Europe’s Voice in a Multipolar World: Address to Diplomats in Brussels

I.  Europe’s Voice Is Missing

Thank you. I am grateful to be with you today, and grateful for the chance to speak frankly about what I believe is the most singularly important missing voice in the world: the voice of Europe. The European Union was founded on a great moral lesson — the lesson of two world wars — and that founding gave it a vocation as a voice for peace. That vocation is the reason its founders Monnet, Schuman, Adenauer, and de Gasperi built the institutions in which we sit, and the reason that, in my own lifetime, I had the privilege of knowing leaders of the stature of Jacques Delors and Romano Prodi who carried that vocation forward.

It is precisely that voice which Europe has lost, and which the world cannot do without. The consequences of its absence are felt first in Europe itself. Europe possesses, in my judgment, the most successful economic and social model in the world today — the highest quality of life, the deepest social provision, the most durable democratic culture. But that model cannot be sustained on the present geopolitical course. Europe is not stagnating; it is in decline. This is because it does not understand its own place in the world economy as that economy now exists, and because it has accepted a strategic posture at odds with its own interests, and at odds with the world’s interests.

A telling illustration appeared this week in the Financial Times. The newspaper reported that Chancellor Friedrich Merz had committed a diplomatic blunder by suggesting that the United States had humiliated itself in the Iran war. The article’s complaint was not that the Chancellor had said something untrue. The complaint was that he had said something true that ought not to have been spoken. We have arrived at a place where the truth, when it is spoken, is treated as the offense.

I want to suggest a different diagnosis. Europe remains, eighty years after the end of the Second World War, a continent with a gravely excessive American presence — with U.S. military bases on its soil, U.S. nuclear weapons stationed under sharing arrangements in several member states, and an external policy whose default reflex is alignment with Washington. The relationship that was meant to be a guarantee for Europe against the worst has, by its perpetuation long past its rationale, become an obstacle to Europe’s clear thinking about its own interests.

The recent withdrawal of 5,000 American troops from Germany was treated in many capitals as a worrying sign; the more appropriate response would have been to ask the United States whether the rest of the American troops might not also be welcomed home. The United States is not, today, protecting Europe. It is confusing Europe — leading it to break what should be its most natural relationships with the rest of the continent and with the wider world, and to acquiesce in actions abroad that violate the very principles on which Europe was founded.

Consider the positive importance of Europe’s trade with Russia. As an economist, I find it astonishing that this argument needs to be made in Brussels at all. The economies of the European Union and Russia are textbook complements, in the precise sense developed more than a century ago by the Swedish economists Eli Heckscher and Bertil Ohlin: one is factor-rich in capital, technology, and skilled labor; the other in land, energy, and minerals — with a wonderful supply of skilled labor as well. The gains from such trade are enormous and mutual. To sever that relationship, as Europe has done, is to inflict a serious and avoidable injury upon both economies. The injury to Russia is significant; the self-injury to Europe is greater.

I am not suggesting that geopolitics has no place in trade policy. I am suggesting that the geopolitical assumptions on which Europe acts are mistaken. The deep mistakes — with Russia, with China, with the conflicts in the Middle East — derive, I believe, from an underlying error. The United States has repeatedly taken unjustified and provocative actions against Russia, China, and several countries in the Middle East including Libya, Iraq, Iran, and Syria; and in every case the European Union has gone along with the United States, rather than recognizing the dangers from ill-advised American decisions. The United States, in short, has led Europe into a diplomatic dead end, and Europe has quietly followed. Let me explain the argument with some care, since it is not the mainstream perception. To do so, I will start with a bit of history.

II.  The Long Arc: Western Dominance and Asian Recovery

The most fundamental development in the world economy of our time is the recovery of Asia to the center stage of the world economy. This is a process that has been unfolding for several decades, and to understand it we must step back to look at a longer arc of world history.

