The War Europe Forgot It Was Fighting

 version date: July 24th, 2026

 

The War Europe Forgot It Was Fighting

NOTE: This is not meant to be an analysis as much as a “left field” view on reality in Europe. It's not as much meant to be convincing, or believed, as much as attacked. But it contains my biases and I am not the one able to hit them.

There has been a war in Europe. Russia won it.

Not on a map, not with a formal surrender, but through the quiet, cumulative arithmetic of European strategic decommissioning after the fall of the Berlin wall. The continent’s leadership speaks in terms of deterrence, EU enlargement, and is engaging in a collective performative dance to the tune of “we are fighting Putin, others do not”. Their operational behavior tells a different story, and has done so for decades. Press “mute” on the remote control, and a very different perception rears its ugly head.

The disconnect is structural, not rhetorical. For over a decade, EU institutions treated geopolitical friction as as temporary liquidity issue rather than a foundational constraint. Few events showed it  brutally like the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in 2014, at the hands of  "Russian separatists". Europe arguably proved it was in surrender mode already, because there are historically two alternative way of reacting to this kind of incidents: one, practiced by all dominant powers through centuries, could be called the "Mattis school of believing everyone". on February 7th, 2018, "Syrian" troops approached a US held refinery near Khaskam. US forces used deconfliction lines to contact the Russians to make certain that no Russian troops were present and that there would be no confrontation. Russian authorities claimed the forces there were not theirs.

The US accepted their word. and proceeded to turn back the attack with predictable results: more than two hundred Russian "mercenaries" were killed , while the Kremlin admitted... less than half a dozen  Russian casualties. Well, that's the short end of the stick of "plausible deniability".

But it's quite possible that the US behavior, while fully in line with traditional practices, was also due to After Action Report of what Europe actually did after similar "Schroedinger's Russians" killed three hundred people by downing an airliner flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur while it was overflying the Dombass.

Europe started an inquiry. 

After all, which spontaneous separatist movement is unable to acquire and operate a Buk missile system? Hey, it's only three vehicles, and whose cousin is not a tracking radar operator, or a missile technician?

Also, later, High Representative Federica Mogherini of the EU stated that the European Union "calls on the Russian Federation to accept its responsibility" and to cooperate as well.

Maybe a comprehensive SEAD mission would have made more sense. But it gets better, since in 2014, Italian then Prime Minister Enrico Letta attended the opening of the Sochi games in Russia.

  European Leaders demanded strategic autonomy while quietly dismantling the industrial, energy, and fiscal architectures required to sustain it. The most pristine example is German energy policy. Berlin traded long-term gas infrastructure for short-term price suppression, on top of Green ideologies, which depend on natural gas for their survival. The result was not resilience; it was the systematic transfer of strategic optionality to Moscow’s primary export commodity.... on top of A LOT of hard cash. When the 2022 rupture arrived, Europe didn’t face a crisis—it faced an accounting entry already written.

History offers a parallel that clarifies the mechanism, even if moralizers refuse it: Neville Chamberlain vs. Angela Merkel and Ursula von der Leyen. Chamberlain is widely remembered as an appeaser. That’s incomplete. His "appeasement" purchased eighteen months of industrial mobilization, airframe production scaling, and anti-aircraft network deployment that kept Britain on the board when the Blitz arrived. The alternative wasn’t immediate peace; it was defeat. Merkel and her EU institutional counterparts did the inverse. They put all their chips on their ideological stance (and voter base, wink wink) while allowing strategic sectors to atrophy and/or depart for China. Von der Leyen’s European Commission didn’t just fail to rebuild defense industry capacity; it actively fought it it in favor of regulatory harmonization, carbon pricing externalities, and financial engineering that treats ammunition pipelines like ESG compliance checklists. Germany’s armed forces were gutted like a freshly caught trout—visibly intact, structurally hollowed out, left to rot beneath the surface. Every other EU capital followed the budgetary template. Capability decay became a contagion disguised as fiscal responsibility.

The distortion is no longer theoretical. It shows up in force disposition. Take Italy:  the only three cutting-edge ground units designed for high-intensity maneuver warfare are perpetually rotating into Lebanon under UNIFIL mandates that functionally entangle them with Hezbollah-aligned positions. This isn’t a tactical misallocation; it’s the mechanical output of a system speaks one way and acts another... until Foreign Minister Tajani slips and says something to the effect that Hezbollah shouldn't fire on UNIFIL troops that are there to defend them. When strategic STATED intent and operational deployment diverge this sharply, you’re not managing risk—you’re managing decline.

What does this mean structurally? equilibrium collapses when price signals return to reality.  And the "new normal" where defense spending has to show a pulse, on top of electoral cycle spending and the long waves of the Gulf war, are putting Europe in an awkward spot indeed. Germany could have to use candles this coming winter.

The pruning phase has begun, but it won't be painless. 

The next eighteen months will test whether that pruning yields correction or collapse. France heads to the ballot box for a presidential election where fiscal space is already contracting under unfulfillable social commitments. Italy faces a general election layered atop sovereign debt service walls and municipal liquidity strain. Across the continent, incumbents manage expectations by promising future growth while drawing down present reserves. And through it all, the institutional trio of Von der Leyen, Lagarde, and Kallas remains at the helm. I find it difficult to imagine a political configuration more functionally aligned with Moscow’s strategic preferences to the extent that if asked to bet against a winning Putin keeping them in the saddle, i'd politely refuse.. A leadership bloc that treats energy security as a regulatory exercise, defense spending as a compliance metric, and fiscal consolidation as performative art doesn’t just fail to deter aggression; it subsidizes it, as seen in the continuation of Russian gas import. Hungary was not ostracised because it opposed its end, but because it said it was happening, something Giovanni Sapone (Joe Soap) in the streets of Italy doesn't know and doesn't get told.

Europe didn’t lose a war on a battlefield. It lost it by confusing "well meaning" with battle plans, and bureaucratic directives with strategic thinking. The storm that clears the rainbow leaves wreckage first. Survival requires abandoning the simulation before the ledger demands payment.

Disclaimer: This analysis reflects historical patterns, institutional mechanics, and market discipline over time. It does not constitute financial, political, or security advice. Do your own research, verify primary sources, and exercise independent judgment.