2025-09-13 04:38:36
AI weather predictions are in vogue, and the skies look like they are darkening. OpenAI’s eagerly awaited GPT-5 received a muted response. Valuations are sky high, and overall AI investment plans keep surging into the billions and trillions. On the prediction market Manifold Markets, someone recently put up a question on whether there will be an AI winter at the end of 2025.
But the current collective answer seems to be no. The prediction trades at a 1.1% chance.
AI is here to stay, and no short-term autumn chill can stop it from producing profound change. It might be helpful to remind ourselves of a distinction that is often lost in another field: environmental policy. Climate change experts distinguish between weather and climate — where the daily weather may fluctuate, but the overall shift in the climate emerges more slowly over time. A cold summer day does not provide evidence of a lowering of the average temperature of the planet.
We are moving from a world in which we think about AI as a quick shift in weather to one in which we need to, and have time to, prepare for a changing climate. AI will impact jobs, security, education, science, and almost every other field of society over time. In regulatory terms, this means taking a long view. Regulations must avoid trying to legislate for a shift in the weather.
Climate change experts built an ingenious model dividing climate change into different changes in the temperature: this is what it will look like if the Earth becomes on average one degree Celsius hotter, and what if two or three degrees.
An AI capabilities report should take the same approach. Instead of temperature, we should look at things like percentage of jobs displaced, the length of autonomous tasks AI can perform, and the percentage of benchmarks that change over time.
These metrics outline a space of possibilities crucial to explore for policymakers. Just as with temperature, we can then choose to impose ambitions at the pace of change — and try to stay below a certain percentage of jobs displaced within a certain timeframe, to take just one example.
Now, you may protest, we have much more influence over technological change than over climate change, and the idea that we should try to forecast the AI transformation may seem wrong, or even offensive. Such models seem to be infused with technical determinism.
But maybe we have more influence over technology than we do over the way the climate changes? Or are these both examples of complex systems that evolve as a result of our collective choices over time scales that measure in decades and centuries rather than in days?
We have more influence over technological weather — the short-term uses of technology, the design today of systems, and the behaviors of tech companies — than we do over regular weather. But it does not follow automatically that the evolving technological climate is ours to choose.
When a technology becomes a geopolitical hinge, it becomes hard for any single political constituency to affect its long-term trajectory — not impossible, but hard — and if we assume this is the case, we would do well to prepare for a spectrum of scenarios.
A long-term observatory for artificial intelligence is needed, tasked with exploring different scenarios, key dimensions of change, and possible policy options. We might be heading for some dreary autumn AI weather. But we should prepare for a deep technological climate shift.
Nicklas Berild Lundblad is a Senior Fellow with the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis. Nicklas is a writer, researcher, and public policy expert with 20 years of experience leading, building, and developing policy functions at companies like Google, Stripe, and now DeepMind. His interests include technology, politics, philosophy, and science.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Thursday, October 9, 2025 at 2:30 PM ET
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2025-09-13 02:46:17
It’s called a super app, unifying messaging, payments, digital identity, and public services.
In the US and Europe, Meta’s efforts to transform WhatsApp have failed to gain traction. It’s a similar story for X and Uber. But super apps dominate in China, and Russia now is rolling out its copycat effort Max.
It is more than technological innovation; it’s a calculated extension of state surveillance under the guise of “digital sovereignty.” Since September 1, 2025, Russian law has required Max to be preinstalled on all mobile devices sold domestically, embedding surveillance infrastructure into citizens’ daily digital lives.
The success or failure of super apps says much about a society. In the US, WhatsApp and other messaging apps — all private offerings — have yet to integrate payments and other services at scale, perhaps driven by privacy concerns about sharing too much data with one provider. Users prefer specialized apps for functions like finance.
In China and Russia, few such concerns exist. The Chinese WeChat has become foundational to both public and private life. Over the past decade, WeChat has transformed from a messaging platform into a ubiquitous surveillance tool, integrating policing, citizen verification, and location tracking in seamless, everyday use.
Public acceptance of this trade-off is widespread: many citizens willingly surrender certain freedoms for convenience, efficiency, and economic growth. Mechanisms such as mandatory real-name registration entrench this model, and the narrative of prosperity helps reinforce the government’s legitimacy.
