Today, I shall try to cram into my little speech of "How the hell did we get to where Europe is today?" And end with a plea not only to look at the immediate and short-term developments in our occasionally threatened neighborhood, but to start thinking about grand strategy and to look beyond current security concerns, towards the future of this country, our region and Europe. And more importantly, to assist it in creating that future.

Twenty years ago, when the ICDS was founded, Estonia was two years into its status as a newbie member of the EU and NATO, still learning the ropes of those two large organizations, generally keeping quiet, our heads down and learning how to work within them. But we were happy and satisfied. After all, not only were we independent and free — we had made it into the two clubs that mattered for our future security and well-being.

Sadly, the dismissive arrogance of some countries toward pre-enlargement Central and Eastern Europe did not diminish with membership. That would not change noticeably until February 24, 2022. Even today, it's a slog.

Meanwhile, and since the ICDS' halcyon founding days of twenty years ago, the erstwhile Kumbaya peace, love and Woodstock era in Europe would soon draw to a close. In February 2007, Vladimir Putin's Munich Security Conference speech declared them to be over and we saw soon enough what that meant on the ground. The debilitating DDoS cyberattacks on Estonia in April 2007 and the ensuing riots were a first indication of the change; the disappointing 2008 Bucharest NATO summit and the Russian invasion of Georgia followed in rapid succession. Nonetheless, none of those shocks made even a dent in the broader European Wandel durch Handel paradigm of relations with Russia. Those were a problem only for the newbies.

That was then, this is now. Perceptions have changed, as has the transatlantic relationship. Even the EU's understanding of security has slowly evolved, though not enough.

First, perceptions of Russia. After the foreign policy obscenity of signing the Nord Stream 2 contract a mere year and a half after the occupation of Crimea and the Russian shootdown of MH17, it took the full-scale invasion of Ukraine four years ago to change the general view of Russia as a gold mine for European business and end the old member states' offering psychological diagnoses to Central and Eastern European members, which had actual empirical knowledge of Russia wie eigentlich gewesen — not the wished for Russia, the home of that great European cultural icon "Tolstoyevski."

Pax Americana passes

What has truly changed, however, is the end of the world all of us here have grown up in or those in Central and Eastern Europe before 1991 so desperately wished to join: the generally rules-based order of the past 80 years, established and more or less maintained by the United States since World War II.

This change is not about the U.S. "withdrawing from NATO." There's no need to do that. It can easily remain in with voting rights but choose to take its troops out. It can even stay out or abstain in case Article Five is invoked by an Ally.

It's much bigger than that. But the old order is dying. Russia and China have been undermining it for 20 years. When we read the U.S. National Security Strategy, published in December, or just listen to the pronouncements of senior U.S. officials in the past year, it's clear the U.S., too, no longer sees itself as the benign hegemon that will uphold the global order the U.S. itself established in the 1940s.

This was truly a grand strategy to establish a rules-based international order with the U.S. acting as a benign hegemon. It was, moreover, the greatest of all grand strategies. Pax Romana, 2000 years ago, was summed up by Tacitus in Rome's final victory over Carthage: "They make a desert and call it peace." The Peace of Westphalia, as well as the Peace of Augsburg and the principle Cuius Regio, Eius Religio, established the basis of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, which ended the Thirty Years War — but not the interference. The tripartite order, established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, lasted a century until World War I, but that in reality was little more than a division of Europe between continental autocratic empires that suppressed uprisings of citizens clamoring for liberal democracy. While Great Britain's own grand strategy instead was to become the world's great maritime power, for Britannia to rule the waves and the sea lanes around the globe.

But the U.S. strategy was different. The Benign Hegemon's rule of what we call the West was military, political, economic, diplomatic, cultural and even culinary, if we think of the ubiquity of the world of hamburgers and Coca-Cola. Promoting free trade and free markets, liberal democracy, human rights and the rule of law, it went far beyond any earlier grand strategy. And for 80 years, it worked, allowing Europe to live, grow and prosper. Pax Americana was all-encompassing, not just military or for the purpose of control and domination. Those of you who know a little bit of Finnish attitudes, it can be summed up as follows: Escaping in January to Spain's Tenerife, a forty-year-old Finn lies sunbathing on the beach, sipping a gin and tonic, watching his kids frolic in the surf while listening on his AirPods to Bruce Springsteen, Pearl Jam, Beyoncé or Lady Gaga, depending on what he listened to as a youth. To express his ultimate satisfaction with this transcendental hedonic Gesamtkunstwerk, he lets out a satisfied sigh and says simply, "Amerikka."

