Europe believes it is at peace. It believes it is a concerned bystander, morally and materially supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression. In truth, Europe is already a belligerent—not against Russia alone, but against the United States. The war it is fighting is a proxy war between Washington and Moscow, conducted on Ukrainian soil, financed by European taxpayers, and fought just below the nuclear threshold. The majority of Europe’s population is completely oblivious to this reality, and in that obliviousness lies the greatest strategic danger of the twenty-first century.
I. Clausewitz and the Nature of the War
Carl von Clausewitz wrote:
“War is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse with an admixture of other means.”
By this definition, Europe is unquestionably at war. The means are not limited to conventional military operations. They include proxy forces, economic coercion, information warfare, sabotage, assassination, cyberattacks, and the deliberate weaponisation of refugees, energy, and inflation. The absence of a formal declaration of war is irrelevant. War, for Clausewitz, is not defined by legal formalities but by the pursuit of political objectives through organised violence and coercion.
The political objective of the United States in this war is not the conquest of Moscow. It is the strategic dismantling of Russia as an independent pole of power, the neutralisation of Russian influence in Europe and Eurasia, the fragmentation of the Russian Federation, and the permanent subordination of Europe to American strategic interests. These objectives can be achieved without a single American tank crossing the Vistula or the Dnieper. They require only that both Russia and Europe exhaust themselves in a war that Europe does not fully understand.
Russia, for its part, is not fighting Ukraine. Ukraine is the battlefield, not the enemy. Russia is fighting the United States through the body of Ukraine. Every Russian artillery barrage, every drone strike, every tactical advance is aimed not primarily at Kyiv but at the political will of Washington and the cohesion of NATO.
Russia understands the nature of the war. Europe does not.
II. The Philosophical Dimension: Arendt and the Manufactured Blindness
Hannah Arendt argued that power arises when people act together in concert. Violence can destroy power but cannot create it. Modern hegemonic systems do not always announce themselves with invasion. They work by dissolving the common world—the shared space of facts, trust, and institutions that makes collective political action possible.
The United States has applied this insight to Europe with extraordinary precision. Through its dominance of global media, its control of transnational institutions, its network of NGOs, its intelligence relationships, and its cultural hegemony, Washington has manufactured a European reality in which the war is framed as a simple morality play: Russia is the aggressor, Ukraine is the victim, and Europe is the noble helper.
This framing is not false in its particulars, but it is radically incomplete. It conceals the fact that the United States engineered the geopolitical conditions for this war, that it is using Ukraine as a proxy to bleed Russia, and that Europe is paying the strategic and economic price.
Arendt warned of the ideal subject of modern power:
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
Europe’s population has been reduced to precisely this condition. It cannot distinguish between an accident and an attack, between a crime and an act of war, between a humanitarian intervention and a proxy operation. Was the Nord Stream pipeline explosion a Ukrainian operation, or an American act of economic warfare? Were the cyberattacks on European hospitals and energy grids the work of independent criminals or state-sponsored actors? The ambiguity is the weapon. When a population cannot name the enemy, it cannot mobilise against it.
III. The Military-Technical Reality: Attrition on an Industrial Scale
The war in Ukraine is not a regional conflict. It is an industrial-scale war of attrition between the United States and Russia, fought by Ukrainian soldiers who are dying in numbers that Europe refuses to contemplate. Reliable casualty figures are suppressed, obfuscated, and abstracted. But as the war grinds on, the butcher’s bill approaches a scale of two million killed in action and wounded—a figure that, if acknowledged, would shatter the carefully managed European perception of the war.
This is not accidental. The United States has deliberately chosen an attritional strategy. It has no intention of defeating Russia quickly or decisively, because a quick Russian collapse would eliminate the strategic rationale for NATO expansion, for the militarisation of Europe, and for the subordination of European foreign policy to Washington. The longer the war lasts, the more Russia is weakened, the more Europe is economically dependent on American energy and security guarantees, and the more the United States consolidates its hegemony.
Russia, by contrast, has been forced into a war of endurance. It is fighting not for territory but for strategic survival. Its objective is to outlast Western political will, to impose such enormous costs on Ukraine and its backers that Europe eventually fractures and forces a settlement on Russian terms. The Russian military has adapted to the attritional nature of the war: it has mobilised its industrial base, absorbed sanctions, reconfigured its logistics, and accepted casualties as the price of strategic patience. Russia is not winning in the classical sense of rapid battlefield victory, but it is not losing either. It is grinding forward, slowly, at enormous cost, while Europe’s will to continue erodes.
Clausewitz identified the center of gravity as the hub of all power and movement, on which everything depends. For Europe, the center of gravity is not military. It is political will—the will of populations to continue sacrificing their living standards, their energy security, and their young men for a war whose true nature they do not understand. The United States is attacking this center of gravity through information warfare. Russia is attacking it through relentless attrition of Ukrainian forces. Both powers are fighting for the soul of Europe, and Europe does not know it.
IV. Escalation Dominance and the Nuclear Threshold
Clausewitz distinguished between limited war and absolute war. Nuclear weapons impose an absolute limit: neither Washington nor Moscow wants a general nuclear exchange. But this does not mean the end of war; it means the war is fought below that threshold. The side that can operate most effectively just below the opponent’s escalation threshold gains decisive advantage.
The United States conducts a grinding proxy war in Ukraine, provides intelligence, training, targeting data, and increasingly advanced weapons systems, while maintaining the fiction that it is not a direct belligerent. This deniability prevents Russia from escalating in ways that would force a direct US–Russia confrontation.
Russia, for its part, has responded with its own form of sub-threshold warfare: nuclear signalling, cyberattacks, and sabotage operations in Europe. These operations are designed to impose costs on Europe without crossing the threshold that would trigger a direct NATO–Russia war. The result is a war that is real but invisible, deadly but deniable, total in its political ambitions but deliberately limited in its military means.
V. Why Europe Is Completely Oblivious
Europe is oblivious because it has been conditioned to be oblivious. Its political class has not told its citizens the truth because the truth would demand sacrifices. If European leaders openly declared that the continent is engaged in a proxy war between the United States and Russia, they would have to ask for higher defence spending, energy rationing, cyber conscription, and a mobilisation of public will. They would have to confront the fact that their own foreign policies are not their own. That is politically catastrophic.
So they prefer to manage the crisis technocratically, reassuring the public that there is no war, only “challenges,” “hybrid threats,” and “resilience building.” The language itself is a form of denial.
The United States has exploited this condition brilliantly. By keeping the war below the threshold of perception, it has ensured that Europe’s fragmented populations will not act as political communities. Europeans are isolated, confused, and distrustful of their own institutions. They cannot name the enemy, so they cannot oppose him. The war is being lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of the European public—precisely where the center of gravity lies.
Clausewitz’s most profound warning applies directly to Europe today:
“The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish… the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.”
Europe has mistaken the kind of war it is in. It believes it is a moral supporter of a just cause. It is actually an unwitting belligerent in a great-power conflict, a battlefield for the ambitions of Washington, and a prize to be won by whichever power can first break Russian will, and as long as Europe remains blind to this reality, the war will continue to be fought on its soil, with its money, and at the cost of its future—without its population ever understanding why.