In Russia, by contrast, no evident social compact equates technological control with prosperity. Public opinion toward democratic and economic reforms remains deeply ambivalent. A Pew Research Center survey found that only 43% of Russians retrospectively approved of the transition to multiparty democracy after 1989, and just 38% supported the move to a market economy, levels significantly lower than in many other Eastern European countries.
Nostalgia persists: in 2021, 49% of Russians expressed a preference for the Soviet-era political system, compared to 16% for Western-style democracy, and 62% favored economic planning over market capitalism. These attitudes suggest that, unlike in China, the notion of trading personal freedom for stability and prosperity does not resonate in Russia.
This divergence in public attitudes has essential consequences for surveillance technologies. In China, platforms like WeChat operate under domestic surveillance laws that require the company to share data, including communications, contacts, and location information, with the government. Most users accept or tolerate this arrangement.
In Russia, surveillance infrastructure is equally sophisticated. Systems like SORM, the “sovereign internet” initiative, and the facial recognition network known as Safe City in Moscow provide the Kremlin with formidable monitoring capabilities. Yet in a society where democratic demand is weak and many citizens are accustomed to authoritarian rule, these measures may be perceived less as modernization and more as the continuation of state dominance.
The Russian case highlights a fundamental difference with China. In China, the normalization of surveillance is tied to a prosperity narrative that many citizens accept, while in Russia, prosperity has not been sustained, and the legitimacy of state control remains fragile. As one Carnegie Endowment study notes, Russia’s economic stagnation and declining real incomes have increasingly undermined popular support for the Kremlin’s legitimacy, even as control mechanisms intensify.
Max is not simply a digital service, but a test case in authoritarian governance through technology. It is a platform designed to insert surveillance into the core of Russian civic life, but it does so in a society without the implicit bargain of prosperity that underpins China’s acceptance of similar tools.
For the transatlantic community, this divergence is relevant. It underscores the need to develop and promote digital models that combine innovation with privacy, autonomy, and democratic values, offering citizens worldwide a compelling alternative to the authoritarian model of governance through super apps.
What price are citizens willing to pay for such convenience? Max not only lacks end-to-end encryption but is in fact designed to share metadata, calls, location, and activity with the authorities, opening the door to truly draconian surveillance. Dissenting voices already describe it as a “digital gulag,” a space where every message can be inspected. Max is also being promoted as a tool of social control: its use is encouraged in schools, in official communications, and by telecom operators who include it in their plans without charging for the data it consumes.
The critical question is whether Max can sustain user engagement once the initial phase of mandatory installation fades. The track record of earlier Russian alternatives is not encouraging: platforms like TamTam and Rutube never displaced their international counterparts nor gained sufficient appeal on their own.
By contrast, WeChat has been an unequivocal success in China, despite being equally transparent to government oversight. Any success that Max achieves will likely stem less from persuasion than from gradual imposition. It may become the default option simply because it is the easiest and most practical path, even as it offers no meaningful privacy and positions itself as a tool of total state control. The network effect becomes the lever by which the government channels citizens into an environment of surveillance and control — citizens who walk voluntarily into the camp, because it is where all of their friends already are.
Max benefits from every institutional advantage, from legislation to massive promotion. Yet its long-term viability will depend on whether it can deliver genuine utility (digital identity, frictionless payments, access to public services, etc.) without requiring citizens to surrender their privacy entirely to the state’s scrutiny. At that critical juncture lies the accurate measure of whether Max becomes a genuine super-app or remains, in what may well be a purely rhetorical distinction, a perfect instrument for digital supervision.
Enrique Dans is a non-resident senior fellow in the Tech Policy Program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is a Professor of Innovation at IE University in Madrid.
Bandwidth is CEPA’s online journal dedicated to advancing transatlantic cooperation on tech policy. All opinions expressed on Bandwidth are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
Thursday, October 9, 2025 at 2:30 PM ET
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2025-09-12 22:10:21
Russia’s Investigative Committee says members of the 83 Guards Air Assault Brigade shot themselves, and each other, so they could fraudulently collect more than 200 million rubles ($2.4m) in state payments.
