Europe on the Brink of War
- Andrew B. White
- 1 day ago
- 15 min read
When regime survival depends on war and diverging incentives make escalation inevitable
Introduction: Why Incentives Matter
When analyzing geopolitics—particularly questions of war and peace—it is essential to examine the incentives of the parties involved. This requires rising above the fog of war, the daily noise of mainstream media narratives, and the emotional manipulation of public opinion. Such analysis is inherently difficult. No one can credibly claim to produce a fully comprehensive account of the objectives and incentives of every actor in a conflict of this magnitude.
The complexity arises not only from the number of actors involved—nation-states such as Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and members of the European Union—but also from supranational institutions like NATO, and from powerful interest groups operating largely outside public scrutiny, such as the global interest for “war as business” of the trans-national MIC (Military Industrial Complexes) and the globalist banking/financial cabal. These actors can influence both escalation and peace processes in ways that are opaque and indirect.
Another factor must be taken into account. While nation-states still exist, above all Russia and China, along with some smaller, relatively sovereign nations in which special interest groups are not allowed to take over national interests—especially in matters of security, defense, and economic benefit for the nation as a whole—in the Western world, one cannot consider the EU or the USA as nation-states. For decades, powerful interest groups have hijacked the democratic process and sterilized any popular electoral outcome via lobbying and funding of politicians. Therefore both the USA and the EU do not represent the interests of their own people but rather those of oligarchic elites, who constantly fight for power and primacy. They further their personal interest by nurturing and funding puppet politicians and use corruption, blackmail, sexual entrapment schemes and even homicide when everything else fails to to steer their puppets and further their interest. They represent, from time to time, different sectors and primarily tech/surveillance, big-pharma, defense/military, banking/finance and the media. Some, like financial behemoth Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street also embrace all sectors via indirect control of most listed companies of the Western world. Their power to dictate their terms is immense.
Not one political leader in the western world is independent and not directed by one or more of such powerful oligarchic groups to which they have pledged allegiance. All the rest is just bla-bla and political theater for the sedated masses.
A recent example is Trump’s US delegation which met with Putin to discuss a possible peace agreement. The delegation was not composed of U.S. officials, but rather of “representatives” of such powerful interest groups, such as Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law, Kushner, while simultaneously BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, was meeting with former comedian, oligarch appointed, Zelensky. It is therefore clear that if a peace deal is to be struck, the interests of BlackRock and the banking/financial cabal must be safeguarded.
This, however, is not straightforward. It yields more complexity, because even within the banking and financial cartel, there are different factions and opposing interests fighting for primacy.
Accordingly, what follows is a tentative analytical framework, not a definitive account. The situation is fluid, shaped by ever-shifting and interacting political, economic, military, and monetary forces. Outcomes are therefore uncertain by definition.
Still, an attempt at clarity is necessary, especially at this moment in time, since these incentives risk escalating the conflict to a “point-of-no-return”.
I. Russia’s Incentives: War as Constraint, Not Opportunity
One of the most glaring omissions in Western discourse on the Russia–Ukraine/NATO war is a serious examination of Russia’s incentives.
Western narratives attribute the conflict solely to Russia and routinely frame the conflict as an expression of Russian imperial ambition. Yet this interpretation fails to withstand scrutiny when examined through facts and objective economic, demographic, and strategic lenses.
To hold this perspective one should dismiss well documented key historical events: the 2014 Maidan coup, the post-Cold War eastward expansion of NATO, the premeditated Western boycotting of the Minsk agreements (as later confirmed by former Chancellor Merkel), and the deadly targeting of Russian-speaking civilians in disputed regions by Ukrainian nationalists.
But the reasons for this tragic war are not the objective of this article, therefore let’s dive into the incentives.
1. Economic Non-Rationality of Territorial Expansion
From a purely economic standpoint, occupying western Ukraine offers no meaningful benefit to Russia. Ukraine as a whole is a huge liability, a bankrupt state with a devastated infrastructure and western Ukraine’s populations are hostile to Russia. The richest regions in natural resources—particularly coal—are largely concentrated in the Donbas, which Russia already controls in significant part.
Even there, the gains are very marginal for a nation with a massive wealth of natural resources like Russia:
Coal from Donbas would increase Russia’s production by roughly 4–6%, meaningful but not transformative.
Gas, oil, steel, and iron ore gains are negligible relative to Russia’s existing resource base.
Ukrainian iron ore in disputed regions would add only 3–5% to Russian output, again interesting but not strategic nor transformative.
