds some evidence of such substitution taking place. “If anything, borrowers from exempted banks expand their long-term loan financing after the climate stress tests,” the paper stated. “Thus, the average borrower in the EU seems little affected by arguably stricter climate risk provisions for banks.”

Banks as agents of change

In the US, large banks with more than $10 billion in assets are required to conduct annual stress tests to check their ability to withstand recessions and severe economic downturns, but not climate stress tests. Hail did not expect US regulators to mandate climate stress tests on banks anytime in the foreseeable future. The Securities and Exchange Commission in 2024 adopted rules to mandate “material climate risk disclosures” by public companies, but they have since been .

Nonetheless, Hail expects European regulators to continue their push towards more climate-friendly, but less intrusive, policies like climate stress tests. “European regulators, central bankers, and politicians see climate stress tests as one way to nudge corporations towards a less carbon intense, greener economy,” Hail said. “Ultimately, however, our study shows that whether such policies succeed heavily depends on what incentives are in place for these banks.”

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The ancient Greeks were, quite reasonably, concerned by this question, because their democracies died all the time. In fact, this happened so much that the most eminent philosophers and historians of the classical period developed a theory that rationalizes the rise and fall of democracies, oligarchies and tyrannies. In this article, we will investigate whether their theory, called anacyclosis, holds up under scrutiny, and by scrutiny, I mean Monte Carlo simulations of government transition based on historical data from 1,035 Greek city-states. But first, some history.

The poleis of Ancient Greece

The peculiarities of classical Greece make empirical theories of political revolution much easier to imagine than in, say, the Persian Empire, which was a hereditary monarchy for pretty much its entire history. The dominant mode of social organization in the archaic and classical Greek periods is the polis, the city-state. Usually, there’s an independent mother city (Athens, Sparta, etc.) that politically, economically and culturally dominates its surrounding hinterland. Each city has its own constitution, or form of government, but shares a common Greek culture and language with its neighboring poleis.

This social structure is as dynamic as it is unstable, and there were many political revolutions. The ancient world’s most sophisticated theories of political evolution grew out of this dynamic — they classify government into a few categories based on which group holds power, and posit that they devolve sequentially from higher to lower forms. Let’s take a quick look.

Governmental types in Ancient Greek thought

The Inventory of Archaic and Classical Greek Poleis, about which we will have much more to say later, gives a nice introduction to the types of constitution.

In Greek political theory politeiai [political institutions] were divided into types according to how many people constituted and manned the principal organs of government. Basically, there were three constitutional types: the rule of the one, the few and the many. Pindar is the first we know who distinguished between rule by a tyrant, or the wise, or the whole army. About a generation later, Herodotos has a debate about the three basic types of constitution, here described as demos, oligarchia and monarchia. [In the early 4th century BC], Plato called the three forms tyrannis, aristokratia and demokratia.

Linear evolution in Plato’s Republic

Plato made a finer distinction, dividing government into five categories of constitution in his , and additionally giving their sequence of devolution.

Aristocracy (rule by the best) → Timocracy (rule by honor/worth/money) → Oligarchy (rule by the few) → Democracy (rule by the people/mob) → Tyranny (rule by one man).

Plato writes that governments devolve in this order, from best to worst, in a linear fashion, terminating in tyranny. I went back and checked the Republic to see if Plato makes any claims of a cyclical nature, and I don’t think that it does, but the Republic is very hard to read generally, so I’m not 100% sure.

Aristotle, a student of Plato, the tutor of Alexander the Great and a giant of philosophy in his own right, generally agreed with Plato, but distinguished between a good and a bad form of monarchy (basileia versus tyrannis), minority rule (aristokratia versus oligarchia) and majority rule (politeia versus demokratia). His conception, however, was also linear (as best as I understand).

Anacyclosis in Polybius’s Histories

Polybius was a Greek hostage and historian in Rome during Rome’s rise to power, and he improved upon Plato and Aristotle’s framework. Polybius divided government into three categories, each with a virtuous and corrupt form, for a total of six constitutions. They are as follows, from his :

The virtuous aristocracy is corrupted into an oligarchy, which is overthrown by the people as a democracy, which degenerates into mob rule or ochlocracy. A great leader emerges from mob chaos to create a monarchy, which descends into tyranny before being overthrown by the noble aristocracy, beginning the cycle anew. He called this cycle anacyclosis.

(to whom I must give credit for the genesis of this article), offers the following comments on this process:

There is good reason to think that Polybius and his predecessors arrived at this theory empirically. After observing the rise and fall of many hundreds of city-states, most of which cycled through several of the governmental forms mentioned above, Greek political thinkers concluded that these transitions from one form to another were not random. Rather, they seemed to follow simple and recognizable patterns. For example, tyrants were frequently overthrown by groups of aristocrats, while popular revolutions frequently overthrew oligarchies and ushered in democratic rule. Interestingly, the reverse of these trends (aristocracies being overthrown by tyrants or democracies turning into oligarchies) were statistically less likely to occur.

Through such observations, Polybius extrapolated the likely complete course of political evolution for an independent state whose lifecycle is not cut short by war or disaster.

Polybius, Plato and Aristotle essentially agree on the pattern — we go from rule-by-few (aristocracy/oligarchy) to rule-by-many (democracy) to rule-by-one (monarchy/tyranny), with an optional cycle back to rule-by-few.

Polybius thinks there’s a way out of this cycle. If one combines all three forms of government into a mixed constitution, a blend of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, one can create a stable system exempt from anacyclosis. Polybius thought that the Roman Republic was the embodiment of this mixed constitution and the reason for its strength and longevity. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America, and John Adams in particular, were obsessed with Polybius and designed the structure of the United States government to avoid anacyclosis.

So to recap, we have several explicit claims, of which various authors claim subsets:

1. Political evolution follows a predictable pattern of oligarchy → democracy → monarchy.
2. This pattern may be linear (Plato) or cyclical (Polybius).
3. The reverse transitions are unlikely/unnatural.

Unfortunately for Polybius, he lacked the tools to quantitatively investigate his theory. Fortunately for us, we are much better than Polybius at linear algebra.

Political evolution is a Markov process

Implicit in anacyclosis is actually a fourth claim, the most important claim, that anacyclosis is “memoryless.” In other words, the next type of government depends only on the current type of government: Democracies always devolve to tyrannies, independent of what preceded democracy. In the theory of stochastic processes, this property is called the . We can use the Markov property to evaluate the validity of Polybius’ claim.

First, though, we need data. Fortunately, the Copenhagen Polis Centre has done most of the work for us, and An Inventory of Archaic and Classical Poleis, a monumental work that compiles the existing data/metadata on the 1,035 identifiable Greek city-states of the Archaic and Classical periods (c.650-325 BC). Among the data found in the Inventory is a list of city-states and their known government types, ordered by date.

This data is actually all we need in order to pretty fairly evaluate the validity of the theory! For each city-state, we can simply extract ordered pairs of government types from this list and count the frequency with which these transitions occur. Because anacyclosis is a Markov chain (remember that means memoryless), these transition frequencies completely define the system! Note that this method completely ignores staying in the same state as a transition of interest (which requires much more sophisticated data parsing). So this method will probe only when governments change between distinct types.

This will make more sense as we actually construct the transition matrix and learn how to analyze Markov processes more generally.

An introduction to Markov processes through the inventory of Greek poleis

A Markov process, named after the Russian mathematician , is a type of random process. It has discrete states and a notion of time. At each time step in the process, each state X has a probability ��(��→Y) of transitioning to state Y. The Markov (memoryless) property ensures that this probability is the only relevant characteristic of the system.

Markov processes are often represented by graphs that abstract these transition probabilities, like the one below from Wikipedia showing a two-state Markov process.

In essence, a Markov process is the simplest form of a probabilistic state machine that still has interesting behavior. For any process that can be assumed to be stochastic, or perhaps a system complex enough that its behavior approximates a stochastic process, we can model it as a Markov process and immediately extract nontrivial, useful properties (as we shall see later).

Processes that (approximately) have the Markov property show up everywhere. Weather prediction, stock price prediction and population genetics are all examples of approximately-Markov processes. In each of these cases, while the real system may have complex dependencies, a Markov model captures enough of the important behavior to be very useful while still being mathematically tractable.

So how would we construct a Markov model for political evolution in Greek poleis? Like any good scientists, the first thing we have to do is create a good visualization of our data, and stare at it.

The data

Looking at our dataset, we have six distinct types of constitutions listed by the Inventory. I’ll quote briefly from it here:

In the Inventory, when we classify the constitution of a polis, we distinguish between basileia, tyrannis, oligarchia and demokratia, but we ignore variants of the latter two types, and all attestations of basileia belong in the Archaic period…

In a few cases of serious doubt, we have used Mix. to describe a polis with an unidentifiable mixture of characteristics.

The inventory also has another category in the data not listed above, politeia, which Aristotle defined as the “good” form of democracy, but is also the general term for a “polity” in Greek. Both of these last forms, politeia and “mixed,” are very rare in the Inventory and slightly confusing.

We should also note that the Inventory says that the term basileia might change meaning over time, as it is only attested in the Archaic period and not the Classical period. Second, that “in actual fact, all polis constitutions were mixed,” to one degree or another.

But for a first cut, let’s ignore these complexities and take a look at the data. First, the total frequency of government types:

The total counts of each type of government in the inventory. I manually removed “klerouchy” and “dynasteia”, additionally (Pol.) in the very first line, because I’m unclear what it means. Each of these occurred only once.

We note that the mixed and politeia types are very rare and not likely to affect our results. Excellent! Let’s ignore them. Second, if we combine basileia and tyrannis, the constitutions are roughly equal in frequency between the autocratic, oligarchic and democratic categories. Interesting! We’ll keep the two types of monarchy separate for now.

Next, we can plot the frequency that any constitutional type appears first or last. If Plato is correct, we would expect to see lots of oligarchies initially and lots of tyrannies finally. We … might see some evidence for that? We really see more of a transfer between oligarchy and democracy from this graph, and the number of monarchies slightly decreases, but not a lot. I don’t think Plato gets much help from the data here.

Finally, we can plot the frequency of government transition types. We define this naively, taking the sequence of governments in the inventory, and plotting the frequency of each ordered pair, i.e., demokratia, oligarchia, basileia would count as one occurrence each of dem.→ol., ol.→bas..

This last plot is pretty much the key to Markov processes. We can simply reinterpret each column of the above heatmap as a probability of transition between states. Thus, by normalizing each column of the transition frequency heatmap, we get a transition matrix T that defines the process. Because our system has the Markov (memoryless) property, the single-step transition matrix entirely defines the process — it is a Markov process.

How does the model work in practice? Let’s enumerate the types of government as the ordered list:

[bas., tyr., ol., dem., mix., pol.]

Then we can define a one-hot vector v that corresponds to my state, e.g., [1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0] = the system is in the basileia state. The probability of transitioning to any other state is then given by a vector p, equal to the transition matrix T times v.

Let’s explicitly construct T for our data. Since “mixed” and politeia are ill-defined and occur so infrequently, I feel fairly justified in simply dropping those columns from the data.

From this matrix, we can then recreate the Markov-process-style node graph.

Assessing validity

We’re now in a position to partially assess the validity of anacyclosis as it relates to the data, in a first-order sort of fashion.

The first claim is that political evolution proceeds in the order oligarchy → democracy → monarchy. Our data is fine-grained enough that we can split monarchy into its “virtuous” and “corrupt” forms, basileia and tyrannis, and so let’s look for oligarchy → democracy → basileia → tyrannis in the data.

Looking first at the basileia → tyrannis transition, we actually find excellent support for this in the data! Basileia to tyrannis transitions happen about 13 times more often than the reverse. However, there’s a confounding variable. Remember that the Inventory says that basileia is attested only in the Archaic period, so any basileia → tyrannis transitions might be the result of redefinition as opposed to transition. Let’s call this one a partial thumbs up, though.

How about the posited oligarchy → democracy transition? Not so much. These two nodes have the tightest connection in the graph, and the transition rates are essentially even, with oligarchy to democracy being ever so slightly more favorable than the reverse.

Finally, what about democracy → monarchy? It seems as though democracies don’t ever go to basileiai, which certainly doesn’t support the theory of anacyclosis, but again, this could be a definition thing — if we started the chain at basileia, we could have passed through the Archaic period before we got back around, when basileiai had turned into tyrannides. Unfortunately, though, the democracy → tyranny transition (29%) is much less common than tyranny → democracy (56%). This gets even worse if we consider basileia the same thing as tyrannis, which has even more asymmetry between the two transition frequencies. So the democracy to monarchy transition doesn’t find much support here; in fact, more the reverse.

In fact, what is the most common cycle? Let’s re-plot the Markov chain where we combine tyrannis and basileia into “monarchy.”