The alleged scam, which involved 35 high-ranking and decorated officers as well as private soldiers, appears to reflect the endemic corruption in the armed forces and the growing reluctance of men to take suicidal risks fighting in Russia’s war on Ukraine. More than 220,000 have already died among a total of a million casualties.
Guard Colonel Artem Gorodilov and Lieutenant Colonel Konstantin Frolov, both senior commanders in 83 Air Assault, have been charged with fraud and are reported to have admitted to their part in the scheme.
Frolov was wounded four times and awarded two medals for his service, but investigators now say none of the injuries resulted from combat operations. He reportedly admitted asking colleagues to shoot him in areas of his body that would avoid vital organs.
Gorodilov is a former commander of 234 Airborne Assault Regiment, one of the units responsible for the Bucha massacre in April 2022, when Russian troops tortured, raped, and murdered hundreds of Ukrainian civilians. He has been sanctioned by the US and his representatives refused to comment on the fraud allegations when approached by Kommersant, the government-aligned Russian daily newspaper.
The pair were first apprehended at the end of June 2024 and implicated their fellow servicemen in the alleged fraud. Ukraine’s HUR intelligence service corroborated the story, though it appeared to use the same language as the Kommersant report.
83 Air Assault was active in Chasiv Yar, which Russia struggled to take last year, and redeployed to the Kharkiv region, according to FDD’s Long War Journal.
The “Nikolaev Vanek” Telegram channel wrote at around the same time that many members of 83 Air Assault “can’t fight, there are too many 500s,”, the military code for soldiers refusing to engage in combat.
Russian soldier Oleg Vesnin, from the unit, released a video that month saying he had been “without food and water” for three days and couldn’t take it anymore.
Prior to that, brigade members had been complaining about a “lack of rotations” and reporting “low morale” after being posted to Bakhmut, according to the ISW.
While corruption is endemic in Russia, the reports have to be treated with caution as they rely on Russia’s notoriously shady Investigative Committee, which Vladimir Putin has referred to as a “pivotal component” in his regime, and has praised for “steadfastly upholding the interests of the state.” Details may be unreliable, and ulterior motives are possible. Show trials are common in Russia, and federal investigations are often used to make an example of people deemed disloyal to the regime.
While there is a track record and widespread opposition media reporting of low morale and soldiers refusing to fight in 83 Air Assault, which lends some credibility to the allegations, the regime could well have other motives in publicizing this story. The costs of financial compensation for the wounded are staggering, often inflated by promises made to those signing up. There may also be a desire to minimize public knowledge of casualties in Ukraine. Recent polling shows a huge number of Russians saying they have been personally affected by the war, some 58% in total.
Back in March, lapsha.media, a Russian propaganda organization masquerading as a fact-checking website, claimed that “Ukrainian propagandists and anti-Russian media” were spreading “fakes” about the catastrophic losses suffered by 83 Air Assault.
Reports of self-inflicted injuries may also help the Kremlin cast doubt on the legitimacy of wounded soldiers. Moscow notoriously lowballed its published casualty figures for the war in Ukraine before it stopped publishing them at all.
An investigation based on National Probate Registry data, by Russian opposition outlets Meduza and Mediazona, indicated that Russian casualties hit record highs in 2024, with the deaths of 93,000 men across the year, twice as many as in 2023.
Of course, reports of soldiers injuring themselves to avoid combat are not unprecedented. At least as far back as World War I, there was evidence of soldiers shooting themselves in the foot to avoid being forced to advance toward enemy guns.
There is more than enough evidence that Russian soldiers are forced into suicidal assaults and that some resist their orders. The story of 83 Air Assault Brigade suggests a cocktail of corruption and desperation by men facing danger, deprivation, mutilation, and death. Not all details presented by tightly-controlled Russian information sources may be true, but the themes of an army devoid of discipline and morale, fighting a war of conquest for a sadistic despot and the people propping him up, are very obviously accurate.
Aliide Naylor is the author of ‘The Shadow in the East’ (Bloomsbury, 2020). She lived in Russia for several years and now reports from the Baltic states and Ukraine.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-09-11 23:40:08
Armenia signed a strategic partnership agreement with China during the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit on August 31. Both sides pledged to expand commercial and investment ties and — more tellingly — backed one another’s independence and sovereignty.
