CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Can Europe Reassert Itself After Ukraine?

Photograph Source: Dati Bendo / European Union, 2025 / EC – Audiovisual Service – CC BY 4.0

Washington’s 2025 strike on Iran, the raid to remove Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in early 2026, and its renewed interest in acquiring Greenland have clarified the country’s international priorities. Meanwhile, securing Ukraine’s independence, once a defining rallying cry of the liberal world order, has slipped to a second-tier concern, but remains central for Europe. Equally pressing for the continent is the U.S. exerting economic and military pressure alongside the separate tensions over Greenland’s sovereignty. Combined with Russian pressure from the east, Europe’s vulnerability has been plainly exposed.

This is despite the European Union’s 27 member states representing roughly 450 million people, forming the world’s second-largest economy, and possessing advanced military capabilities, including France’s nuclear deterrent. Yet policy missteps, coupled with decades of outsourcing its security and strategic planning to Washington, has prevented the EU from mobilizing its collective power effectively. It now finds itself adrift as the U.S. narrows its global attention, eroding the region’s hegemonic stability.

Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen has warned of this trajectory for years. In his book, The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order (2024), he argues that the conflict will shape not only Ukraine’s fate but also the structure of international relations. A Western victory would extend its unipolarity in international affairs, while a Russian one would accelerate multipolarity by showing that Western rules cannot be imposed. Without deviating from its current foreign policy, the EU’s permanent marginalization is all but assured.

From Unipolarity to Uncertainty

In his book, Diesen writes that the post-Cold War expansion of Western institutions rested on the assumption that Russia was permanently weakened. During an interview with me, he said that the West believed its role would be “to manage its decline,” with Russia expected to “orbit the West essentially at the periphery, and it would do as it was told without having a seat at the table.”

Support for Western expansion into Eastern Europe was strong among institutionalists, industrialists, Eastern Europeanstates, and foreign policy hawks. While Russia naturally rejected NATO expansion, warnings about pursuing such a policy emerged throughout the 1990s from U.S. officials such as George F. Kennan, architect of the Cold War containment policy; former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock; former Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M. Gates; and former Secretary of State James A. Baker, III. Diesen explains in his book that this caution continued after several rounds of expansion. In 2008, “William Burns, who… became the director of the CIA, warned in a memo that threatening NATO expansion could provoke a Russian military intervention.”

He further writes, “During the first Cold War, the dividing lines in Europe were clearly delineated and the status quo had been largely respected, thus the competition for influence and proxy wars occurred in the third world. In the emerging second Cold War, the West and Russia were competing over where the new dividing lines in Europe would be drawn.” Ukraine, however, was always destined to be the flashpoint. As Diesen told me, “If you look through the ’90s, a lot of the leading politicians and academics in the United States recognized really, that Ukraine was this red line.”........

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