Russia Won The War. When Will Europe Notice? | Pascal Lottaz & Ezequiel Bistoletti

## A turning point in global order: from unipolar moment to uneasy multipolarity What emerges from the exchange is a stark claim: the three-decade unipolar moment that followed the Soviet collapse is over. The conversation places recent high-profile summits, military posturing, and political theater into a single narrative—one in which the balance of power is migrating eastward and a new multipolarity is asserting itself. This is not simply a matter of rhetoric or symbolism. It is a structural shift: economic integration, alternative institutions, and concerted diplomatic choreography by non-Western powers are providing credible options to the world’s political actors beyond the institutions and guarantees that dominated the 1990s and 2000s. For Europe, which has organized much of its security thinking around the logic of American primacy, this development poses a profound strategic dilemma. The conversation frames recent images—elaborate parades, summit photographs, clustered handshakes—not as mere pageantry but as signals. They signal a purposeful alternative model: one that emphasizes equal treatment among states, voluntary association, and the politics of multipolar engagement. In contrast, Western approaches that rely on hierarchical levers—sanctions, security umbrellas, and displays of superiority—look increasingly brittle and less persuasive to many states in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The practical consequence is that the West’s ability to set global agendas unilaterally has diminished, and the elevator shaft of global decision-making now opens onto several floors, not just one penthouse. ## Russia, Ukraine, and the limits of attrition warfare A central thread in the discussion is a controversial, unsettling contention: that Moscow has achieved a form of victory in the war of attrition in Ukraine. The conversation lays out a grim arithmetic—stockpiles of munitions, manpower shortages, and sustained attrition on the battlefield—that together suggest the conflict may be stabilizing in a way that favors the side with greater endurance. Equally important is the implication for Europe. If the conflict grinds on while Western supplies and public patience erode, European capitals will be confronted with a bitter choice between open-ended support and a negotiated settlement that accepts security arrangements they find politically distasteful. The military analysis dovetails with a strategic one: attrition wars reward access to resources over short-term battlefield theatrics. When logistics, production capacity, and political will are the decisive variables, preeminence in international institutions and rhetorical denunciations matter less. For Europe, the uncomfortable reality is that the projection of hard power on the continent has depended heavily on alliance structures underwritten by an external guarantor. If that guarantor either retreats or reorders priorities, Europe’s ability to influence the war’s outcome diminishes sharply. The conversation pushes this point: the longer attrition grinds on, the more pressure grows for diplomatic exit strategies, including negotiated security arrangements with actors currently deemed adversarial. ## The American question: continuity, disruption, or selective retreat? The conversation wrestles with the perennial puzzle of U.S. foreign policy: is what appears as unpredictability a genuine reorientation, or simply another permutation of longstanding patterns? Recent diplomatic gestures and public theatrics—ranging from overtures to adversaries to stern treatment of allies—are read as both signaling and obfuscation. On one hand, a shift toward “pivoting to homeland” and tighter focus on the Western Hemisphere could suggest less appetite for indefinite external commitments. On the other, new basing agreements, sustained deployments in contested theaters, and public renaming of defense institutions indicate continuity in the projection of military power. This duality matters because European and global calculations depend on credible expectations of American behavior. If U.S. policy is indeed transactional, bilateralist, and ready to punish allies to extract concessions, Europe faces strategic instability: allies cannot rely on consistent cooperative security mechanisms. If instead the United States is genuinely recalibrating toward selective engagement—doubling down where national interests are high and stepping back elsewhere—then Europe will need to do a brutally realistic assessment of where its interests align and where it must build autonomous capacity. The conversation insists that ambiguity is itself destabilizing: states respond to uncertainty by hedging, building alternative partnerships, and seeking security arrangements that reduce dependence on any single hegemon. ## Multipolar institutions and the appeal of equality The discussion highlights a crucial factor enabling the shift: the attractiveness of institutions that treat states as peers rather than supplicants. Organizations and groupings that foreground equal partnership, voluntary cooperation, and development-oriented economic ties—such as emerging platforms in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—are winning adherents precisely because they offer an alternative to conditionality and hierarchy. For many governments in the Global South, the choice is not ideological loyalty but practical calculus: who offers infrastructure, trade, and diplomatic respect without existential demands? This is not to romanticize these emerging groupings. The conversation recognizes the asymmetries and internal competitions within blocs, and it does not deny self-interest and rivalry among their members. But the optics and the operating logic matter: diplomacy that emphasizes mutual recognition and negotiated security, rather than tutelage or coercion, resonates differently in capitals from Jakarta to Buenos Aires. For Europe, the response cannot be mere denunciation. If Western actors want to remain influential, they must offer comparable incentives—economic, technological, and diplomatic—that respect partners’ agency. Otherwise, they risk seeing friends and competitors alike gravitate toward arrangements that diminish Western leverage. ## Europe at the crossroads: rearm, reconcile, or resign? One of the most forceful implications of the conversation concerns Europe’s strategic choices. Three broad options are sketched: build independent hard power; negotiate a new continental security architecture that acknowledges the security perceptions of others; or persist in dependence on an increasingly