By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/1/26

Last week, the Guardian gave us a curious little snapshot of the accelerating decline of political thinking in Western Europe. Timothy Garton Ash’s “How to Defeat Putin” essay, three days later presented as a ‘View from the Council’ by the EU-funded lobby group ECFR, begins, as these things often do, with the sensible premise that the bloc needs a serious Russia strategy, but it ends somewhere much darker, with a prescription for saving democracy by making it less democratic.

It’s all part of the recurring contemporary sickness where the author wants the EU to become more authoritarian in order to defeat authoritarians. We can call it ‘Von der Leyenism,’ rooted in that peculiar strain of Western European thought which believes not everything associated with 1930s Germany was bad, and there were more than a few redeeming features. An old trick, dressed up in a clean shirt, which insists we must police speech to defend freedom and pretty much akin to fucking for virginity. All built on the belief that dissent should be treated as treason, provided the dissenter uses the wrong vocabulary and comes from the wrong side of the political tracks.

The phrase “see off our own nationalists” is the big giveaway here, and it exposes the real agenda. If it meant defeating them at elections by addressing voter concerns, it’d be fair enough because that’s how politics is supposed to work. But we all know the new toolbox involves lawfare, censorship, surveillance, deplatforming, financial pressure, spook interference, media campaigns, and the endless insinuation that any party outside the Brussels-approved centre is somehow carrying a matryoshka doll stuffed with Kremlin cash.

For the plan to succeed, liberal democracy would have to be replaced with a new form of “managed democracy,” this time with Western branding. Basically, Russia’s Surkovism of the 2000s remodelled with better tailoring, gender quotas, fewer cigarettes, less rap, more diversity, rainbow flags, pronouns and far duller nightlife.

The tragedy is that the author almost remembers the real lesson of the 20th century Cold War, but then races straight past it as if he were a colt wearing blinkers in the 2.40 at Sandown. The West outlasted the Soviet Union because it offered a better life and not because it could police thought more efficiently. Even the children of Khrushchev and Stalin moved to America, but the Kennedy clan and the Roosevelts didn’t scurry off east pining for the kommunalnaya kvartira of Leningrad.

The West boasted freer institutions, higher living standards, more open debate, more space for the individual and a deeper sense that tomorrow might be yours to shape, rather than something handed down from a committee of grey men who addressed each other as ‘comrades’ and had a strange habit of kissing each other full on the lips.

The entrapped Eastern-bloc youth didn’t look across the Iron Curtain and envy NATO communiqués, what they envied were supermarkets, freedom to travel, universities, jazz records, jeans, nicer cars, uncensored books, Michael Jackson, and the possibility of living without a little censor lodged permanently in the skull.

That’s what made the West attractive, but now look at the programme being offered by the liberal oped writing class. It involves a permanently securitised EU, cut off from cheap Russian energy and raw materials and committed to rearmament, sanctions, industrial strain, falling living standards and endless moral instruction. Does Ash seriously believe this is supposed to become the great attractive pole of the twenty-first century? And on the basis of what? Would it be expensive electricity, deindustrialisation, high youth unemployment, rising inequality, migration crises and a political class that calls voters dangerous when they complain?

Germany is the obvious warning flare because, for decades, its successful model rested on cheap energy, advanced manufacturing, solid infrastructure, a cohesive society and access to both developed and developing markets. Since 2021, that model has been battered as factories are under pressure, energy costs have risen, the country is absorbing more and more migrants (very often of questionable utility to wider society) and the old industrial certainty has gone thin around the edges while even the rail network is falling apart. Yet instead of asking whether EU members can really prosper while permanently severed from Europe’s biggest country, the half-continent’s strategic class reaches for another lecture.

What they fail to grasp is that the EU can’t censor and moralise its way into attractiveness and nor can it build unity by dishonestly pretending that populism is exclusively a foreign infection. The EU’s top dogs prefer the lie that voters have been hypnotised by Moscow because they can’t process the truth which is that more and more of them no longer believe the current political class (that means them) is up to the job. And while calling their opponents agents, dupes, racists, ‘pro-Russians’ or extremists is easier than answering them, it’s also suicidal.

Now, none of this means Western Europe should be weak and its various countries should, of course, defend themselves. They should have armies that function, borders that mean something, industries of substance, clear identities and leaders capable of speaking to Washington, Moscow, Beijing and Kiev without sounding like interns at a think tank panel.

But a serious EU would also understand geography, and accept that Russia isn’t a passing weather system, but rather it’s Europe’s largest country, a nuclear power, a major resource base and a permanent fact of the continent. Trying to exclude Russia from the European project while drawing in every other ex-Soviet state was always a ludicrous form of wishful thinking, and it’s also had structural implications for Russia itself. If the EU had behaved differently it could have waited out the Putin generation, which is understandably aggrieved by the Soviet collapse and the humiliation of the 1990s.

Then it could have dealt with a more internationally-minded and liberal-minded leadership, which didn’t even remember the USSR, that was certain to follow. We should never forget that just a month before the first Maidan protests in Kiev, Alexey Navalny came second in a Moscow mayoral election, but after the EU and the US wholeheartedly supported the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government, Russia’s elites concluded, whether we like it or not, that the West’s commitment to democracy and rules was only a sham.

This isn’t a call for the EU to surrender to Moscow, but rather a suggestion that it build a European security architecture that includes both Russia and Ukraine, because no stable order can be built by pretending one of them can be wished away.

If the EU continues to become poorer, more censorious, less free and more frightened of its own voters, it will keep heading down the road to ruin.