These potential gains are dwarfed by the costs of war: human losses, sanctions, frozen reserves, trade disruption, and long-term economic friction. Therefore there is no plausible economic case to be made for war as a profit-maximizing enterprise for Russia.
2. Strategic Constraint and Security Logic
Russia’s incentives are better understood as defensive and strategic. NATO’s eastward expansion, combined with Ukraine’s post-2014 militarization and integration into Western security structures, has been perceived in Moscow as a direct and escalating security threat.
From this perspective, the war is not about expansion but about preventing further strategic encirclement and preserving Russia’s ability to act as a sovereign great power as well as protecting the Russian speaking populations of the disputed regions.
II. Ukraine, Europe, and NATO have Asymmetric Incentives for Prolongation
If Russia’s economic incentives for war are weak, the very opposite is true for Europe and its NATO partners.
1. Strategic Value of Ukrainian Resources to Europe
Ukraine’s natural resources matter far more to Europe than to Russia:
Natural gas: Ukraine produces 19 bcm (billion cubic meters) annually—roughly 50% of EU domestic production. This is even more strategically significant in a post–Nord Stream environment.
Iron ore: Ukraine exported 33.7 million tonnes in 2024, nearly matching the whole EU’s domestic production and accounting for almost 50% of all EU imports. This makes Ukraine a critical supplier for European steelmaking and industrial capacity.
Disruption or control of Ukrainian resource flows therefore has critical direct industrial consequences for Europe, far more than for Russia.
2. War as an Asymmetric Strategy
Europe and NATO are able to pursue a war of attrition at relatively low direct human cost:
Ukrainian manpower absorbs the bulk of battlefield losses. In excess of one million Ukrainian men have been sacrificed for the greed of the globalist oligarchies in a war that could have been stopped in better terms for Ukraine/EU/NATO already two years ago.
European states incur financial costs but avoid mass mobilization. Human costs have been so far limited to deniable special forces.
A prolonged conflict weakens Russia militarily, economically, and politically.
From this standpoint, the incentives for prolongation are clear: a weakened Russia, potential regime instability, and long-term strategic advantage without existential risk to European societies. This is the centuries’ old wet dream of European oligarchies: appropriate Russia’s immense wealth. Napoleon, Hitler and more recently the Rothschild financed Jewish Oligarchs - who raided Russia’s resources after the collapse of the USSR before Putin came to power and put an end to the pillage – all tried the same with different means and tactics. And all failed.
3. Self-Preservation Drives the EU’s Posture for continued War
Another more central incentive shaping the EU’s stance is institutional self‑preservation. The EU is a heterogeneous assemblage of nations with distinct languages, political cultures and a millennia long history of bloody conflicts. Unlike the United States—which emerged from a shared founding narrative, a common constitutional tradition, and a unifying frontier experience—Europe lacks a single civilizational substrate capable of sustaining a centralized political union without coercive mechanisms.
From this perspective, maintaining cohesion through supranational authority requires either increasing economic prosperity, which keeps everyone relatively happy and fosters consent, or—when legitimacy erodes—the expansion of administrative and security controls through surveillance and coercion. Which is what we see now happening throughout the EU. The EU’s inept and parasitic rulers have committed suicide by doing all that was humanly possible to destroy national identities, cultures and the economic potential of historically great productive nations such as Germany and Italy. By de-localizing manufacturing and by killing the SMEs - to comply with their globalist puppeteers’ dictats – they have collapsed the wealth of the populations and have decimated the middle-class which was both the engine of economic prosperity and the foundation of social cohesion. The result is the rapidly eroding consent to the failed European Union project. The war in Ukraine therefore functions as an externalizing catalyst: it supplies a permanent emergency frame that justifies centralization, exceptional powers, and accelerated integration in defense, surveillance, and finance to keep the EU together, coerce their citizens and preserve the parasitic elite’s benefits and privileges.
Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin frames the EU as follows: “EU is a colony of global liberal network that has nothing to do with sovereign European interests. When this network was controlled by the US, the EU was a double colony - of America (military) and of globalists”.
