Europe Is Alone And Under Siege

2025-12-07 09:01:35

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The map below is a depiction of The Deluge, a historical event in which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - which had been a major European power - was defeated and destroyed under the combined assaults of Russia and Sweden in the 1600s.

Map via Wikimedia Commons

After having its power broken, Poland was carved up in the 1700s and subjugated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. It took more than two centuries, until the fall of communism in 1991, for Poland to reemerge as a strong, truly independent country.

The Deluge shows that power and independence are not permanent. If you are surrounded by hostile powers, and if you don't have the ability to guard yourself against those powers, no amount of historical greatness can save you from being subjugated.

This is an important lesson for Europeans to remember right now, as they find their region under siege from Russia, China and the United States all at once.

The United States no longer cares about the European project

Why would America care about Europe at all? For most of our history, we didn't. In the 19th century, the US viewed European countries as dangerous rivals. In the early 20th century, Americans prided themselves on not getting involved in European affairs, and were incensed at their government for dragging them into World War 1.

Only after World War 2 did Americans start caring about Europe, and we did so for three reasons:

West Europe was a bulwark against Soviet communism.

Europe was a key trading partner.

Many Americans came to value their ancestral ties to Europe.

The first of these reasons vanished in 1991. Europe is still a bulwark against Russia, but Americans no longer feel threatened by Russia. Russian power is far less than what it once was, and Russia's rightist ideology does not threaten the rightists who now rule America.

As for communism, many (most?) Americans now believe that European countries are socialist. When American conservatives ask where in the world socialism has succeeded, American progressives will always reply“Europe” or“Scandinavia.” Whether Europe or Scandinavia is actually socialist is irrelevant; Americans have come to see it that way.

Europe is still an important trading partner. But Trump and the other people now in charge of the US do not understand trade at all. They think about trade entirely in terms of the net trade balance, rather than in terms of total US exports.

Trump & Co don't care that America sells $650 billion a year to Europe; the fact that Europe sells $800 billion a year to America means that Trump & co. think America is“losing” and would benefit from a cutoff of trade.

Remember that the US is an unusually closed-off, self-sufficient economy, so Americans in general don't think too hard about trade or try to understand why it's valuable. Also, the people running now the country are especially ignorant about economic matters.

As for civilizational ties, this is the reason Trump and the MAGA movement have turned so strongly against Europe. The American right values Europe because they think of it as a White Christian homeland - the source and font of Western civilization. Here's a post I wrote about that earlier this year.

I wrote:

This isn't a new attitude, either. Remember that in order to persuade a reluctant America to join World War 1, the US government had to depict Germany as an ape abducting a white woman!

If you understand this, then nothing in America's new National Security Strategy is mysterious, surprising, or confusing. Here's how War on the Rocks summarizes the Trump administration's attitude toward Europe:

The American right sees the“mad brute” in the ape cartoon as the dark-skinned Muslim immigrants who have entered Europe in large numbers in recent years. And they see themselves as needing to save the woman - representing their view of Europe as the traditional font of White Christian civilization - from that mad brute.

This tweet by Elon Musk pretty much sums up the American right's attitude toward Europe:

This is why no amount of European shaming or moral persuasion can have any effect on the Trump administration - or on any Republican administration in the decades to come. This kind of appeal to friendship is totally useless:

And this kind of bitter, angry hectoring is worse than useless:

The American right - i.e., the people now in charge of the country - do not care intrinsically about democracy, or about allyship, or about NATO, or about the European project. They care about“Western Civilization.”

Unless Europe expels Muslim immigrants en masse and starts talking about its Christian heritage, the Republican Party is unlikely to lift a hand to help Europe with any of its problems. Democrats will want to help Europe, but they will only be in power intermittently, and helping Europe will not be high on their priority list.[1]

Thus, America is not riding to the rescue this time, or for the foreseeable future. I wish things were different, but my wishes count for nothing; this is the reality with which the Europeans must now deal.

Russia and China together are the real menace to Europe

Europeans do not need me to tell them that Putin's Russia threatens not just Ukraine, but all of Europe. They are well aware of this fact. Russia now regularly flies its drones into Europe, and is probably behind a wave of sabotage attacks on European infrastructure.

How can Russia, a country of just 144 million people and $7 trillion in GDP (PPP), hope to overcome Europe, which has 520 million people and $33 trillion in GDP (including the UK), especially after Russia has expended so many of its young men and materiel in its war with Ukraine already? There are three answers here. The first is gray-zone warfare, including sabotage and political influence campaigns. But that's only the beginning.

Russia's second method for fighting Europe is what I call a“Ponzi empire” strategy. Russia has enslaved vast numbers of Ukrainians from the occupied regions of Ukraine to fight against the rest of their country.

If Russia conquers the rest of Ukraine, it will similarly enslave the rest of the country's population, and send them to fight against Poland, the Baltics, and Moldova. If they then defeat Poland, they will enslave the Poles and send them to fight against the next European target, and so on.

This is a very traditional Russian strategy. Enslaved Ukrainians were used to attack Poland in 1939. Enslaved Poles were forced to fight Russia's wars in the days of the old Tsarist empire, and would have been forced to do so again as part of the Warsaw Pact. Just like zombies turn humans against their own, each slice of Europe that Russia can chop off ends up being turned against the rest.[2]

Russia's final strategy for fighting Europe is to rely on Chinese assistance. Russia's own industrial base is very weak, and relied heavily on imported European parts and machinery that has now been partially cut off. But Chinese tech has largely plugged that hole, as the Carnegie Endowment reports:

China is a far bigger manufacturer than Europe, and can pour essentially infinite war production into Russia if it wants to. And China is now assisting Russia's gray-zone warfare against Europe:

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