Europe is gone

For the US historian of Eastern Europe, Timothy Snyder, the geopolitical consequences of the Ukraine war will be devastating. Putin, according to Snyder in an interview with Welt, has no vision, because: "He is practically handing over his country to China."

The fear is absolutely realistic. The sanctions that the West imposed on Russia in response to the invasion of Ukraine cut off the Russian giant from almost all connections to the rest of Europe. Moscow will have no choice but to turn to other partners. By far the strongest will be China.

Severely weakened economically, Russia will then have to sell itself cheaply in order to quickly fill the gaps left by the withdrawn Western investors. And China will be ready to buy extensively and cheaply. Parallel to the economic weighting, the political weighting will also shift. Moscow is shrinking into a mere junior partner of Beijing.

But that is only one side of the tragic European development. The European Union and Germany will also lose weight and scope. For years and decades, top EU politicians have been preaching the unity and “common strength” of their union of states. In practice, however, the small-scale regulation bureaucracy and the jealous pursuit of national interests at the expense of the otherwise warmly praised “partners” regularly dominate. It has been (and still is) preoccupied with things like maintaining a dysfunctional single currency at great expense or wrestling with the distribution of money within the Union.

The EU remained invisible as a foreign policy factor: the Union practically did not exist in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, in the response to Washington's Iraq war in 2003, or during the invasion of Libya in 2011. Conclusions should have been drawn from these experiences. The "common strength to the outside world" remained a phrase that Angela Merkel also uttered for 16 years without having done anything about it, as René Pfister laments in Der Spiegel.

So now Europe, and not just the EU, seems to be disappearing from the geopolitical map of the world. Russia is becoming the forefront of Chinese ambitions to become a world power. A development that takes your breath away in its dimensions. And Western Europe, with its centers of Berlin, Paris, Brussels and London, largely defines itself almost exclusively through its loyalty to the United States.

Source: Prußische Allgemeine Zeitung