We are in a global war. Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Sudan, Congo… bloody wars with millions of deaths. The current rearmament reveals intentions that are far more catastrophic. Rearmament, against whom? Now that the American protector is absent, are we once again arming against our European neighbours?
The war in Ukraine was the West’s last attempt to reassert a decaying Anglo-Saxon unipolar empire. It failed. The West stands at the brink of disintegration, a prospect that terrifies Europe’s elites.
The U.S. has lost its military dominance, weakened by capitalism’s own logic of maximizing profit: tanks designed more to generate maintenance revenue than to fight, F-35 jets that cost the same as 10,000 Iranian attack drones… Meanwhile, globalist deindustrialization shifted value creation from production to speculation, laying the foundation for a virtualized economy that endlessly enriches tech elites—leaving the giant without productive capacity and standing on feet of clay.
The West—an Anglo-Saxon geopolitical invention sustained for eighty years from the Marshall Plan to NATO’s power—is in agony. This is a chance to recover Europe’s autonomy, not understood merely as a continent, but as a civilization that also includes the Americas and has defined the world’s legal, scientific, and political categories of thought.
The West is not Europe. The heart of Europe is rooted in Christian culture, precisely because its identity formed through a dialectic between the religious and the secular realms, creating spaces of freedom unknown in the theocracies and autocracies of other civilizations.
With the Peace of Westphalia, Europe learned “to reach agreements without imposing itself on others,” unleashing enormous energy for development—until nationalism took over. It is a civilization shaped by social revolutions, many inspired by the awareness of being equals before God the Father. “Liberty, equality, and fraternity”—not yet lived as an inseparable triad—beautifully summarize the aspirations of communities excluded from power, whom we call «the people» all over the Earth.
Recovering European autonomy to build a culture of peace will not be easy. The people are weakened by consumerism, ideologies, and social media—but they do not want more wars. Western elites, deeply corrupt, may be split between Trumpism and the dwindling neoliberal progressivism hiding in the EU (which is not Europe either), but they still hold immense power.
Russia has once again become their mortal enemy—tragic, considering its 1990s invitations to build a common home “from Lisbon to Vladivostok.” That was unacceptable to a “West” afraid of losing hegemony and being isolated as a mere transatlantic entity—what geopolitical strategist Mackinder called a casus belli over 120 years ago in his theory of the Eurasian “heartland,” later updated by Polish American neocon hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1990s.
Let us begin by rebuilding the Europe we can be proud of—not imperial, not defined “against” others. The Europe of revolutions for justice, of open and universal culture, of hope and the dream of a nonviolent future. A Europe whose peoples gave birth to Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Teresa of Ávila, Kant, Marx, Freud, Edith Stein, Hannah Arendt, Rovirosa, Bach, Verdi, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Cervantes, Goethe, Dostoevsky… an immense constellation of men and women who have elevated us culturally, morally, and spiritually.
Now is the time for a Europe of solidarity and self-management, letting a new sap of peace flow through our societies. Let us not be betrayed, as the socialists were before World War I when they approved their respective national rearmaments.
Everything begins with building a new culture by and for the people.