But Pax Americana is over. What the U.S. has created began already in 1944 with the Bretton Woods organizations — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which later became the World Trade Organization. In 1945, the U.S. created the UN. These institutions came from the understanding that the U.S.' failure to establish a structure to bind countries together in the League of Nations after World War I and to rebuild and help Europe economically was also responsible for the horrors that began in the 1920s and 1930s, from hyperinflation and mass unemployment to the rise of fascism. Its core axiom was the UN's prohibition of aggression or the use of force to change borders. On the economic side, the U.S. also established the Marshall Plan in 1948, which raised Europe out of the widespread poverty of the immediate post-World War II period. That same year, the slow realization that the USSR was not an ally became explicit with the Berlin Blockade. The communist coups d'etat in Central Europe, replacing democratically elected governments in Poland, erstwhile Czechoslovakia and Hungary, led UK Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevan to write to President Harry S. Truman asking to create the North Atlantic Treaty that same year, which in 1949 saw the "O" — meaning a functioning organization appended to the treaty — giving us NATO. It was also the U.S. actively pushing, in 1950, Prime Minister Robert Schuman's plan for the European Coal and Steel Community, which Washington saw as a way to strengthen Western Europe. What would eventually become the European Union was hardly to "screw America," as President Donald Trump has averred, but to prevent conflict among the founding six countries.

We can continue. It was the U.S. that created the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, later the Organization on Security and Cooperation in Europe, making the so-called third basket of human rights a fundamental tool to push back on repressive communist regimes in the wider European space. Later, the U.S. pushed for NATO enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe, for a Europe Whole, Free, and at Peace, when at the time, many Western European countries were opposed to taking in those Eastern Europeans lest enlargement of NATO upset Russia and harm the opportunities it offered as the El Dorado to the east. And it was President George H.W. Bush who proclaimed the "peace dividend" after the fall of communism in 1989–91, leading to massive disarmament by both the U.S. and Europe in the 1990s.

Where are we today, in 2026?

Policy gurus from the three schools of thinkers in the US — the isolationist realist, the interventionist neocon and the liberal internationalist — all have concluded in the last several months that America has changed, and changed fundamentally, abandoning the 80-year approach to its relations with the world. Stephen Walt, dean of America's foreign policy realist school, in his Foreign Affairs article, called his country not a "benign" but a "predatory hegemon." The interventionist neocon thinker of the Iraq War, Robert Kagan, in his piece in the Atlantic, called his country "the rogue superpower" and titled an earlier piece this year as "America Against the World." While former OSCE Ambassador and NSC advisor to President Joe Biden, Michael Carpenter, titled his recent Foreign Affairs article "The Postliberal Superpower."

Vice President JD Vance's speech in Munich last February, excoriating European law, and his choice to meet the leader of the far-right, pro-Russian AfD party instead of the host country's Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, was a foreshadowing. This was shortly followed by the United States voting in the UN with Russia, North Korea and Belarus, as well as 14 other Moscow-friendly countries, on February 24, 2025, against a resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Ukrainian territory. The sudden imposition of unilateral Liberation Day tariffs on the EU left another deep wound. Repeated threats to take over Greenland, by force if needed, shocked Europe as a sucker punch to its collective face. Not bothering to consult with NATO Allies on the Iran war and then turning on them to say that the Strait of Hormuz is your problem, not ours, and that we will leave NATO, has put Europe before its biggest challenge since the end of World War II. Indeed, President Trump reiterated that because Denmark would not cede Greenland to the United States, it was a "bye-bye" to NATO.

"Pulling out of NATO", of course, is a long-term promise of Donald Trump dating to 1987 when, after returning from his first trip to Moscow, he took out full-page ads in the New York Times, Washington Post and the Boston Globe urging the U.S. to withdraw from NATO. In practice, though, it's not so easy. It would take a year for such a decision to come into force. Moreover, since Senator Tim Caine and N.B. State Secretary Marco Rubio sponsored an amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act, preventing the president from unilaterally renouncing the North Atlantic Treaty without a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate, it has become even more difficult.

But in reality, it's not necessary to renounce the North Atlantic Treaty to pull out of NATO. It's enough to withdraw the approximately 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Europe today. Once the ongoing Department of Defense Force Posture Review is completed, the American presence on the continent will probably see a major restructuring anyway, as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised already last spring. And lastly, if an attack on a NATO country were to take place, there is no automaticity of response. A full NATO response requires consensus, which, without U.S. leadership, will be difficult to achieve among recalcitrant Allies. And even if that's obtained, it's not at all clear what the U.S. would contribute. So, let's leave this discussion behind us and look at where we stand.

