Europe’s Bleak Future

Europe is in deep trouble today, mainly because of the Ukraine war, which has played a key role in undermining what had been a largely peaceful region. Unfortunately, the situation is not likely to improve in the years ahead. In fact, Europe is likely to be less stable moving forward than it is today. 

The present situation in Europe stands in marked contrast to the unprecedented stability that Europe enjoyed during the unipolar moment, which ran from roughly 1992, after the Soviet Union collapsed, until 2017, when China and Russia emerged as great powers, transforming unipolarity into multipolarity. We all remember Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 article—“The End of History?”—which argued that liberal democracy was destined to spread across the world, bringing peace and prosperity in its wake. That argument was obviously dead wrong, but many in the West believed it for more than 20 years. Few Europeans imagined in the heyday of unipolarity that Europe would be in so much trouble today. 

So, what went wrong? 

The Ukraine war, which I will argue was provoked by the West, and especially the U.S., is the principal cause of Europe’s insecurity today. Nevertheless, there is a second factor at play: the shift in the global balance of power in 2017 from unipolarity to multipolarity, which was sure to threaten the security architecture in Europe. Still, there is good reason to think this shift in the distribution of power was a manageable problem. But the Ukraine war, coupled with the coming of multipolarity, guaranteed big trouble, which is not likely to go away in the foreseeable future. 

Let me start by explaining how the end of unipolarity threatens the foundations of European stability. And then I will discuss the effects of the Ukraine war on Europe and how they interacted with the shift to multipolarity to alter the European landscape in profound ways.