Europe’s global power was ascendant from the sixteenth century onward, and by the end of the nineteenth century European empires dominated most of Asia and Africa. This dominance was achieved through a combination of technological advances and military conquests. At the end of the nineteenth century, the United States and Japan joined the race for empire. The United States completed the conquest of North America around 1890, and quickly embarked on overseas empire-building, beginning with the annexation of Hawaii in 1898 and the victory over Spain in the same year, which brought the United States several new colonies including the Philippines and Puerto Rico. Japan went to war with China in 1894–1895, and took two colonies, Korea and Taiwan.

Up to the end of World War II, the West’s economic dominance over Asia and Africa was decisive. As of 1950, the combined GDP of the West — meaning the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Western Europe — was approximately 55 percent of world output, supported by a population that was only about 19 percent of the world’s.

Had it not been for World War II, the West’s dominance might well have continued well into the twenty-first century or even beyond, because the West’s overseas empires were systematically suppressing the development of the colonies they dominated. They extracted resources, denied education to local populations, and built infrastructure to serve the mines and plantations rather than the broader economy. What broke the European imperial system was World War II, which drove the European powers to financial bankruptcy and provoked rebellion among their colonies. As Europe retreated from empire, sometimes peacefully, sometimes after a war of liberation, the former colonies gained independence.

The end of European empire allowed an economic process called convergence to begin. Convergence is the simple proposition that countries which are economically laggard in GDP per capita tend, under reasonable institutional conditions, to grow faster than countries which are ahead. This is because laggard countries can adopt technologies and methods that already exist in the high-income countries, and because the marginal returns to capital tend to be high where capital is scarce.

With the retreat of the European empires, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and the recovery of East Asia from Japanese militarism, the conditions for Asian convergence existed for the first time in two centuries. From the 1950s onward, much of Asia began to grow faster than the West. When China’s reforms began in earnest under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, China’s growth rate rose to roughly 10 percent a year and was sustained at near that level for several decades — a doubling of national output every seven years or so. The result was the largest, fastest, and most sustained reduction of poverty in human history, and the emergence of a Chinese economy now of comparable size to the American economy. Measured at purchasing-power parity, China’s GDP is now roughly one-third larger than America’s.

Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, took roughly a decade to begin its own recovery. As one of the Western advisors most actively engaged in those years, I tried unsuccessfully in the early 1990s to persuade the U.S. and European governments to extend financial support to Russia to speed the transformation. Alas, the United States was more interested in a weak Russia than in a strong and successful Russia after 1991, and so the United States never provided the financial support that would have smoothed the transition from the Soviet Union to its fifteen successor states, and from central planning to the market economy. Russia’s economic recovery therefore began around the year 2000 rather than earlier, and was based importantly on the mutually beneficial trade with Europe to which I previously referred.

The result of these long processes is that, at the level of economic output, the world has rebalanced very substantially. In 1980, the combined GDP of the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the rest of Western Europe was about 55 percent of world output; today it is approximately 30 percent. Asia’s share rose from about 30 percent of world GDP in 1995 to roughly 50 percent in 2025. This outcome confirms a forecast I made nearly thirty years ago. In a 1997 study for the Asian Development Bank, Emerging Asia, I projected, based on the theory of economic convergence, that Asia’s share of world output would rise by some twenty percentage points over the following three decades — and that is in fact what happened between 1995 and 2025.

Two conclusions follow from these basic facts. First, the world is now multipolar in the most basic economic sense: economic dominance by the West is over, and it will not return. The center of gravity of the world economy has returned to Asia, where it was for centuries before the rise of the European empires. Second — and this is where the trouble begins — the political class in Washington, and to a lesser extent in the European capitals, has not yet accepted the fact of multipolarity. The most dangerous gap in geopolitics is the gap between the world as it is and the world that the U.S. leadership still believes it to be. Europe’s mistake is to go along with the U.S. fantasy that the United States still dominates the world.

III.  The Unipolar Moment and the Search for Permanent Primacy

When the Cold War ended, the United States believed it had achieved permanent primacy. The mood is captured in countless documents and speeches of the early 1990s: America was “the sole superpower,” “the indispensable nation,” the colossus that had no peer and would have none for decades or even centuries to come. This conviction has shaped American policy for thirty-five years and is the deep cause of much of what has gone wrong in the international system in our lifetimes.

