When Israel and the United States launched their strike against Iran on Saturday, February 28, the President of the European Commission responded the only way Europe knows how: by scheduling an “urgent” meeting… for Monday.
In a world that moves at military speed, Europe answers at bureaucratic pace. Slow. Procedural. Irrelevant.
It has always been this way. The difference now is that it matters. Because Europe’s problem is no longer just inefficiency. It is something deeper.
Europe is not only strategically unarmed. It is morally disoriented. A large part of European public opinion would rather see Israel and the United States fail than accept the legitimacy of force. Another, smaller but influential group has embraced a different illusion: that wars can no longer be won. That victory is impossible. That negotiation—always negotiation—is the only acceptable outcome.
Europe is not only strategically unarmed. It is morally disoriented.
Both positions lead to the same place: surrender.
This explains Europe’s reaction to Donald Trump’s request that NATO allies help secure the Strait of Hormuz. The answer was immediate: no. Not because Europe does not depend on that chokepoint. But because it does not consider it “its war.”
The EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said it plainly. Germany confirmed it. No troops. No risk. No commitment. Only “diplomacy”—a word that, in this context, is little more than a placeholder for inaction.
Europe is still living in a world that no longer exists.
Trump’s request has been widely interpreted across Europe as a sign of American weakness. As if Washington were asking for help because it cannot act alone. This is a fundamental misreading. This is not a plea. It is a demand
What we are witnessing is not weakness, but hierarchy. Not dependency, but power. What, in older language, would be called an imperial expectation. A “no” to weakness is meaningless. A “no” to power carries consequences. Europe no longer understands the difference.
The problem is that Europe has lost its understanding of war altogether.
For decades, Europe has lived under the American security umbrella—prosperous, protected, and largely unaccountable. That era is over. The imbalance between both sides of the Atlantic is no longer just military. It is technological, economic, and strategic.
Europe is not facing a world of equals. It is navigating a world of powers on which it depends. Can Europe function without American technology? Without Microsoft, Google, or the digital infrastructure that sustains its economy? Can it replace Chinese manufacturing? Can it survive a disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, through which flow the energy and resources it desperately needs?
The answer is obvious. European policy behaves as if it were not.
Europe could have made this war its war. Iran is not a distant threat. It is a regime that has projected violence into Europe for decades—through networks, proxies, kidnappings, and terror operations. It has openly declared its hostility toward the West.
And yet, for many in Europe, that is secondary. What matters is that Trump must not win.
Timidity dressed as virtue, and irresponsibility disguised as prudence.
But reality is moving in the opposite direction. European defeatism collides with operational facts. The problem is that Europe has lost its understanding of war altogether.
The European Union was built on a deep pacifist impulse. Over time, that impulse became doctrine. And that doctrine became blindness. Europe forgot that war has its own logic—its own timelines, its own rules, its own brutal clarity
A year ago, during NATO’s Hedgehog exercise, a handful of Ukrainian drone operators neutralized two allied battalions—over a thousand troops—in less than twelve hours. Not because of a lack of courage, but because of a lack of adaptation. Modern war rewards speed, flexibility, and technological awareness. Europe has lost all three.
War is hell, as General Sherman said. But it is not inevitable apocalypse. It requires intelligence, balance, and restraint. But above all, it requires something Europe no longer possesses: the will to win.
Europe is not stagnating. It is retreating.
In the world that is coming, communiqués do not deter.
European leaders occasionally acknowledge that the old order is gone—only to retreat into familiar rhetoric within hours. Others, like Spain’s prime minister, reduce the entire issue to domestic politics, turning opposition to Trump into a substitute for strategy. The result is predictable: timidity dressed as virtue, and irresponsibility disguised as prudence.
And the outcome is just as predictable: irrelevance.
Henry Kissinger once asked who to call if one wanted to speak to Europe. He also observed that when the United States presses a button, a missile is launched; when Europe does, a communiqué is issued. Nothing has changed.
Except that now Europe is issuing those communiqués while openly defying the very power that guarantees its security, fuels its economy, and sustains its technological base.
And in the world that is coming, communiqués do not deter. They do not protect. And they do not sustain civilizations
Published originally on March 17, 2026.
