On 24 February 2022, the collective West was handed something it had not asked for: an opportunity and a duty arriving at the same moment. Not merely a strategic interest in resisting Russian aggression—a duty.
A duty to Ukraine, yes. But more fundamentally, a duty to itself: to prove that the value-based world order it had built, benefited from, and spent decades proclaiming was worth defending when the cost became real.
The worst is still ahead
To understand what kind of moment this is, it helps to look at how similar ruptures have developed before. The major European reshuffles of the modern era offer a rough comparison.
The revolutionary and Napoleonic period, a European conflict, lasted 26 years (1789–1815). The two world wars, continental in origin but global in reach, consumed 31 (1914–1945). The post-Cold War settlement was resolved in 12 years (1989–2001).
If the current reshuffle began on 24 February 2022, then eight to ten years is not an unreasonable outer limit.
The trend is not a neat descending line—scale expands timelines. But the direction of travel, driven by the acceleration of communication technology and political time, is still clear. If the current reshuffle began on 24 February 2022, the day Russia invaded Ukraine, then eight to ten years is not an unreasonable outer limit—even if it might develop into a larger, possibly global conflict.
That places us not close to the end of the storm but somewhere near its middle. The middle is where centrifugal forces do their most destructive work, where systems reveal what they are actually made of, where illusions stop being sustainable.
The task was not to win paradise.
In February 2022, the math still seemed to work for the West. It looked like Europe would bear the main burden of supporting Ukraine, while the United States would hold the wider perimeter—deterring China, reassuring Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, containing Iran.
Russia was grinding itself into depletion on Ukrainian soil. China, for all its present weight, was carrying demographic and economic burdens that would force a strategic reckoning by the 2030s. Iran was perhaps less than a generation away from political transformation. The task was not to win paradise. It was to hold the line long enough for those internal pressures to mature into constraints.
Where are we now?
That possibility is now largely gone. Not because of any one leader or any one decision—but because of something older and harder to name: a failure of civilizational stamina. Or, to put it more bluntly, let us remember the speech Winston Churchill gave in June 1940, when he declared that “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Where are we now? What would we feel if our leaders gave us such speeches today? The urge to fight? Or would we just be slightly embarrassed? I leave each reader to find their own answer.
Not destroyed. Hollowed
That embarrassment, if it is there, has a history. The West, after three decades of post-Cold War comfort, has lost the habit of patience. It has forgotten how to make commitments that outlast election cycles, how to absorb costs that don’t resolve in a news cycle, how to hold a line when holding it is slow and unglamorous.
A president threatens to leave NATO not because America lacks the means to lead, but because the domestic political culture has collapsed inward.
The political cultures that once sustained Western leadership—American internationalism, European coordination, the shared understanding that order requires maintenance—have quietly hollowed out. Not destroyed. Hollowed.
The erosion is not symmetrical. America’s is deeper and of a different kind. A president threatens to leave NATO not because America lacks the means to lead, but because the domestic political culture that once made such leadership legible has collapsed inward.
What will remain of American leadership—of the transatlantic partnership? A living commitment, or a largely empty sentimental pleasantry—the kind Secretary of State Rubio offered in Munich this February when he noted that America “will always be a child of Europe”? We do not know.
Hungarian voters just demonstrated that democratic reflexes can still fire when pushed hard enough.
Which makes Europe’s core failure only more inexcusable. It is the failure of a continent that knows what needs to be done and cannot coordinate itself to do it—declarations without capacity, slogans without actions, the language of resolve without the mechanisms to act on it.
Europe remains a global player and a serious partner to America only if it undergoes a categorical change, and categorical change is exactly what European institutions struggle most to produce. Yes, Hungarian voters just demonstrated that democratic reflexes can still fire when pushed hard enough—but a last-minute correction is not the same thing as stamina.
Yet America and Europe still share a value system more deeply than either shares with any other part of the world. That is not nothing. It is, in fact, one of the few structural assets that survives the current disorder more or less intact—and it matters, even when the political relationship is this difficult to manage.
The West did not lose its stamina in a moment of crisis.
The deeper question is how it came to this. The answer seems to lie in three decades of an illusion—the illusion that history had ended, that the liberal order was self-sustaining, that the habits which had built and defended it could be safely retired. Patience atrophied.
The political will to absorb costs over time, across election cycles, without visible reward, quietly disappeared. The West did not lose its stamina in a moment of crisis. It spent it down, gradually, in the long years when nothing seemed to demand it—cashing in the peace dividend and deferring the bill. That bill is now due.
How to survive the storm
Regardless of US-European relations, what the West now needs to survive the storm is a strong Ukraine.
And within Europe, the tighter regional formations that are less dependent on grand choreography—Nordic-Baltic-Polish cooperation above all, built on shared geography, shared threat perception, and earned seriousness, to fend off the threat from the East; and a Mediterranean counterpart built on the same logic of shared exposure—facing a different threat, but no less dramatic: as global instability hollows out African states with weak institutions and no internal reserves, the immigration pressure on Europe’s southern flank will only grow.
That window is closing, if it has not already shut.
This means Ukraine’s place is inside the northeastern formation, not alongside it, which also means the historical grievances between Kyiv and Warsaw and Budapest must be worked through by all sides, not left for Moscow to exploit. That requires compromises no one will find comfortable.
At the same time, it is clear that the larger battle—for the moral credibility of democratic civilization as a model worth choosing, for the attention and allegiance of a global south watching closely—is more than probably lost. The West could have fought it. It chose comfort instead. That window is closing, if it has not already shut.
The ones who weather this period will be those who think beyond the next election.
Yet this is not the end of the story. History will continue, even if our willingness to tackle it on a global scale is waning. What comes next will be harsher, more improvised, and less forgiving. This is not cause for despair—despair is another form of comfort. It is a cause for clarity.
The ones who weather this period will be those who think beyond the next election, build real military capacity, and form regional coalitions strong enough to hold without waiting for a grand consensus to arrive from above.
Illusions are over. Now, only those who pull themselves together will have a chance.
Editor's note. The opinions expressed in our Opinion section belong to their authors. Euromaidan Press' editorial team may or may not share them.
Submit an opinion to Euromaidan Press
