Notes on European geopolitics in Ukraine and the Middle East

2026-10-14

This is a collection of comments I have made in the context of private exchanges. I have already written about most of these in previous entries, though here I piece everything together into a more complete view of the case. This is an extensive analysis of political trends in Europe and the West at-large, with regard to economics, geopolitics, and culture.

Imaginary communities and mass mobilisation

First, a general observation about the conduct of war and how it has developed over the course of modernity. With events surrounding the Peace Treaty of Westphalia, Napoleon, the Prussians, and then the two World Wars we witness the phenomenon of totalising conflict in varying degrees of intensity. War becomes life and the entirety of society is involved in the process.

Large masses of population are mobilised and thus their mindset, their morale, as well as social coherence is of paramount importance. Historical nationalism was, in essence, a story of shared belonging: an imaginary community that individuals were members of, were proud to partake in, and were willing to make sacrifices for.

I say “imaginary community” because at the scale of a nation there no longer are interpersonal relations and close links between those involved. Especially in earlier eras, there was no mass transport and telecommunications, so one would have to assume that people on the other side of the country were their kin.

Imaginary communities exist everywhere, including in our times. A common case is with fandom in sport or in support of some celebrity or subculture. Fandom engenders a sense of togetherness which flattens or obscures any other differences among those who share the same identity.

Indeed, identity is the epitome of an assumed constant. Already at the individual level, a person will form a set of beliefs they adopt as an extension of who they are, despite the fact that beliefs are malleable, people are adaptable, and attitudes are informed or otherwise conditioned by environmental factors. Public debate is toxic in large part because individuals form their identity on the basis of opinions they grow attached to, to the extent that challenging the opinion is perceived as a personal attack.

Religion is another typical imaginary community when it is done at the scale of some of the world’s major creeds as compared to a localised cult. A Christian Catholic believer in, say, Italy does not have the same day-to-day realities as a Catholic in the Philippines, yet they both believe to be part of the same group and therefore are, ab initio, positively disposed towards each other.

Imaginary communities are not inherently wrong. My use of the term “imaginary” is descriptive. The point I am stressing here is that people can develop an affinity with others whom they have never met and can, furthermore, build an ethos of solidarity with them.

In their benign form, imaginary communities empower people to trust strangers and to maintain a pro-social attitude towards their fellow people.

At any rate, imaginary communities build on top of human’s propensity for organic communities, which are those that revolve around the family, neighbourhood, and immediate milieu. Organic communities are predicated on interpersonal relations that are (i) done in a spirit of trust, (ii) involve close mutual knowledge, and (ii) may often be based on blood ties.

A typical organic community is the extended family, which is a small society unto itself that distributes the burdens of life, such as parenthood and elderly care, shares resources to make living more sustainable, and has a strong commitment to the common good of its continuity as a group.

Nationalism, in particular, has in many parts of the world leveraged the clear ethnic elements of organic communities to project ethnicity to the level of the imaginary community. Europe has many such ethnic nationalisms though there have also existed the civic brands of nationalism, which are typical of former empires such as France.

An empire cannot pretend to have ethnic homogeneity, so it instead leans fully on the imaginary side of communitarianism to speak of more abstract values and institutions, which themselves are always subject to interpretation in a way that organic communities are not.

The nature of warfare throughout modernity demanded the cultivation of a shared ideology among the subjects of the state. The mass mobilisation of people can only happen successfully against the backdrop of a singular baseline ideology that inspires each person to promote the perceived common good.

It is also why representative democracy arose as a historical necessity. It is a system of decision-making that creates the impression of participation while still retaining the age-old power structures which are oligarchic in nature. In republics there is an assumed public sphere that encompasses everybody and which, in principle, renders each person an equal among equals. As such, their connection to the body politic, to the imaginary community, is reinforced through repeated involvement and/or the potentiality thereof.

Disefranchised subjects do not make for effective soldiers because they are not fighting for a cause they believe in. They also are not open to the stratagems of the oligarchy. Whereas the belief in the control of stakes in an exclusive group makes sacrifices more likely and acquiescence the norm.

Nevertheless, representative democracy is a relatively weak tool in this regard. It is useful insofar as it contributes to the sense of community, but is otherwise not essential for the purposes of oligarchic governance. What matters is to have the positive disposition of the people as a starting point of shared destiny such that (i) mass mobilisation is not contested when the times call for it and (ii) most acquiesce to the status quo when there is peace.

