Europe’s Hour of Peril

Europe is facing great danger. In the space of days, four incidents have shattered the illusion that the war in Ukraine could be contained or ‘localised’ without further consequence to the stability and tranquility of the continent. Russian drones wandered into Polish airspace first, on September 9th. One of them was found over 200 kilometres away from Poland’s eastern border, having flown that large distance unimpeded. Then, on the 13th, Romanian jets scrambled against a kamikaze drone over the Black Sea. Finally, on September 19th, 3 Russian MiG-31 interceptors pierced Estonia, taking the boundary of NATO itself and defiantly flying just a few dozen kilometres from a NATO capital. Moscow is probing, that much is certain. In all likelihood, it will probe further—and more boldly—in the weeks and months ahead.

Any of these episodes could easily be written off in itself. There have, thankfully, been no casualties to lament thus far. And yet, history does not occur in disconnected episodes; it accumulates. A spark here, a misstep there—and the continent could easily find itself aflame. Sarajevo 1914 was, on the face of things, a small Balkan incident. The guns that followed ravaged a whole generation. Today, the odds are immeasurably greater—Russia is the world’s foremost nuclear power. While Europe’s inept and historically illiterate political class may speak loudly of defanging the Russian bear, the thought of an air skirmish in Estonia starting the domino effect that leads Europe down the road of nuclear war should terrorise any reasonable person. It also shows, again, why U.S. President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán are correct in their demand for a negotiated end to the Ukraine conflict.

Poland’s and, now, Estonia’s invocation of Article 4 illustrates how abominably narrow the margin of error has become. The provision doesn’t require war. What it does is broadcast seriousness of intent. In Romania, the Black Sea, which was long a geopolitical afterthought, has become an armed theatre, in whose skies Russian and Western aircraft chase each other on a daily basis. In Estonia, the Russian pilots just lingered long enough to remind us that NATO borders can be breached as well. They are not arbitrary events. They are a trend.

The pattern is unmistakable: the lines between peace and war are fast eroding. With the vast NATO-Russian border a powder keg, a crashed drone, a nervous pilot, or a scrambled transmission can each lead to a European apocalypse. For the globalist, nomadic elites bred by the EU power machine and ruling over most European nations, such fear might be tolerable. In case of disaster, the “citizen of the world” mentality dictates that one can simply go away and settle elsewhere. But for a patriotic leadership, the homeland matters most. The nation is irreplaceable. This is why, ever since the Russians invaded Ukraine three years ago, those advocating for negotiations have been overwhelmingly on the patriotic Right. Not because conservatives are naive, pacifistic, or Russophilic, but because they understand what is at stake.

In Brussels, however, the language remains maximalist. The mandarinate still lives in a wonderland of its own. Escalation, not negotiation. Sanctions and weapons, even if sanctions visibly don’t work and weapons can only prolong the fight, killing and maiming hundreds of thousands of young Europeans while doing nothing to improve Kyiv’s position. The continent’s leaders call for defining the conflict in terms of morality—a new crusade, a Manichaean struggle between good and evil. But wars are not morality plays. Wars are struggles of power and interest. You either possess the objective, material resources to prevail in the field of battle, or you don’t. In that case, you better talk while there is still time for diplomacy. That is what Kyiv and Brussels ought to be doing—not trying to convince Trump to revert to a pro-war, neo-Bidenian foreign policy even as the dangers to the whole of Europe continue to escalate.

Since the war began, in 2022, Hungary has been among the precious few with the courage to speak the truth. Orbán’s government has been mocked as an appeaser and shunned as defeatist. But every wayward drone that strays into the periphery of NATO and every Russian fighter jet that crosses into Baltic skies justifies Budapest’s pragmatism. The 2,500 km-long NATO-Russia border cannot be allowed to become a permanent friction point. Europeans should not live under constant fear that some minor incident in the East could lead to continental annihilation. And, since Russia isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, the only way of achieving this is by diplomatically engaging the Russians. This is not cowardice. It is rational statecraft.

The time for mutual de-escalation is now. The danger we’re facing is just too great to tolerate. Imagine one of the Russian drones had fallen on a Polish village. Imagine that, likely by accident, it had hit a family home. Could Warsaw then avoid retaliating? Could its government survive the popular pressure to do so? What if a NATO fighter shoots down a Russian plane? Would Moscow simply accept an apology? Retaliation might well lead to retaliation until Article 5 is triggered, and the proxy war now being fought in Ukraine would then become a full-on war with nuclear giants facing each other. For Europe, such a war could well make WW2 pale by comparison.

Serious peace negotiations are therefore urgent. Europe must relearn the caution of Bismarck, de Gaulle, or Powell, who all understood that the stability of the continent owed nothing to leaving Russia adrift but to anchoring it in a common settlement. Of course, diplomacy is often a messy business; whatever the deal that is eventually reached, it will never be seen as perfect by either party. It will anger Kyiv and its European sponsors, who will lament ceding territories to Moscow; it will also likely anger the most bellicose, inflexible politicians in Russia, who no doubt wished they could force the West into bigger concessions. Yet statecraft, as the adage goes, is the art of the possible. More than ever, our suffering continent needs politicians with the maturity to recognise it.