Europe has had a good run. It has been at the top of world affairs for half a millennium, since the great age of exploration connected all continents and first gave man a global perspective. The great European empires – initially Portuguese, then Spanish, British, French – dominated much of the planet for some 350 years. The places that lay beyond European control were either inward-facing civilisations like China and Japan, or regional powers without truly global ambitions like the Ottomans, Russia and the United States in its first century of independence.
But over the past 150 years, Europe’s collective weight in the global balance of power has been on a declining path. Two world wars, the loss of empire, the rise of new players with global reach – first America, then the Soviets and now China – have seen Old Europe give up its primacy in international affairs but nonetheless retain a seat at the top geopolitical table.
Since 1945, however, Europe’s influence and status have been entwined with and increasingly dependent on American power, as part of what we have come to call “the West”. The transatlantic relationship became so close, complex and deeply rooted in the consciousness and political culture of both Europe and the United States, that trying to assess European power independently of American power – i.e. to disentangle them – had become conceptually impossible. This has served to conceal the underlying erosion of Europe’s real standing in global affairs.
The matter is not simply one of lack of military capability. European quasi-total reliance on American security has well been understood since the days of Churchill, and yet the alliance held tight. This was because Europe’s economic power – especially in the EEC’s and EU’s golden age – acted as an anchor for America’s military protection. A rich, thriving Europe, of a similar political-ideological orientation, made a good business partner and strategic ally to Washington in any possible scenario. It was better to keep it close than let it become a competitor, or let it fall under the domination of a foe.
But Europe is none of those things anymore. From economic parity with the US 10-15 years ago it is now well behind and de-industrialising fast. It has effectively lost the big tech competition. Its welfare systems, bureaucracy, corruption and protectionism debilitate and suffocate its prospects for growth. Its wild immigration policies, elite-led “liberal” repression of freedoms and political opponents – including such abominations as the annulment of elections in member states like Romania when they turn out the “wrong” results – only guarantee more social and political dysfunction.
Why would the US need Europe at this point, and what would be the penalty or geopolitical downside of letting go of it and leaving the Europeans to their own devices? Lacking the actual exercise of independent power and only having ever acted on the world stage, since 1945, in the shadow of American might, the Europeans have lost touch with the modest reality of their true condition. The Ukraine peace talks, from which Europe has found itself excluded in the most humiliating fashion, are finally revealing the real extent of European power in the only context that matters, i.e. that of high-stakes international peace negotiations – and the picture is one of at best a second-rate player that hopes to influence things indirectly, from the margins.
The stark truth is that, primarily because of European weakness and policy failures on Ukraine and indeed with the US, the political backbone of the transatlantic relationship that has given substance to “the West” for 80 years has now broken. The institutional frameworks, such as NATO, remain formally in place; but politically and strategically, the US and Europe are now effectively going their separate ways. This is a terminal event for Europe’s status as one of the great centres of power, and the end-point of its long arc of decline.
Just as Europe leaves the main stage of global power politics, Russia appears to re-enter it after three decades in the post-Soviet “wilderness”. This goes beyond the mere optics of the direct US-Russia talks and the return of high-level summitry – as in Alaska – for the settlement of grand geopolitical issues like in the old Cold War days.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a great deal of substance to Russia’s resurgence. The war has had the effect of increasing, not decreasing, its military power. Its economy has proven to be extremely robust: As liberal economist Adam Tooze recently admitted on his podcast, the Moscow is fighting the war “without even breaking a sweat”, economically. And politically, it is Ukraine not Russia which is now under pressure after four years of war, with Putin having further consolidated his Chinese alliance and Russia’s reputation across the Global South. If the war ends with anything that can be interpreted as more of a Russian than of a Ukrainian victory the result could be seen rather widely as a demonstration of restored Russian power. The narrative that Russia will push will be that Moscow took on the entire West and won.
Big wars tend to alter the patterns or even the structure of world order. There is a case to be made that this is already happening now, before the Ukraine war has even formally ended. In recent years it has become commonplace to observe that the US-China relationship is the most important in international affairs because of their superpower status. This, then, indicates that the world has become bipolar again with China now playing the old USSR’s role; hence, too, all the talk of Cold War 2.0.
In this context, the rather popular “multipolarity” framing appears to be ultimately mistaken, since none of the other presumed “poles” of power – such as Europe or India – displays a credible ability to successfully fight a great-power war, which is the best and only real benchmark for this kind of status.
The problem is that now Russia seems to qualify as a front-rank power under this requirement, on account of its performance in the war since 2022. It is certainly not in the same league economically as China or the US, nor is its global political influence on par with theirs. But, on the other hand, neither does it seem accurate to rank Russia together with all the other main actors, including Europe, given what it has demonstrated militarily together with its diplomatic standing both with the US and China.
It would appear, therefore, that a better way to understand Russia’s position in the world system now, as it has evolved through four years of high-intensity warfare, is to assume – at least provisionally – that it might perhaps be closer to that of the two leading powers than to the rest, Europe included. If this were eventually proven to be true – and only the final result of the war can provide the definitive proof – then the obvious conclusion would be that the world structure of power is now tripolar, with Russia the weakest but nonetheless part of the three.
The consequences of anything approaching a Russian “victory” in Ukraine will reverberate throughout the international system, and there is little sign that the Europeans quite appreciate the gravity of what lies ahead for their own standing in the world. But let us hope in a better outcome.
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