Can Europe reassert itself after Ukraine?

Washington’s 2025 strike on Iran, the raid to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro in early 2026 and its renewed interest in acquiring Greenland have clarified the country’s international priorities. Meanwhile, securing Ukraine’s independence, once a defining rallying cry of the liberal world order, has slipped to a second-tier concern, but remains central for Europe.

Equally pressing for the continent is the US exerting economic and military pressure alongside the separate tensions over Greenland’s sovereignty. Combined with Russian pressure from the east, Europe’s vulnerability has been plainly exposed.

This is despite the European Union’s 27 member states representing roughly 450 million people, forming the world’s second-largest economy, and possessing advanced military capabilities, including France’s nuclear deterrent.

Yet policy missteps, coupled with decades of outsourcing its security and strategic planning to Washington, has prevented the EU from mobilizing its collective power effectively. It now finds itself adrift as the US narrows its global attention, eroding the region’s hegemonic stability.

Norwegian political scientist Glenn Diesen has warned of this trajectory for years. In his book, “The Ukraine War and the Eurasian World Order” (2024), he argues that the conflict will shape not only Ukraine’s fate but also the structure of international relations.

A Western victory would extend its unipolarity in international affairs, while a Russian one would accelerate multipolarity by showing that Western rules cannot be imposed. Without deviating from its current foreign policy, the EU’s permanent marginalization is all but assured.

From unipolarity to uncertainty

In his book, Diesen writes that the post-Cold War expansion of Western institutions rested on the assumption that Russia was permanently weakened. During an interview with this writer, he said that the West believed its role would be “to manage its decline,” with Russia expected to “orbit the West essentially at the periphery, and it would do as it was told without having a seat at the table.”

Support for Western expansion into Eastern Europe was strong among institutionalists, industrialists, Eastern European states and foreign policy hawks. While Russia naturally rejected NATO expansion, warnings about pursuing such a policy emerged throughout the 1990s from US officials such as George Kennan, architect of the Cold War containment policy; former US ambassador to the Soviet Union Jack Matlock; former Deputy National Security Adviser Robert M Gates; and former Secretary of State James Baker, III. Diesen explains in his book that this caution continued after several rounds of expansion.

In 2008, “William Burns, who… became the director of the CIA, warned in a memo that threatening NATO expansion could provoke a Russian military intervention.” He further writes, “During the first Cold War, the dividing lines in Europe were clearly delineated and the status quo had been largely respected, thus the competition for influence and proxy wars occurred in the Third World. In the emerging second Cold War, the West and Russia were competing over where the new dividing lines in Europe would be drawn.”

Ukraine, however, was always destined to be the flashpoint. As Diesen told me, “If you look through the ’90s, a lot of the leading politicians and academics in the United States recognized really, that Ukraine was this red line.” In his book, he argues that Ukraine’s proximity to Russia, deep cultural ties, and military significance explain Moscow’s intense resistance to its westward alignment.

In a 2025 podcast interview with the Stimson Center, Diesen clarified that while he does not support Russia’s war, he views it as a predictable outcome from a realist perspective. He sharply criticizes European leaders for backing NATO expansion, arguing that “if you know that the Russians will invade and destroy Ukraine if you try to expand NATO, it’s hardly a moral thing to advocate for this.”

As the Russia-Ukraine war nears its fifth year, media attention may have waned, but its strategic importance has not. Diesen told me that if Russia is defeated, “then we [the West] can restore the collective hegemony and the United States will stay in Europe. If we are defeated—and we are being defeated—then the Americans will have to recognize that this is a multipolar order.”

In early 2025, Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested the US would not only accept but actively promote multipolarity. The idea echoed the Nixon administration’s embrace of a multipolar world order in the 1970s, before US preeminence reasserted itself under President Ronald Reagan and was later supercharged by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This time, however, the strain on US dominance appears more apparent. Diesen said during the interview:

The problem for the US is when you have a hegemon, your strategy is to be everywhere at all times. And this is problematic because just by definition, there’s no strategy now and there are no priorities—everything is a priority. So, this has also diminished the strategic thinking in the United States.

Also, when you’re a hegemon, you can absorb a lot of cost, you can do a lot of foolish things, and they have done a lot of foolish things, especially over the past 30 years. But it can only absorb the cost for so long. At some point, the final straw will break the camel’s back, and I think, once that happens, and we’re heading toward that now, there’s going to be some discipline which will be forced upon the United States.

But it’s not an easy adjustment to make… And so this is part of the reason why the US is now coming with this new idea that we have to get out of Europe.

Russia, by contrast, moved early to accelerate multipolarity. In 2014, when the Ukrainian proxy conflict erupted, Diesen told me that Russia’s dream of integration with the West died. Instead, Russia pivoted toward Asia in search of new opportunities, as “for the first time in 300 years, they didn’t have to look only toward Europe anymore for modernization and economic development.”

It was not without miscalculations, especially in Ukraine. “I think they thought they could just rush in with their army and then within the week, you would have the Ukrainians agreeing to restoring their neutrality. When they found out that NATO convinced them to fight instead, suddenly they weren’t prepared for this,” prompting, Diesen said, a turn toward a more industrial wartime economy.

Tension between other powers in a multipolar system can be expected, but Diesen noted they can be managed through a balance of power and non-Western-dominated institutions.

In Central Asia, where Russian and Chinese interests overlap, “the Chinese are pushing through with the Belt and Road Initiative, the Russians have the Eurasian Economic Union, and they’re able to find a way of harmonizing it under the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. So, there will be tensions, but I don’t see any clashes because they both want to integrate the greater Eurasian space, they both recognize they can’t do it without the other side,” Diesen said.