4. War as a Tool of Internal Consolidation
The conflict with Russia provides EU’s rulers with a powerful narrative to:
Legitimize rearmament and the emergence of a centralized European defense apparatus which - when needs be - can be turned against its own citizens to repress the increasing dissent;
Expand internal security coordination (Europol, intelligence sharing, counter‑disinformation regimes);
Normalize restrictions on political dissent under the banner of countering “foreign influence”;
Accelerate the adoption of coercive digital governance tools (digital identity frameworks, a CBDC digital euro, compliance‑driven financial oversight) each time justified with false narratives such as tackling tax evasion, money laundering or terrorism financing. All prerogatives, by the way, of the banking/financing cartel and governmental shadow intelligence organizations and their “plausibly deniable” connected organizations, which need unaccountable slush funds to finance their dirty endeavors.
As we have seen, the incentives here are not only resource‑driven, but also political. War postpones reckoning with internal fragmentation by recasting dissent as disloyalty and sovereignty claims as security risks. The longer the conflict persists, the stronger the rationale for “exceptional” governance becomes. After all did not Zelensky justify not holding elections because of the war? Or, were the emergency powers introduced in the USA by the “Patriot Act” following 9/11 ever revoked? The script is always the same.
5. Likely Consequences for Europe
Two broad trajectories emerge in my opinion:
1. Authoritaritarian Consolidation: EU rulers will tighten their grip to prevent centrifugal forces. This path implies deeper supranational control over fiscal policy, defense, borders, free-speech, and digital infrastructure. Repression becomes endogenous: once institutionalized, emergency powers rarely recede. The trajectory for Europe seems, paradoxically, similar to that of a totalitarian socialist regime such as the former DDR and USSR, perhaps more likely the “EUSR”.
2. Fragmentation and Secession: If coercive integration fails, the Union will fracture. Member states could reclaim sovereignty over currency, taxation, borders, and defense. Of course the transition will be chaotic but the outcome, once the dust settles, will be far better. The new Europe born from the ashes of the failed EU experiment could resemble a looser and more flexible association centered on free trade and mobility—without a centralized political core. This will represent a return to multipolar civilizational pluralism within Europe itself. A decentralized architecture is far more resilient than the forced union.
3. Monetary Architecture and Strategic Autonomy
The euro has been a failure. It has benefited some economies (Germany above all) while it has penalized others (Italy above all). Its rigidity has amplified divergence among member economies. A plausible alternative is going back to monetary pluralism: national currencies adjusted to domestic conditions, interacting externally through neutral settlement layers. In this context, non‑sovereign assets such as gold or Bitcoin can function as reserve hedges and cross‑border stores of value, disciplining inflationary policies through market competition rather than centralized control.
4. Competitive Federalism Versus Uniform Regulation
A decentralized Europe would reintroduce beneficial competitive pressures among states. Jurisdictions that reduce bureaucracy, taxation, and regulatory burdens would attract capital and labor, while less competitive models would face adjustment or decline. This dynamic—absent in a harmonized regulatory bloc—creates evolutionary pressure toward efficiency and competitiveness rather than conformity.
5. Synthesis
Europe’s incentives are thus asymmetric and internal: the war sustains a supranational project under stress and a deeply corrupted political system. Yet the very tools used to preserve the Union—centralization, corruption, surveillance, coercion and ideological homogenization—may accelerate its disintegration or transform it into a coercive polity detached from popular consent. In either case, the continuation of the war materially worsens Europe’s long‑term strategic position.
III. Monetary Incentives and the Logic of Fiat Power
A critical but under-discussed driver of Western war incentives lies in the structure of the fiat monetary system.
1. Reserve Currency Privilege
The U.S. dollar and the euro—still the world’s two dominant reserve currencies—allow the United States and the EU to:
Monetize war expenditures and dilute its inflationary effects among a larger base of currency users.
Access international credit markets to finance Ukraine through loans rather than direct fiscal sacrifice.
Russia lacks this privilege. Significant ruble expansion would rapidly devalue its currency and destabilize its economy.
2. Financialization of War
War financing benefits:
The military-industrial complex, which is the direct beneficiary of war expenses. In a loop of perverse incentives the MIC is also a large and influential donor to the political puppets thereby reinforcing the money-political power-business of war “circular economy”.
The financial sector, which extends predatory loans to Ukraine, that can later be leveraged for asset privatization, restructuring, and long-term dependency and to appropriate its resources. This reinforces another perverse loop of incentives in the money-political corruption-predatory lending-resource extraction/pillage “circular economy”.
More or less the same perverse incentives are at work when the EU has seized Russia’s reserve assets deposited with Euroclear in Belgium. The seizure of Russian sovereign assets held in Europe further locks the EU into a dangerous “favorable-war-outcome” logic, while simultaneously undermining global trust in Western financial neutrality.