Imaginary communities with an eye towards the potential for mass mobilisation is also what the United States administration is trying to develop through its exaggerations about masculinity and testosterone levels. The point is to make something look cool in order to then instrumentalise it in the service of governance. By creating an impression of superiority via a performative culture of manliness, they hope to instil the attendant ethos of the eager soldier, who will blithely join the war effort—or any other initiative for that matter—effectively as proof of their manliness, for what sort of self styled super-man would shy away from a challenge? Such is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The imaginary Europeanness of the Ukrainians

The war in Ukraine is a calamity for its ordinary people and a bonanza for the oligarchs domestically as well as abroad. The Western nations have for decades now cultivated the idea that the Ukrainians are “European”. This is not a mere geographical designation but normative coded language about which sphere of influence a country should fall under.

The European Union has, in this regard, been acting as the de facto political arm of NATO. To provide incentives to Ukraine to join the single market, which has long now stopped being just a “single market”.

The EU is the successor organisation to the European Economic Community, which was a trade cartel, free trade area, and customs union in the beginning though gradually developed its own legal order, known as the “Community acquis” (acquis communautaire). Though the EU has far greater ambitions even at the formal level, including for the establishment of a supranational military capacity which is currently ongoing.

Incorporating Ukraine in the wider framework of the European integration process, even if not within EU proper, is thus the instrumentalisation and inevitable militarisation of Ukraine against Russia through the back door. It cannot be otherwise, given the clear character of the European Union since its formation in the 1990s with the Treaty of Maastricht and especially in the 21st century, culminating in Euromaidan and the events ever since.

I must stress again the effect of imaginary communities. I was working at the European Parliament while Euromaidan was unfolding to the cheers of Western audiences. My question at the time to my jubilant coworkers was “how many Ukrainians do you know in person?”. I do not even need to tell you the answer.

By taking for granted the alleged Europeanness of the Ukrainians, the West seeks to bolster its power by expanding further to the east. It considers it its moral duty to proceed, legitimising expansionism before it even happens.

Control over Ukraine puts immense pressure on Russia, which is an important leverage for business among others, provides easy access to the Caucasus and by extension the Iranian plateau, and frames Turkey from the Black Sea, effectively adding another check in place, should the Turks be having second thoughts about their alliances.

In turn, Russia needs to exert control over Ukraine to avert Western influence in the broader region but also to advance its own imperialistic ambitions. Through Ukraine, Russia controls much of the Black Sea, has direct access to the Balkans, and can then work its way towards the Mediterranean, while still conncected to corridors that lead to Iran through the Caucasus and from Central Asia as well.

Among Western audiences, the pop culture explanation of the Ukraine war is that Putin is a power-hungry thug. While that may be true, it fails to appreciate the imperatives of geography and the peremptory incentives at play.

The West has to push eastward in order to secure energy flows and improve its own competitiveness on the global stage. The alternative of continuing with international trade is not beneficial to them, as they are the party with the greatest need, hence the weaker bargaining position. This is a reality on the ground regardless of what one thinks.

Similarly, Putin or not, Russia gains by widening its reach towards the Mediterranean and loses if the Europeans/Americans effectively force it to retreat further north.

We can already notice how the geography of Ukraine links it to the Middle East, even though that may not be obvious prima facie. Whomever has power over the Middle East effectively has power over much of the planet due to closer access to key energy arteries and trade routes: energy and trade are two sides of the same coin.

Mass mobilisation is not needed when others do the fighting

The imaginary community with the Ukrainians serves a more immediate and sinister function: to convert Ukraine into a battering ram against Russia, make the war an inevitability, and thus throw Ukrainians to the meat grinder without wider debates and referenda, all in pursuit of broader geopolitical objectives.

Western liberals who are now cheering for their assumed Ukrainian brethren, whom they have never met, are effectively providing their assent to a strategy of sacrificing Ukraine to the altars of Western imperialism.

Westerners provide money, intelligence, and hardware, while Ukrainians carry out the fighting. For many Ukrainian men, this is done by brute force, through a phenomenon known as “busification”: to arrest them, throw them into a bus, beat them up and humiliate them, and then send them to the battlefield already dead inside where they will likely face their doom.