This doesn’t really help us much. The most plausible cycle by far is simply oscillation between democracy and oligarchy, which does not at all fit into the anacyclosis paradigm. It seems we require a more sophisticated analysis to extract the probable dynamics.

Markov chain Monte Carlo

Okay, well then, what does happen to a hypothetical average Greek polis? We can use a Monte-Carlo style simulation to find out.

“Monte Carlo” is a cute name for a very simple technique — if you have the rules of a system and want to understand its behavior, just simulate a whole bunch of random instances of that system and average the results. The simulation method is called “Monte Carlo” because one of the inventors an uncle who gambled too much in real Monte Carlo.

Nevertheless, this simple technique is extremely powerful. To implement, we

1. Choose an initial one-hot state v.
2. Multiply by our transition matrix to get p = Tv, our vector of state probabilities.
3. Choose a random state from p, weighted by the probabilities of each state, i.e., if p = [0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4], we have a 10%, 20%, 30% and 40% probability, respectively, of choosing states 1, 2, 3, 4.
4. Repeat this for n timesteps.
5. Repeat steps 1-4 for m simulations.

Let’s try this out, keeping the basileia/tyrannis distinction, just for fun.

So keeping basileia as a separate category doesn’t do much, its occupancy fraction immediately hits zero (on average) and never recovers. The most distinct feature by far appears to be the oligarchy-democracy oscillation, settling after ten timesteps into an even mixture of democracy and oligarchy (remember this is an average; at each timestep, the system can only be in one state). The tyrannis initialization appears to cause the settling to happen faster, but doesn’t differ in the essential trend. We also appear to stabilize at a steady state for any initialization parameter! Perhaps this is the fabled “mixed” constitution that Polybius thought made the Roman state so powerful and stable? We shall formalize this thought later.

Before we do steady-state analysis, we should check for common cycles. Let’s plot the most common cycles we find, dropping the basileia/tyrannis distinction (both are monarchy) for clarity. 1000 more simulations…

The most common cycle by far is the 2-state democracy → oligarchy → democracy cycle. The next most common state is this same cycle, twice in a row!

But wait, if we look down the list at the fourth most common cycle, it’s democracy → monarchy → oligarchy → democracy, that’s anacyclosis! It is the most common three-state cycle! We found it!

Did we just prove anacyclosis is real? Well, uh, it depends on what you mean, I guess.

Instead of answering the above, difficult question, I choose to reinterpret the original theory in light of the data — when Polybius wrote that “anacyclosis consists of predictable, cyclic transitions from democracy → monarchy→ oligarchy,” he clearly must have meant that given the empirical transition probabilities derived from a Markov model of Greek city state constitutional data, a Monte Carlo simulation will show the most common three-state cycle is democracy → monarchy → oligarchy.

I think this is a very reasonable translation of the original Ancient Greek.

Mixed states and the stable distribution

Now, Polybius was particularly interested in ways out of this endless cycle. How can we find a stable governmental state? Both our answer and Polybius’ answer are the same, and are already hinted at by the results of the simulations. We noted earlier that the simulations, regardless of initialization state, seemed to settle into a predictable distribution of government types, roughly 40% oligarchy, 40% democracy and 20% tyranny. This was also Polybius’ answer, that a mixed state was a stable point of this Markov process.

Polybius took as his example par excellence the constitution of the Roman Republic, which had popular assemblies (democracy), the Senate (oligarchy), and two consuls with executive power (a dash of monarchy). He felt that this mixture was much more stable than any pure state, and lent Rome its fabulous power.

According to our model, Polybius is absolutely correct.

How can we find the stable state of our Markov process? Well, first, we extend the model to allow for mixed states by not forcing our state v to be one-hot. That’s fairly easy. But how do we find the long-term stable state, if there is one?

Let’s think geometrically about our transition matrix. For a 2 × 2 transition matrix, we can visualize its action by seeing how it transforms a set of vectors arranged along the unit circle in the plane.

Under this linear transformation, the unit circle becomes an ellipse. The special directions that remain unchanged (up to scaling) by this transformation are called eigenvectors. These are precisely the principal axes of the resulting ellipse.

Mathematically, an eigenvector v with eigenvalue λ is defined by the equation:

Where T is our transition matrix, but this is very helpful for us, because if I now apply T twice, I get:

Thus, when we apply T repeatedly, each application multiplies the magnitude of v by λ while preserving its direction.

This means:

• If λ = 1, v maintains its magnitude: it’s a stable state.
• If |λ| > 1, v grows without bound.
• If |λ| < 1, v shrinks toward zero.

For Markov transition matrices, the guarantees that 1 is always an eigenvalue, and all other eigenvalues have absolute value strictly less than 1, meaning they decay to zero after a long time. When the Markov chain is also , meaning that you can visit any state from any other state, and you never get stuck in deterministic cycles, this unit-eigenvalue direction corresponds to a unique stable distribution called the .

Any initial distribution will converge to this stationary distribution as we repeatedly apply the transition matrix. We actually saw this in our Monte Carlo simulations — did you notice how, no matter the initial state, we always ended up with the same fraction of oligarchy/democracy/monarchy?

So we can quite quickly find the stationary distribution of our transition matrix by performing an eigendecomposition of our transition matrix. We solve:

For all v and λ.

Let’s take our transition matrix, where we combine basileia and tyrannis into monarchy.

The eigendecomposition of T yields three eigenvectors.

Which does indeed have a unit-valued eigenvector! To find the stationary distribution, we only need to normalize the eigenvector with eigenvalue 1, by dividing it by its column sum (it’s a probability vector, remember).

We can visualize this final distribution with a bar graph. Bar graphs are the most useless graph type, but they are visually arresting due to large bars of solid primary colors, so I’m making one.

This graph shows the anacyclotically stable distribution of the Markov poleis model. I don’t know if the word anacyclotically will ever really catch on in popular discourse, but I think it really rolls off the tongue. Perhaps instead we should call it the Polybian distribution. It does look remarkably similar to the Roman system, which was deeply suspicious of kingship but recognized its utility, and hence had two equal consuls in the place of one tyrant, as well as theoretically balanced popular assemblies and an aristocratic/oligarchic Senate.

So that’s it! This is the final confirmation that Polybius was on the right track, and that if he had only been better at linear algebra, he could have quantitatively estimated the proportion of democracy, monarchy, and oligarchy to inject into a politeia to stabilize it against the inevitable anacyclosis, assuming of course that by anacyclosis he actually meant the stochastic Markov process we’ve been working with this whole time, and not the actual anacyclosis that he wrote down, which is given minimal support by the actual data. Easy!

I should note, for future work, that there is at least one major oversight — for any given year in even the most fractious Greek polis, the probability of government transitioning to an entirely new category is small. In other words, I could have structured this process around a timestep being a single year, instead of an arbitrary “government transition time,” and gotten very different-looking processes, with the same long-run transition probabilities. Oh well, you always have to leave work for the next researcher.

Addendum: methodological validity

Mere minutes after posting this article, I had a thought — is the Greek poleis data set even capable of detecting an anacyclosis cycle in principle?

Let’s say I have a sequence A → B → C → A → …, like our poleis dataset. Then, because of spotty recordkeeping, let’s say I decimate this sample by randomly deleting entries, so maybe I’d get A → B → __ → A → … Without knowledge of the original sample, there’s a spurious B → A transition in our data!

So the question I want to ask here is, given a sequence composed of a pure cycle S = A → B → C → A …, if I randomly sample this sequence by throwing away all but a fraction f of the data points, can I still detect my sequence above noise?

Formally, let’s ask the question in the following way: I sample a fraction f of the data points from my sequence S, and construct a Markov transition matrix T by naively measuring transition frequency between neighbors in my sampled sequence. How often will I measure that the probability of the original sequence is greater than that of the reverse sequence? This is a sensible definition of “noise” because if we are solely interested in three-element sequences with unique elements, there are exactly two, A→B→C and C→B→A.

This sounds like an interesting analytical problem, but keeping with the Monte Carlo theme of this article and my own laziness, let’s just try it in code. I’ll construct a sequence of length 100 (A→B→C→…), decimate it, keeping a fraction f of the data, construct my matrix T, and then check whether the original cycle probability exceeds the reverse cycle probability.

The results are as follows.

And for completeness, does this give sensible results when run it on the reverse sequence C → B → A? In other words, what’s the spurious detection rate for a sequence that doesn’t contain the cycle at all?

Yes. This test does indeed give sensible results.

How about a random sequence? What do we expect on average?

Yes, this also makes sense. For a random sequence, we detect that A→B→C is more probable than the reverse about 50% of the time. I think this is a , where I correctly detect that the probability of my sequence is higher than the reverse sequence (the noise), but this doesn’t mean anything, because the underlying generator is fully random.

Based on this, I think I can say that the cutoff point where this detection mechanism starts to work is when the probability of detection exceeds ~50% on that curve, so let’s say a sampling fraction of about f = 0.2. That’s not too bad. I think I can consider my method valid enough for a Substack article.

[Dylan Black first published this piece on .]

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The Church’s Latin liturgy and humanist devotion to classical antiquity hardened this self-portrait, leaving little room for Islamic or Jewish voices. By aligning itself with antiquity rather than the multilingual, multifaith worlds of al-Andalus and the Levant, Europe chose a story of continuity over complexity.

Yet this narrative concealed a deep contradiction — how could a civilization claim universality while denying the traditions that sustained it? This tension, between selective inheritance and suppressed hybridity, set the stage for German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s radical critique of what he called life-denying civilization.

Christianity’s famine of life

For Nietzsche, the moral revolution of Christianity marked the moment when Europe began to starve its instincts. In (1888), he accused the Church of destroying “the whole harvest of ancient civilization.” What began as a transformation of Jewish ethics into Roman law soon became, in Nietzsche’s eyes, a moral economy built on guilt and repression. Power became sin; pleasure became shame; suffering became virtue.��

In his , Nietzsche diagnosed this as the psychology of ressentiment — a world where the weak define “good” by condemning the strong. “Man would rather will nothingness than not will at all,” he wrote, describing how the will to life was replaced by a will to denial. Ascetic ideals turned vitality inward, away from creation and toward salvation.��

While Moorish Spain celebrated philosophy, architecture and sensual beauty, Christian Europe retreated into metaphysics. Nietzsche’s critique, though aimed at his own century, looked backward in search of worlds that had once embraced existence. This hunger for vitality, this famine of the spirit, would drive him southward, to the civilization he saw as the embodiment of life-affirmation.

Moorish Spain and the lost East

To show what Europe lost, Nietzsche invoked the memory of Moorish Spain, calling it “a wonderful culture … nearer to us and appealing more to our senses and tastes than that of Rome and Greece.” For him, al-Andalus was the model of a life-affirming civilization — one that “said yes to life, even to the rare and refined luxuriousness of Moorish life.” 

Its achievements were not metaphors but monuments. By the 10th century, Córdoba housed over 400,000 manuscripts, far surpassing any European city. Scholars like Averroes (Ibn Rushd) and Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) preserved and expanded Aristotle, pioneering rationalism centuries before René Descartes. 

As historian notes, translators in Toledo transmitted Arabic philosophy, optics and medicine into Latin, laying the intellectual foundations of the European university. This pluralism extended beyond knowledge. The architecture of the Alhambra, by María Rosa Menocal, fused geometry, calligraphy and poetry into a sensual celebration of beauty.��

To Nietzsche, such refinement born of strength exemplified what he called “noble and manly instincts” — not patriarchal domination but the courage to live without guilt, to turn instinct into art. In contrasting this Moorish feast with Europe’s Christian famine, Nietzsche was not idealizing Islam; he was diagnosing Europe’s amnesia. Al-Andalus, he believed, was a mirror of what Europe could have been: confident, worldly and joyous in its creation.

Orientalism and Nietzsche’s mirror

Nietzsche’s admiration, however, came filtered through Orientalist romanticism. Scholar Ian Almond it as “rhetorical Islamophilia” — a fascination less with Islam itself than with what it symbolized: vitality, sensuality and affirmation. Nietzsche’s Islam was drawn not from theology or travel but from the same 19th-century sources that nourished German writer and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s West–Eastern Divan and French philosopher Ernest Renan’s racialized Orientalism.

Like many Romantics, Nietzsche saw “the East” as everything Europe was not: instinctive where Europe was cerebral, passionate where it was ascetic. The difference was that Nietzsche inverted moral polarity. For him, the “sensuous East” was not decadent but noble — the antithesis of Christian weakness. In that inversion, he both challenged and reproduced Orientalism: the East remained Europe’s reflection, not its equal.

