US-Russia Summit Destroys 500 Years Of European Geopolitics.

## A rupture, not a routine summit What emerges from the recent exchange about the US–Russia meeting is a claim that something more than a bilateral tete‑a‑tete occurred: the summit signaled a potential break with five centuries of European geopolitics built around balance, spheres of influence and continent‑wide diplomacy. The conversation argues that this moment should be read not as an isolated encounter but as a visible symptom of a much deeper tectonic shift — a recognition that the post–Cold War European order, which relied on Western-led integration and the steady advance of NATO, has unraveled into strategic incoherence. Rather than celebrating a return to diplomatic normality, the discussion warns that the summit exposes the absence of institutions and ideas capable of managing inter‑great‑power rivalry on the European continent. ## The summit as an inflection point The discussion frames the Alaska meeting as historically significant because it reflects a new modality of great‑power interaction in which tacit rules and old forums have been sidelined. Far from being simply another press photo opportunity, the summit is interpreted as the first public admission — by the fact of leaders meeting face to face — that the old logic of excluding a major Eurasian power from discussions about European security has failed. What the conversation stresses is not that immediate agreements will emerge, but that the summit reveals a necessary pivot: if Europe’s security problems are going to be solved, they will have to be addressed at a strategic level with Russia, not merely managed through peripheral instruments such as arms transfers or incremental sanctions. Importantly, the exchange stresses that the Ukrainian conflict is a symptom rather than a cause. The argument is that decades of refusing to accommodate legitimate Russian security concerns, while simultaneously pressing NATO expansion and economic disentanglement, created the conditions for the current war. In that sense, the summit’s real significance is procedural and conceptual — it opens a door back to diplomacy about the underlying architecture that produced the crisis. ## NATO expansion and the absence of a common table A central strand of the conversation attributes the present crisis to a longstanding refusal to negotiate a European security order that included Russia on an equal footing. Since the end of the Cold War, European security policymaking, the discussion contends, has been structured around integrating as many states as possible into EU and NATO frameworks — a project that left Russia outside the table around which continental arrangements were discussed. This approach, the analysis argues, substituted “hegemonic peace” for arrangements based on mutual restraint and indivisible security. The panel traces a predictable logic: as NATO inched closer to Russia’s borders, Moscow’s strategic anxiety increased; as Europe pursued economic and normative integration with former Soviet spaces, Russia saw its historical and strategic buffer zones erode. Attempts to manage these tensions through limited agreements, such as the Minsk process, are portrayed as inadequate precisely because they avoided confronting the larger architecture question. From this vantage, the conversation presents the 2014–2022 sequence as the culmination of a policy that never squarely addressed Russian demands for a role in European security. ## Europe as a subordinate strategic actor One of the conversation’s more stark claims is that Europe has effectively subordinated itself to American strategic imperatives, losing the autonomy required to mediate a settlement. The discussion sketches a trajectory in which early post‑Cold War hopes for a European pole that could balance American dominance gradually receded into a position of privileged alliance. Over time, the United States shaped European political communities, investments and security postures in ways that produced dependence rather than strategic independence. That dependence, the conversation warns, has two dangerous consequences. First, it incentivizes European leaders to prefer perpetual confrontation over reconciliation because continued conflict guarantees American security presence and political support. Second, it deepens Europe’s internal fragility: economic dislocation, political legitimacy problems and social strains follow when a continent treats strategic dependence as security policy. The argument is uncompromising: the Europeans have little leverage to craft an alternative — and having committed to a maximalist posture of deterrence and punishment, they risk being caught between a receding American focus on Asia and a Russia that may no longer be contained by military means alone. ## Ideology, groupthink and the politics of denial The conversation places significant emphasis on the power of ideology and collective identity in shaping policy. After the Cold War, the idea that liberal democracy had won and that Western institutions were the natural global axis took on quasi‑religious force. This ideological framework, the discussion argues, made it difficult for Western publics and elites to treat Russia as a legitimate stakeholder with legitimate security concerns; instead, Moscow was increasingly cast as a malign other, a political and moral deviation from the assumed teleology of Western modernity. Such a narrative hardened into a form of groupthink: dissenting views were stigmatized as Kremlin apologia, and nuanced debate about strategic accommodation became taboo. The conversation suggests that this consensus was not merely mistaken but performative — a political posture sustained to maintain moral and geopolitical coherence. Hence, when realities shifted — when conflict erupted and the costs of exclusion became manifest — the ideological apparatus resisted recalibration, favoring escalation, punishment and the rhetorical construction of a total victory rather than compromise. ## The strategic consequences of keeping the war alive From the exchange emerges a troubling calculus: parts of Europe have a perverse incentive to sustain conflict because the presence of war legitimizes American security guarantees and maintains a unifying narrative of resistance. The conversation notes statements by some European officials suggesting that prolonged conflict would allow rearmament and strategic preparation; that grim logic, they argue, treats war as a policy instrument to buy time and cohesion. But this is presented as short sighted and self‑defeating. The potentially catastrophic outcomes