The Western nations support Ukraine because it is good business for them. That money returns to the European arms dealers and relevant contractors to be converted into machinery for the war effort. In effect, this is a wealth transfer from European taxpayers to the coffers of Western industrialists and bankers via the Ukrainian regime.

The average European person is not benefiting from any of this. It is the conniving oligarchs in Europe and in Ukraine who are reaping the profits, while the poor suffer. As we see in France, for example, the government is perennially broke when it comes to social projects yet it somehow keeps finding billions for warfare.

What is happening now is showing us that matters of legitimacy and accountability, vaunted magnitudes of representative democracy, are not important when the mobilisation of troops is effectively outsourced to a contractor. European governments do not have to justify the war in Ukraine in terms of continued loss of life among their own citizens as that is not impacting them at the visceral level: they are not actually losing their loved ones but only some strangers whom they pretend to care about.

Indoctrination, then, is focused on the Europeanness of the Ukrainians, such that the recycling of money from taxpayers to the rich continues unencumbered.

Europe’s governance without a government

The European Union is largely irrelevant on the global stage right now. They are not in the arms race on artificial intelligence, their industries are not as competitive, their population is getting older, and they are generally underperforming relative to their economic weight and legacy.

Much of this is explained by the architectural flaws of the European Union, especially the euro area which is a currency zone with a single monetary policy but without an equivalent fiscal capacity. Furthermore, the EU represents a case of governance without government which pretends to be a representative democracy even though it lacks even the basic feature of an elected government through direct vote.

The Europeans failed to address the post-2008 financial crisis in a manner that was decisive. The crisis lingered well into the late 2010s, while the austerity measures that were adopted across the Union effectively made Europe lag behind in terms of global competitiveness.

To this day, the EU does not have a rational Economic and Monetary Union. There is no counterparty treasury to the European Central Bank and, consequently, there are no effective mechanisms to rebalance internal trade deficits among the Member States. In effect, the only policy that the EU architecture allows is indefinite fiscal tightness: the permanence of austerity.

Though austerity is not generalised. There still is plenty of money to shift towards Ukraine, as I have explained. This is about maintaining an institutional arrangement that disempowers the average person and arrests social movements at their inception. Their participation is largely irrelevant, because voting for a government at the level of the nation-state does not, in any way, refashion the framework within which this government may conduct its policies. One is allowed to pick faces, but not the parameters of policy.

Leading up to the top of the order in the EU, we notice how there is no elected government, and not even the pretence of representative democracy. The European Commission’s leadership is appointed in office, while the institution serves as a bureaucratic body tasked with the day-to-day efforts of the executive function. Meanwhile, the European Council is an intergovernmental institution in which Member States adopt decisions through inter-state bargaining. Within the Council, there are power imbalances and an overall tendency for submission to the supranational agenda, owning to the lack of monetary and fiscal sovereignty among national governments.

The European Council as such is not democratic, even if those sitting at the table are, at least on paper. The reason is that each head of state or government has legitimacy to forward their own national agenda, but as a collective they do not have the commensurate legitimacy to formulate a European agenda, nor the concomitant accountability towards a singular demos. There are no elections for what the rules and policies of the Union should be, because there is no electable executive function at the Union level.

The EU exhibits “sovereignty mismatch”, as I have explained many times before, which effectively means “rules for the whole, but legitimacy and accountability only for the parts”. Put differently, this is a case study in the fallacy of composition that plenty of Europeans have fallen victim to: something that may be true for the constituents is not necessarily true for the constituted.

Europe’s governance without a government ties in neatly to the dynamics of not requiring mass mobilisation to promote a war. There is no European demos and there need not be for the oligarchs to continue with their unscrupulous machinations. The narrative about the Europeanness of the Ukrainians is converted into seemingly technocratic rule-formation for the subsequent enrichment of those involved in the war with Russia.

Europe’s gambit for competitiveness and energy

Europe has two major problems right now: (i) its industry is not competitive and (ii) it does not have reliable access to energy. With regard to the latter, Europeans used to import energy from Russia and the Middle East, both of which are disrupted, thus depending mostly on the Americans. As for competitiveness, where commerce fails, war offers a lucrative alternative. The BBC’s reporting on the matter, titled Europe’s car makers are in crisis. Will the threat of war rescue them? offers a hint at the incentives involved.