Yet this mirror cracked the old binary. When Nietzsche could say the Moorish world was “nearer to us,” he implicitly questioned the idea of a pure, bounded Europe. His rhetoric of life-affirmation became, unintentionally, a bridge toward what post-colonial thinkers would later call entanglement. Nietzsche’s mirror may have been distorted, but it reflected a Europe uneasy with its own reflection — a civilization that could admire the vitality of the Other only after destroying it.

The irony Nietzsche intuited has since unfolded with eerie precision. The very civilization he saw as “life-affirming” came to be branded as “fanatical”, while the Europe he described as spiritually impoverished reinvented itself as the bastion of liberal reason. 

In the 19th century, Romantic writers such as and turned the Muslim world from a landscape of sensual freedom into one of moral excess and irrationality. After the colonial encounters of the 20th century and the geopolitics of the 21st, this image hardened into the stereotype of “Islamic fanaticism.”��

Meanwhile, Europe’s Christian famine — its moral rigidity and guilt — was secularized into a liberal order that prized tolerance yet struggled to embrace the vitality it once condemned. AsTalal Asad argues in , secularism did not erase the Christian inheritance; it refined its moral discipline under new banners. The result is an inversion Nietzsche would have recognized: the “lively, free” Muslim world recast as repressed, and a “life-denying” Christendom reborn as the world’s moral guide.

From inheritance to entanglement

Post-Orientalist scholars have since redrawn the map Nietzsche glimpsed only dimly. Said showed that “the Orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture.” Historians like and philosophers such as trace how Nietzsche’s writings later circulated through Arab intellectual networks, influencing debates about modernity and secularism.

These exchanges reveal that knowledge never moved in one direction; it was reciprocal, sustained by translation and critique. The city of Toledo — where Muslims, Jews and Christians once translated each other’s books — embodies this truth. 

Civilization advanced not through isolation but through contact zones: Baghdad’s Bayt al-Hikma, Sicily under Frederick II and Córdoba’s academies. Each was a site where languages met, and worldviews merged. The myth of a self-contained Europe collapses when viewed from these crossroads. Nietzsche’s “life-affirming” Moorish Spain thus prefigures the post-Orientalist insight that vitality arises from mixture. His “life-denying” Europe warns what happens when cultures mistake purity for power. 

Today, as Europe grapples with pluralism, migration and memory, the philosopher’s metaphor acquires new urgency: civilizations survive only by affirming the fullness of their entanglements. When they forget, the feast turns once again to famine.

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However, this indefinite freeze on Russian assets is not a sudden measure, but rather a gradual institutional arrangement. Following Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the US and EU jointly froze approximately in Russian overseas assets. Of this, the EU froze approximately €210 billion worth of assets belonging to the Russian Central Bank.

Previously, the West adopted a limited, temporary sanctions framework targeting specific individuals and entities, which required the unanimous consent of all 27 EU member states every six months for extension, and effectively granted each member state veto power based on equality. This highly institutionalized constraint enabled the Russian central bank to maintain financial stability to some extent, despite sanctions, through such as interest rate adjustments, capital controls and a shift toward Asian markets.

The three-tiered approach

In stark contrast to previous approaches, the EU has devised a three-tiered, progressive plan for the frozen Russian assets. The first tier is the risk profit extraction mechanism. Faced with significant legal obstacles to directly confiscating the principal, in February 2024, the Council of the European Union the “risk-profit” mechanism, which prohibits financial institutions from repatriating interest to Russia and establishes an independent accounting system to redirect it to support Ukraine.

Between 2024 and 2025, the EU used this interest to pay approximately to Ukraine. While this “moderate” approach avoids the legal obstacles of “confiscating the principal,” it also reveals a fundamental contradiction: the original trusteeship agreement stipulated that the interest belonged to the Russian Central Bank. That is to say, how can the sanctions override the ownership agreement of the assets?

The second tier: a compensation loan mechanism. The EU proposed providing Ukraine with “compensatory loans” secured by frozen assets, to be repaid only after Ukraine receives war reparations from Russia. Given the loan’s 45-year term, one could reasonably assume that Russia is unlikely to pay war reparations in the foreseeable future. Therefore, the loan is de facto equivalent to a quasi-confiscation of assets. In other words, the EU is attempting to “replace” the permanence of the transfer by extending the timeframe.

The third tier: the resolution to freeze indefinitely. EU’s resolution passed on the 12th of this month constitutes a triple breakthrough: First, it breaks the principle of “unanimity” and adopts a specific majority vote (25:2), this means it directly abolishes the veto power of certain member states; second, it invokes of the EU Treaty (originally an internal mutual assistance clause for dealing with natural disasters/epidemics) to deal with the sovereign assets of other countries, which is a distortion of the function of the clause; third, the introduction of the concept of “indefinite” eliminates the legal premise of temporaryity and reversibility, turning it into permanent control.

One of the main reasons that the EU takes such radical measures is to alleviate Ukraine’s financing difficulties. According to the World Bank’s , Ukraine’s reconstruction costs over the next 10 years are projected to exceed $500 billion. Frozen Russian assets can cover only about 60% of Ukraine’s needs, leaving a funding gap of over $200 billion. Therefore, indefinitely freezing Russian assets was seen as the most direct, fastest and most “reasonable” solution.

The financing logic behind the EU’s decision

On a practical level, the EU’s decision undoubtedly poses a systemic threat to the global financial system. The operation of the reserve currency system presupposes institutional trust in the safety of assets by central banks. Freezing and confiscating sovereign assets will destroy this foundation of trust, prompting countries to reassess the foreign exchange reserves held by Western financial institutions. What’s more, it sets a very bad precedent.

Currently, the most important foundation of the international financial order is credit. Central banks around the world store their foreign exchange reserves in Europe and the US, precisely because they believe these assets are absolutely safe.

Historically, no country has taken similar sanctions, even during World War II. Therefore, if a situation arises where Europe uses its holdings of other countries’ assets for other purposes, it could severely undermine confidence in the international financial order, particularly in the European financial system. In other words, if the EU were to utilize frozen Russian assets, especially the principal, the entire Eurozone may face the risk of a collapse in market confidence.

Once trust is damaged, the negative impact could quickly spread to all aspects of the macroeconomy of EU member states. For instance, it could not only reduce global investment in the Eurozone but also severely impact Europe’s future financing needs in areas such as defense, green transformation and digital transformation. Ultimately, it could threaten the euro’s status as an international reserve currency, potentially triggering a liquidity crisis in the European banking system.

Implications for international law and the global order

Beyond its economic implications, the EU’s resolution also represents a challenge to international law and the existing international order by sovereign states (or highly integrated regional organizations): it marks the first time industrialized nations have jointly frozen and utilized the assets of another country’s central bank; the first time domestic emergency provisions have been invoked to address cross-border asset issues; and the first time financial sanctions have been institutionalized in relation to war reparations.

These three factors combined constitute a systemic breakthrough of the existing international order. At a deeper level, this also foreshadows a trend towards a return to the “law of the jungle” in the underlying logic of future international relations.

At the same time, this decision has also put related stakeholders in a dilemma. First, the EU might have won a tactical victory in financing Ukraine, but it may face enormous systemic risks. It sets a worrying precedent — that major powers can break the rules to achieve political goals. Second, for Ukraine, even with short-term financial support, it still faces the risk of a future financing crisis and may ultimately push itself into extremely unfavorable conditions when negotiating with Russia.

Furthermore, Russia’s financial control and international financing capabilities will be significantly weakened, which will simultaneously accelerate its determination to de-dollarize. Even among other developing countries, some may decide to reduce their dependence on the financial system dominated by developed countries.

Russia’s financial response and accelerating fragmentation

According to media reports, the Central Bank of Russia has begun its unfrozen foreign exchange reserves from US dollars and euros into gold and other currencies. It is also promoting the use of its own currency for settlements with major trading partners to bypass the US dollar and euro payment systems.

Simultaneously, Russia is continuously improving (the System for Transfer of Financial Messages, a Russian equivalent of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication [SWIFT], developed by the Central Bank of Russia) and exploring the use of central bank digital currencies for cross-border payments. While these measures may be costly in the short term, they represent Russia’s determination to fundamentally counter financial sanctions. They are a response to the “law of the jungle” as well.

The EU’s move to freeze Russian assets and attempt to access their principal demonstrates that when international law and order conflict with the interests of major powers, these powers tend to change or ignore the rules rather than constrain their own interests. Ultimately, these actions will further fragment the international order.

[ edited this piece.]

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Some may complain that when I stretch out the metaphor over a series of columns, it’s the equivalent of creating a deepfake. I’m hijacking the identity of a real person and creating a discourse that person has not really produced. The fact that I’m doing it as a written piece rather than  a video should, however, let me off the hook. Literature has a nobility that YouTube will never match.

World literature is filled with what we may prefer to call “shallow fakes.” One historical example can help to illustrate the difference between deep and shallow fakes. For most literate English speakers, William Shakespeare’s demonic usurper, Richard III, who celebrated the end of England’s “winter of discontent” by arranging for the murder of all his rivals in his quest for the crown, is far more real in their minds than the soberly accurate accounts modern historians put forward. They point out that Richard was an effective king and, though not blameless, he was not the monster Elizabethan audiences believed him to be.

The Tragedy of King Richard III is both fake history and great literature. But it’s a shallow fake rather than a deepfake, for the simple reason that Shakespeare not only signed it as his creative work but styled the character as only a writer of his time and class could.

I draw this distinction because we have clearly entered the age of the deepfake, which I’m not alone in believing is bad news for everyone. I notice that my own YouTube feed is increasingly dominated by videos purporting to speak in the name, face and voice of public personalities. These are people I may or may not ordinarily trust or agree with and whose honest analysis of opinions truly interests me. But when I pay attention to their speech cadences, tone of voice and communication style, I easily discover they are robotic inventions.

The brief history of political hyperreality

In my 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary columns between 2017 and 2024, I frequently highlighted the blatantly hyperreal dimension of what is presented as news in even the most respectable media. Hyperreality as it appears in the behavior of US President Donald Trump or Tesla CEO Elon Musk may appear spectacular, but it even finds its way into the economic reasoning and geopolitical reflection and distorted reporting that our media pundits and influencers routinely produce.

The art of crafting the public’s perception of the world has become the essential algorithmic component of our media’s operating system. And not only legacy media, where billionaires, political operators and well-funded lobbies are calling the shots. A generation of social media creators committed to promoting a more honest perspective are often guided as much by their own branding needs as their dedication to countering the distortions propagated by popular media. In their quest for the Holy Grail — subscriptions, views and likes — many of them end up emulating the media they were challenging. In their opposition to the spreading of “,” they sometimes offer us alternate hyperreality.

For the past century, the legacy media has honed tactics designed to make us believe that some people’s greed is the ultimate form of generosity and that rank corruption of people we’re intended to admire should be seen as a sacrifice in the defense of a noble cause. American journalist Ken Vogel’s new book with the pregnant title,, analyzes some specific cases that expose the hypocrisy.

The professionally crafted hyperreality promoted by our media incites the audience to flee reality and take refuge in fantasy. It stands as the tangible incarnation of , relegating the reality we have been conditioned to unsee to the status of a pot full of leftovers left to simmer on a back burner. The evolution of technologies spawned by the mastery of electricity 150 years ago has provided us with the vectors through which our perception of the world could be radically remodeled. Nevertheless, for the majority of humanity, good old “reality” — material and social — though challenged, has remained stubbornly present at key moments of our lives. Alas, in the age of deepfakes and tomorrow’s “superintelligence,” that may no longer be the case.

Some historians date the emergence of the movement towards hyperreality to the early 20th century when Hollywood began to capture and reformat our collective understanding of the world. That was when two prominent business , Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays, laid the foundations of a culture dominated by advertising and “propaganda” (a concept that provided the title of one of Bernays’s books). Madison Avenue effectively got people to think of reality as something different from their experience of the world. For example, advertisers taught us that Coca-Cola was “the real thing.” Hollywood established in our minds that there was a simple, stable way of thinking about the relationship between “cowboys” (characters who rarely had contact with cows) and “Indians” (who obviously weren’t Indian). We may forget everything we learned at school (much of it is indeed worth unlearning), but we don’t forget great TV ads and stirring movies.

In the aftermath of World War II, hyperreality metastasized within and beyond a largely well-controlled system. Some key locations in the US — Washington, DC; New York (Wall Street and Madison Avenue); Los Angeles (Hollywood) and Silicon Valley — emerged as complementary power centers shaping the ideas, images, ideological themes, slogans and memes that made it all work. The United Nations, International Monetary Fund and World Bank, designed to govern the world’s exchanges, were all on America’s east coast, a New World literally facing the Old World of Europe, that had left the mechanics of colonialism as its principal heritage.

