Geopolitics: Europe’s Antifascist Duality Explored

The Two Faces of Europe: Antifascist by Day, Lackey by Night .

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Europe has spent three years wrapping itself in the Ukrainian flag. It has sanctioned oligarchs, funded artillery shells, cheered ICC arrest warrants, and lectured the Global South on the sacred inviolability of international law. European leaders have stood at podiums from Brussels to Kyiv invoking the ghosts of 1938, warning gravely that appeasement is how democracies die. It is a powerful performance. The problem is that it is, increasingly, exactly that — a performance, staged for a domestic audience, dissolving the moment the script demands real courage.

Because while Europe was performing its antifascist awakening against one authoritarian bully on its eastern border, it was quietly genuflecting to another one pressing in from the west. And the moral contortions required to maintain both positions simultaneously have finally become too grotesque to ignore.

A Psychologically Abusive Relationship

At the Munich Security Conference in February 2026, a European diplomat offered an analogy that was more revealing than intended.

The continent’s relationship with the Trump administration, they said, was “a bit like a psychologically abusive partner” — one who reminds you constantly of how good things once were, then demands total compliance as the price of the relationship.

The remark drew knowing laughter in the room. It deserved something harder: recognition that a continent of 450 million people, commanding the world’s largest single market, had chosen to describe its geopolitical condition using the vocabulary of a trauma survivor. ^[1]

This is what three decades of outsourcing European security to Washington has produced. Not partnership. Not alliance. A dependency so structural and so psychological that European leaders have lost the muscle memory of independent action entirely.

The numbers tell the story. After Trump returned to the White House, EU governments — desperate to forestall American trade tariffs and retain US security commitments — began offering extraordinary concessions. They pledged to raise defense spending. They accepted lopsided trade frameworks. They bit their tongues on Greenland, on Venezuela, on the systematic dismantling of the US democratic institutional order. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace delivered the verdict with admirable bluntness: “the policy of subservience has not worked”. Every capitulation was read in Washington not as goodwill, but as a weakness to be exploited — and rewarded with further demands. NATO Secretary General Rutte floated the possibility that real European strategic autonomy might require defense spending at up to 10% of national GDP — a figure so politically explosive it would trigger the very far-right electoral tsunamis that Trump’s administration has been actively cultivating inside EU member states. ^[2] ^[3]

A politician at a marble podium in a European style parliamentary chamber raises his fist while his shadow on the wall shows him bowing with his hat, as suited delegates sit around a circular bench applauding — A defiant gesture at the podium hides a bowing shadow, exposing the gap between public bravado and quiet deference in Europe’s corridors of power.

The Structural Mirror

The comparison between Putin and Trump is no longer a polemical device deployed by commentators. It is now a subject of serious structural analysis at the highest levels of European foreign policy research. The European Council on Foreign Relations published a study concluding that Trump’s “illiberal Atlanticism” and Putin’s “Eurasianism” overlap structurally and ideologically in ways that should alarm any genuine defender of the liberal order. ^[4]

Both leaders define European civilization in ethnic, cultural, and religious terms — explicitly rejecting the EU’s foundational premise that European identity is built on normative values: democracy, rule of law, human rights. Both portray themselves as paternalistic defenders of the “real” Europe against liberal elites and cosmopolitan “outsiders.” Both have systematically cultivated nationalist, Eurosceptic political parties inside EU member states — funneling legitimacy, media oxygen, and in Russia’s case direct financing — to fragment European unity from within. Both treat their respective neighboring regions as imperial backyards governed by the logic of power, not law. Trump’s aggressive revival of the Monroe Doctrine — his open threats over Greenland, his territorial posturing over Canada, his economic coercion of Mexico — is structurally identical to Putin’s doctrine of a Russian “Near Abroad” over Ukraine and the post-Soviet space. Same imperial logic. Different flag. ^[5]

The American Enterprise Institute — not a publication known for anti-American sentiment — went further still, arguing that Putin, Xi Jinping, and Trump are collectively engaged in a “freedom counterrevolution” — a three-pronged assault on the post-1945 liberal international order, each reinforcing the other’s legitimacy by demonstrating that great powers simply do not answer to international law. Europe solemnly condemns the first two. It writes the third a blank check, renewed quarterly. ^[6]

freedom counterrevolution pitchfork — Three great powers spear the post 1945 order with a golden pitchfork while Europe stands below, torn between protest and complicity.