are multiple. If the fighting stops on terms that preserve Russian leverage, the United States may downgrade its European commitment, leaving a weakened, economically strained Europe to manage a resurgent Russia. If the war continues, Europe risks becoming a physical battlefield with massive humanitarian and infrastructural devastation. And in either scenario, the conversation warns, the political legitimacy of European leaders will be damaged if they are seen as mere vassals of external powers rather than architects of their own security. ## Pathways back to a sustainable European order Despite the bleak diagnosis, the exchange sketches possible pathways to break the impasse — but they require hard choices. First, any stable settlement must treat Ukraine as part of a broader European architecture problem, not as a standalone bargaining item. Addressing Ukraine’s fate will therefore require mechanisms that reconcile Ukrainian sovereignty and security with Russian strategic concerns, an effort that is likely to entail creative, multinational guarantees rather than unilateral guarantees of membership or unconditional reparations. Second, the conversation argues for reviving the principle of indivisible security: arrangements that prevent one party’s security from being built on the insecurity of another. This implies negotiating limits on expansi

US-Russia Summit Destroys 500 Years Of European Geopolitics Second part of discussion with Glenn Diesen. First part on his channel: https://youtu.be /FWT0Aq5tpMc?si=AcyM_JOxsNjzmAbd Our shop: https://neutralitystudies-shop.fourthwall.com Transcript of the Summit meeting: https://open.substack.com/pub/pascallottaz/p/transcript-putin- trump-press-conference? #M2 Hello, everybody. Pascal here from Neutrality Studies, and today I've got with me again Glenn Diesen, a professor of international relations at the University of Southeast Norway, a very good colleague of mine, and I'm very happy to have him back because we want to discuss the Putin- Trump summit. I was just earlier on his channel giving him my perspective, and now he's kind enough to stick around and give us his perspective. Glenn, welcome back to the channel. #M3 Thanks, Pascal. #M2 I'm really glad that we can do this because there's a lot to unpack, right? To me, it's one of those moments when I feel that something is changing. Although maybe the summit will be forgotten in a few years, the way we also kind of forget that Biden met Putin and so on, because everything went down the drain anyway. But I can't get around the feeling that, no, this is different. For the first time, we're seeing a new way in which great powers actually interact with each other, especially after the West pretended for so long that Russia is isolated, that the world is against Russia. And now they're still pretending that, oh no, Russia is going to get the feeling that it's being reintegrated, as if it had ever been excluded from the world. The Western solipsism is just quite fantastic when it comes to this. How do you interpret the process that we've been seeing over the last six months, which has now culminated in this great power summit in Alaska? #M3 Well, I agree with you. I think there's huge significance behind this. If you look at the actual format for discussions we've had about Russian security over the past 35 years, there really hasn't been -- 1 of 12 -- any. Since the 1990s, European security has entailed integrating the entire continent—with the exception of the largest country in Europe. I think this is the source of everything. We canceled all agreements for common security based on indivisible security in favor of a hegemonic peace, which manifested itself through NATO expansion. And as many predicted back then, this is what would cause conflicts in the future. It kind of makes sense. It would be easy to explain to a child why the idea of a Cold War military alliance expanding closer and closer to Russian borders, while ensuring that Russia doesn't have a seat at the table in Europe, is somehow considered a recipe for peace and stability. But anyway, what I want to get to is that for more than 20 years, we refused to discuss Russia's seat at the table in Europe. We didn't want to discuss their security concerns. Indeed, the whole ideology we built Europe around was that the EU and NATO would be a force for good. So yes, you might not be part of this club. We might put our military along your borders, your missiles, but this is a source of stability and democracy. So we didn't make it possible to discuss what Russia wanted. And of course, it took us up to 2014. We could topple the government in Ukraine, but also, this is good for democracy and stability. We had fake solutions, you could already argue, from 2015 with the Minsk Agreement. This goes up to 2022, the Russians invade. We had three years of no diplomacy at all—not talking to the Russians. If you live in Europe and you try to discuss European security architecture or Russian security concerns, you'll be crucified. This is almost treason. "This is what Russia says. You're repeating Kremlin talking points." And the unipolar system has moved to this point where Ukraine was really the main thing that actually took us now to a hot war. And now that Russia has won this, what we have to discuss is how to resolve the wider problem in Europe. How do we return to some of the things we should have discussed 30 years ago? Again, the principle of indivisible security, stability on the continent. But we're not. Instead, some people want to dismiss this as, "Oh, we're just... make them stop shooting at each other. We have a ceasefire. Once a ceasefire is in place, we can push in some European troops and rebuild Ukraine, and then there will be stability again." So they want to go back to the old format of this hegemonic peace, but the Russians won't have anything of it. So I think this is where we are. We're at this point where, first, we have to be able to identify how we ended up in this conflict in order to assess the possible solutions to actually resolve it. And this isn't going to be done overnight. And as you said, to have the president of Russia and the United States meeting on the border in Alaska—even though they're kind of, not kind of, they're fighting almost a direct war now, not even a proxy war—is a huge achievement. But it doesn't mean that an agreement can be reached this quickly. Because, as I always point out, Ukraine is not the source of tensions between the US and Russia; it's the product. This is a consequence of a broken European security architecture. So if you want to solve Ukraine, you have to