This follows earlier statements made by the Armenian leadership that the country is interested in officially becoming a member of the SCO, a Beijing-run grouping.
Why does it matter? The deal is the latest in a series of Armenian measures to shift from its traditionally heavy reliance on Russia and toward better diversified external relations. That will prove a challenge, since the Kremlin is jealous of its position in the South Caucasus, and because the reliability and intentions of countries like China are far from clear.
Armenia’s intention is to reverse the geopolitical isolation caused by the wars for Nagorno-Karabakh, which it lost to Azerbaijani forces in 2023. In Armenian eyes, Russia had pledged to aid it and failed to do so. That brutal lesson in political realpolitik still haunts the country.
So it seeks closer ties with neighbors and great powers in both the East and the West.
China is just one aspect of this approach. Armenia has revived the country’s historic ties to France with agreements including arms shipments, and is also working on concluding a strategic agreement with the UK to improve security and military ties. Negotiations are likewise underway with the European Union (EU) on expanded cooperation within the new EU-Armenia Partnership Agenda, which would replace the partnership priorities adopted under the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement (CEPA) reached in 2018. The visa liberalization scheme is yet another program that was recently initiated to pull Armenia closer to the EU.
The country has also improved relations with the US. The two signed a strategic partnership agreement early this year during the last days of the Biden administration and the so-called TRIPP agreement reached on August 8 with Azerbaijan, along with the bilateral US-Armenia agreements on cooperation in nuclear, commercial, and political matters, underscore the nature of an expanding partnership.
Armenia is meanwhile pushing for improved ties with Turkey, evidenced by multiple meetings between the leaders of the two countries and most of all Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s historic visit to Ankara in June. Turkey closed the border and severed diplomatic ties more than 30 years ago when fighting began with its ally, Azerbaijan, over Nagorno-Karabakh. A thaw offers a better relationship with a key regional player and improved trading links as routes to the west open up.
Armenia has made progress with Azerbaijan, its chief rival. Yet, the power imbalance pushed Yerevan to take a more pragmatic stance by seeking a permanent solution to the conflict by agreeing to recognize Nagorno-Karabakh as part of Azerbaijan. There are also efforts to normalize relations with Pakistan, which until recently remained the only country that refused to recognize Armenia’s existence out of friendship with Azerbaijan and Turkey.
For Beijing, closer relations with Yerevan are a logical continuation of the policy in the South Caucasus that followed the signing of strategic cooperation documents with Georgia in 2023 and then two agreements with Azerbaijan in 2024 and 2025.
All of which has caused jitters in Iran, Armenia’s southern neighbor, which has taken a pounding from Israeli and US air attacks in June. The two countries have been close, and Tehran is concerned about the US involvement in a corridor through Armenia. For Iran, the territorial integrity of Armenia is a key foreign policy goal. Following the TRIPP agreement, the Iranian president visited Yerevan, and several bilateral documents were signed, including on the development of border infrastructure. A few days later, a high-ranking Armenian delegation visited Tehran, where the topic of discussion was once again the corridor passing through Armenia.
The Iranian response helps illustrate one serious problem in Armenia’s outreach program — new deals bring better relations in one area but risk them in another.
Despite the rhetoric and hopes for a more balanced foreign policy, there are certain realities that Armenia cannot change.
The first is that Russia remains important in the regional balance of power. Armenia is highly unlikely to ditch Moscow-led multilateral institutions such as the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and especially the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), given the economic advantage Yerevan garners.
The second is that the value of the new deals is unclear. Can China really be trusted to aid Armenia in any way, given its treatment of Ukraine since the all-out invasion? The days when Beijing would be relied upon to defend national territorial integrity as the centerpiece of its foreign policy are long gone.
And even if Armenia changes its constitution to abandon the claim on Nagorno-Karabakh, will dictatorial Azerbaijan’s post-war swagger diminish? Will Turkey become more even-handed, given its longstanding ties to the Azeris? Can France and the EU act as a balance, given geographical remoteness and a host of more pressing problems closer to home?
Yet the relationship with Russia is changing, and the Kremlin knows it. Where Russia was once first among equals, that primacy is now gone.