The Gaza Verdict

Nothing exposed Europe’s ideological bankruptcy more cleanly than Gaza. The contrast is not subtle — it is a floodlit demonstration of exactly the double standards that authoritarian governments have always accused the West of maintaining.

When the International Criminal Court moved against Vladimir Putin, European governments applauded. They had spent years funding and championing the ICC as the institutional cornerstone of international humanitarian law. When the same court turned its attention to the Middle East, the applause stopped. Abruptly. Completely.

Former EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell — a man not prone to radicalism — stated it with unusual directness:

“If we applaud when the ICC acts against Putin, we should do the same when it acts against other actors in the Middle East”.

His own institution ignored him. Human Rights Watch documented in February 2026 that the European Council had failed even to reaffirm its previously stated support for ICC proceedings — a deliberate, documented retreat from Europe’s own declared principles. ^[7] ^[8]

This is not a nuanced policy disagreement. It is a structural double standard, and it matters enormously beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe it enables. It hands authoritarian governments — in Moscow, Beijing, and Washington — the most lethal propaganda weapon available: empirical proof that the “rules-based international order” was never a universal principle. It was always Western power wearing legal costume, applied selectively against adversaries and suspended for allies. Every time Europe enforces international law against Russia while excusing violations elsewhere, it validates Putin’s core argument. It validates Xi’s. It now validates Trump’s.

Cartoon politicians in a grand courtroom cheer under a yellow spotlight for a defendant linked to Ukraine, while on the other side a silent group sits under a white spotlight in front of an empty dock marked pending with Israeli and Palestinian flags, as a man in the center holds a sign reading ICC equals sacred. — In The Hague, one war gets ovations while another waits in silence, exposing how sacred principles become selectively applied.

The Courage Deficit

The Verfassungsblog, one of Europe’s most rigorous constitutional law publications, made a point that deserves wider circulation: previous US administrations, even when violating international norms, at least fabricated legal justifications. The creative lawyering was cynical, but it kept international law rhetorically alive — it acknowledged the law’s existence by engaging with it, however dishonestly. The Trump administration has dispensed with that pretense entirely. It simply ignores justification. It does not argue that its actions are legal. It does not argue at all. And Europe — which spent decades insisting that demanding legal justification was the entire point — has chosen silence. ^[9]

At Munich, Field Marshal Lord Richards framed the stakes with the clarity that European politicians have been studiously avoiding:

“Trump, Xi, Putin and their authoritarian acolytes are seeking to return us to an era of Great Power politics”

— a world governed not by law but by the will of the powerful. Europe nodded. Then went home and negotiated more trade concessions. ^[10]

The Middle East Monitor captured the civilizational moment with appropriate severity: the major powers have “openly torn off the mask of hypocrisy in observing international restraints”. The question is not whether the mask has been removed. It has. The question is what Europe intends to do now that everyone can see clearly — and whether its own face beneath the mask is any more honest than the ones it has spent three years denouncing. ^[11]

A European politician in a blue suit stands in a grand hall before a mirror, a cracked theatrical mask labeled Values lying on the floor while the reflection shows a smirking, more cynical version of himself surrounded by shadowy great power figures, as observers in the gallery watch with folded arms. — With the mask of values shattered on the floor, Europe is forced to confront whether its real face is any more honest than those it condemns.

The Reckoning

Europe does not lack instruments. Russia’s frozen sovereign assets — approximately €300 billion — sit largely in European financial institutions. The sanctions architecture that is strangling the Russian war economy runs through Brussels and London, not Washington. The EU’s single market remains the world’s largest, and access to it is a privilege, not a right, that can be conditioned on respect for the very norms Europe claims to champion. The tools exist.

What does not exist — or what has atrophied to the point of dysfunction — is the political will to use those tools without first checking Washington’s temperature. That is not a security constraint. It is a moral failure dressed as pragmatism.

And it is the failure that makes Europe’s antifascist posturing not merely hypocritical, but actively dangerous: because a Europe that selectively enforces its principles teaches the world that principles are negotiable, that law is instrumental, and that the only real currency in international relations is power.That is not the lesson of 1938 that European leaders claim to have internalized. That is the lesson that produced 1938 in the first place.