European policymakers hope that the threat of the U.S. withdrawal from the world is not a permanent condition, that perhaps it will change with the next administration. I'm not so sure. To base our security on the possible outcome of an election two and a half years from now seems to be more a case of hopium. Secondly and equally unclear is how much even a completely different administration will want to go back to the status quo ante of the transatlantic relationship of yesteryear or how long it would take to do that, given, to put it mildly, the current restructuring of the Departments of State and Defense. And third, do we have that much time? Given the plethora of estimates from NATO Secretary General Marc Rutte, as well as German, Nordic, Baltic and other militaries, regarding when Russia will be able to attack Europe, we just may not have time before 2029. That, in turn, ultimately depends on how well the war in Ukraine goes. If badly, then Russia will be ready to attack sooner; if it goes well in Ukraine, then later. But deal with it we must.

And of course, we need to take it into account and start to plan seriously already now — what if the war does go badly for Ukraine? Here, we must consider how we will deal with the possibility of a truly massive influx of refugees. After the horrors of Bucha, Irpin and Mariupol, the killings, torture, mass rapes and kidnapping of children, how many Ukrainians will remain under Russian occupation? Losing Ukraine means the EU would have to deal with up to 35 million refugees pouring into Europe itself. In comparison, consider the profound effect on the rise of populist parties across Europe, the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment and the cost to social services we saw in 2015 when a million and a half refugees from the Middle East found their way here. I don't know how much planning has been done for such a possibility, as we hope for a resolution to the war, but the prospect of a mass flight of 35 million refugees must be on our radar screens.

A new security environment

With a U.S. that is pulling back from the world, as we have already described, Europe is left in a wholly new security environment. A Foreign Policy piece by Hal Brands, one of the more interesting American security thinkers, Henry A. Kissinger distinguished professor of global affairs at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, paints three different possibilities that follow from an American withdrawal from its previous role as guarantor of the world order and the end of Pax Americana:

"One possibility is a two-worlds scenario reminiscent of the Cold War, in which the globe is divided into dueling blocs led by Washington and Beijing. A second possibility is an age not of two blocs but of several empires, in which an array of potentates capture regional spheres of influence. A third possibility is a self-help world, in which U.S. behavior turns predatory and plunges the system into an anarchic abyss."

These three possible scenarios need not fall into discrete and mutually exclusive categories. A U.S. that, as the National Security Strategy argues for, is neo-Monrovian, Western Hemisphere-based, but opposed to China, can still act in the interests of the Empire. A world of Empires where China wants the western Pacific democracies of Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, the Philippines and Oceania in its sphere of influence would certainly be opposed not only by the U.S. While Russia, having already expanded its sphere to Slovakia, Hungary, perhaps also to Czechia, Austria and most certainly Serbia, will eye the rest of Europe, as it has ever since the defeat of Napoleon. With the Russophilic AfD and Rassemblement National, the leading parties in Germany and France, respectively, we must consider the possibility that, though out of power today, in the coming years, they may be running the most consequential countries of Europe. And we can be certain, with considerable help from Russia itself.

I suggest reading Hal Brand's article, where he elaborates on the implications of these three scenarios. But the message for us is clear. Europe had better get its act together and get serious about its defense, of which only a fraction has to do with its current state of military readiness. Rather, most of Europe's defense problems have to do not with years of low spending but with the structural limitations of the European economy. Moreover, Europe needs to deal with the political paralysis we constantly experience when member states abuse their veto power in the European Council to prevent aid to Ukraine and sanctions on Russia or use the location of Euroclear's headquarters to stymie our foreign policy objectives.

If anything, looking at how the EU has been falling behind in a number of realms vital for competition and overall security — not just military, but in political cohesion, economic growth and in the development of technology — we desperately need to carry out reforms in a broad range of areas: from the consolidation of our energy markets just to keep us powered enough to actually participate in the rapidly developing world of AI, to unified capital markets so that we have enough money to invest in these technologies, to common borrowing by the EU, to banking union consolidation, to the single market for services, to our industrial policy. But first and foremost, to ensure we can compete in a world where innovation is already dominated by the U.S. and China.

This year, the biggest European investment in AI is €1 billion from the French company AMI. In the U.S., the Big Four tech giants (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft), along with Oracle, are projected to invest between $660 billion and $690 billion in 2026, nearly doubling their 2025 levels, which means that last year, it was more than $300 billion. In other words, in two years, private companies, with heavy contributions from the U.S. government, have invested a trillion dollars in the most crucial technology of today and the future — while all Europe can show is one billion. I won't even get into how, without massive investment and substantial reform of our energy markets, we won't be able to afford the level of AI enjoyed by the U.S.