The name of this CEPA contributor has been withheld to shield him/her from retribution by dictatorial and authoritarian states.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-09-11 01:49:10
While there was only limited damage from the 19 Russian drones that entered Poland on September 9, the strategic signal was deafening. The Kremlin is using an old playbook on a grander scale — poke your enemy and see how he responds.
Will the West demonstrate unity and resolve, or weakness and hesitation? The Kremlin believes NATO can be bent to its will. That notion must be shattered.
Poland got off on the right foot. The response was swift and, in a rare display of unity, a quickly convened meeting of the National Security Council included both President Karol Nawrocki and Prime Minister Donald Tusk, who buried their bitter political differences for the occasion.
Poland also invoked Article 4 of the North Atlantic Treaty, which is designed for consultations when sovereignty and security are threatened. This decision is designed to make every ally take ownership of the problem and demonstrate to Moscow that airspace incursions cannot be shrugged off as accidents of war (one of several contradictory talking points from Russia during the day).
What are the risks? The attack penetrated as far as 200 miles into Poland and was engaged by Polish and allied combat and AWACS aircraft. But while the drones only inflicted limited damage, it did mark the first time NATO has fired on the Russian military since its all-out war of aggression against Ukraine began in 2022.
So this was far more than a local nuisance. The danger now is that a feeble alliance response — the familiar diet of public statements without action — risks becoming a perilous new normal, as the Baltic states have been warning all summer. There are only a number of occasions, “the world’s most successful military alliance” can be revealed as powerless before it loses any claim to that title.
The alliance cannot continue to simply soak up the punishment. Deterrence by denial is not enough; deterrence by punishment is required. That means imposing costs on Moscow every time it violates NATO airspace (as it has repeatedly done in Poland and the Baltic states), and raising the price beyond a few disposable drones.
What can be done? There is now a clear need for a military response. NATO does not have to attack Russia to show real toughness. As Ambassador Kurt Volker has proposed, extending the coverage of NATO air defense batteries that are based on allied territory to bring down Russian drones and missiles over Western Ukraine would aid that country and the West. It is absolutely in accordance with international law, and while it would infuriate Putin, he would not act — past experience shows that he backs down when he faces real opposition.
In addition, the UK defense secretary has suggested British units may now be deployed to Poland and others — principally the US to ensure the message is heard — should do likewise.
Much more serious sanctions would reinforce the impact. Existing measures need to be better tailored and enforced to strike at the backbone of Russia’s drone production in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, where versions of Iranian Shaheds that fall upon Ukraine every night by the hundred are assembled by the thousand.
Many of the core entities involved are already sanctioned both by the US and Europe, but there are huge gaps in enforcement. The United Arab Emirates and other Gulf states, for example, still enable transfers between Alabuga’s partners and its Iranian suppliers, while crucial machine tools and precision equipment are acquired through middlemen in Turkey, China, India, Switzerland, and Thailand.
Although the EU’s latest export controls prohibit new software sales and updates to Russian entities, there is still no formal mechanism to force manufacturers to revoke existing software keys, firmware, or after-sales support for equipment already at sanctioned sites.
Evidence from wreckage shows Western electronics and components are still being used in Russian and Iranian drones, demonstrating persistent leakage in procurement networks and the need for urgent action.
NATO nations and other allies also need to clamp down on the shipping of drone components, which have been moving for years along the Caspian corridor from Iran to Astrakhan and Olya. A version of the attestation regime already built for Russian oil exports could be used to monitor vessels and operators and empower insurers and ports to act.
Shaheds rely on imported microelectronics, engines, and composite materials sourced through Tehran, Hong Kong, and other hubs. Export controls should be tightened by blacklisting the components most often recovered from drone wreckage and tracing serial numbers and gray-market resellers.
The West has already demonstrated the ability to seize illicit weapons shipments at sea, including UK interceptions of vessels carrying Iranian missiles, and stepping up the consistency of such seizures would force Tehran to pay more to keep its networks alive.
NATO needs a graduated response ladder that makes every airspace violation costly for Moscow. Cyber operations would be especially effective, and the framework for action already exists in the 2024 Washington Summit Declaration, which explicitly recognized cyber capabilities as part of NATO’s deterrence and defense posture.
The Kremlin’s push is deliberate. Every drone sent across NATO borders is meant to measure how far the alliance will bend. Allies who respond with a shrug are playing a perilous game. The incursions are not random, but are a calculated move to check NATO’s resolve and foster division.
