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It's August 2025. Biden is history. Trump is back. And after three years of war, one thing is beyond obvious: Europe still has no plan.
Billions have been spent. Headlines have been written. Security "guarantees" have been announced and re-announced. But on the ground in Ukraine, what we have is a war of attrition — and a continent still improvising its way toward defeat.
The U.S. Is Out — By Choice
Let's stop pretending. Whatever comfort Europeans took from the idea of "unshakable American support" is gone. Trump has made that crystal clear. He drags his feet on every shipment. He treats Ukraine like a bargaining chip. And when he isn't stalling, he's running interference for Moscow — signaling weakness and chaos that Putin reads as opportunity.
Europe has to understand this: the United States is no longer a partner to be counted on. Any plan that assumes Washington will lead is worse than naïve — it's dangerous. From here forward, U.S. help, when it comes, is a bonus, not a backbone. The future of Ukraine is Europe's responsibility now, or there is no future at all.
Diplomacy Is Not a Strategy
The second illusion is that clever diplomacy will somehow end this war. That if we talk long enough, Putin will blink, or that "security guarantees" without actual firepower will change anything.
That fantasy needs to die.
Putin isn't negotiating for peace. He's buying time — to rebuild his army, to fortify occupied territory, and to wait out Western fatigue. Every delay, every soft promise, every meaningless communiqué hands him that time. And every day without a plan costs Ukrainian lives.
Europe Needs a Real Plan — Now
The blueprint already exists. In The Shield and Denial Strategy and The Ukraine Decision, I've laid out the industrial framework Europe needs: mass air defense production, sustained artillery supply chains, co-production facilities in Ukraine, and enforcement mechanisms that actually work. The details are there.
The cost is modest: €200 per European per year — less than half a percent of GDP.
The deliverables are clear:
Air defense at scale, so Russia's missile and drone terror campaigns fail.
Artillery and drone parity, so Russian offensives collapse by default.
Co-production in Ukraine, to shorten logistics lines and political cycles.
The only thing missing is the political will to execute.
Physics Doesn't Negotiate
Moscow doesn't care about rhetoric. It doesn't care about communiqués or hashtags. What Moscow fears is industrial reality:
Interceptor stockpiles measured in months, not days.
Two million shells delivered on schedule, month after month.
Drones at scale, integrated with precision targeting.
Energy resilience that keeps Ukraine's grid above 95% uptime, even under winter barrages.
When those numbers start moving in the right direction, the Kremlin will notice. Not because Putin suddenly grows reasonable, but because physics doesn't negotiate. When every offensive fails, when the cost of holding territory rises every quarter, when Western fatigue is off the table — that's when Russia's strategy collapses.
Stop Throwing Money — Start Building Discipline
Europe's problem isn't resources. It's discipline. The continent has thrown billions at Ukraine — but in scattershot bursts, without coherent timelines, without enforceable milestones, without accountability.
Take Germany's delayed Leopard tank deliveries in early 2024, or France's stop-start CAESAR howitzer shipments. Each delay sends the same message to Moscow: Europe talks tough but delivers weak.
Drift isn't neutral. Drift is surrender by installments.
Decision Time
This is the moment for Europe to decide whether it wants to win this war or pretend to try. The steps are painfully obvious:
Pass three-year funding laws that auto-disburse, removing politics from logistics.
Establish a European Defense Production Board with teeth to enforce contracts and delivery schedules.
Build and maintain a public delivery dashboard that voters — and Moscow — can see, tracking air-defense systems, shells, drones, and production capacity in real time.
No More Illusions
This war will not be won by speeches, hashtags, or diplomatic fantasies. It will be won by a plan: measurable, predictable, industrial.
Europe has the money. Europe has the factories. Europe even has the blueprint. The only question remaining is whether Europe can afford not to act.
The day Europe executes a real plan, the day predictable timelines start moving metal and men at industrial scale, is the day Moscow realizes the war it thought it could outlast is the war it can no longer win.
That day cannot come soon enough. The question is: will Europe choose to make it happen?
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vak
