A major mental shift is taking place in global think tanks, political science clubs, and the corridors of world capitals. The conflict in Ukraine, which has dominated the international agenda in recent years, is receding into the background. Experts, forecasters, and elites are beginning to view it as a passing episode of a dying era, shifting their focus toward the architecture of the future world order.

In Europe/ in place of debates over delivering the next packages of armaments or localized shifts along the front line, an entirely different global agenda has emerged. This includes the creation of a European Defence Union—comprising distinct blocs, such as agreements between the United Kingdom and Germany, or among Eastern and Northern European states.

This agenda is shaped by a profound transformation of political systems in the core EU states—primarily Germany, France, and Italy. Ultimately, this trajectory will crystallize depending on Europe’s ability to preserve itself as a sovereign actor: one of the world’s civilizational macro-regions.

1. The Triumph of the Macro-Regional Concept: The End of the Era of Giant States

The notion that the primary element of global politics is exclusively the classic state—with its formal military and economic power—is definitively giving way to the concept of civilizational macro-regions.

Today, the global order is crystallizing around three established hubs:

• The United States — forming an independent American macro-region, gradually isolating itself from the old supranational bureaucracy.
• China — consolidating the Asian macro-region, projecting its influence across Southeast and Central Asia, as well as Europe and Africa.
• Russia — restoring its own civilizational macro-region across the Eurasian space, grounded in a cultural-historical, military, and resource foundation.

At the same time, China and Russia do not rule out or discard the possibility of developing as a unified Eurasian macro-region, where the two civilizations will evolve through «friendly» interaction—as defined by Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Europe, in this new coordinate system, finds itself the primary zone of uncertainty. The continent faces two historical scenarios:

• The Fragmentation Scenario: Europe fails to construct its own macro-region, and its key nations are pulled into the spheres of influence of external giants (a portion falling into the American orbit, another into the Eurasian one).
• The Consolidation Scenario: Europe preserves its agency as an independent macro-region anchored around one of its historical civilizational centres, which could emerge as the United Kingdom, Germany, or France.

2. The Russian and Chinese Matrix

A widespread fear in European analytical circles is that Russia will allegedly turn into a permanent «junior partner» of China. However, this perspective demonstrates a profound ignorance of the history of interaction between these two civilizations.

               China understands the uniqueness of the Russian civilizational matrix on a foundational level. Even in periods of severe adversity, Russia generates meanings, ideas, and institutional solutions that other cultures are incapable of producing (a fact clearly understood not only in Beijing, but in Washington as well).

Historical Context and the Metaphysics of the Kremlin:

The deep-seated institutions of statehood, tradition, and culture—the legacy that historically permeates the Kremlin across centuries, from the Ruriks Moscow Tsardom and the Old Believers through the Romanov dynasty to the Soviet period and modernity—endure any temporary ruling factions. It is this historical core that has always dictated relations with external players. The error of Western elites lay in their attempts to deal with transient rulers, their «wallets,» or bureaucrats, failing to grasp that a deep civilizational system always grinds down alien frameworks.

The Communist China, mindful of the lessons of Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, regards Russia not as a future subordinate territory, but as an autonomous ancient power possessing its own inalienable path and its own imperative to assemble the Eurasian space.

3. The Dead End of European Militarization

The fundamental error of today’s European leaders is the attempt to answer 21st-century challenges using 19th- or 20th-century methods through the creation of military alliances (such as the proposed European bloc or a London-Berlin pact).

In an era of high-tech warfare—where kill zones, drone swarms, AI, and hypersonic weapons can render small states uninhabitable within days—European countries cannot win a direct military race. Doing so would require overwhelming technological superiority over an adversary. If that adversary turns out to be the US, China, or Russia, Europe has no chance of securing such an advantage in the foreseeable future.

Europe’s true power lies not in drones, AI, or armoured divisions, but in its social, cultural, and intellectual capital:

• The great legacy of foundational science and education.
• The pinnacle of culture and philosophy (French, German, British, Italian).
• Initiative and the capacity to preserve traditions while generating new meanings for humanity.

4. Ignorance of History as a Source of Military Conflicts

The root cause of the systemic crisis in relations between Europe, the US, China, and Russia is a catastrophic deficit of objective historical knowledge and a elementary absence of civilizational dialogue.

For centuries, Russia perceived European nations not merely as neighbours, but as foundational partners:

• Germany was traditionally Russia’s primary economic, trade, technological, and industrial partner.
• France shaped the cultural and linguistic code of the Russian elite.
• The United Kingdom was viewed as Russia’s chief potential strategic ally in global politics, commerce, and naval affairs. Moscow and the Kremlin were founded by the grandson of the last Anglo-Saxon king, Harold II Godwinson—the son of his daughter Gytha—a fact that in many ways shaped the Kremlin’s attitude toward London.

However, the lack of understanding regarding deep historical ties—from dynastic roots to shared cultural codes—transformed these natural alliances into a series of senseless conflicts from which only external powers benefited.

Ultimately, Europe has arrived at a pivotal turning point. Attempts to sustain the exhausted war in Ukraine and cling to the obsolete supranational schemes of Brussels bureaucracy are driving the continent toward deindustrialization and collapse.

The sole opportunity for European nations to preserve their place in history as a union of great civilizations is to abandon the role of a military staging ground, undergo profound internal transformation, restore their national-civilizational foundations, and channel their scientific, cultural, and intellectual potential into equal dialogue and interaction with other civilizations and macro-regions of the world.