The American playbook for the maintenance of primacy is, by now, well documented. Since 1945 it has rested on the search for a series of presumed monopolies of advantage: first the atomic bomb (a monopoly that lasted only four years, until the Soviet test of 1949), then the hydrogen bomb (which lasted only months, because Andrei Sakharov and his colleagues were no less able than their American counterparts), then a sequence of putative technological choke points which have fared no better. There are no permanent monopolies in technology. NVIDIA chips are not a choke point. ASML is not a choke point. Other people learn, innovate, study, reverse-engineer; ideas diffuse; intelligence and skill are widely distributed. The pursuit of economic choke points as a basis for grand strategy is a pursuit of a phantom.

The Cold War nearly brought the world to extinction. The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis is the case that should be most carefully studied by every leader and every diplomat. Two things saved the world at that moment. First, the two leaders — John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev — understood, against the advice of many around them, that they had a shared overriding interest in saving civilization rather than in launching war. Second, they communicated, including through back channels, rather than cutting off diplomacy.

Yet even after the formal agreement of 28 October was reached, an accidental disaster almost struck. A Soviet submarine commander, with a disabled vessel that was out of contact, believed that the submarine was under attack and therefore ordered the launch of a nuclear-tipped torpedo. He was overruled at the last moment by a senior officer aboard. Had the submarine fired the torpedo, the United States would likely have responded with a full nuclear attack, given U.S. nuclear doctrine at the time and the influence of figures such as Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who had argued for a first strike throughout. The point is that we are living on the precipice, and should be taking every step to stay away from nuclear disaster, premeditated or accidental.

The Cuban missile crisis was resolved, in the end, by the wisdom of two leaders, the diplomacy of UN Secretary-General U Thant, and the active personal mediation of Pope John XXIII, who broadcast a public peace appeal from Vatican Radio on 25 October 1962 and conveyed messages to both Kennedy and Khrushchev. Six months later, drawing the lessons of the crisis, the Pope promulgated his great encyclical Pacem in Terris, addressed to all people of good will. The world survived 1962, but only narrowly, and only because individuals on both sides acted with prudence and wisdom, rather than bravado and recklessly Gambling with Armageddon — the title of the magisterial book by the late historian Martin J. Sherwin, which provides the deepest and most insightful account of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A generation later, the world was offered an extraordinary second chance. The greatest statesman of the late twentieth century, in my judgment, was Mikhail Gorbachev. He inherited the leadership of a nuclear-armed empire and decided that the Cold War had to be ended without violence. He disbanded the Warsaw Pact without a shot fired. He proposed a new European order — a “common European home” stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. He offered something of which there is no other example in modern history: a nuclear superpower voluntarily standing down its military alliance system and offering its former adversaries a bold gesture of peace.

I was an advisor to the Polish Solidarity government in 1989, and to Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin in 1991–1993, and I can testify to the seriousness of the offer of peace that was made in those years. I can also testify, from my work throughout the region, that all countries at the time simply wanted peace and a chance to rebuild their broken economies. What they were instead given, as the years unfolded, was a U.S. policy that treated their independence not as the foundation of a new European order, but as a strategic gain by the United States to be consolidated against Russia.

IV.  The NATO Promise and Its Betrayal

The most important commitment of those years — and the most cynically denied today — is the commitment given by U.S. and German leaders to Soviet leaders, in connection with German reunification, that NATO would not expand eastward. The documentary record on this point is overwhelming. It includes the explicit assurances given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker, by West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher, by NATO Secretary-General Manfred Wörner, and by other senior figures on the Western side. It includes the personal commitment of Chancellor Helmut Kohl to Mikhail Gorbachev in their meeting of 10 February 1990 in Moscow, where Kohl said in plain terms: “We will not take advantage of you with German unification. NATO will stay in its place.” Only weeks ago, the former prime minister of Australia, Paul Keating, told me that, just after that February meeting, Helmut Kohl had said to him directly that the agreed quid pro quo for German unification was no NATO enlargement. The denial of this commitment today by U.S. and European leaders is one of the most consequential lies of our time.