This accelerates:
Reserve diversification away from the euro. With de-dollarization in full swing, de-eurization will follow.
Investment flows into neutral stores of value such as Bitcoin and gold, as well as the repatriation of gold reserves held in foreign western countries.
Adoption of bilateral settlement systems among which Bitcoin will inevitably play an increasingly strategic role.
Adoption of non-Western financial rails.
Rather than demonstrating strength, asset seizure signals institutional exhaustion—the behavior of systems that can no longer compete through production and growth.
IV. Russian Strategic Thinking: Karaganov’s Perspective
Russian strategist Prof. Sergey Karaganov - in his piece “Europe: a bitter parting” - frames the war as existential. His core argument is that Europe—if allowed to rearm and consolidate—will remain Russia’s primary long-term threat.
Key elements of his analysis include:
Russia’s “European vector” is finished; a strategic pivot to Asia (“Siberization”) is necessary.
A prolonged war favors Europe by allowing rearmament and ideological mobilization.
Deterrence must be restored, including nuclear credibility, to force political capitulation.
Strategic pressure must target not only Ukraine but European backers to raise escalation costs.
Failure to understand this mindset dramatically increases the risk of catastrophic miscalculation.
It is important to focus on the following points made by Prof. Karaganov, because these are of the utmost importance for the Europeans to understand:
To restore credible nuclear deterrence and convince Europe of the cost of escalation: Karaganov argues Russia must increase the credibility of its nuclear deterrent (including revising doctrine to make limited nuclear use possible) so Europeans believe escalation risks are real and withdraw support for Ukraine.
To coerce direct participants into stopping (targeted conventional strikes as warning): He recommends threatening/using strikes (first conventional, possibly later escalatory measures) against bases/logistics in countries actively backing Ukraine (explicitly naming Britain, France, Poland, Germany, Romania) to deter their involvement.
Strategic-economic coercion as part of the message: He even proposes treating certain punitive economic measures (e.g., extreme tariffs on Russian oil) as acts of war that would justify strong retaliatory responses, to raise the political cost for supporters of the anti-Russia coalition.
Prof. Karaganov’s hard words shall be taken at face value. They are not threats. It is a lucid view of the reality and of the consequences for those who do not see it.
He also sets out what would be the likely consequences if Russia hesitates and does not act boldly:
Loss of deterrence and emboldening of the West — perceived Russian weakness (restraint) could encourage further aggression and normalization of attacks on Russian strategic assets, raising the chance of escalation under less favorable circumstances.
Greater risk of global wider war later — Karaganov argues paradoxically that continued hesitation could increase the chance of a larger or even thermonuclear war if the conflict grinds on and the West seeks to decisively reverse Russian gains; he therefore claims decisive (including nuclear-doctrine) measures are necessary to prevent escalation on worse terms. (This is his rationale for increasing the credibility of nuclear deterrence.)
Geopolitical and civilizational costs — failure to break Europe’s will, in his view, would prevent Russia’s strategic “Siberization” and leave Russia constrained, culturally and economically entangled with a hostile Europe rather than pivoting to Asia.
Prof. Karagonov’s analysis shows clearly the Russian incentives and the game theory behind the need of a “shock and awe” type of escalation targeting directly European weapon suppliers and decision centers. This is a new perspective that European rulers shall now take into account.
V. The United States and the NSS: A Strategic Reversal
The 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy marks a clear break from decades of interventionist orthodoxy.
The document emphasizes:
Rapid cessation of hostilities in Ukraine
Strategic stability with Russia
A reorientation toward the Western Hemisphere
Skepticism toward NATO expansion
Open criticism of European political dysfunction
This places Washington increasingly at odds with European rulers, whose incentives remain aligned with prolongation rather than settlement.
VI. Conclusion: Incentives, Miscalculations, and Escalation Risk
At this stage of the conflict, incentives have sharply diverged—and become dangerously misaligned.
Europe is no longer fighting merely to weaken Russia at low marginal cost. Its parasitic elite is now dangerously invested in the continuation of the war. The seizure of Russian state assets, the progressive militarization of EU governance, and the use of the Russian threat as the primary glue holding together an increasingly fragile supranational project mean that peace itself has become destabilizing for the European power structure. Ending the war without a clear political victory would expose the EU’s internal contradictions, the rulers’ lies, delegitimize emergency measures, and accelerate centrifugal forces. War, therefore, has become not just a foreign‑policy tool but an instrument of internal regime maintenance.