Differences between the US and Europe over Russia remain real, with some in Washington eager to cut a peace deal with Putin, but it is no longer a matter of preference or posture. It has become a transatlantic issue, with all allies sharing an interest in containing Russia’s military industrial complex.
What is needed above all is a genuine shift in paradigm. NATO cannot remain trapped in static defense and ritual condemnation; it must prove it can seize the initiative.
That means moving beyond interception toward calibrated offense, including hard power but also using hybrid tools, cyber disruption, and financial pressure as deliberate instruments of deterrence. If the alliance does not set the rules of the next engagement, the Kremlin will.
Maciej Filip Bukowski is the Head of the Energy and Resilience Program at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in Warsaw, and is a non-resident fellow with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), where he writes about issues including Central European security.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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2025-09-11 00:04:03
Violating Polish airspace could turn out to be Vladimir Putin’s worst mistake. Imagine that it leads to the instant seizure of Russia’s frozen central bank assets and to the transfer of $300 billion to finance Ukraine’s resistance. Another result could be accelerated progress towards the “drone wall” promoted by the EU’s defence commissioner, Andrius Kubilius. The attack could also build political consensus behind a new rearmament bank to finance Europe’s urgent increases in military spending. And it might lead the United States to reverse any planned cuts to its military presence in Europe, and to programs that support the Baltic states and other frontline states. An optimist could imagine a really serious squeeze on the Russian economy leading to political unrest, even regime change.
In reality, none of that is going to happen. Instead, we will see expressions of grave concern, perhaps even outrage, coupled with backslapping at the speedy response of Polish and allied warplanes in shooting down the drones. We may see another package—the umpteenth—of European Union sanctions on Russia.
Putin will not conclude from any of this that he has made a terrible mistake. Instead, he will sit chuckling in his bunker and will continue his successful policy of highlighting the gaps in the alliance’s escalation ladder and the weaknesses in its decision-making. This involves systematically testing our reactions and our willpower, sometimes with overt attacks, more often with hard-to-trace stunts and sabotage. Remember, this approach has deep roots. “Active measures” were a feature of Soviet political warfare from 1917. The Baltic states were warning friends and allies about Kremlin mischief-making and dirty tricks back in the 1990s.
Another common thread is that, again and again, these attacks go almost unpunished. The cyber-attack on Estonia in 2007 brought only handwringing. A string of incidents this year in Sweden leaves officialdom there mute and seemingly clueless. Across Europe, the repeated, persistent use of drones to breach airspace, disrupt civil aviation, and collect intelligence highlights another vulnerability. And because these attacks go unpunished, the Kremlin widens its scope and increases its intensity. Their practical aim is not just to sow dismay and division. It is to undermine support for Ukraine, and to encourage European countries to join the Trump administration in arm-twisting the Kyiv authorities into an unfair, unsustainable, humiliating ceasefire deal.
Europeans mostly fail to realise this. They still hope plaintively for a decisive American intervention. But those days are gone. Barring a game-changingly robust response to Poland’s invocation of NATO’s Article 4 collective-defense clause, the US security guarantee to Europe has been exposed as empty. Insofar as the US administration does care about European security, it is not to bolster its defences, but to reduce the competitive and regulatory threat it poses. It seeks less renewable energy and more liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports. It wants less interference with US tech companies over data privacy, copyright, and political advertising, and in protecting youngsters from pornography and other abuses.
That is no cause for despair. Europe is big and rich enough to defend itself, if it chooses, both from Russian imperialism and from the machinations of US corporations and their political servants. What is lacking is willpower. Threat perceptions and the capabilities needed for defense and deterrence still vary hugely across the continent. Some countries are outright cheerleaders for Putin. Others are paralysed by political polarisation (France) or allergic to any sacrifice (Spain, Belgium). Or, like Britain, they cannot envisage a policy that does not follow a US lead.
But this is their choice. Nobody—yet—makes them behave this way.
Edward Lucas is a Senior Fellow and Senior Advisor at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He was formerly a senior editor at The Economist. Lucas has covered Central and Eastern European affairs since 1986, writing, broadcasting, and speaking on the politics, economics, and security of the region.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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