The policy that the United States and the European Union pursued — enlarging NATO eastward through wave after wave of accessions — was a strategic mistake of the first order, and it was understood as such at the time by leading diplomats. In a broadcast on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour on 5 December 1994, Ambassador Jack Matlock, the last U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, opposed NATO enlargement on precisely the grounds that it would corrode the trust then being built with a democratizing Russia. Henry Kissinger, opposite him, supported enlargement, but conceded that Russia was not a threat and that enlargement could indeed provoke Russian antagonism. Kissinger then justified his position with a remark of stunning candor: that if we cannot face down the Russians while they are weak, we will not be able to do so when they are strong. That sentence is the single clearest statement of the policy that has been pursued for thirty years.

The strategic logic underlying enlargement was made fully explicit by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard and in his Foreign Affairs essay of the same year, “A Geostrategy for Eurasia.” Brzezinski openly described the intended sequence of NATO enlargement: to the Visegrád states by 1999; to the Baltic states, Romania, and Bulgaria by 2005; and to Ukraine between 2005 and 2010. He further argued that, in the long run, Russia might be reorganized as “a loosely confederated” federation of three parts — a European Russia, a Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic. The aim was American primacy across Eurasia. This was not a fringe view. It was the operating geopolitical theory of the U.S. national security establishment. From the U.S. point of view, in other words, the Cold War never came to an end.

Europe became a partner in this delusional U.S. project, and — with the legitimate and joyful goal of reuniting the eastern half of the continent with the western — was swept along into a more aggressive enlargement than the original European vision had envisioned, one based on NATO enlargement rather than on open trade and investment, and on the concept of indivisible security at the center of the Helsinki Final Act and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

I was myself among the most enthusiastic champions of European enlargement, having helped draft, at the request of the Solidarity leader Jacek Kuroń, the first Polish reform program, whose opening words were the simple declaration that the plan aimed at Poland’s return to Europe. But the European project I believed in was the European project of Monnet, of the Helsinki Final Act, of Ostpolitik, of Gorbachev’s common European home — a Europe extending eventually to a peaceful relationship with Russia, not a Europe of NATO enlargement engaged in constructing a new division with Russia roughly 1,400 kilometers east of the old Berlin Wall.

The architecture that took shape was completely different. NATO bases and weapons systems advanced toward the Russian border. By 2004, with the second wave of enlargement, NATO infrastructure was in the Baltic states and on the Black Sea. In 2002, the United States unilaterally withdrew from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and began to install Aegis missile systems in Poland and Romania, refusing to commit not to install them in Ukraine as well. From the Russian perspective these were not abstract actions by the United States; they were the elements of what could become a decapitation capability against the Russian state. President Putin gave clear public warning in his February 2007 speech to the Munich Security Conference. The warning was not heeded; the following year, at the Bucharest Summit of April 2008, NATO declared formally that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members of NATO.” Chancellor Merkel, in her recent memoir, acknowledges that she understood at the time that the commitment of NATO’s enlargement to Ukraine could set NATO on a path to war with Russia.

V.  Ukraine: A Preventable War, A Continuing Tragedy

From 2008 to 2022, the Ukrainian crisis unfolded step by step, and it could have been prevented at many points. The 2014 Maidan coup, the long failure of Ukraine to implement the Minsk II agreement, the steady militarization of Ukraine after 2014 with U.S. financing and armaments, were all stepping stones to war. As both Chancellor Merkel and President Hollande have since acknowledged, Minsk II was not enforced in good faith by the Western governments; the agreement was regarded, in their own telling, as a means of buying time to build Ukraine’s army. Minsk II would have stabilized the crisis in Ukraine by granting autonomy within Ukraine to the Russian-speaking eastern oblasts. Instead, Ukraine never implemented the autonomy provisions, and the West never pushed Ukraine to do so.