How can Europe compete when it is clear that the new grand strategy for both the U.S. and China is to invest massively to become AI hegemons, from which, in this brave new world, all else follows? Power, political, military and economic competition, as well as the soft power and the often anti-EU propaganda we see on America's Facebook and Twitter and China's TikTok.

Europe is not even in the game right now. And unless we embark on a massive reform effort, Europe will, in the words of Mario Draghi, "die a slow, agonizing death." And that's only if, before that, we haven't begun to invest in armaments and defense technology and find that we have to defend ourselves militarily.

These fundamental reforms, however, will require each EU member to give something up. Capital markets and the banking union require smaller countries to accept that this may hurt their national banks. Common borrowing by the EU requires the so-called frugals to drop their objections and the more profligate, indebted countries need to tighten their fiscal policies. Everyone has to agree to qualified-majority voting on foreign policy. The need for these hard decisions is hardly new. As Jean-Claude Juncker, then president of the EU Commission, said some ten years ago, "We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it."

The problem of getting re-elected touches a small number of politicians. What needs to be done affects the lives of 450 million Europeans. What specifically needs to be done politically and economically is described in all its unelectably gory glory in Mario Draghi's report to the EU Commission of October 2024. This is what needs to lie at the heart of a European grand strategy. From that, we can also derive our defense and military tasks. We have little time to do any of it.

All this is needed not only for the EU to regain competitiveness. All this is badly needed to reassure our position — our say, if you will — in the global environment that is being rewritten, as we sit here. There is, namely, a clear demand from many, if not most, countries globally for rules, predictability, order, even or especially now that the hegemon is no longer interested in underpinning the previous order.

Rules and predictability — and the order stemming from it — are something the EU can offer. For all our slowness and supposedly dry, restrictive and tedious bureaucracy, when an agreement is struck with Brussels, there is hardly ever any walking it back. The EU is also all about rules and not only for ourselves but also for our partners. Since the 1990s, all free trade agreements that the EU closes with partner countries include not only an economic framework but also clauses on human rights, labor standards and environmental protection. This is no substitute for hard security arrangements or for political alliances. But it offers something that is a rare commodity these days: clear rules and long-term predictability. Moreover, the EU has these agreements in place with countries forming one-third of global GDP. Add the EU's volume and you'll have an area of some common rules, a playbook for almost half of the global GDP. Plus, there are more countries in line to join.

Some words on defense

With the economy, we face Draghi's "slow agonizing death from a loss of competitiveness." Yet, with all the warning signs flashing red from one official statement in Washington on the threatened end of NATO, the EU also has been perhaps even criminally slow to react, as if we really don't believe what we read or hear every day. How will we defend Europe without the U.S. in the lead? I haven't seen any answers or real efforts to do something about it.

In addition, my own particular bêtes noires include our failure to revise military doctrine and practice to take into account the drone revolution and, secondly, this bizarre term "hybrid" or "grey zone" warfare. As if we'd never heard of von Clausewitz's dictum that war is the continuation of policy by other means, including so-called hybrid. Or the Gerasimov doctrine of combining military and non-military tools to achieve policy ends. Both the latter and dealing with drones are pure cases of obsolete policies.

Last year, here in Estonia, at our Hedgehog NATO exercises with 13 NATO nations participating, a 17-man Ukrainian drone team obliterated an armored infantry unit of 6,000 men. The comment of the British general in charge was, "We're fucked."

As for so-called hybrid warfare, we continue, at the NATO and EU levels, to insist that warfare has stayed the same as it was in 1948 or during the Cold War. NATO Article Five requires an armed attack to be enacted by its members. What we see across Europe, and especially in Northern Europe, are clear attacks that cross neither Article Four nor Article Five thresholds. Yet they are attacks, carried out by the Russian military intelligence and other special services. Since they do not rise to the level of Articles Four or Five, they are treated as national responsibilities. "Not our problem" is what we hear from our two organizations — "you deal with it."

Beginning in 1944 and through 1950, the United States crafted a serious grand strategy to restore and then uphold the liberal democratic world, as well as market- and free trade-based Western order. It took half a decade of effort and creative thinking when the U.S. faced the daunting prospect of Europe and Asia reduced to rubble in the wake of the largest war the world had seen. Now that that order is fading, it is up to Europe to fill the void left by the U.S. as it pulls back and renounces that world of yesterday. If not for others, then we must fill that void with a liberal, rules-based order, at least for ourselves and our children. What this would be is nothing less than a genuine grand strategy to save the world we have benefited from for some eighty years. We must not let mere political parochialism and short-term election gains keep us from taking up the challenge.

As Sir Humphrey in "Yes, Minister" said:

Diplomacy is surviving into the next century.
Politics is surviving until Friday afternoon.

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!