Aris Roussinos wrote an important column for the British website Unherd that explores how the European tail wags the American dog. “Far from the United States forcing European states into a stance of radical and self-defeating hostility to Russia, it is European states that have consistently pushed a reluctant Biden administration into delivering ever-more deadly and sophisticated weapons systems to Kyiv,” Roussinos writes.

The pattern of hawkish European states browbeating their cautious and reluctant overlord into greater escalation echoes the dynamic of the Libyan intervention, wherein which the bright-eyed and idealistic Cameron and Sarkozy pairing cajoled Obama into what he later termed the Libyan “sh*tshow” against his better judgment. If anything, NATO displays the European tail wagging the American dog: Instead of keeping Europe subordinate, weak but ambitious European states use the NATO alliance to advance their own foreign policy ends—ends that, in Libya, would prove disastrous as a European failing rather than an American one.

Roussinos is, of course, partly correct. Reactionaries, especially in America, are blindsided by two major handicaps: first, the inability to see that the institutions that they once considered the bulwark of a conservative order are actually now a radical and expansionist bureaucracy; and second, a blindness to the fact that both NATO and a nascent EU changed character, especially after the collapse of the USSR, with former communists cleverly changing jerseys and taking positions of power in both.