In December 2021, with Russian forces visibly massing on the Ukrainian border, I spent an hour on the telephone with the U.S. National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. I argued that the war could be avoided by the simple step of the United States stating publicly that NATO would not enlarge to include Ukraine. The substance of Sullivan’s answer was that there would be no war, and so the question of NATO enlargement was moot. He was sadly wrong.

After the Russian invasion, in March and early April 2022, the two parties came close to ending the conflict. The Istanbul talks led to a draft framework agreement that addressed the core security issues and could have brought the war to a close. Yet the negotiation was halted by the United States and the United Kingdom, which advised the Ukrainian government against signing. I have had this confirmed in detail by Turkish diplomats who were present, by my colleague Ambassador Michael von der Schulenburg — who has written the fullest account, and who is in this room — indirectly by former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who participated in the mediation, and also by the head of the Ukrainian delegation himself, David Arakhamia. As a result, rather than an agreement in April 2022, Ukraine has lost probably more than one million dead and wounded, vast territory has been destroyed, and the eventual settlement is likely to be worse for Ukraine than the one that was on the table four years ago.

Europe has stood with Ukraine in name, but the practical effect of European policy has been to prolong a war that Ukraine cannot win and that ought, in the interests of Ukrainian lives and Ukrainian statehood, to be ended through negotiation, and ultimately through Ukraine’s neutrality and an end to the provocation of NATO enlargement. The reported recent push by some European leaders to return Ukrainian draft-age men from European territory to the front lines, in some cases against their stated wishes and at the edges of European law, is one of the saddest expressions of where this policy seems to be leading. This is not standing with Ukraine. It is using Ukraine as a proxy to fight Russia. It is an ignoble policy.

VI.  Iran: A War of Whim

Let me turn to the war that began last summer. The U.S. and Israeli air campaign against Iran of June 2025 — the so-called Twelve-Day War — was, in my view, neither a war of necessity nor even a war of choice in the conventional sense. I have called it a war of whim. There was no proximate Iranian provocation. There was no breakout of the Iranian nuclear program. Negotiations on the nuclear issues were proceeding. Instead, the United States and Israel bombed Iran. And now, on 28 February of this year, they have done it again. Amid negotiations the Omani mediator deemed to be advancing, the United States and Israel resumed their war on Iran.

Even more to the point: there was already a nuclear agreement with Iran, reached in 2015 and backed by the UN Security Council — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Under that agreement, the IAEA verification regime was functioning, and Iran was operating within the enrichment limits set by the JCPOA. Nonetheless, at Israel’s urging, the United States unilaterally repudiated the JCPOA in May 2018. If the concern of the United States and Israel were really Iran’s nuclear program, the rational policy would have been to maintain the JCPOA, not to tear it up and then, seven years later, to launch an attack on the very leadership that had constrained nuclear activity for thirty years on religious as well as political grounds.

The Iran war is not about nuclear weapons. The day it began, Prime Minister Netanyahu publicly described it as the realization of an aspiration he had held for forty years. That aspiration is not a secret. It is to topple the Iranian regime.

The aspiration to overthrow governments in the region that back the Palestinian cause has been articulated in print and in policy since the 1996 paper “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” prepared by a study group led by Richard Perle for the incoming Netanyahu government. The strategic doctrine laid out in that document, and developed over the subsequent thirty years, has rested on a sequence of regime-change operations by the United States and Israel aimed at securing Israeli military hegemony in Western Asia. The list of target countries was disclosed publicly by retired General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, based on a Pentagon memorandum he was shown in the weeks following the September 11 attacks. The memorandum named seven countries to be “taken out” in five years, in the order: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran. All seven have, in the years since, been the target of war or systematic destabilization by the United States and Israel.

It is worth saying plainly that the destabilization to which I refer is not a series of spontaneous popular movements. The breaking of Sudan into two states in 2011, in which Israel played a documented role; the long civil war in Syria; the destruction of Libya; the destabilization of Lebanon — these were not the results of internal unrest alone. They were the consequences of regime-change operations pursued by the United States and Israel, backed by substantial financial, intelligence, and operational support.