To be clear, there is no “threat of war” that is going to rescue them, but their own willingness to become bellicose and to fan the flames of jingoism in Eastern Europe. Reading the article in light of what I have covered thus far offers an indication at the powerful incentives of the oligarchs, as well as the euphemisms employed in the service of justifying big business in the name of some lofty goal for “security”, “democracy”, and other such empty words.

Europe’s calculus for arresting its downfall into civilisational oblivion is to push forward with the war in Ukraine and then to increase the pressure against Middle Eastern nations. This is where Israel enters the picture and why we witness the seemingly bizarre yet perfectly reasonable phenomenon of major far-right parties across Europe all being fervent proponents of Israel.

There is a distinction to be made between far-right policies and far-right parties. The EU is already implementing far-right policy and uses relevant rhetoric with regard to Ukraine. It furthermore exhibits contempt for democracy via its robust anti-social economic framework as well as its overall governance without a government. That they are doing this without wearing military uniforms shows how dictatorships have become increasingly more subtle at the surface level, all while the policies are decisively against the majority of the population.

Modern technocracy does not need to be overtly authoritarian because it has no need to openly force conformity. There is no pressure for mass mobilisation into war and thus no immediate requirement to awaken the average citizen to the realities of their power apparatus. It is far more effective to obscure decision-making behind layers of complexity that no ordinary person is able to scrutinise or reason about. It, further, is expedient to maintain a discourse of exceptionalism, of grand values and norms, without necessarily realising it. Such are the much-touted “European values”, chief among them the commitment to representative democracy, while the very organisation that states as much is not democratic throughout.

The European elites will not withdraw their support for Israel because the latter performs the same function in the Middle East as Ukraine does in Eastern Europe, namely, to serve as a protectorate and to be a battering ram in the region, plus to promote geopolitical interests accordingly.

Israel occupies a key spot, as it reaches with relative ease the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the Eastern Mediterranean. If we draw a line of influence from Western Europe to Israel, we clearly understand how the West can use its protectorate to drive a wedge that cuts the Muslim world in half, separating North Africa from West Asia. This axis extends from Western Europe, to the Balkans, then through Greece and Cyprus, to Israel.

From there, Europeans and their American allies can apply greater pressure on the Middle Eastern nations to get favourable deals from them, to deny China access to cheap energy as well as emerging markets, and generally to strengthen their grip over both the Mediterranean basin and the land stretching towards the Caspian sea. More so once we see it holistically in combination with the aforementioned geopolitics of the war in Ukraine.

This is effectively a longer-term attempted pincer move by the West to (i) gain a stronger grip on the Middle East, (ii) ensure that Turkey is tied to the Western sphere of influence, (iii) weaken Russia by forcing it to retreat into its hinterlands, (iv) inhibit the ascent of China, (v) keep close tabs on India, and (vi) prevent the Muslim world as such from becoming sovereign.

The opposite incentives are also true. Iran, for example, gains greatly by having a corridor to the Mediterranean, as well as access to the Red Sea. But they are not my focus right now.

Muslims in Europe

Which brings me to the topic of demographic change in Europe. The native populations are ageing, while their lifestyle attitudes for a nominally abundant city life make childbearing unfashionable, uneconomic, undesirable, and burdensome.

Europe requires mass migration to keep its welfare state in place. It also needs it to enable a wide range of occupations. This is a reality that becomes increasingly more pressing as the population ages, because a greater proportion of retirees increases the burdens on funds, while simultaneously putting downward pressures on the economy: the worst of both worlds (notwithstanding cultural zombification when everybody around is old, as I have covered before but will not expound on herein).

Calls to restrict migration cannot ever amount to effective longer-term policy, as they constitute the equivalent of collective suicide. For them to be viable, they have to be combined with strict and thoroughgoing reforms in the direction of creating a baby boom, which is unlikely to happen as (i) attitudes do not change easily and (ii) fertility offers a relatively short window of opportunity, especially when lifestyles are not optimal for it.

Europe’s numbers are maintained through migration flows and the growth of Muslim populations among its inhabitants. Those Muslims represent an immediate inconvenience and potential obstable for the West’s ambitions in the Middle East, as they will continue to call out what they perceive as the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, and will put pressure on politicians to act against the Israeli regime. An example of this is the current government in the United Kingdom, which has made tokenistic moves against Israeli settlements in the West Bank without, however, jeopardising the wider geopolitical project.

