🗺🔽🛡The Beginning of the End for Europe’s Old Security Order: Towards a Geoeconomic Architecture Emerging from the Washington–Moscow Dynamic
Recent informal diplomacy between Washington and Moscow signals a fundamental erosion of the traditional Euro-Atlantic security architecture, as Europe is reduced to a spectator in negotiations that will define its own future

✍️Author: Ricardo Martins, PhD
Sociologist specializing in geopolitics and international relations, Utrecht University

➡️The informal, shadow diplomacy conducted by figures like Steve Witkoff symbolizes a structural shift. Geopolitics is no longer dictated by foreign ministries but by political families and corporate networks prioritizing transactional, resource-based deals over institutional alliances. This Washington–Moscow axis, grounded in commercial logic and bilateral trust, deliberately bypasses European capitals and multilateral frameworks, humiliating a continent that derived its legitimacy from them.

Europe’s tragedy is not that it is being excluded from the negotiations shaping its own future, but that it does not yet fully grasp the depth of its exclusion

➡️The emerging understanding rests on four economic pillars: joint Arctic resource extraction, energy corridor development, the reintegration of Russian hydrocarbons into global markets, and replacing NATO's military logic with profitable economic interdependence. This geoeconomic architecture sidelines Europe, which has tied its industrial base to sanctions and decarbonization, leaving it structurally weaker and facing deindustrialization.

➡️Europe is discovering painful truths: it cannot defend itself without the U.S., sanctions have backfired, and it will not be a co-author of the peace settlement for Ukraine. NATO will survive but be downgraded to a secondary, transactional framework dependent on U.S. political will and the personal Trump-Putin dynamic. The alliance loses its role as Europe's strategic core.

🟦The continent lacks the nuclear deterrence, military-industrial depth, and cohesive political will for true strategic autonomy. As Washington and Moscow converge economically and Asia's centrality grows, Europe risks becoming a marginalized peninsula in a Eurasian supercontinent it does not control. Its tragedy is not just exclusion, but a failure to grasp the depth of its lost agency in a world now governed by power, not norms.

#EU #EuropeandUkraine #geoeconomics #Internationalpolitics #NATO #Russia

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