“All that is solid melts into air,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously proclaimed almost 180 years ago. Their Communist Manifesto was published against the backdrop of the European revolutions of 1848. But they should have seen 2025 – we are beginning to witness a mighty melting of what is un-solid about EU-NATO Europe.

This time, the backdrop is not (yet) a typical revolution – street fighting, barricades, and all. But there are two historic events that, in their combined geopolitical impact, will be revolutionary, though they have been anything but unforeseeable. These are, in order of importance, Russia’s defeat of the West in Ukraine, and America’s doubling down on Trumpism.

The two developments have made the sands on which the EU-NATO Europeans have built their rickety policy edifice not merely shift but cave in. Relentless obedience to Washington has always been self-damaging, but now a reckoning is at hand with accumulating self-harm reaching a tipping point into self-destruction.

It is true, on the surface, that EU-NATO Europe is still digging in its heels. The EU has just produced its umpteenth renewal of sweeping – and constantly increasing – sanctions against Russia. A faction of ten among its member countries are shouting for even more. A top energy official of the European Commission is in Washington to explore ways in which the Europeans can give in, again, to ever-increasing US pressure and buy even more ruinously expensive liquefied natural gas (LNG) from their great insatiable “ally.”

Yet some, even among Europe’s current elites, are still capable of intuiting that things are so desperate that they must, finally, question even apparent axioms. As the Financial Times has just reported, there are voices, including from EU heavyweight countries such as Germany, that dare think about the unthinkable, namely returning to openly buying inexpensive fossil fuel energy from Russia. In a less topsy-turvy world, the EU should, of course, never have stopped doing so. But as it is, one aspect of Western economic warfare against Russia was the EU’s declared – if non-binding, nota bene – intention to completely........

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