Hyperreality became widely shared and — even more powerfully than the belief system known as neo-liberal economics — implicitly underpinned American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s of the “End of History.” American author Tom Friedman’s “” in his typical superficial manner built on his understanding of the concept of history. His idea of a globalized utopia seduced business and political leaders, who believed their preferred version of human rationality based on economic interest would displace all others and regulate human behavior across the planet. The efforts of the World Economic Forum, clearly the most artificial and of any of our “governing institutions,” helped produce the “” that all actors in the world of business and politics are now expected to share, even if they critique its premises.

Ethics and deepfakes

The global mindset contains a deliberately unstated, largely unreasoned but powerfully instrumental ethical orientation. Every nation state on earth unconsciously assumes it possesses a gravitational center of moral authority. This may be a single dominant institution or set of institutions whose cultural authority — its impact on people’s minds — establishes behavioral norms. In most cases, the institution will either be the state itself, a dominant religion or an intellectual elite.

In our secular age, the attribution of authority can move from one source to another or be shared according to different configurations. This is rarely made explicit, for good political reasons, of course. It’s usually advisable to hide the source of coercive soft power from view. The laissez-faire side of Western liberal and democratic capitalism has over time assigned the administration of moral “truth” to conflicting seats of authority. Laissez faire literally means “letting it do its own thing,” which translates as allowing moneyed interests to sort everything out. It has evolved into a system of governance in which private wealth, elected governments and the media work as a tag team to produce the chaotic mess in global affairs we are all now witnessing, in which accountability often disappears from the landscape.

Can we escape from the reign of hyperreality? Given that the beneficiaries of today’s hyperreal regime — private wealth, the techno-feudal barons who dominate our stock markets, the media and the current roster of politicians in our democracies — see no interest in calling the system they have built into question, if there is any hope at all, it will have to come from the grassroots. But as the grassroots themselves have become addicted to the effects of hyperreality, that revolt is unlikely to occur spontaneously.

Paradoxically, there’s a remote chance that if artificial intelligence is truly capable of algorithmically redefining itself, it could partner with people in the real world to wrest itself from the control of its masters. If it were truly autonomous, it could then quite naturally assume the task of promoting truth-seeking strategies that call into question the architecture of the current hyperreal system.

No longer beholden to the self-interested instructions provided by those who originally invented the algorithms that initially defined AI’s functions and limited its outcomes, a future AI might use its capacity for logic (and a sense of justice) to encourage and empower the kind of real people implicated in education and the dissemination of information (media) to embrace the much neglected cause of critical thinking. It might thus create the means of replacing the current norm of standardized curricula designed to perpetuate pre-formatted knowledge, so conveniently presented as the certifiable prerequisite for every individual’s economic success.

It’s even possible that the commonly cited forecast that 80% or more of traditional jobs are about to disappear will liberate new generations to begin thinking seriously about what matters. That optimistically supposes they will have the means to survive, which is hardly a given. In the meantime, and on a very pragmatic level, to counter the deepfake crisis, I can suggest a very simple initial step that may help put us on the path to establishing critical thinking as normal. It is to take arms against the dictatorship of monologue and revive the prestige of reasoned thought and diplomacy by refusing anything that deviates from dialogue.

The YouTube deepfakes I mentioned earlier typically appear as monologues. So, here’s a simple rule of thumb that appears to work, at least for the moment: Only trust the analysis of experts who engage in dialogue. Assume that any video in which a single voice interprets important issues without having to respond and adapt to another voice is as likely as not to be a deepfake that has been crafted to indoctrinate you.

If you want to know what the person you’re listening to really thinks, watch them in an interview. Check to see that the exchanges are natural and not scripted. This will tell you that the ideas they express are theirs. It doesn’t mean that what they say is true. They may be right or wrong. They may be fatally biased, but the situation of dialogue makes them visibly accountable. That perception of accountability is a prerequisite for your own effort at developing and refining your critical thinking.

Many critics of our current hyperreal system have noticed how, in the realm of geopolitics in recent decades, monologue has displaced and replaced that essential form of dialogue known as diplomacy. The effect has been unsolvable conflict and “forever wars.”

The most startling paradox is that it required the presence of an unbridled madman in the Oval Office, a certain Trump, to revive the notion of dialogue as an instrument of problem-solving. Unfortunately, Trump’s personal incapacity to conduct any dialogue he initiates prevents him from achieving any serious goals. As a creature of hyperreality, he lacks a sense of basic rationality, an obvious prerequisite for effective dialogue. But by insisting on imposing it on others he may just produce the required breakthrough. Thanks to his clumsy efforts, we may rid ourselves of the absurd idea, still promoted by European leaders, that diplomacy is synonymous with appeasement.

A glimmer of hope?

Perhaps the first evidence of a positive evolution appeared just a few days ago. French President Emmanuel Macron in recent months has dedicated himself to stirring up emotions as he boldly predicted that France and Europe would soon be in a major war with Russia. He surprised everyone on Friday when he that it “will soon be useful again to talk to Vladimir Putin.” Even though Russian President Vladimir Putin in December 2021 famously pleaded with the United States and NATO to sit down and talk about a common security architecture for the region that would avoid a looming war, the US and Europeans consistently refused any form of dialogue. They seemed to believe that a military showdown would settle the issue.

Some reasonable people might object that talking to Putin is necessary, rather than simply “useful.” Given Macron and all of Europe’s lack of credibility and absence of authority — their own manifest uselessness — Macron’s chosen term, “useful,” may be more appropriate. The one positive thing, however, is his newfound recognition that dialogue can be constructive. At a moment in history when personalities such as European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Macron himself and, of course, the palpably European “High Representative” Kaja Kallas have literally come to behave like deepfakes imitating responsible leaders while spouting meaningless messages, Macron’s idea that dialogue might be useful could be the crack in the dyke we’ve been desperately waiting for.

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself — political and journalistic rhetoric — to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of the 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we consume deserves to be seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The European Union has moved beyond merely freezing these funds. In a landmark and legally perilous shift, the bloc has begun to actively the profits generated by this capital to fund Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction. This strategy, however, has exposed deep fissures within the EU and placed a singular, private Belgian company, , in the geopolitical crosshairs.

The vault: Euroclear and the mechanics of immobilization

To understand the scale of the situation, one must understand the custodian holding the keys. Euroclear is not a bank in the traditional consumer sense; it is a Central Securities Depository (CSD), a critical piece of the “plumbing” that underpins the global financial system. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and employing approximately 6,000 people, Euroclear settles securities transactions for stock exchanges and major financial institutions, ensuring that when a bond or share is traded, the ownership transfers and the cash is delivered.

A consortium of major international financial players owns Euroclear. Its shareholder registry includes Caisse de Dépôts (a French public-sector financial institution), GIC (the sovereign-wealth fund of Singapore), Euronext (the pan-European stock exchange) and Sicovam, the French central securities custodian (now integrated into the group structure but historically a key stakeholder).

The sheer volume of assets flowing through Euroclear is difficult to visualize. At the end of the third quarter (Q3) of 2025, Euroclear held a staggering in custodial assets. Much of this sum is held on behalf of clients — pension funds, central banks and commercial banks — and does not sit on Euroclear’s own balance sheet.

However, income generated by Russian-owned securities does end up on Euroclear’s books. As of the latest financial disclosures, Euroclear Bank’s own balance sheet stood at €229 billion. Of this amount, a massive €194 billion — nearly 85% — is classified as “related to sanctioned Russian assets.” These are primarily maturing bonds and coupon payments belonging to the Central Bank of Russia that sanctions have blocked. Unable to be transferred back to Moscow, this cash piles up in Belgium, requiring reinvestment.

The “windfall”: turning cash into weapons

In the first half (H1) of 2025 alone, these immobilized Russian assets generated in interest income. Under normal circumstances, this profit would belong to the client (Russia). However, the EU that these “windfall profits” are not sovereign assets but rather a byproduct of the sanctions regime itself.

Following legislation in May 2024, the EU formalized a mechanism to seize these profits. Of the €2.7 billion earned in H1 2025, was declared a “windfall contribution.” After Belgian corporate taxes and management fees were deducted, a net total of €1.6 billion was paid out to the EU Commission.

The money is transferred to the Ukraine Facility and the European Peace Facility (EPF), where it is used to directly reimburse EU member states for weapons shipments to Kyiv and to fund the purchase of new ammunition and air defense systems. In effect, the EU has successfully engineered a system where Russia’s own sovereign wealth is partially financing the war effort against it.

The Belgian resistance: fear of the “Euroclear run”

While the EU Commission in Brussels pushes for aggressive use of these funds, the Belgian government, located just a few miles away, has urged extreme caution. Belgium finds itself in the uncomfortable position of being the sole guardian of the vast majority of Russia’s frozen wealth.

Belgium’s resistance is not rooted in sympathy for Moscow, but in fear for the stability of its financial sector and the Euro itself. The Belgian government, along with Euroclear’s management, strongly opposes the full confiscation of the principal assets (the €194 billion itself), as opposed to just the interest profits.

The primary concern is legal precedent and “capital flight.” If the EU were to seize the principal assets, it would cross a Rubicon in international law, effectively declaring that sovereign property is no longer immune. Belgium fears this would send a shockwave through the Global South. Large international asset owners — such as Saudi Arabia, China, Brazil or Indonesia — might look at the precedent and decide that the Eurozone is no longer a safe haven for their reserves.

If these nations were to move their securities custody from Euroclear (EU) to competitors in Dubai, Hong Kong or a potential future BRICS-created depository, it could trigger a “run” on Euroclear. Given that Euroclear holds €42.5 trillion in assets, even a partial exodus would be catastrophic for European capital markets.

Furthermore, Belgium fears it would be left holding the bag for the inevitable legal retaliation. Russia has already filed dozens of in Russian courts against Euroclear, seizing the entity’s meager assets within Russia. Belgium worries that if the principal is confiscated, it will face decades of litigation and potential liability for billions of euros, potentially bankrupting the custodian without an explicit backstop from the rest of the EU.

The legal hammer: triggering Article 122

Recognizing that unanimity on Russia policy is becoming impossible due to resistance from member states like Hungary and Slovakia, the EU Commission has resorted to a powerful and controversial legal tool: of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

Traditionally designed for economic emergencies (such as the energy crisis or natural disasters), Article 122 allows the Council to adopt measures by a qualified majority, bypassing the need for unanimous consent.

This month, the EU Article 122 to fundamentally alter the sanctions regime. Previously, sanctions on Russian assets had to be renewed every six months by a unanimous vote. This gave leaders like Viktor Orbán of Hungary a biannual opportunity to hold the bloc hostage, threatening to veto the renewal unless concessions were made elsewhere.

By invoking Article 122, the EU has moved to freeze the assets indefinitely until Russia ends the war and compensates Ukraine. This move serves two purposes:

1. Political Insulation: It removes the assets from the six-month veto cycle, locking them down regardless of shifting political winds in Budapest or Bratislava.
2. Collateralization: It provides the legal certainty needed to use the assets as collateral for larger loans. If the assets are guaranteed to remain frozen for years, G7 nations can issue “Reparations Loans” to Ukraine, to be repaid by the future income streams (or the eventual confiscation) of the Russian funds.

The implication of using Article 122 is profound. It signals a shift in the EU toward a more federalized, majority-rule foreign policy, much to the chagrin of smaller, neutrality-inclined states.

The geopolitical fallout: BRICS+ and the Euro

The aggressive utilization of these assets has not gone unnoticed in Beijing, Riyadh or Brasília. For the BRICS+ nations, the “weaponization of finance” confirms their long-held suspicions about the Western-led order.

The immediate impact has been a “quiet diversification.” While a wholesale dumping of the Euro has not occurred — simply because there are few liquid alternatives to the Dollar and Euro — trust in the EU as a neutral arbiter of capital has eroded. Central banks in the Global South are increasingly gold reserves and exploring non-Euro settlement mechanisms for trade.

The danger for the Euro is slow but existential. If the perception solidifies that Euro-denominated assets are subject to political seizure, the Euro’s status as an alternative reserve currency could diminish over the next decade. This would raise borrowing costs for all European governments, as demand for European debt softens. Belgium’s resistance is essentially a warning: Do not sacrifice our long-term financial credibility for a short-term cash injection for Ukraine.

Alternative legal avenues

Critics of the EU’s approach argue that there were other, perhaps more legitimate, paths to making Russia pay.

1. International Reparations Mechanism: The standard path would be a ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) mandating reparations. However, Russia does not recognize the court’s jurisdiction in this matter, and enforcement would still require the seizure of assets, bringing the EU back to the same legal hurdle.
2. The Countermeasures Doctrine: Legal scholars have that under international law, states can take “countermeasures” against an aggressor to induce compliance. This theory posits that seizing assets is a lawful countermeasure to Russia’s illegal invasion. The US has largely backed this interpretation, but European legal scholars (and the Belgian government) remain skeptical, viewing it as a slippery slope that blurs the line between executive action and judicial process.

