2025 was dismal for Western Europe. And at this rate, it will get worse

Reckless warmongering, political manipulation, and propaganda have all been parts of the EU’s march towards the abyss
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 (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 .
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.
Cut through the nauseatingly hypocritical value cant and the hysterical Russia-is-coming-for-us-too! nonsense, and the real reason for this resistance is obvious. Any peace anchored in reality (and thus with a chance to last) would inevitably have to reflect that Russia has long gained the upper hand on the battlefield over both Ukraine and its Western backers. And among the proudly not-quite-from-this-world leaders of NATO-EU Europe, having to accept reality is considered an insufferable affront.
With a little bit of bad luck for ordinary Ukrainians – and they have had plenty, from their cynical Western friends-from-hell to their ultra-corrupt rulers at home – .
Yet the NATO-EU Europeans’ rearguard action to keep peace at bay was not their only sensational mistake in 2025. At least two more are obvious.
First, let’s look at the ongoing transformation of NATO with a little bit of historical perspective: NATO’s first secretary general, Hastings Ismay, is said to have quipped That was as honest as it gets from a man in that position, and it certainly beats his non-entity successors, such as Mark Rutte and Jens Stoltenberg, on no-bullshit straight talk.
Historically speaking, it’s a curious and revealing fact that NATO kept sticking around when the Russians first took the initiative to end the Cold War and then dissolved their own Cold-War military alliance, the long-forgotten Warsaw Pact (officially, the ‘Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance’.)
Instead of following suit, NATO set out on a course of over-reach and expansion. Between the early 1990s and the present, the alliance has furiously provoked Russia by blunt bad faith and ceaseless enlargement. It has also cast about globally for pretexts for prolonging its existence, often at the cost of ordinary people caught in the crossfire of its regime-change or, as in the case of Ukraine, as pawns of a failed proxy war.
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