For Europe, however, adapting to a multipolar world is profoundly destabilizing. While the EU remains an economic heavyweight, it lacks the cohesive military power and modern experience to forge an independent foreign policy, having relied on US leadership for far too long.

The breakdown of the Atlantic security relationship, Diesen said, is “devastating for Europe, because in the post-Cold War era, the unipolar order, the ambitions of the Europeans was collective hegemony,” a unipolar system in which the political West would rule jointly. That structure has eroded, and “this is the tragedy for Europe; they haven’t found a place in the multipolar world.”

Europe’s disadvantages

Much of Europe’s disadvantages stem from the limited strategic value it offers to other power blocs. Despite its vast market, Diesen said that Europe needs “greater strategic autonomy in key industries. They should have already developed more technological sovereignty, especially in the digital sphere,” having previously criticized the EU’s weak tech sector and digital infrastructure.

Kristian Thyregod’s December 2025 assessment on the need for Europe’s technological reality check shows that this fact is increasingly recognized, yet the slow development of an EU-wide digital payments system, even as countries like Brazil, India and China have built their own, highlights the bloc’s lack of urgency.

By comparison, the US combines a dynamic, technology-driven economy with abundant natural resources; China’s industrial scale couples with its control over critical supply chains such as rare earths; and Russia wields military power alongside vast energy and raw materials. The EU has instead sought global influence through setting regulatory standards, but excessive regulation has constrained innovation instead of enhancing leverage.

Threat perceptions are also fragmented across the EU. Migration dominates security debates in countries such as Germany and Italy, while Eastern European states continue to view Russia as the primary threat. France similarly sees Russia as a challenge, but its global ambitions give it an outward-facing strategic outlook that complicates a unified foreign policy.

This lack of cohesion is evident in the debate over using frozen Russian assets to support Ukraine. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has consistently backed using the assets, largely held in Belgium, while French President Emmanuel Macron has urged caution, showing a clear break between the EU’s most powerful countries.

Belgium, which would bear the consequences of the decision, has implored the EU to drop its support to seize the assets. Yet Diesen told me that he expects the EU to assert its authority over Belgium:

It seems too foolish to contend that the Belgians will stand there and be liable—they can destroy their economy. On the other hand, this is Europe. They [Belgium] will come under great pressure and threats from the EU as well. I just saw an article in Politico which made this point that the EU will treat Belgium like Hungary if they refuse to do as they’re told. They’re not in a good spot, and so do you face the threats of the Europeans? Do you steal the Russian assets? And then who knows what kind of consequences this will have.

Diesen has previously stated that the EU risks disappearing, but believes reform could possibly prevent this. He cites British historian David Mitrany’s advocacy for functionalism, which favors building institutions around specific tasks and pooling sovereignty where practical, as opposed to the broader, more federalist approach that largely shaped the EU. Attempts at regional coordination, such as the Three Seas Initiative and Visegrad Four Group, have seen limited success.

For Diesen, diversifying its international relationships is essential. Europe still needs Russia, and Russia does not wish to turn its back on the continent. The EU should pursue strategic autonomy by reducing dependency on the US without rupturing the alliance. Diversifying partnerships is crucial, he said, because overreliance on Washington gives the US excessive leverage to impose its demands.

New world order

When describing what kind of mid-century balance of power would best support global stability, Diesen said, “You want international institutions to reflect the current distribution of power,” adding that frameworks built around assumptions of permanent Western dominance were unlikely to endure.

He also pointed to growing US challenges to existing multilateral formats, like the G7, as evidence that this adjustment is already underway. “These are not the leading seven economies of the world,” he said, referencing the “C5” framework suggested by Trump in 2025 composed of the United States, Japan, China, Russia, and India. In this configuration, the major powers would “sit down and essentially, make the agreements, harmonize their interests, and more or less manage the world.”

In his book, he writes how it is important “to return to a balance of power in which the competing national interests of the great powers are addressed, and common rules cannot be imposed unilaterally with claims of universalism.”

Asked how other great powers or middle powers, such India, Turkey, Brazil and Saudi Arabia might shape the new world order, Diesen explained:

A multipolar system is quite beneficial for small, medium-sized countries because if you have a unipolar or bipolar system you have to just adjust to the one or two games in town, there’s not that much you can do. So, you will be very subordinated. What you see from what all the countries you mentioned now is there’s many centers of power; you have the ability to diversify. No one’s going to own you anymore, so [the country is] going to have a lot of more possibilities to pursue political autonomy.

While other countries adapt to the emerging order, the EU remains trapped in the past. Slow, indecisive, and divided, it cut off Russia, its main energy partner, on Washington’s advice to support Ukraine, only for the US to step back, leaving Europe to bear the costs. Yet the EU is unwilling to abandon its liberal values or protection of Ukraine without striking a death blow to the liberal order.

Diesen sees a possible path forward: “I think if there can be a peace agreement where we accept that Ukraine will be neutral… then on this foundation you can find some stability.” As Russia adjusts and the US pulls back from Europe, the EU should decide how to support Ukraine while safeguarding its own role in the emerging world order.

John P Ruehl is an Australian-American journalist living in Washington, D.C., and a world affairs correspondent for the Independent Media Institute. He is a contributor to several foreign affairs publications, and his book, Budget Superpower: How Russia Challenges the West With an Economy Smaller Than Texas’, was published in December 2022.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute and is republished with permission.