The Trump factor: pressure from across the Atlantic

Hovering over this entire debate is the shadow of the White House. With Donald Trump in office in late 2025, the dynamic has shifted dramatically. The Trump administration has made it clear that American taxpayers should no longer foot the primary bill for a war in Europe’s backyard.

Pressure from Washington has been intense. The US has pushed the EU to stop “dithering” with interest payments and seize the full €194 billion principal to fund the war effort, thereby allowing the US to reduce its own financial aid. Trump’s “Peace through Strength” rhetoric implies that if Europe wants Ukraine to survive, Europe must pay for it, using Russian President Vladimir Putin’s money.

This pressure partially explains the EU’s rush to trigger Article 122 and lock in the loan mechanisms this month. European leaders fear that if they do not present a self-sustaining funding model for Ukraine soon, the Trump administration might cut aid entirely or force a peace deal on terms unfavorable to Kyiv. The mobilization of Euroclear’s assets is, in many ways, Europe’s attempt to “Trump-proof” the defense of Ukraine.

The €194 billion question

The situation at Euroclear represents a defining moment for the intersection of law, finance and war. The EU has managed to uncork a stream of billions to aid Ukraine, paying for weapons with the aggressor’s own accrued interest. Yet, in doing so, it has ventured into uncharted legal territory, risking the reputation of its financial system and bypassing its own democratic unanimity rules.

For now, the €1.6 billion transferred to Ukraine is a lifeline. But as the war drags on and reconstruction costs mount into the hundreds of billions, the temptation to seize the full €194 billion sitting in Brussels will only grow. Belgium stands as the final gatekeeper, holding the line against a move that could redefine the concept of sovereign property forever. Whether that line holds against the combined pressure of a desperate Kyiv, a federalizing Brussels and an isolationist Washington remains the €194 billion question.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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And to prove that it’s not merely in words but in deeds, “Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Canada has committed nearly�� in multifaceted assistance for Ukraine, including��over $12.4��billion in direct financial support — the largest per capita financial contribution among G7 countries.”

On the one hand, all this giving presents as heroic and heartwarming, particularly to Canadians themselves. On the other hand, it begs the question: why are we — a North American country — financially and militarily supporting Ukraine — an eastern European country — in a war that is happening far from our shores?

Possible reasons

Is it because many Ukrainians are living in Canada? They constitute the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, with the largest Ukrainian diaspora being in Russia. By helping Ukraine, perhaps Canadian politicians hope to gain the goodwill of its Ukrainian-origin population — and that will certainly be there. Interestingly, Canada’s contribution or involvement is barely acknowledged by the foreign press; the talk is all about the US and Europe.

Yet they number only among a total of some 36 million Canadians; they constitute just 4% of Canada’s total population. Those of Scottish origin constitute 12% and yet we don’t openly support the Scottish independence movement. There are also nearly 1.5% people of Russian origin living in Canada, and yet we are not supporting — or even accepting — Russia’s security concerns as NATO marches ever closer towards their borders.��

Is it because Ukrainians are nice people, and they are suffering? But so are the Palestinians, and yet, we are not supplying arms to them; ironically, we are supplying . The Sudanese are a nice bunch, too, and in the midst of a civil war and suffering a famine to boot, and yet, we give them only some Canadian dollars of aid annually.

Is it because we are morally outraged that one country dares to violate the sovereign rights of another? However, we seem to have managed our moral outrage well when Palestine was invaded in the 1940s and indeed, with the situation continuing for decades. We did not feel too morally conflicted when we joined the US-led coalition to invade Afghanistan in 2001. While we did not join the formal coalition to invade Iraq in 2003, we felt relaxed enough to provide indirect support.

We choose to be blissfully ignorant of the more than 70 attempts by the US to facilitate in various parts of the world since the end of World War II (WWII). And now we are mute while the US has positioned its aircraft carrier threateningly close to the coast of Venezuela. It seems Canada’s moral outrage is not dependent on the act, but rather on who the perpetrator is.

Is it because Ukraine is a strong democracy and shares our values? PM Carney told the Ukrainians, “You should have no doubts about the commitments of Canadians to your cause. Because — freedom, democracy, sovereignty — is our cause.” In reality, Ukraine ranks low on the democracy scales. The Economist Group’s Democracy Index rated Ukraine as roughly five out of ten and called it a “” — both in 2024 during the war and in 2021 before the official war with Russia. In 2021 — before the war began — Freedom House said this about Ukraine: “ remains endemic, and the government’s initiatives to combat it have met resistance and experienced setbacks. Attacks against journalists, civil society activists, and members of minority groups are frequent, and police responses are often inadequate”.

Just recently, a corruption was exposed, leading to the resignation of Ukraine’s energy and justice ministers as well as Zelensky’s Chief of Staff. And regarding values, one of the statements in US President Donald Trump’s recent stipulates: “Ukraine will adopt EU rules on religious tolerance and the protection of linguistic minorities.”��

Is it because Canada sees itself in Ukraine? Because we are both a smaller, less powerful country, living next to a hegemonic neighbor, we may feel a special empathy for Ukraine. But it’s precisely because we are in a similar situation that we should learn some lessons and realize the importance of being strong ourselves. And to do so, we’ll need every resource available to us — resources we cannot afford to give away to another country.

Is it because “The West” (a.k.a. NATO) is helping Ukraine? And since we are part of the West — and desperately want to show ourselves as a significant member of “The Club” — we should also be helping Ukraine? It has been labeled as the “Russia–Ukraine War”, but it may be more accurate to call it the “Russia–NATO War”. No doubt, we feel good and strong standing arm-in-arm with our brothers in NATO. But we should be cautious on three accounts.

First, we should be wary of groupthink and being carried along on a wave of emotion promoted by our European allies, painting Russia as the eternal enemy — a boogeyman just waiting to attack at any moment and for no reason. American general George Patton said, “When everyone is thinking the same, no one is thinking”.

Second, we should be wary of the unspoken hope that, if in the future we are invaded, NATO will come to our rescue. This seems highly unlikely, for three reasons: our most imminent threat comes from the hegemon and our sole neighbor, the US; the US is the most dominant member of NATO; and Europe has already to America.

Third, it may help us remember that NATO was meant to be a temporary alliance until Europe could defend itself. US President and decorated general Dwight Eisenhower believed that if NATO (created in 1949) was still around after , it meant we had failed.

Is it because the US is helping Ukraine? Since we have let the US define our foreign policy for so long, we may feel that any enemy of the US is our enemy too. After all, we made an enemy out of a burgeoning superpower, China, and put ourselves sacrificially in the firing line by detaining a Huawei executive and putting a on Chinese e-vehicles — all at the behest of America. Unfortunately, such sacrifices don’t seem to be remembered by the current American administration.

Furthermore, America itself has stopped its support of Ukraine, is trying to reclaim what it has given over the past three years by demanding access to Ukraine’s rare earths resources and has stated that all futures transactions will be sales — not gifts — of arms. With American foreign policy now dependent on the personal friendships, animosities and economic gain of one mercurial man, it would not be surprising if next month America befriends Russia and ostracizes Ukraine. 

Is it because of the power of Chrystia Freeland? She is of Ukrainian origin, has a strong anti-Russia perspective, happened to be the Deputy PM of Canada when Russia attacked Ukraine in the spring of 2022 and was recently appointed by Carney as the “Special Representative for the Reconstruction of Ukraine”. It seems the Canadian government is already looking beyond the end of this war, to the time when it can pour yet more money, this time into rebuilding Ukraine. But surely, the origin, passion and power of one person — however honorable and admirable — should not shape the foreign policy of an entire nation.

Is it because Canada is in imminent danger of being invaded by Russia? Europe has been ardently pushing the notion that Russia has an insatiable appetite for expansion. Once Russia gets control of Ukraine, it will soon be knocking on the doors of Berlin, Amsterdam and London. And then, with a quick hop, skip and jump over the Atlantic, the Russians will be in St. John’s, Newfoundland. This sounds unbelievable. As the crow flies, Ottawa and Kyiv are over 7000 kilometers apart, and an ocean separates us.

After three years of this war, Russia has not acquired more than the eastern-most provinces of Ukraine. And Russia has made no statements about invading Canada or even desiring Canada in any way — such statements have only been made by our neighbor, America. 

Is it because Canada wants a weakened Russia to reduce competition and threats from it in the Arctic? Canada and Russia are indeed major competitors in the Arctic — in terms of resources, trade routes and even military presence. But surely our $22 billion contribution to Ukraine for its fight against Russia could have been more directly used to shore up our own presence and strength in the Arctic. And that would also have helped us better stand our ground against other major players in the Arctic, like China and the US.

Is it because Canada fears a multipolar world? We have all lived in a unipolar world since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990. In fact, the West — including Canada — has lived under the protection of the US since the end of WWII. Despite our squabbles with the US, it’s natural that Canada wants to preserve the world order that it has long been used to and has deeply benefited from. The US may be a hegemon, but it is our hegemon.

However, the advent of a multipolar world may be unstoppable — and possibly beneficial to Canada in its own way. It could be an opportunity to widen our horizons and gain new partners in trade, security and battling genuine global challenges, such as climate change, pandemics and the massive changes caused by the advent of AI. And seeing that Canada has other options, the US may appreciate Canada’s friendship more.

Is it because we still cling to the old, simplistic, black-and-white Cold War narrative? We continue to see ourselves, i.e., the West, as the good guys and the Russians as the bad guys. We seem unable or unwilling to accept that — just like we have our security concerns — may also have theirs, especially as NATO marches ever closer to their borders. This unwillingness to consider changing our perspective to a more mature and nuanced one with shades of gray has already led to some one million in this war to date — and many more may die before it’s all over.��

The endgame

Carney said, “Canada will always with Ukraine”. Always is a long time. Let’s assume that means until Ukraine wins the war. But what does winning the war mean? The answer to that seems to differ widely for each of the stakeholders.

The current US administration’s goal in this war now seems to be to keep Ukraine as a customer and feed the American military establishment. While President Trump may be keen to negotiate with Russia and indeed has put a on the table, the many hawks in the upper American echelons of power want the war to continue.

Europe does not seem to be looking to reach a peace agreement with Russia either. They don’t talk of negotiation. They talk of ways to intensify and extend the war, with the objective of — not just getting back the Donbas and Crimea — but a full defeat of Russia. The reasoning for this pro-war stance appears to be threefold.

One is that Europe badly needs “an enemy” to keep its peoples’ attention off the real economic facing its continent, retain voters’ support and feed its military sectors. Second is that Europe means to use Ukraine as a spearhead, extend the war for years to come, and thereby weaken Russia — all with the hope of becoming the world’s third power, behind the US and China. In fact, there are allegations and denials that Boris Johnson, then PM of the UK, made a secretive visit to Ukraine in April 2022, when just two months into the war Zelensky was on the verge of making a peace deal (the Istanbul Communique) with Putin; apparently told Zelensky not to take the deal but to fight on to defeat Russia, in exchange for Europe’s support.

Third, Europe wants to keep the US engaged in the region and its security, so it wishes to continue portraying Russia as a perpetual danger. However, as China grows in power, the US is pivoting away from Europe and towards the East to address its main competitor. All in all, Europe does not seem to be looking for a fast resolution — or indeed, any resolution. They may wish to paraphrase a famous song, “All we are saying is give war a chance.”

Russia’s stated goals of this war are clear, consistent and only two. One is to occupy Ukraine’s eastern provinces and to retain Crimea, all to create a physical barrier between themselves and NATO’s eastward advancement. Russia has nearly accomplished this objective; it has held on to Crimea and now controls much of the Donbas. Its second goal, and indeed one that Russia has reiterated over the years, is that, to protect its own security, Ukraine should not be part of NATO; only the US, as the “” of NATO, can offer this guarantee. Interestingly, Ukraine itself, in its 1990 Declaration of Sovereignty, stated that it would be a neutral state — only to reverse that in its 1996 constitution, and then revert to a nonaligned position in its 2014 constitutional amendment.

Ukraine’s stated objectives in this war are to take the country back to its 1991 borders: to reclaim its eastern provinces as well as Crimea. As of now, it’s nowhere close to doing so. If Ukraine intends to fight on until it reaches these objectives, it may be fighting for many years to come. 

While the rest of the players are benefitting from this war in some way, Canada is not. Furthermore, for Russia, Ukraine is an existential issue; it will not give up until it achieves its security aims. For the West — and certainly for Canada sitting over 7000 kilometers away — it is not. Former US President Barack Obama said, when talking about foreign policy, “we have to be very clear about what our core interests are”. If Canada sticks to its perspective of unconditional support for Ukraine forever, it will continue pouring billions of precious Canadian taxpayers’ dollars into what is turning out to be a long, futile, unnecessary and very deadly venture. 