The first of these wars, the Iraq war of 2003, was sold to the U.S. public in the autumn of 2002 by means of a focus-group-tested message about non-existent weapons of mass destruction, developed within the office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. The war was not an intelligence failure. It was a public-relations operation. Many of us watching Secretary Colin Powell’s presentation at the United Nations in February 2003 understood at the time, with whatever reluctance, that what we were hearing was simply not true.

Iran was always, in this strategy, the big prize for Israel. Yet successive American presidents from Clinton to Biden declined to authorize a war against Iran, knowing that it could prove disastrous. They resisted despite intense pressure from Israeli prime ministers and from the Israel lobby in Washington. President Trump, in his second term, did authorize it. The plan, as best we can gather, anticipated the sudden decapitation of the Iranian leadership followed in rapid succession by a new government oriented toward the United States and Israel — something on the rough model of the recent U.S. intervention in Venezuela. It did not work. Iran retains a sovereign government, retains real deterrent capability, and has demonstrated its willingness to use that capability by striking U.S. military bases in the Persian Gulf.

The basic principle of rational policy now applies: when one is in a hole, stop digging. The right course of action is for the United States to end the war that it recklessly resumed.

I will close my remarks on Iran with a small but, I think, telling vignette. On the day Iran was attacked in June 2025, I was asked to testify at the emergency session of the UN Security Council but was prevented from doing so by the United Kingdom, which held the chair. I sat in the chamber and listened. The first speaker was the ambassador of Bahrain, who described what had occurred that day as an unprovoked attack by Iran on his country. The French, Greek, British, and other European ambassadors spoke in similar terms. None of them mentioned that the United States and Israel had launched the war against Iran that morning, or that the Iranian missile strikes that day were merely the response to U.S. and Israeli aggression. The speakers who took this line represent countries that host the U.S. military on their soil. They are, in my view, only semi-sovereign countries. By hosting the U.S. military, they give up the chance to think clearly and to speak clearly.

VII.  What Europe Could Yet Do

Let me bring the argument back to where I began, and to where you sit in this room. The world is multipolar. The Western share of global output is approximately half of what it was in 1950. The American project of indefinite primacy has failed in its own terms, has produced a series of catastrophic and unwinnable wars, and is led, at this moment, by a political class that has not understood what has happened. The most dangerous condition in international affairs is not the strength of an adversary; it is a great power’s misunderstanding of its own position.

Europe is not condemned to follow the U.S. delusions of hegemony. The European Union has, in its own founding traditions, the resources for an independent voice and an independent security. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 established the key principles — sovereign equality of states, peaceful settlement of disputes, territorial integrity, non-intervention — on which a stable European order can be built. Ostpolitik in Germany, the Single European Act, and the long process of enlargement have shown that Europe is capable of complex, patient, multi-decade statecraft when its leaders have the courage to undertake it. The Europe of Monnet, Schuman, Adenauer, and de Gasperi was built on exactly that capacity, against precedents and obstacles vastly greater than any we face today.

What Europe needs to do is what the founding generation of the European Union did: tell the truth about the world as it is, and act based on European interests as those interests actually exist. To do so means to recognize that the natural economic and security relationship of Europe is one of stable, mutually respectful relations with Russia, not of further NATO enlargement. It means to recognize that Europe’s security interests are not advanced by participation in U.S. wars of whim in the Middle East. It means to recognize that the rise of China and of the rest of Asia is not a threat to European prosperity but a vast opportunity for trade, for cooperation on global problems, and for the construction of a multipolar order based on the United Nations Charter.

It also means — and I say this with the candor I believe is owed to this audience — that Europe will need to find its voice independently of the United States. The voice that Europe can offer is not anti-American. It is the voice of the European founders, of the Helsinki principles, of the rule of law, of the dignity of every nation, of the conviction that war between great powers must never again be the way humanity organizes its affairs. That is the voice the world is waiting to hear. It is the voice that, if Europe does not soon recover it, may be silent for a very long time.

Thank you.