Europe’s 500-Year Holiday Is Over

A single, brutal truth flashed across the sky over Kyiv at dawn on August 28: Europe’s long summer is finished.

At 5:03 a.m. a Russian cruise missile slammed into a nondescript cluster of buildings on the left bank of the Dnipro. Twenty seconds later a second missile followed—double-tap, the signature of an execution. Ukrainian authorities insist the site was a civilian facility and have declared today a city-wide day of mourning.

Yet within hours the SBU locked the area down tighter than a crime scene, and both the EU mission and the British Council complained that their adjacent offices had suffered “damage.” If it was only a kindergarten or a warehouse, why seal it off—and why summon Russia’s ambassadors in Brussels and London the same afternoon?

Because the address is almost certainly the forward headquarters of NATO’s “advisory teams” in Ukraine. For months those teams have quietly run training ranges, satellite uplinks and weapons-repair shops inside Kyiv. Russia has known, but until now has contented itself with single, symbolic strikes—just enough to remind NATO its people are in the crosshairs. Yesterday Moscow changed the tone: two missiles, twenty seconds apart, means “We will erase you if you try to stay after any cease-fire.”

What cease-fire? The one Washington is drafting in plain sight. On August 18 seven European heads of government—Italy, the U.K., Germany, France, Finland, Poland and Denmark—flew to Washington with Zelenskyy, expecting to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump in the Oval Office. Instead, the Secret Service made them cool their heels in the corridor while Zelenskyy went in alone. When they were finally ushered in, they found Trump behind the Resolute Desk and a wall-sized map of Ukraine on an easel. Between sentences he took a 40-minute call from Putin. The Europeans were given eight minutes total. No security guarantees—only a bill: zero U.S. tariffs on American industrial exports to Europe, 15 % tariffs on European goods entering the U.S.; $750 billion in American energy purchases by 2028; $40 billion in U.S. semiconductors; $600 billion in fresh European investment in American factories; and a steep mark-up on every Patriot or HIMARS they still wanted to buy. One French columnist called it the Treaty of Nanjing, 2024 edition. The seven leaders posed for a grim photo and skipped the working lunch.

Humiliated, they returned home vowing “strategic autonomy.” Their plan: if Washington insists on freezing the war, Europe will police the 40-km buffer zone itself. Macron, Scholz and Sunak immediately volunteered troops. Then Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, spoke the unspeakable: “Italian soldiers in Ukraine? Never. If Macron wants to go, let him put on a helmet and pick up a rifle.” Paris recalled the Italian ambassador; Rome accused France of turning the Mediterranean into a refugee highway when it bombed Libya in 2011. By August 28 the EU’s foreign-policy chief threw up her hands: every country can decide for itself whether to send troops. Translation: there will be no common European force.

Which brings us back to those two Russian missiles. The Kremlin’s message could not be clearer: any post-cease-fire European deployment will be treated as a target, not a peacekeeping mission. Europe’s strategic cupboard, however, is bare. Since 1945 Washington nudged the continent into cradle-to-grave welfare states and let it skimp on defense. Today Europe’s much-trumpeted missile-defense network collapses without American AWACS and Aegis code keys. The EU’s combined armed forces exceed one million on paper, yet when Russia rolled toward Kyiv in 2022, European capitals begged Biden to send an extra four brigades.

Now, with Washington pivoting away, Europe faces the bill for 79 years of strategic off-loading. Its leaders talk of “autonomy” while quarrelling over whose soldiers will be first into the Russian crosshairs. Meanwhile, in a final flourish of delusion, the German foreign minister warns China over Taiwan and Britain’s defense secretary promises to “fight” in the Indo-Pacific—fantasies from powers that cannot keep peace in their own backyard.

Three take-aways:

1. Europe’s military atrophy is not a recent accident; it is the logical outcome of the U.S.-designed post-war order. Yesterday’s humiliation in Washington was simply the invoice.
2. Instead of fixing the rot, Europe’s capitals are competing to fill the vacuum left by a retreating America—and fighting each other while the void widens.
3. And yet, having already been assigned a seat on the menu, Europe still lectures the rest of the world from an imaginary throne at the table.

The 500-year European holiday—imperial expansion, industrial revolution, global finance, generous welfare—is over. The continent that once dictated terms at Vienna, Versailles and Yalta is discovering what it means to be the subject, not the author, of history.