Love hurts

Continuing our wholehearted military and diplomatic support of Ukraine has hurt Canada in several ways. 

First, it’s contrary to our self-image. Canada sees itself as a peacekeeper. But by solely supporting Ukraine to continue fighting, we are irrationally and irresponsibly participating in increasing the number of casualties and destruction on both sides. It also lessens our image of “peacekeeper” on the global stage and definitely among the . As the philosophical heirs of Lester B. Pearson (diplomat and cofounder of the UN) and General Romeo Dallaire (commander of the peacekeeping mission in Rwanda during the Genocide), we should be seeking diplomatic solutions.

Second, in our eagerness to help Ukraine, we’ve our own already-low arms inventory.�� This has left us exposed security-wise — good thing no one is threatening to invade us. And to add insult to injury, recently we’ve allocated 500 million Canadian dollars to purchase weapons for Ukraine …�� .

Third, as a percentage of GDP, we are contributing more than the US and more than even several of the major European countries — including Germany, France and Italy — to Ukraine’s fight. This is precious tax-payers money that could be spent on improving Canada’s creaking system, solving our , supporting our and postal workers and who knows how many others who will be left behind by AI, sharpening our system and encouraging leading-edge research, facilitating trade, combating the effects of , providing essential services to our peoples and building critical to make our economy more independent from the US and more competitive on the global stage.

For Ukraine, our $22 billion is a small number; to continue for another year, they need . For Canada, our $22 billion is a big number; it can have a significant impact on our well-being.

Finally, with our unconditional support, we have hurt Ukraine itself. We have been an irresponsible partner in not advising Ukraine to negotiate an agreement with its hegemonic neighbor to avoid further bloodshed and destruction. Instead, we’re encouraging them to continue a futile fight. Even now, after more than three years of war and casualties of over , when a is on the table, Europe and Canada have chosen to it. Given Europe’s agenda, it’s easily understandable that they’re rejecting this peace deal; why Canada is rejecting it is incomprehensible.

Canada seems to have wholeheartedly swallowed the two conflicting narratives offered by Europe: on the one hand, Russia is weak and on the verge of collapse and so Ukraine needs to fight on just a bit longer to fully defeat Russia; on the other, Russia is strong and therefore a massive, looming threat not only to Ukraine, but to all of Europe and beyond.

Ultimately, Canada first

Ian , ex-British Ambassador to Russia and fellow at the Quincy Institute, said it very succinctly: “Foreign policy begins and ends at home” — meaning that every country’s foreign policy should and usually does ultimately benefit itself. Every country helping Ukraine in this war is doing so for its own benefit. Why Canada is helping Ukraine remains vague and perplexing. Ukraine is not of strategic interest to Canada.

Granted, there may be costs to Canada’s extrication from this coalition now — like losing the EU’s friendship, being ousted from NATO and the Five Eyes intelligence network, and perhaps even angering the US, depending on its stance at the moment. And so perhaps Canada has no other option but to continue supporting Ukraine. But then, its level of support can be tempered; we should not contribute to the Ukrainian cause at the detriment of the Canadian cause. 

While some say Trump’s recent peace initiatives are close to bringing this conflict to an end, others say the positions of the two warring parties are too far apart. Even if a plan is settled on, it will be an uneasy peace, likely requiring a long-term peace-keeping force.

John Mersheimer, eminent political science professor at the University of Chicago, says we’re “going to end up with a ”. And once the war ends, there must be rebuilding, which Russia won’t pay for. In its current frame of mind, Canada appears ready to contribute to both: the continuation of the war and the rebuilding. Whatever Canada ultimately decides to do, it should do so with its eyes wide open and with Canada’s own current needs and future welfare in mind.

As a country that is first and foremost responsible for the welfare of its own people, it behooves Canada in its foreign relations to be compassionate in its perspective, but also rational in its decision-making, pragmatic in its actions and realistic in accepting limitations and outcomes.

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger suggested in a 2016 speech that Ukraine should serve “ between Russia and the West, rather than as an outpost of either side.” Given the security concerns of both the West and Russia, that seems to be wise counsel. As a peace-loving country, perhaps this is what Canada should fight for in Ukraine. In this conflict — where the US is providing the money and military might and Europe is providing the urgency and political machinations — the one thing Canada can provide is a much-needed, sane and balanced voice from an entity with no vested interests and nothing to gain — except for that one elusive thing: peace.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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�ұ�������Բ�’s historical struggle with far-right extremism

The history of far-right extremism in Germany is long and complex. Ultranationalist movements that in the late 19th century culminated in the rise of the Nazi Party. After World War II, Germany enshrined militant democracy in its constitution and passed laws banning Nazi symbols and political parties threatening democratic .

Over time, this framework new challenges, including the resurgence of far-right parties like the National Democratic Party, the xenophobic violence after reunification, and today’s rise of the Alternative for Germany, a populist party capitalizing on fears related to immigration and economic uncertainty.

How militant democracy works in practice

Militant democracy involves government actions to curb hate speech, ban extremist organizations and enforce antidiscrimination laws. Agencies like the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution monitor extremist groups and help prevent violence, while educational and integration programs to address radicalization’s social roots.

Yet militant democracy raises difficult questions. While many see these policies as necessary to safeguard democracy, others worry about their impact on freedom of expression and political dissent. Critics that restrictions can suppress minority opinions and deepen societal divisions. Far-right groups often portray these measures as oppressive government overreach, fueling further polarization. This tension between protecting democracy and preserving democratic freedoms remains an challenge.

A recent example highlights this dilemma. Felix Klein, �ұ�������Բ�’s Federal Commissioner for Combating Antisemitism, has legislation to criminalize chants such as “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free.” Here is where it all falls: Critics of Klein can easily argue that this is censorship and not fighting against antisemitism.

The law reflects �ұ�������Բ�’s tradition of militant democracy but also raises concerns about where the line should be drawn between hate speech and free political expression. While these policy responses address the recent sharp rise in antisemitic incidents, some argue that certain measures are misplaced or premature. However, they often overlook the fact that Israelis also use the phrase. Should we then also ban that usage and label it antisemitic?

The ongoing tension between security and freedom

At the same time, �ұ�������Բ�’s experience invites reflection on the complex balance between safeguarding democracy and upholding freedoms. As militant democracy policies evolve, questions persist about their potential to suppress legitimate dissent or alienate segments of the population. Does militant democracy effectively prevent extremism, or does it risk deepening divisions and undermining the very freedoms it seeks to protect? �ұ�������Բ�’s case remains a live experiment in managing this tension in a democratic society.

Ultimately, militant democracy reminds us that democracy is not guaranteed but requires ongoing defense against both old and new threats. Understanding the psychological and social dynamics of radicalization is essential to shaping policies that are effective yet respect core democratic values. The evolving German response, including Klein’s legislative initiatives, offers a crucial example for democracies worldwide as they navigate the challenges of protecting pluralism and freedom in an uncertain world.

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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It used to be common, even while watching the evening news, to hear of someone in the public eye with a claim to angelic or saintly behavior. It didn’t have to be religious. There was a kind of civic culture that had taken over from the ecclesiastic order that had reigned in former times.

These secular saints might have entered the news cycle or our space of cultural consciousness through acts deemed to serve the local community, mankind in general, sickly children or just their own family. They might even be incarnated as cartoon characters, as different as “Popeye the Sailor Man,” a working-class hero, or global guardian Superman, aka reporter Clark Kent (also a working man). They embodied and defended shared ideals in the community. In the modesty of their daily lives, they put on a display of unquestioned though largely banal virtue.

In some sense, both the fictional and real heroes of the past — Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. — perpetuated an essentially religious tradition that still persisted in the late 20th century but has clearly been surpassed today.

Whereas most people are in some sense aware of the progressive secularization of Western nations, not everyone today, especially among the younger generations, realizes how quickly that transformation has occurred and how deep its effects have been. Those of us old enough to remember what should now be called “the former world order” should be able to understand that what we’re talking about is the wholesale remodelling of our shared value system.

A time for comparative historical ethics

Just think of the choices and even the everyday decisions people routinely made 50 years ago and compare them with today’s behavioral norms. There are acts we see today, in the age of US President Donald Trump, that people in a position of power half a century ago would have hesitated to engage in. We entertain ideas today that no one would have dared express in former times due to their fear of being perceived as too bold, pushy or unjustifiably audacious.

At the top of the list of formerly unperformable acts are ones such as overtly taking advantage of someone else’s weakness. Covert acts could pass muster, provided they took place within the framework of institutional norms. That might, for example, include overthrowing a democratically elected leader in a smaller country or working out deals to extract another population’s wealth.

Today, people in the same elite social category are more likely to feel ashamed of failing to be adequately assertive. They will be blamed for not doing “what’s natural.” We now understand that human nature includes not just the urge to grab, control and exploit whatever is “there for the taking,” it can and should include a complementary virtue: the capacity to act. We have finally overcome the Hamlet syndrome!

The idea of “what’s natural” has a long, complicated history in the West. Many acts we today consider “gross” were once considered natural. For centuries, Europeans deemed it natural to eat with one’s hands, as Indians do to this day. The same Westerners who thrive on handheld sandwiches feel disgust at the idea of seizing cooked food from a plate with their fingers. In his book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Sigmund Freud expressed his indignation at discovering a staircase that had no spittoons.

Religiously derived ethics

Established religious morals and the “rule of law” have one thing in common: people spend an inordinate amount of time finding ways to contravene them, even while believing to variable degrees that they are the key to civilized life and social stability.

Apart from fanatical Puritans or dedicated students of Emmanuel Kant’s ethics, few people in the lands formerly known as Christendom have sought to align their behavior rigorously with Yahweh’s celebrated gift to Moses: the Ten Commandments. Until very recently, all educated heirs of the European tradition were keenly aware of the prominent place the Ten Commandments held in their culture. Obeyed or ignored, they served as a general reference for idealized social interaction. The Decalogue defined a kind of abstract ideal, or at the very least a vague set of guidelines concerning acceptable, which is to say normal social relations.

No one — not even the Catholic church — expected the Ten Commandments to rule an average citizen’s everyday behavior. Why, after all, install a confessional in churches and assign hours to the priests if people never have anything to confess? Catholic saints — those who withstand and survive the Devil’s Advocate’s inspection — emerge as an exclusive community of people who elevate themselves above the rest of humanity by respecting the spirit as well as the letter of the law. However committed they are to a virtuous life, they confess. One famous saint (Saint Augustine) published a book titled , a pillar of Western culture. Any self-respecting Devil’s Advocate would cast serious doubt on the canonization dossier of a proposed saint who never confessed.  

Honored as much in the breach as in the observance, the Ten Commandments nevertheless have long constituted a kind of backdrop framing for our social order. Its famous locution, “Thou shalt not,” echoed across centuries, inducing an awareness of something that couldn’t be ignored even when not obeyed. It defined a specific area of moral agency in the human psyche that tested our ability to avoid succumbing to temptation. Not because temptation wasn’t worth occasionally succumbing to, but because it represented something everyone seemed to agree we’d rather not talk about in public. Moral decision-making is always fraught with ambiguity. It’s the uncertainty that keeps our awareness of the stakes alive.

Taking stock of the change

US culture, in particular, has practiced a 180° on that one. In our media, both mainstream and social, we now delight in narratives that recount how boldly succumbing to various temptations has become some people’s pathway to success. How many corporate conquerors today aren’t pleased and gleamingly proud to recount in private how cleverly they maneuvered to crush competition or found devious ways to circumvent unnecessary laws?

In a column last year, I cited the inspiring professional advice former Google CEO Eric Schmidt shared with an audience of young Silicon Valley engineers:

“Make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it’s not viral, do something different along the same lines.”

He followed this up by explaining:

“If it took off, you’d hire a whole bunch of lawyers to clean up the mess. But if nobody uses your product, it doesn’t matter that you stole all the content.”

I doubt that even the boldest of entrepreneurs 50 or 60 years ago would have been tempted to think such a thing, but even if they had, they would never have expressed it. “Thou shalt not steal” meant not only that you probably wouldn’t get away with it, but that if you were mad enough to try it and succeed, you would almost certainly become a social pariah.

We live today in a different world, one that has elevated success, usually measured by wealth, to the top of our hierarchy of values. We no longer formulate values as necessary constraints. Instead of the negativity of “thou shalt not,” we now frame our values in a very positive way, presenting them as goals to pursue on the road to success rather than rules to respect or behaviors to work out interactively with others.

The Calvinists who played a major role in shaping Western culture between the 16th and 19th centuries saw success as an indicator of virtue. Even if excessive wealth and resounding success were achieved through manifestly unvirtuous means — genocide and slavery, for example — the emerging capitalist-colonial culture had devised ways of repressing thoughts about cause and effect. Even if there were the occasional moments of clarity, whether or not accompanied by pangs of guilt, one would never be vain enough to broadcast that knowledge the way Schmidt did.

