If foreign policy is human, then war in Ukraine killed the prodigal child of Biden and many European leaders, leaving them bereaved. Proof of death occurred when the 2023 Ukrainian summer counter-offensive failed. Eighteen months on, Zelensky and European leaders remain unable to break out of the cycle of grief. Trump has unwittingly become their therapist.

Loss is devastating. I lost my mum to cancer in 2008, and it was the worst day of my life. Hundreds of thousands of people in Russia and Ukraine have had to confront a premature reckoning with grief of much younger relatives, and in many unforgivable cases, children, in the teeth of this pointless war.

Little thought seems given to them, when the polished limos glide up to the red carpets in Brussels and elsewhere, and our besuited leaders shake coiffured heads at how awful it all is.

Yet von der Leyen, Scholz, Macron and the countless British Prime Ministers since war broke out, have experienced their own particular form of grief, caused by the Biden-inspired misadventure in Ukraine. This helps to explain their inability to let go of a lifeless foreign policy.

Their dead brainchild, a belief that a smaller, economically fragile, conventionally armed Ukraine could defeat a much larger, economically robust and nuclear armed Russia.

This belief held strong with billion dollar buttresses of cash from America, Albion, Europe and elsewhere. Because the collective West is economically much stronger than lone Russia by many multiples, after all? Our cash was like the best Kevlar, or so we thought.

But then it turned out that wars are won by people, not pipedreams. Mostly men, but also women, holding guns, killing other humans they had never before........

© Eurasia Review