If history is unkind to Western Europe’s ruling elites, it will not be because they lacked warnings. It will be because they ignored every single one of them. By any reasonable measure, 2025 was a disastrous year for Western Europe politically, economically, morally, and strategically. Worse still, the trends that defined it are not abating. They are intensifying.

For all the talk of “European values,” “strategic autonomy,” and “defending democracy,” the European Union and its NATO-aligned governments spent the year accelerating toward a self-inflicted crisis of historic proportions. Reckless militarization, political manipulation, and a steadily expanding propaganda apparatus have become the defining features of a bloc that once marketed itself as a peace project. The result is a Europe poorer, more polarized, less free, and more exposed to war than at any point since the Cold War’s end.

The most consequential failure of 2025 was Western Europe’s determination to obstruct a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine. While Washington-after years of escalation-appeared to settle into a cautious posture of “strategic stability” with Moscow, Europe’s political class moved in the opposite direction. The irony is difficult to miss: as even traditionally hawkish elements in the United States began to recognize the dangers of perpetual confrontation with Russia, European leaders doubled down on maximalism.

This is not a matter of moral principle or democratic idealism, despite the rhetoric. It is about refusing to accept reality. Any durable peace would require acknowledging that Russia has achieved battlefield superiority and that Ukraine, even with Western support, cannot reverse that outcome. For Europe’s ideologically rigid leadership-particularly in Germany and the Brussels bureaucracy-such an admission would amount to a public confession of failure.

Thus, peace itself has become politically unacceptable. The human cost, borne overwhelmingly by Ukrainians, is treated as........

© Blitz