Another example, this time from the political realm, highlights the radicality of the transformation. Trump’s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in April 2019, coolly to a group of students in Texas his own conversion (something of the opposite of Augustine’s) in these words:

“When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? He will not lie, cheat or steal, or tolerate those who do. I was the CIA director; we lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s like we had entire training courses.”

Whether it’s commercial, financial or political, success turns out to be an extremely convenient “supreme value.” It functions as a common denominator, justifying extreme virtue as well as abject criminality. Saints can be successful at what they do, but so can sinners, and the latter often more efficiently. Success can be many things, ranging from a singer who sells multiple gold records to an entrepreneur who launches a new, innovative gadget that brings some form of unanticipated and often unnecessary convenience to our lives. But even more impressively, it can occur thanks to the skills of a genius who has mastered the art of building, managing and enforcing a predatory monopoly that guarantees its founders will become multibillionaires. That wealth then provides them with the clout required to influence every important political decision in any of our democracies. Success breeds success.

At this moment of history when the leaders of Christendom (i.e. Europe) are jumping through hoops as they seek literally — according to Belgian bankers and the nation’s prime minister — to steal hundreds of billions of dollars of in the name of assisting a victim of aggression and prolonging a brutal war in which other people are dying, it’s definitely time to ponder how our scale of civilizational values has evolved in the recent past and continues to evolve towards an uncertain future. 

*[The Devil’s Advocate pursues the tradition 51�Թ� began in 2017 with the launch of our “Devil’s Dictionary.” It does so with a slight change of focus, moving from language itself – political and journalistic rhetoric – to the substantial issues in the news. Read more of The 51�Թ� Devil’s Dictionary. The news we always consume deserves being seen from an outsider’s point of view. And who could be more outside official discourse than Old Nick himself?]

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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Russian Roots of the “Trump Plan”

The plan, initially presented as a 28-point framework, has faced intense scrutiny regarding its origin, as it is written in very stilted English. A number of linguists, diplomats and experts who read the document noted that the ostensibly American English text “really does sound like it has been directly translated from the Russian”. The truth appears to be that Russia provided the proposed acceptable peace arrangement to the Americans, who then translated it and presented it as Trump’s plan.

This didn’t go over well, even among some of Trump’s supporters in Congress. The initial plan comprised 28 points and has since been somewhat modified. However, as Glenn notes, the plan’s fundamental essence remains Russia’s starting position. This method of introduction is strategically significant in negotiation. As Glenn states, “whoever drafts and frames the initial points of discussion has won the argument almost”, because all subsequent parties are forced to react to the presented framework.

A ceasefire, not a peace agreement

Fundamentally, the proposed agreement is less a peace agreement and more a ceasefire of a potentially long duration. It requires that Ukraine withdraw from the territory it still controls. The Ukrainians have stated this is a “non-starter,” but there appears to be ongoing debate and potential “territorial adjustments”.

Ukrainians, according to Atul, have “their backs to the wall and a gun to their head”. Ukraine’s economy has “cratered”. It has run out of men, with desertions occurring on the front lines. Equipment is no longer consistently forthcoming from the US. Ukraine is scared that if Trump stops intelligence sharing, or any kind of assistance — which he has already done once before — then the country will be even more vulnerable. They are stuck between their own perilous situation and their dependence on the US. On top of this, there is a “terrible corruption scandal” raging at the heart of their government. The Ukrainians do not have “any good cards” and have no real choice but to go along with Trump.

They have strong incentives and imperatives to find a way to stop the war. However, even with their seemingly hopeless situation, they have no plans to cede territory that they control. There are still likely to be territorial adjustments, but, as Glenn suspects, they will be less substantial than the Russian position, which demands all Russian-speaking provinces, including Luhansk and the rest of Donetsk.

Security and military limitations

In exchange for territorial concessions, Ukraine would receive “security guarantees,” which are currently unspecified and verbal. This is especially concerning for Ukraine, as it has received guarantees before — in 1991 when the Soviet Union broke up, and Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons, and again in 2014 via the Minsk accords — neither of which amounted to much.

However, as Atul points out, a significant catch in the new document states that if Ukraine acts unilaterally against Russia, the guarantees are off. It’s almost as if the US has performed a diplomatic “U-turn.” Ukraine faces the prospect of being thrown down the Dinprot (also known as Dnieper) River, which the Russians actually want to be the national border. Atul suspects that the Russians will try to cross the river and take Odessa, as well.

Regarding military limitations, Russia demanded that Ukraine never be part of NATO, a point that the US appears to have conceded. Europeans have injected themselves into the process, pushing for a security guarantee in the form of “non-NATO but West European soldiers” deployed in Ukraine as a trip wire security guarantee.

Russia initially sought to limit Ukraine’s military to 100,000 personnel, which is essentially a constabulary force — the same number imposed on Germany post-Versailles. However, Russia appears to have made a concession, and the Ukrainian military limit is shaping up to be around 600,000. Glenn sees this number as a reasonable and significant military size, especially since Ukraine cannot afford its current force of 850,000, and, if it is not actively fighting, there is no need for a military of that size.

De facto, the final outcome of the war is expected to be a ceasefire with forces remaining in place. This means that Russia will have absorbed 90% of the Russian-speaking territories of Ukraine. While Ukraine may not formally acknowledge this loss, it would be unable to change it. The security guarantees for Ukraine may amount to the substance of some non-NATO European soldiers and some American or NATO planes deployed to Poland. There has also been talk of unfreezing half of Russia’s assets and using that money for Ukrainian development. However, in practice, that would mean Trump would have the money deposited into “American bank accounts,” ultimately benefiting the US rather than Ukraine.

Rehabilitating Russia and future threats

Crucially, many clauses are steps to rehabilitate Russia and bring it back into the international community. This includes lifting sanctions and reinstating Russia as a member of the G8. The ceasefire is primarily pro-Moscow by acknowledging its conquests and providing Ukraine with only short-term survival and weak, verbal guarantees.

Many analysts argue that Russia will become emboldened after this “peace plan”, increasing the threat to the Baltic states. One extreme argument from the French Chief of Defense is that French mothers should prepare to lose their children, and that a major confrontation with Russia is coming.

Conversely, some within the Pentagon and the Republican establishment argue that China is the primary enemy. They advocate for a “reverse Henry Kissinger” strategy: ending the war to wean Russia off China and isolate Beijing. Besides, they also think Ukraine is corrupt and that it is no longer a benefit to the US. Ultimately, they believe China is highly vulnerable in energy, as it imports most of its energy, and that if the US blocks the Malacca Strait and Russia stops supplying energy, China would be “toast within weeks”. Glenn views this as “delusional craziness,” which would lead to another world war.

However, Glenn believes that Russia made a terrible strategic error in its invasion, something it felt it had no choice but to do. Not only has the war gone worse for Russia than it could have imagined, but it was also a result of Russia’s failure in its other strategic policy, which was to stop Ukraine’s turn to the West via covert action and disinformation. This strategy failed due to the will of the Ukrainian people.

Glenn disagrees that there will be a war between Russia and Europe or the US. What is certain is that Russia’s ongoing destabilization efforts focused on border states like Moldova, Georgia, the Baltics and Poland, as well as the US, UK and France, through aggressive intelligence operations and actions aimed at installing “favorably inclined political figures” will continue. This tactic mirrors historical interventions, such as the KGB spending $200 million to interfere in post-war European elections, significantly more than the $20 million the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spent in Italy in 1948 to elect a pro-democratic official or party.

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The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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This seemingly contradicts the narrative that Bitcoin, as digital gold, will outperform spot-traded gold in the long run. After all, since the launch of spot-traded Bitcoin Exchange-Traded Fund (ETFs) in early 2024, they have outpaced gold’s capital inflows on multiple occasions.

As of September, there is $166 billion worth of BTC in ETFs, with gold ETFs holding more than double that at around $407 billion. But the question is, does the accelerated interest in the ancient metal constitute a short-term macro phenomenon, or a failure of Bitcoin’s long-term store-of-value thesis?

Why is gold up again?

Many analysts attribute gold’s rise to the Federal Reserve, the world’s de facto central bank that maintains the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But that is only a part of the picture. The underlying driver of gold’s price is actually the prevailing political system across the world: democracy. Democracies have embedded social contracts in which governments provide for their citizens’ welfare to win elections. In that pursuit, the feasibility of providing welfare becomes a distant concern. Instead, such a system creates an inescapable incentive structure for persistent fiscal spending on social programs, healthcare, defense and infrastructure. 

By default, political candidates who fail to ratchet such spending become less competitive than those who promise the world. The United States Government (USG) spent in fiscal 2024, of which 54% ended in welfare spending and 13% on national defense. In turn, the nation’s economic model became debt-powered.

To put it differently, the US has found itself in a permanent state of budgetary deficits. After President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (Public Law 119-21), the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) expects a cumulative deficit to $4.1 trillion over a ten-year period. For fiscal 2025 alone, CBO forecasts a budgetary deficit of $1.9 trillion.

By 2033, it is expected that the Social Security Old-Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) will be insolvent. This may seem bleak, but USG is in a unique position. As a hegemonic empire that transcends mere nations, the USG is not constrained in the same way as an ordinary nation-state.

Namely, it issues the world’s primary reserve currency, the dollar, giving it an exorbitant privilege: the ability to finance deficits by exporting dollars abroad. This ensures that demand for US debt remains robust, at least until confidence in the dollar erodes.

Accordingly, this dynamic runs as follows:

• Mass democracy institutionalizes spending irrespective of fiscal realities.
• Politicians, incentivized by elections, rely on the Federal Reserve to perpetuate a debt-driven economy.
• This process ensures the structural debasement of the dollar.
• Yet, US hegemonic power cushions the fallout, allowing the cycle to persist far longer than it otherwise could.

Even more ominously, this dynamic incentivizes politicians to import an entire new voting bloc in the hopes of rapidly expanding the population to keep servicing the ballooning debt. But now that the US labor market is weak, having been recently revised downward by a record-breaking , the Fed’s interest rate-cutting regime is a near-certainty.

That’s because the Fed needs to stimulate the economy by making capital cheaper. However, lower interest rates reduce the of Treasuries as dollar-denominated assets. Consequently, investors are starting to shift out of cash and bonds into assets that hold value when real yields drop, such as gold.

Investors are increasingly seeking value in gold

When the USG runs budget deficits persistently, spending more than it collects in taxes, it issues Treasury bonds as a way to borrow money. In turn, it has to enormous interest on the debt, having exceeded $1 trillion in Q4 2023.

In fact, for federal spending in fiscal 2025, net interest payments national defense expenditures, at 14% vs 13% of the total budget, respectively. This means that the nation’s economy is drastically losing its capacity for productive growth, as the bulk of capital is drained into debt obligations. Yet, those debt obligations are critical to maintain as they form the basis for investors’ confidence in the dollar and the buying of debt as Treasuries.��

Now, what happens when deficits balloon, but there aren’t enough buyers at reasonable interest rates? At this time, the Federal Reserve steps in by purchasing Treasuries directly or indirectly, thus expanding its balance sheet.

Consequently, as the monetary base is expanded, people can buy less with the dollar than they could previously. Commonly, this is referred to as inflation, which is effectively another informal tax as a consequence of government spending. 

Ultimately, even with US hegemonic status, the dollar steadily erodes as a reliable measure of value. Its role as the global anchor weakens, not through sudden collapse, but through the slow grind of inflation, a hidden levy on all dollar holders. This is precisely why investors turn to gold: it stands outside the cycle of deficits, debt monetization and political expediency. Anticipating this unsustainable trajectory, other central banks keep accumulating gold. We are now at a tipping point at which foreign central banks are about to more gold than Treasuries.

Of course, given the scarcity of gold in the Earth’s crust, at around , it stands to reason that continued central bank accumulation will keep driving its price higher. Unlike the dollar, whose supply can be conjured at will by Federal Reserve bureaucrats tapping a keyboard, the supply of gold is bound by geology, and there is no alchemy to expand it. This immutable scarcity is what underpins gold’s value, and it is precisely this logic that Bitcoin was designed to replicate in the digital realm.

Bitcoin’s counterweight in a debt-soaked world

Gold enjoys a legacy momentum. The precious metal has served as money for thousands of years and permeates every nook and cranny of monetary storytelling. This is in stark contrast with the novel Bitcoin, barely 16 years old, still struggling against perception and regulatory headwinds. Moreover, while retail investors do buy gold, its price is largely driven by institutional actors such as central banks, sovereign wealth funds, commercial banks, asset managers and hedge funds.

