Or perhaps it was the year it became obvious that the European elites were taking orders from someone who isn’t the Americans and who doesn’t give a damn about the various European peoples.
To be fair to the dismal year on the way out, at least 2025 won’t be a hard act to beat. In particular, if last January anyone was recklessly optimistic enough to hope for the West to come to its senses about its catastrophic relationship with Russia and the war in and over Ukraine, they will have been largely disappointed. (Let’s not waste time on those who were still dreaming about actually defeating Russia: the clinically delusional and deliberately disingenuous are an unrewarding topic.)
It is true that the disappointment delivered by 2025 in this area has not been total. There has been one major positive – if still incomplete and reversible – development: After many abrupt twists and turns, Washington seems to have settled on a policy of “strategic stability” (in the language of the new National Security Strategy) with Moscow. This marks a possible path to mutually beneficial normalization, perhaps even a future détente. (I will plead the Trump Unpredictability Caveat here, though: if the American president and disrupter-in-chief flipflops again, don’t blame this author.)
But, at the same time, the almost 30 countries best labeled NATO-EU Europe, with politically rigid and ideologically zealous Germans in the lead not only in Berlin but Brussels as well, have found the single most perverse issue to finally assert some independence from their US overlords: stalling an end to the Ukraine War. This obstructionism has been so obvious that even (some) Western observers have started noticing it.
Though little noticed, this is actually a historic reversal. Silly pundits used to say that Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus. But now when even the traditionally ultra-bellicose Americans have finally been backing out of an ever-worsening confrontation between, in effect, the West and Russia, NATO-EU Europe’s odd – and unpopular – elites have resisted the prospect of peace.
The insanity, the oddity, and the unpopularity of the European elites cannot be exaggerated. I don’t know anyone, of any political persuasion, who actually supports anything the EU is doing. No one wants war. No one will be willing to go to war. If they try to make anyone go to war, they’ll fight their own governments before they’ll fight the Russians.
It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the Russians already have a plan in place to help those who would rather fight the people that want to fight Russia than fight them.
I expect more than one European government to collapse completely or be overthrown before 2026 is through. And if one goes, there will likely be a domino effect.