Europe’s decades-long subordination to US grand strategy has become so firmly embedded in its institutional ideology that it has acquired a momentum of its own, blinding European leaders to the glaring and irreconcilable contradictions between their normative ambitions and material capabilities, Paweł Wargan writes.
In November 1990, the governments of Europe, Canada, the United States and the Soviet Union gathered at the Palais de l’Elysée in Paris to discuss the changing world order. After three days of discussion, they adopted the Charter of Paris for a New Europe. Building on the vision of a “common European home” first put forward by Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, the document promised to inaugurate a new security architecture for a post-Cold War Europe. “The era of confrontation and division of Europe has ended”, the Charter declared. It promised that Europe would become “a source of peace, open to dialogue and to cooperation”.
But the loss of Soviet power did not signal the end of an “era of confrontation”; it marked that era’s dramatic escalation. For much of the post-World War II period, the USSR and the struggles for national liberation that it had helped fund and arm acted as an obstacle to Western belligerence. Their retreat opened the floodgates of conflict wide open – unleashing a wave of economic and military assaults that subordinated increasing parts of the world to the US-led order.
By the 1990s, Western Europe had largely been integrated into that project. The Truman Doctrine and Marshall Plan, which set the foundations for anti-Communist containment in Europe, had weakened anti-systemic political forces and established free-market policies privileging US investment. Washington’s increasing military presence on the continent protected that new order, policing and culling political alternatives. The retreat of Soviet power, however, presented the US with an opportunity to extend that order further afield. That is why, while US leaders publicly backed European proposals for a new security architecture, they actively sabotaged them in private. “To hell with that,” US President George H.W. Bush told Germany’s Helmut Kohl in 1990, referring to the commitment not to expand NATO. “We prevailed, they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”
In 1997, the US Senate debated the merits of admitting three new states to NATO. “Europeans have proven incapable, left to themselves, of settling their differences peacefully,” then-Senator Joseph R. Biden said in his opening remarks. “The United States… must continue to lead the new security architecture for that continent.” In the debate that followed, Russia was mentioned 353 times, more than the combined number for the three countries whose accession was under discussion: Hungary was mentioned 56 times, Poland 66, and the Czech Republic 36. The scene was set. Two years later, NATO advanced eastward – not by an inch, but some 1,000 kilometres, as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were absorbed into the alliance. “Pan-European security is a dream,” US Secretary of State James Baker had said in the early 1990s. Now, that dream was dead.
NATO served an instrument for securing, maintaining, and extending US control in Eurasia, a vast territory that US strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski called “the grand chessboard”. For decades, the US had manoeuvred its pieces to prevent political and economic integration on the continent. Ronald Reagan’s operation to destroy the German-Soviet Druzhba pipeline four decades ago – like the destruction of the German-Russian pipeline Nordstream 2 in 2022 – made it clear that challenges to Europe’s dependence on the US would not be tolerated. Checkmate, Brzezinski wrote in 1997, would mean absorbing Ukraine and shifting US military infrastructure – implicitly, including its nuclear weapons – to Russia’s borders. It was thought that this would deal a strategic blow to the country, potentially leading to its disintegration. In this way, Brzezinski hoped, the US would gain “unlimited access to this hitherto closed area”, securing not only Russia’s vast mineral wealth, but also a strategic bridgehead to East Asia.
But the West had misjudged not only Russia’s capacity to resist the assault, but also its own ability to sustain this escalating confrontation. Across the West, the industrial base necessary to support a prolonged high-intensity conflict had been systematically eroded by decades of neoliberal restructuring and financialisation. The strategy of military expansion and economic containment has failed in its goal of forcing Russia’s surrender. On the contrary, it has seen the emergence of Russia as a new centre of development, evidenced most clearly by the way in which Western sanctions have boomeranged against their architects. Now, the calculus in Washington has shifted. Donald Trump’s attempts to regulate the conflict in Ukraine appear to stem from the recognition that neither of the remaining paths forward – a catastrophic escalation, or the continued erosion of US hegemony and military capacity – serve US interests.
The US retreat from the trans-Atlantic consensus, in turn, has revealed the European bloc’s hollowness. The EU lacks both its own security architecture and the unified and accountable political governance necessary to build one. Its ReArm Europe initiative – breath-taking in the scale of its headline figures – faces a similar fate to the abortive Green Deal or post-Covid Recovery Plan. Both initiatives were ultimately stymied by the EU’s overreliance on private finance, entrenching the logic of austerity that had kept Europe in a severe crisis of underinvestment, and deepening the divisions between Europe’s core and periphery that have long tugged at the bloc’s unity.
It did not have to be this way. After the turmoil of the financial and sovereign debt crises, Europe began to look east. Trade with Russia and China ballooned. States ravaged by a decade of austerity signed up for the Belt and Road initiative to renovate ports, restore roads, and build bridges. It appeared that the foundations for peaceful cooperation across the Eurasian landmass could finally be established.
