Russians reciprocate with friendship as vigorously as they do with hostility, so the possibility of peace is not a mirage at all.

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The publication of America’s new National Security Strategy has sent many European commentators into a collective rage. It is perhaps not surprising that those who are most enraged are the same people in favour of maintaining the war in Ukraine. The cold truth is that European citizens want their nations to focus on their national interests. The European Commission would sooner drag them into a war.

Despite the uproar on X and other social media, the U.S. National Security Strategy says relatively little about Europe, precisely because it focuses on U.S. core national interests. And, indeed, that is the core point made about Europe; that in trying to create a unified geopolitical role, it has neglected the core interests of its Member States.

The Strategy expresses a desire to see Europe regain its self-confidence and reestablish strategic stability with Russia. That aspiration appears driven by a desire to maintain Europe as an open market for U.S. goods and investment, and also to avoid it continuing to be a chaotic continent that diverts U.S. resource from its main peer competitor, which is China. There is also an underlying though unstated sense of Europe and Russia maintaining a healthier relationship in part to resist Chinese domination of both.

Europe’s supposed decline is framed in the context of its reduction in economic stature from 25% of global GDP to 14% now. European economic growth has never fully recovered from the shock of the Global Financial Crisis. With the economic centre of gravity shifting to Asia, the continent is being left behind.

Pundits have taken most offence to the notion that Europe faces civilisational erasure, driven by: ‘European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.., censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.’

Right at the heart of this critique is the idea that the current ‘trajectory of Europe’ which the U.S. wants to ‘cultivate resistance to’, is eroding national sovereignty and the value of the nations within Europe. The Strategy is shot through with bemusement that culturally rich and diverse Europeans nations, which are the well spring of America’s citizenry, are abandoning their interests in favour of an inchoate supranational identity that is simultaneously unattainable self-harming.

In the aftermath of World War II and centuries of conflict, the European project emerged as a way to allow for the peaceful coexistence of very different nations, linguistically, politically and historically. The adrenalin running through the veins of unprecedented levels of peace and stability until 2014 was the dismantling of economic social and cultural barriers nations, that did not erode their unique sense of self of any nation.

It may well be true that a U.S. security shield avoided the domination of Europe by a hostile Soviet Union until 1991, and for that we should be thankful. But the reason why European states learned to live in peace with each other after that period was largely because politics and security were largely left out of the conversation.

The reason European nations spent less on defence after the Soviet Union collapsed was not because their security was underwritten by American troops in Europe, but because they faced no external threat of invasion either in military terms of through unchecked migration.

The irony, of course, is that the factors that precipitated Europe’s contemporary decline, the ever greater weight and importance given to undemocratic transnational groupings such as NATO – were U.S. led. Impetus from the U.S. to keep expanding NATO gradually reintroduced very real risk to Europe as Russia felt increasingly left out in the cold and threatened. Needing to justify a role for itself, the European Institutions have grabbed ever more competence from Member States to resist so-called Russian aggression.

Once and for all, at least it is hoped, the Strategy attempts to kill ‘the perception….of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance’. That is being interpreted by the usual pro-war commentators as a sop to Russia. In fact, it is an invitation to European nations to refocus on their national interests, for the benefit of the European continent as a whole.

Without digging over again the history of NATO expansion, the key point is that neither NATO nor the institutions of Europe are states. They have no core interests beyond the bureaucratic need to exist, grow and accrete ever greater powers. You will never see the European Commission or NATO advancing recommendations on how they might reduce in size or hand power back to their members.

At this time of unprecedented threat of a reemergence of continent-wide conflict in Europe, the Americans are simply suggesting that nation states start to wrest back control. Both NATO and the European Commission, in my opinion, have both undermined the national and inflamed the international, while contributing to the stagnation of Europe as an idea of community, rather than a confederation.

A core principle of the U.S. Strategy is to ‘seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories’.

How Trump seeks to coexistence with other nations of the world is exactly how European states sought to coexist peacefully with each other after World War II. The European Economic Community, as it was called for a while, didn‘t seek to erode the primacy of the nation state, focussing instead on the economic, social and cultural features to create the idea of common purpose, without the shackles of common identity.

Yet, the European Commission’s concept of expansion – which in any case Europe cannot afford – is rooted in a desire to homogenise states under a fictious notion of common European values, and to prioritise conformity over identity.

Any existing European Member that seeks to raise a hand is called out by the collective as a back-slider, a quisling and a Putin stooge, taking Hungary, as a prime example.

Yet, European nations that focussed first and foremost on their economic wellbeing and the maintenance and protection of their industrial bases would buy Russian gas because it made good economic sense to do so.

A Europe that focussed on the protection of its citizens would seek a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine as soon as possible, instead of rejecting every possibility of dialogue, and raising the spectre of a future war that would kill and displace millions of their citizens.

A Europe that focussed on good neighbourly relations would seek a way to live on good terms with Russia and for Russia and Ukraine to live on good terms with each other, however long it may take to recreate that balance.

And in my experience of engaging with the Russians, they reciprocate with friendship as vigorously as they do with hostility, so the possibility of peace is far less of a mirage than people who have you believe.

Of course, war with Ukraine is used as a reason for why this is neither possible nor desirable. But then, unfortunately, the arguments in favour of perpetual conflict with Russia become self-reinforcing, with both Europe and Russia arguing to their quite separate allies about who is to blame, and no one seeking reconciliation, through the cutting off of contact.

So the European Commission has increasingly sought to dominate continent-wide diplomacy and marshalled the tools of its willing legions of media talking heads who insist that nothing must change that talking to Russia is tantamount to treason. The bellicose response to the U.S. National Security Strategy is proof of that. Moscow’s signalling of their alignment with its principles offered as further evidence that Trump is selling us out.

Yet, restoring strategic balance between Europe and Russia, which the U.S. strategy claims to want, requires restoring the primacy of the individual Member States of Europe over its institutions, and handing back control to capitals in how to govern their relations with Russia and other countries.

The European institutions have succeeded in defining Europe as something distinct from Russia, when in fact, Russia is a part of Europe. Calls by Defence Commissioner Kubilius to develop a common European geopolitical strategy, is merely another effort to grasp more competence from the nation states of Europe. These should be roundly rejected. The common foreign and security policy has been an abject failure and should be dismantled.

It is the institutions of Europe who are blocking the door of efforts to restore some normality in relations with Russia, most notably in the form of rabid Russophobes such as Kaja Kallas. She would happily take Europe to war from the comfort of a safe distance. I’d invite more European citizens to heed the invitation of the Americans to seek a way with the implication that she, and other unelected war-mongers, are stripped of their powers.