For the elites in the West, Muslims are not a problem per se: they are happy to welcome them in large numbers. Muslims are an issue only to the extent that they carry with them their cultural heritage. For many, this means their ties to the Middle East and North Africa. The elites have nothing against the Westernised “cultural Muslims”, who are indistinguishable in terms of attitudes and expectations from natives, though those same natives will turn the hijabi girl and their anti-headscarf agenda into a totem of their commitment to so-called “freedom”, “fundamental rights”, et cetera. The goal is not some abstract egalitarianism, but cultural assimilation with the ulterior geopolitical ambition I have already outlined.

Modern warfare and unaccountability

To tie it all together, we have the advances in technology that are turning war into a matter that directly involves increasingly fewer people. Autonomous missile systems, combat drones, and artificial intelligence embedded in weapons, make it so that a relatively small force can carry out offensive warfare and pursue attempts at pillaging resources without explaining its actions.

This means that we no longer have the material realities of mass mobilisation that necessitated the aforementioned imaginary communities as well as the illusion of participation that representative democracy creates. In this new era, the technocratic modus operandi will become the norm and be admitted in plain terms, while the quasi-permanence of policies will not be seen as an inherent problem of the system but a feature which guarantees its stability and survival.

Reporting on war will be increasingly mixed together with memes and AI-generated viral videos to effectively propagandise the destruction on the ground as an interesting spectacle and fun pastime activity. Consumers of war content will not see anything wrong with this as they themselves will be decoupled from the direct consequences of war, namely, death among their family and friends.

To the average person, it matters not whether some drones explode in some far away land. There is no emotional hit of the kind one receives when they learn about the loss of a loved one. Society at-large does not care about machines and will thus have a higher tolerance for such power plays.

What will make the majority sensitive is inflation and economic hardship. Though those do not create the same visceral response as being beset by widespread death does. For as long as the economy does not disintegrate, it is easier for the establishment to advance its interests this way than to make most people actively participate in its military adventures abroad.

A change in attitudes

Imperialism has to be understood as a lifestyle, which comes with a specific bundle of incentives for money-making. It thus cannot be averted by simply voting for other parties. There has to be a much broader and deeper shift in attitudes, which starts with personal choices.

To put it schematically, if you want to have air conditioning and heating all day at an affordable price, if you choose to tour around the world on a whimsy with cheap travel, if you keep buying stuff you do not need and if you continue generating waste out of useful materials, if you live in a city where you do not produce any of your food, if your everyday needs are strongly dependent on a just-in-time system of production and consumption, then you are effectively asking for an empire, you are in love with imperialism and strongly addicted to it, because only by extracting the wealth of other nations and/or bankrupting future generations will you make your otherwise unsustainable lifestyle possible. This is true even if you are anti-imperialist in your words. Deeds are the only relevant consideration here.

When this is the average person, which it is, then imperialism is inevitable. The petty bourgeois has the same wants as the oligarch, except they differ in terms of degree. This system extends all the way to quotidian city life, which is unsustainable by default already from the fact that its flip-side is ever-intrusive monocultural farming. It is why climate change policies have not worked and will never work within such confines. It further shows how unsustainable it is biologically due to how city life makes parenting so difficult that it produces the various rationalisations against even the atomic family, let alone its extended variant.

The expectation for everyone to have their own apartment in the city means that resources are not shared by default. For example, four relatives will require four kitchens, four bathrooms, four of everything. At scale, this becomes much more energy and labour intensive, which is reflected as a more expensive life that is no different than a less sustainable life for people and the planet at-large. This cannot change by putting a cap on rent in urban centres as the Spaniards demand, for example, but by radically transforming our wants as individuals and collectives.

My point is that one does not oppose modern imperialism by merely being vociferous against it but only by proceeding through initiative towards a more autonomous lifestyle, which is inherently rural or at best suburban, is predicated on organic communities, remains economical at the base level in terms of sharing resources, is outright collectivist in its ethos, and thus environmentally friendlier than what is now the norm.

I am, nonetheless, of the view that cultural change only happens when the conditions necessitate as much. People may agree at the rational level, but will then find a million excuses to not upset anything in their immediate affairs and to keep complaining instead about how enfeebled they have become by the circumstances. I understand, to my chagrin, that what I am describing effectively is the avant-gardist intellectual’s way of living, even though it has been the standard for millenia. But I still say it because I consider it my duty to describe what I perceive to be the case, even if it makes me unpopular.