Borrowed Armies, Borrowed Minds

Ukraine is bleeding out on Europe’s eastern border, and Europe is responding with spreadsheets. That is the visible failure - the one measured in delayed deliveries and hedged commitments. There is a quieter one underneath it: that Europe has been borrowing its worldview for so long, from the same country it borrowed its security from, that it has largely forgotten what its own looks like.

Meanwhile Washington has turned. Not suddenly - the turn was always coming. What is remarkable is that European governments are still processing it as a surprise. Nobody should have been surprised. The relationship was always heading here. It was the logical endpoint of an arrangement that was never quite what it claimed to be.

What NATO was actually for

The United States built NATO because a forward-deployed military alliance on the Eurasian landmass is an extraordinary instrument of power projection. Bases in Germany, Italy, Romania - strategic assets, not gestures of friendship. The protection they offered Europe was real, but it was a byproduct, not the purpose.

The protection was therefore always conditional. It lasted precisely as long as projecting power in Europe served American interests. The moment a US administration calculated that it didn’t - whether out of cynicism, incompetence, or genuine strategic reorientation toward Asia - the guarantee would evaporate. That moment is now.

Europe chose not to see this. For decades, the comfortable arrangement allowed European governments to run down their militaries, cut defense budgets, and redirect the savings toward welfare states and the quiet pleasures of geopolitical irrelevance. The Americans would handle it. The Americans always handled it. Delegating your security to someone else only postpones the question. The bill arrives when you can least afford it.

The dependency went deeper than armies and budgets. When you hand someone else your security, you gradually hand them your perception of the world as well. Washington didn’t just defend Europe - it told Europe who the enemies were, which crises required response, and how the global order was supposed to be read. Four decades of that arrangement left European foreign policy institutions genuinely better at translating American positions than forming their own. Europe outsourced its armies. It outsourced its judgment too.

The disgrace in slow motion

Call it what it is: the deliberate sabotage of a country’s ability to defend itself, conducted in the most humiliating fashion possible - public ultimatums, extorted concessions, security guarantees dangled as leverage in what amount to real estate negotiations. The people running this policy are gangsters, and they are operating in plain sight.

Europe’s response has been to hedge. To avoid provoking Washington. To keep treating the relationship as salvageable, the damage as temporary, the aberration as something the next election cycle will correct. Cowardice dressed as prudence.

Ukraine doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for the next election cycle. The men dying in Zaporizhzhia are dying because they live on the border between a Europe that cannot decide if it wants to survive and a Russia that has already decided it wants to expand. Their sacrifice is buying Europe time that Europe is visibly declining to use.

What we owe and why we won’t pay it

Europe has the capacity to support Ukraine at a level that would materially change the war. The resources exist. What’s missing is political leadership willing to tell its populations the truth: that this is our war, that the cost of losing it vastly exceeds the cost of winning it, and that the United States is no longer available.

There is a particular European pathology at work here. We have become very good at thinking of ourselves as the morally serious actors on the world stage - committed to rules, to multilateralism, to human rights. We say the right things with great conviction and then don’t back them up. The gap between European rhetoric on Ukraine and European action has nothing to do with coordination. Europe simply hasn’t found the will to match its own words.

Ukraine is asking for weapons, money, and air defense systems. It is asking Europe to treat its survival as a European interest - which it plainly is. Holding back full support isn’t caution. It’s a decision to let Ukrainians carry costs that belong to us.

On China: competitor, not enemy

Nowhere is the borrowed judgment more visible than on China. Ask a European foreign ministry official how they arrived at their current threat assessment of Beijing, and trace the intellectual lineage carefully. You will find American think tanks, NATO briefing cycles, and the steady pressure that comes with being a security client. You will not find much that is distinctly European - rooted in European interests, European history, or the proximity to both Russia and China that comes with actually being their geographic neighbor.

The record is worth looking at directly. The People’s Republic of China has not initiated a war in over four decades. Its military modernization, while substantial, is built around what strategists call A2/AD - anti-access/area denial. The aim is to stop the US military from operating freely in China’s near seas. Powers that want to control their own neighborhood are different from powers that want to conquer the world. China, whatever its faults, looks a lot more like the former.

Taiwan illustrates how far the Western framing drifts from the strategic reality. The standard narrative treats Chinese pressure as naked aggression against a sovereign democracy. The geography tells a different story.

Taiwan sits at the center of the first island chain - the arc running from Japan through the Ryukyus, Taiwan, and the Philippines to Borneo. In US military planning, this chain functions as a natural barrier containing China’s navy and air force within the near seas. A Taiwan integrated into US military infrastructure - hosting surveillance assets, missile systems, forward-deployed forces - closes the western Pacific to China almost entirely. Every major Chinese port, naval base, and industrial center falls within strike range. Chinese submarines would have to run the Taiwan Strait or the Luzon Strait to reach open water; both are narrow, shallow, and easily monitored.

None of this is a defense of Beijing’s methods, or indifference to the people of Taiwan. It’s an argument for seeing the situation clearly. China’s insistence on Taiwan is driven less by ideology than by a concrete military vulnerability that any Chinese government would feel compelled to address. The United States understood this logic perfectly well when it invoked the Monroe Doctrine, when it brought the world to the edge of nuclear war over Soviet missiles in Cuba, and when it has periodically enforced its own sphere of influence with rather less restraint than it demands from others.

Europe should form its view based on European interests - which include deep economic interdependence with China, an interest in a multipolar world that doesn’t simply swap American hegemony for Chinese hegemony, and a reasonable desire not to be conscripted into a conflict whose primary logic is US-Chinese rivalry. Competitor is the right frame. Serious engagement - on trade, on technology standards, on human rights - flows from that. Treating China as an enemy, on Washington’s instruction, would be the same borrowed thinking that got us here.

No more borrowed time

The postwar European security order is over. Not fraying - over. The institutions that structured it, the alliances that underwrote it, the American commitment that anchored it: gone or going. Europe can respond by finally building the political and military capacity to defend itself, or it can keep hoping the next Washington administration will be more agreeable.

Rearmament alone won’t be enough. A Europe that spends three percent of GDP on defense while still outsourcing its analysis to Washington has bought itself harder muscles and kept the same borrowed brain. Real sovereignty means forming independent judgments - about Russia, about China, about what European interests actually are and who actually threatens them. That work is slower and less visible than ordering artillery shells, and it matters just as much.

Supporting Ukraine and engaging China on European terms - these fit together naturally. That’s what European foreign policy looks like when Europeans are actually making it.

We should have been prepared. We weren’t. The least we can do now is start thinking for ourselves.