Foreign Affairs: The war in Ukraine will reshape Europe

The Foreign Affairs posted an article talks about, how the War in Ukraine is Reshaping Europe.

The war in Ukraine makes it necessary for the European Union to move as a “post-war empire,” in partnership Strategy with a “Postwar American Empire”.

According to the article, the in Ukraine as a motive for change in Europe, seeking to prevent the return of the “Russian Empire” and to restrict the rising “Chinese Empire”.

The recent Ukrainian war opened the door to post-imperial Europe, and that is, a Europe that no longer has any empires dominated by one people or one nation, whether on land or across the seas, a situation that the continent had not witnessed before.

The article stated that, the European Union must restore some of the characteristics of empire, in order to stand up to Russia, and it must also have a sufficient degree of unity, central authority, and effective decision-making to defend the common interests and values ​​of Europeans.

The way the union works with critical decisions, so if each member state has the right to Veto on vital decisions, the union will falter internally and externally, and thus it will deteriorate.

The article acknowledged that Europeans aren’t accustomed to looking at themselves from the perspective of a single empire, but doing so is necessary, as the European Union itself has a colonial past, as the original founders of what would eventually become the European Union, considered the African colonies an integral part of the European project, even as European nations often endured brutal wars to defend their colonies.

On the other hand, the post-war Europe, or the post-war European empire, still depends for its security on the United States.

It’s worth recalling the conversations of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the need for European sovereignty, but when it came to military support for Ukraine, Scholz wasn’t ready to send one category of the main weapons, which are armored fighting vehicles and tanks, unless the United States does.

It was a strange version of sovereignty, as the war certainly also stimulated European thinking and action on defense, so that Scholz committed to a continuous increase in German defense spending and military readiness, so Germany taking the military dimension of power seriously, again, wouldn’t be a reality minor in modern European history.

In addition, Poland plans to build the largest army within the European Union, as will Ukraine, if it emerges victorious from the war, the largest and most militant armed forces in Europe.

The European Union also had very humble beginnings for the military dimension, which traditionally belongs to imperial power, and that if all this happened, the European support for the transatlantic alliance should increase significantly.

It’s also possible to free up more US military resources to confront the threat coming from China in the Indian and Pacific oceans, but it’s still unlikely that Europe will be able to defend itself alone against any major external threat.

The expression “empire of advocacy” by the Norwegian historian, Geir Lundestad, by which he means what the United States possesses within NATO, although “its founding identity is that of an anti-colonial force”.

Lundestad, in explaining his use of the word “empire,” quoted the argument of the former US National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to the effect that “empire can be a descriptive rather than a normative term”.

This American anti-empire is more dominant than the European empire, but it is less than it used to be… it in the past.

The Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was invoked again and again, and later Scholz, that the United States simply cannot tell other NATO members what to do.

Therefore, this alliance also has a credible claim to being an empire by consent.