solve other issues as well—that is, the entire European security architecture. You're going to have to end NATO expansion. If you end NATO expansion, what happens to the -- 2 of 12 -- transatlantic partnership? Does it lose its whole function? Will the Americans leave Europe? Will they go to Ukraine? I mean, there's a lot riding on this, which is why people are panicking like crazy in Europe. So no, sorry, that was a very long answer, but I think it's important that people appreciate this is not just a territory swap—"We'll give you some of Dnipro in return for Donbass." This is not the only issue. #M2 Yeah, and the Russians said as much, right? They are after root causes and they are after security arrangements—not just for themselves, actually, but also for the Ukrainians and for the Europeans. I mean, they would like to have an architecture that somehow works. And I do hope that this is the first summit that gets us towards an acceptable solution, somehow a balance of power on the continent. The fascinating thing, though, is that the way this proxy war, implementation war—this conflict, this outright conflict between the US and Russia—has utterly and completely sidelined Europe. I mean, it has already made Eastern Europe, Ukraine, a battlefield. It is threatening to create an even bigger battlefield. There would be one way of taking this whole thing forward—a very bad way forward. But you can see how the Europeans would actually prefer that. They prefer the militaristic approach of just doubling down harder with all the things that haven't worked so far. What do you make of this? How do you... other than these elite illusions of the Europeans, how did we get to the point where Europe is actively working on making itself a battlefield for two great powers to fight it out? #M3 It's a great question, and I think it doesn't really have that many rational answers. Indeed, if you look at the Europeans—the statements from European leaders in the early '90s—a key concern, coming especially from countries like France, was that there's too much power concentrated in the United States. We need more strong forces in Europe in order to balance some of this hegemonic ambition, to restore some balance. But then, gradually, they kind of began to submit. There are, I guess, many reasons for this. One of them is the role that Europe would have in this hegemonic order. That is, if you have a strong Europe and a powerful United States, then you can have a collective hegemony of the world standing on two legs—the US and the EU. So the Europeans then go from essentially having the ambition to share this unipolar moment with the Americans, to having a very privileged position. Now, you can also look at manipulation. I had spoken to Colonel Wilkerson many times—he was the chief of staff to Colin Powell—and he talks about how they were in the White House, setting up these big whiteboards with all the names of the European politicians. And they would say, "Who will do as they're told? Who will not do as they're told? And which one do we elevate?" -- 3 of 12 -- Who do we push down in order to build the European governments that we want? And interestingly enough, he pointed out that the biggest, you know, the one who will bow to everything we tell them to do, is a Norwegian politician, Jens Stoltenberg. He was the prime minister, and he ended up as the NATO Secretary General. So it is interesting. So there's some of this American manipulation. But beyond this as well, I think the Europeans kind of transitioned a bit into this. But still, if you go to 2008, when Bush wanted to expand NATO to Ukraine and Georgia, the Europeans were pushing back. They realized, as Merkel said, that this would be interpreted as a declaration of war by Moscow. Everyone recognized this was a step too far. The CIA director, Robert Gates—well, Burns as well— but Robert Gates has said this was one step too far, that this would predictably lead to conflict. But you're right, CIA director Burns said the same thing: this will create a war. So this is not a controversial thing. But I think the Europeans got roped into this because these are salami tactics. Gradually, you push—okay, let's push a little bit more, a little bit more. And instead of taking all of Ukraine into NATO now, we'll do it de facto. They become de facto members. We slowly integrate their economy away from Russia towards us. We begin to have security cooperation. We disentangle the whole common culture, get the Russian Orthodox Church out of Ukraine, get rid of the Russian language, and slowly we'll bring them in. This is NATO tactics, by the way—the salami tactics. You don't provoke that fearsome response. But then, when the Russians begin to respond, you begin to cultivate a new political class, which is, "Oh, the Russians are evil. They're bad. They want to restore the empire. They want to have the Russian empire. Putin is Hitler." This is how you create a political community as well. I often compare it to the Prussians versus the French in 1870. Once the French invaded, all the different German states came together, and this is when you create a common national identity—in 1871, you have German unification, when all the German states become Germany as we know it today. So I think this is the way they went. And now, of course, if you talk about what the European leaders themselves said only a few years ago about this being very provocative and potentially starting a war, they will call it Russian disinformation. You can quote the same people; they will denounce the same statements. So I think this was gradual, and now, of course, they're in this position. And when you have this much insecurity, you have a huge war in Ukraine. There are legitimate security concerns. And what is security in Europe? Well, that's America. So now you're completely dependent on America, and the US can convert this security dependence into political loyalties, economic loyalties. The Europeans have to cut themselves off from Russia. They cut themselves off from China. Now, Besant says, you know, Europe has to either put up or shut up. That means you also have to cut yourself off a little bit from the Indians, because you have to put pressure on them. So at the end of the day, America will be the only game in town. So Europe is now completely— yeah, totally subordinated. We are vassals now. Even Macron recognized this. -- 4 of 12 -- We're not proper independent states anymore. So I think we're doing things against our own interests. You can have American presidents standing next to the German chancellor saying, "Yeah, well, you know, we might blow up your pipel