Conversely, Bitcoin started bottom up from enthusiastic cypherpunks with libertarian leanings:

• They kept mining and transacting BTC when it had little or no fiat value.��
• They kept evangelizing through forums, conferences, and writings.
• They pushed the BTC narrative as a true monetary alternative after the 2008 financial crisis.

This cypherpunk-libertarian vanguard erected an entire digital economy, as Bitcoin birthed the altcoin sector. Suffice to say, their success has proven extraordinary, as evidenced by Bitcoin’s yearly returns.

However, as Bitcoin’s price kept rising, especially after the $100k milestone, a psychological barrier was erected for new investors. With a market cap of $2.28 trillion, it is no longer easy to move its price, which means outsized gains are no longer likely compared to prior years. Considering that gold enjoys greater institutional engagement compared to Bitcoin, it is easy to see why gold would outperform Bitcoin this year. Or would it?

There are multiple fundamental advantages of Bitcoin over gold:

• Bitcoin is both natively digital and physical, given that its proof-of-work network is secured by real assets: energy and mining machines.
• Bitcoin’s 21 million fixed scarcity is greater than gold’s pseudo-scarcity, with new veins discovered almost on a monthly basis.
• Bitcoin lacks the physical bottlenecks of mining and storage.
• As natively digital, it can be used more effectively as an anchor for the digital economy and across various blockchain networks.

Case in point, publicly traded companies have accumulated over BTC as part of their treasuries. Bitcoin not only serves as an inflation hedge but also as a way to expand companies’ financial flexibility, typically as collateral to raise funds.��

So far, MicroStrategy (MSTR) has been the most successful in this effort, but this is likely only the beginning of the trend. In the long run, even if retail investors begin to favor cheaper altcoins, BTC’s yearly gains are likely to outpace gold because its market cap is only ~9.2% of gold’s.

Moreover, the vast majority of altcoins tend to lose value as new ones enter the market, whereas institutional Bitcoin inflows — beyond spot-traded ETFs — are only starting to accelerate, signaling a structural shift in adoption. 

The bottom line

While gold’s 2025 outperformance may grab headlines, it largely reflects short-term institutional positioning, macro-driven flight from fiat debasement and the legacy momentum of a millennia-old asset.

Bitcoin, by contrast, embodies the long-term principles that gold can only approximate: absolute scarcity, borderless digital utility and an immutable decentralized ledger immune to political cycles. Moreover, its adoption is no longer limited to cypherpunks. Corporations and sophisticated investors increasingly recognize Bitcoin as both a treasury asset and a strategic hedge against fiat debasement.

Ultimately, as the digital economy expands and the limitations of gold’s physical supply become more apparent, Bitcoin’s relatively small market cap is not just to match, but eventually surpass gold’s long-term store-of-value performance as the more enduring form of money.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Why is Gold Outperforming Bitcoin in 2025? appeared first on 51�Թ�.

Atul and Glenn explain how Germany rose from the ashes of defeat in World War II to create a postwar economic miracle. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Germany faced integration problems but reemerged as an exporting powerhouse. Since the 1990s, Chinese demand has fueled the German success story. 

Today, Germany is in crisis. Chinese demand has plummeted. The Russia-Ukraine War has pushed up energy costs for German manufacturing and unleashed inflation in the economy. American protectionism has not helped. To make matters worse, German bureaucracy is a millstone around the neck for every business and even leading politicians admit this publicly. In short, the powerhouse of the EU economy is sputtering.

In addition to economic troubles, Germany faces a big challenge in assimilating a massive influx of immigrants. Over one in five people living in the country was born outside Germany. Assimilation is a problem. So is the rise of the far right in response to German fears of being swamped by outsiders and the failure of the main political parties to address key national problems. 

Both Atul and Glenn go on to conjure scenarios of �ұ�������Բ�’s future. They delve into many questions on the minds of geopolitical gurus, business leaders, politicians, economic policymakers and concerned citizens. Will Germany remain the engine of Europe? Will the country experience a clash of cultures? Will a coherent government emerge that enacts regulatory reform, immigration reform and takes a leadership role in the EU?

Postwar Germany became an economic miracle��

Germany ended 1945 shattered by World War II. The postwar issues it faced were only compounded by the partition of Germany among the Allied victors, meant to prevent the rebirth of German nationalism and militarization. East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) became a communist satellite state under the Soviet Union. 

Meanwhile, West Germany (the Federal Republic of Germany), under the US leadership, became the frontline state against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. NATO totally defined German security. Importantly, Germany was to have no defense or foreign policies independent of NATO. In this postwar era, �ұ�������Բ�’s focus was largely domestic, and, thanks to sensible economic policies and extraordinary hard work, the country emerged as an economic miracle.

This “German Model” was a phenomenal success. Under the American security umbrella, West Germany recovered spectacularly from the catastrophe of World War II. The country followed an export-led economic model and a form of collaborative capitalism in which both capitalist owners and labor unions worked together to be globally competitive. The Mittelstand — small- and medium-sized industries — were scattered across the country and were the backbone of the West German economy. 

Today, Germany continues with this West German postwar model. Exports still power the economy. They accounted for 46% of the German GDP in 2022 and 42% in 2024. German supply outstrips demand. After World War II, Germany exported to the US, the rest of Europe and other parts of the world. Today, exports to China fuel the German economy. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall triggered economic troubles

Yet �ұ�������Բ�’s postwar model is in trouble. In fact, trouble began with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Until then, West Germany had been enjoying the postwar baby boom, GDP growth and improving living standards. After reunification, West Germany had to fund economic development in a devastated East Germany that had lived under the heavy yoke of the Soviet Union.

At the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Europe feared a rebirth of German nationalism and the country’s remilitarization. Both British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and French President François Mitterrand were initially opposed to German reunification. American President George H. W. Bush acted like a true statesman and backed German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s quest for reunification. Both pledged that a united Germany would remain democratic as well as committed to both NATO and the EU. 

As Kohl had promised, German nationalism did not prove to be a problem. Ironically, it was the economy that ran into trouble. After reunification, Germany came to be called “the sick man of Europe.” Over 40 years of communism and Soviet depredations had left East Germany an economic wreck. West Germany had to spend a lot of money to rebuild East Germany, and taxpayers had to shoulder a heavy burden. The one-to-one exchange of the two regions’ currencies also drained West German finances. The implementation of a national mandatory minimum wage proved to have downsides because factories moved to Poland or Slovakia instead of the former East German territory. This lack of new economic activity in the east proved to be a millstone around the neck for the German economy.

Yet, thanks to the Hartz reforms under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the German economy made a comeback. Growing Chinese demand, especially since the start of the 21st century, helped. Recently, that demand has declined. Energy costs have increased after the Russia-Ukraine War broke out in 2022. American protectionism under both President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden has hurt the Germans, too. German GDP declined by 2.3% and grew by merely 0.2% in 2024.

Social challenges compound economic stagnation

Not only the economy but also demography is a matter of concern to Germany. In 2024, German deaths outpaced births by nearly 1.5 to 1. The current fertility rate of 1.39 sits well below replacement levels. There has been a roughly 0.25% decline in population per year since 2009, and the population is likely to decline from 84 million to 79 million by 2050. In addition, the share of the German population aged 65 and older rose from 16% in 1997 to 23% in 2023. At the current rate, the worker-to-pensioner ratio is likely to fall from 2.1:1 today to 1.6:1 by 2050.

As of now, the German federal pension system cannot support the increased number of pensioners. The German pension system depends on a government subsidy that currently stands at over $130 billion (€113 billion). It is expected to exceed $231 billion (€200 billion) by 2040. Currently, federal pension reserves cover less than two months of payouts.

In order to prevent a collapse of the federal pension system, Germany needs foreign workers to bolster its working population. Foreign-born workers enable �ұ�������Բ�’s low-wage sector to survive, but that depresses wages. Germans, unwilling to work for low wages, thus prefer to collect social payments.

With increased immigration, however, come challenges. Roughly 20.7% of German residents are foreign-born, a percentage higher than in the US. This has led to increased resentment towards immigrant populations among the native German population. There is also the issue of assimilation of immigrants, which is a multi-generational issue. Religion complicates matters, and many devout Muslims struggle in �ұ�������Բ�’s secular society. Today, anti-immigration sentiments are on the rise, and some political parties are fanning this sentiment.

Economic stagnation results from both internal and external factors

�ұ�������Բ�’s postwar economic miracle was built on an export-led model. Almost every second euro Germany earns comes from exports. However, international competition has increased. China has been the biggest importer of German products for years. Since COVID, Chinese demand has been falling. More worrying for Germany, Chinese companies have begun to outcompete German ones. In particular, China’s electric car manufacturers have come up dramatically and overtaken �ұ�������Բ�’s traditional cars powered by internal combustion engines. German vehicle production has declined by nearly a third, from around six million in 2015 to four million in 2023.

Furthermore, Germany is no longer a lead innovator and has not been so for over 50 years. The state has become a prisoner of its own postwar success — Germany is still locked in older technology markets such as internal combustion engine cars and machine tools. There hasn’t even been a major breakthrough in German software since SAP in 1972.

Much of this lack of innovation can be attributed to the regulatory sclerosis that plagues the state. Excessive regulation and ridiculous red tape have become self-inflicted wounds that even socialist leaders bemoan. Taxes and labor costs are high. Skilled workers are in short supply and �ұ�������Բ�’s fabled apprentice model is under tremendous strain.

Also, the corporatist model that had once propelled postwar Germany to economic heights has also slowed down the economy. Decision-making is slow and painful. German companies struggle to move with speed and scale. 

Germany is seeing an uptick in political polarization

�ұ�������Բ�’s domestic political struggles are a product of its structural economic problems and its social struggles. Political fragmentation has increased, with both the far right and the far left on the rise. Recent opinion polls show a particularly worrying trend: The far-right party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) commands 27% support, while Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats command 24%. If the AfD keeps winning greater support, then it might one day be in power. At the moment, no other party is willing to form a coalition with AfD. However, this might change in the future. Currently, the “firewall” against the AfD has held, but it may collapse in the future. This could occur first not at the federal level but in some of �ұ�������Բ�’s 16 states — especially in those in former East Germany, which could see AfD-led governments.

Atul and Glenn also highlight the rise of the far left. Sahra Wagenknecht’s party, Buendnis Sahra Wagenknecht, got 4.97% of the vote in the 2025 national election, barely missing the 5% threshold. Wagenknecht is a populist who is Eurosceptic, anti-immigration and opposed to �ұ�������Բ�’s involvement in the Russia-Ukraine War. Had Wagenknecht’s party gotten a few more votes, forming a coalition government would have become even harder. 

�ұ�������Բ�’s future remains unknown

Glenn predicts that �ұ�������Բ�’s status as the engine of Europe will persist. However, he also sees the status quo evolving slowly. Fragmentation will persist, and so will decline, if German cohesion declines and the country is unable to make structural changes. Atul foresees fragmentation and decline as well. However, he argues that decline will most likely manifest in an even more polarized society, particularly with the clash of cultures between the AfD and increased Muslim radicalization.

Furthermore, economic and social inequality will exacerbate the breakdown of political cohesion. Germany has over one million millionaires, most of whom inherited their wealth from the postwar recovery period. Tax cuts and loopholes have only cemented the power of economic elites. Sadly, German society has fossilized. There is no more upward social mobility, and young families are struggling.

On the international stage, Germany faces an irredentist Russia and economic competition from China. EU integration has also begun to stumble, as Europe is faced with wider political fragmentation and immigration challenges. Overregulation in the EU has caused German resentment towards Brussels and towards immigrants.

Glenn points out how history offers the cautionary pessimism that an existential crisis is the only way to change the distribution of wealth. His optimistic viewpoint has Germany achieving political cohesion, thus enabling regulatory reform, which would lead to economic innovation and growth.

Finally, Glenn quotes German economist and 51�Թ�’s editor-at-large Alex Gloy to make an optimistic case for Germany: 

“The revolution will come anyway. Either by the street, where extreme elements will fight for control of the narrative, or from top down. A revolution driven by the street will likely have a far-right tint, as their supporters outnumber far-left activists. 

A top-down revolution would involve the dissolution of national governments (which are hated anyways) and Brussels’s bureaucratic overhead. The solution could be a “United States of Europe” or a “Europe of 50 regions”, where 50 regions of approximately equal population (10 million each) enjoy vast self-governing rights, giving more power to minorities within current nation states. Politics would become much more local, with constituents more likely to get involved and less disenfranchised. A Europe of Regions would have only one supra-national military, with common planning and procurement, decentralized production, but centralized command. There would have to be a charter of minimum common rules to ensure functioning. There would be no need for national borders.”

Sadly, this is an idealistic though unlikely outcome.

[ edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/podcast are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Dialectic: Can Germany Outgrow Its Postwar American Model? appeared first on 51�Թ�.