Russia, by contrast, is not fighting for influence, expansion, prestige, or marginal economic gain. As articulated by Karaganov and echoed across Russian strategic discourse, Russia is fighting for survival: to prevent encirclement, long‑term exhaustion, and the re‑emergence of a militarized Europe openly hostile to its existence. From this perspective, a prolonged, low‑intensity conflict favors Europe, not Russia. Time allows Europe to rearm, reorganize, and normalize confrontation. Russia’s incentive therefore shifts decisively toward ending the conflict quickly and decisively, even at the cost of a “shock and awe” type of escalation.
The United States occupies a third and increasingly divergent position.
Historically, from the Cold War to the war in Ukraine, the strategic equation was the same: the United States do not protect Europe, it is Europe that protects the United States. Europe has been the buffer zone for the United States, just as former Eastern Europe was the buffer zone for the USSR. Geography has not changed. The structure of the NATO alliance has not changed. The fundamental premise—that Europe absorbs the nuclear risk so that the United States does not have to—has not changed.
Seen through an American lens, the war in Ukraine has offered the opportunity to:
Weaken Russia without endangering America.
Insert a wedge between Moscow and Bejing trying to separate what has become a “fatal embrace” for Washington.
Steer Europe away from cheap and convenient Russian energy and closer to US liquefied natural gas (LNG), thereby weakening Europe’s economies.
Expand arms sales and revitalize the US defense industry at the cost of European economies.
Lock Europe into a structure of dependency that will remain even after the war ends.
Possibly weaken the EU and the Euro thereby gaining market share for American companies and at the same time inflicting some indirect pain to the EU’s largest trading partner, China.
This has been a geopolitical boon, almost friction‑free for Washington, because the friction falls 100% on Europe.
But recently, following the posture outlined in the new National Security Strategy, the Trump administration seems to pivot away from this position, and now wants to disengage strategically from Europe/NATO, and reallocate attention to the Western Hemisphere and the Indo‑Pacific.
Whether this will happen or not is impossible to say. But the question remains: will the US now tolerate—politically and strategically—a direct Russian‑European confrontation without intervening and allow consequences to unfold?
This triangular misalignment dramatically increases escalation risk in Europe.
First, European elites appear to believe—recklessly—that Russian responses can be calibrated, absorbed, or limited. This assumption rests on a profound misunderstanding of Russian doctrine, incentives, and historical behavior under existential threat. It is a form of strategic infantilism: escalation is treated as a controllable narrative rather than a material process governed by force balances, deterrence thresholds and game theory.
Second, Russia now has a clear incentive to shock Europe into reality. As Karaganov argues, only by breaking the European elite’s will to continue confrontation can a durable peace be secured. That logic explicitly rejects endless attrition. It favors decisive demonstrations of capability and resolve designed to terrify political classes and fracture public support for the war.
Third, the United States now retains the option—explicit or implicit—to disengage at the critical moment. If European leaders cross Russian red lines under the illusion of American backstopping, they might discover that Washington’s will for continental military engagement is gone.
The unthinkable therefore enters the realm of the plausible. Not because Russia seeks it, but because European incentives, miscalculations and plain stupidity may force it. If escalation is no longer avoidable, the question ceases to be whether Russia is willing to strike European military‑industrial or command targets, but whether European leaders are willing to risk finding out.
So the question confronting Europe’s rulers is no longer abstract. How long will unelected Eurocrats continue to gamble with war, sanctions, and escalation while assuming that consequences will always fall on others? In a world of hypersonic weapons, shattered red lines, and collapsing alliances, the illusion of insulation is gone. A Russian Zircon launched from a submarine can reach Brussels in 3 minutes and surgically eliminate the EU ruling elites. Then what? What happens if Uncle Sam does not not want to risk nuclear annihilation for the Euro globalists? What if the geopolitical cover vanishes overnight? Do the Europeans rely on Kaya Kallas’ rabid anti-Russian 7.700 strong “chihuahua” army to attack Russia? It would be funny if it weren’t so sad.
History shows that when regimes overreach and legitimacy collapses, public loyalty evaporates with it. Should catastrophe strike, it will not unite Europe behind its rulers—but instead expose how thin their mandate truly was. This is the final warning: wars sustained by arrogance, lies, massive corruption, financial coercion, and denial do not end on conference tables. They end when reality imposes terms no one can renegotiate. And we are getting dangerously close to that moment.
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