Continental Europe once held 25% of global GDP. Today it clings to 14%, nearly half its global weight erased in a single generation. Not by invasion. Not by Putin. By decisions its own elites made freely. Europe was no prisoner. It was not dragged into this. It chose ideology over energy security, fantasy over industry, obdience over sovereignty. It had the power to act like a civilization, and acted instead like a petulant, arrogant vassal.
They swore Russia would disappear.
Yet she stands rooted, sovereign, expanding, the Eurasian pole they insisted could never exist. Its economy rises into the world’s top four while Europe implodes. Its industrial base grows while Europe’s corrodes.
And it is Europe that dims: censored, exhausted, directionless, governed by elites who call obedience maturity and dependency enlightenment. A continent once central to world history now drifts unrecognizable even by the ally that encouraged its self-destruction and now drafts the alibi from afar.
The EU tried to erase Russia. In reality, Europe erased itself. And Washington just wrote the obituary.