inconsistent external guarantor and hope circumstances change. Each option carries costs and trade-offs. Building credible military capacity across Europe requires time, political will, and resources—scarce commodities in fractious democratic polities. Negotiating a security settlement with a power regarded as an antagonist demands painful concessions and a redefinition of threat perceptions. Persisting in dependence risks strategic surprise and the erosion of influence. The conversation presses a pragmatic point: denial is no strategy. Europe cannot assume inertia in geopolitics; it must choose. Nor is this merely a question of military hardware. Strategic autonomy requires integrated industrial bases, diversified trade links, resilient supply chains, and diplomatic agility. The tribunal of public opinion matters too: societies exhausted by inflation, migration pressures, and global shocks may not sustain long wars fought by proxy. Facing these constraints, European leaders must weigh whether the political capital exists to pursue robust defense integration, seek negotiated guarantees that reduce escalatory risks, or accept a diminished role in a crowded multipolar order. ## Neutrality, nonalignment, and the politics of exit strategies For scholars and policymakers focused on neutrality and nonalignment, the conversation offers fertile ground. If great-powe

Russia Won The War. When Will Europe Notice? A guest talk by Pascal on Ezequel Bistoletti's @demoliendomitosdelapolitica . Published here in English. For the translated Spanish version please visit @demoliendomitosdelapolitica . Russia has won the War of Attrition in Ukraine, since NATO is running simply out of munition while Ukraine is short on men to throw into what has become the most gruesome meat-grinder since WWI on European soil. How long until the Europeans will realise that for their own sake, they must sue for peace and a security agreement with the one state they hate the most? #M2 Hello everybody, Pascal here. Yesterday I was interviewed by Ezequiel Bistoletti for his Spanish- language channel called Demoliendo Mitos de la Política (Demolishing Political Myths). He allowed me to also upload this version here in its original English, and he will upload the Spanish version on his channel. So if you speak Spanish and you want to watch it in that language, please go over there and have a look. Thank you. #M3 Good evening, good afternoon, and good morning. Welcome back to Demolishing Political Myths. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming back Pascal Lottaz, who is a friend of the house. He is an associate professor at Kyoto University, and he hosts the YouTube channel "Neutrality Studies." I recommend you go visit it—it has a version in Spanish, and they have very, very good material there. So, Pascal, welcome back. Thank you very much, Ezequiel, for having me back on your show. Pascal, there are a lot of things taking place lately. We have had some historic four weeks, starting with the meeting between Trump and Putin in Alaska 30 days ago, in Anchorage. Then we had, one week ago or one and a half weeks ago, the SCO summit in Tianjin, outside Beijing. The SCO is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, as you know. Later on, we had this amazing victory parade in China with Xi Jinping, with Putin sitting on his right, with Kim Jong-un as well, and a lot of world leaders somehow giving a message of multipolarity towards the West. And finally, we had the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, in Russia, with very interesting statements from Putin as well. So, taking all this together, what do you make of all these events and the message that they're giving to the world with regards to multipolarity, unipolarity, the West, the East, power structures, and so on? #M2 -- 1 of 14 -- Well, I mean, it's not that often that this many international events happen back to back, and some of them were planned a long time ago, like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting and, of course, the forum. Other things happened very quickly, like the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. And then, also, the very next Monday—I mean, that happened on a Friday, and on Monday, you see the Europeans flocking to Washington. Originally, Trump only wanted to invite Mr. Zelensky, but the Europeans just crashed the house and said, "We're going to come with him." And then Donald Trump actually used the opportunity to humiliate the Europeans quite significantly by having them line up in his office in front of his desk on these little chairs, and then even snapping pictures of that. It's absolutely fantastic. And what fascinates me the most is that our media in Europe portrays that as a win—the Europeans being included and having a negotiation with the Americans. It's like, no, no, this was clearly talking down to them, and they don't even realize it. I just had a talk with Anuradha Chenoy, an Indian scholar, and she said that in India, everybody realizes that that was a huge humiliation and insult. But okay, the Europeans live in their own little bubble, and I think we will come back to this later. But to me, what this signifies is definitely that we now have the final proof that even the last person—even Mark Rutte—must have understood that we are now living in the multipolar century, and that it is no longer up to a particular country like the US, or even a grouping like the G7 or NATO, to dictate to the rest of the world what's going to happen. The WTO and the IMF don't have the structural power anymore to just keep other places silent and shut them up. And the others—they are now doing meetings that used to happen once in a decade, you know, like the Bandung meeting of '55, the first time the Global South met and actually got noticed as a group of countries. Then, like in the sixties, there was another one, like in Yugoslavia and so on—the Non-Aligned Movement—that sometimes met, and this grouping within the UN would, every once in a while, talk to each other. But overall, during the Cold War, you couldn't completely forget about them, but they paled in comparison to the bipolar structure and the importance of these two blocs. Then, during the 1990s, nothing comparable ever happened, and everything was structured around the US, Europe, G7, G8. You could see how you had this moment when Russia and China tried to integrate into that post-Cold War structure, and that period is done and over with. So we are, in a sense, now definitely beyond the end of the Cold War. You know how for the last 30 years, we always talked about the Cold War and the post-Cold War. The post-Cold War era has now ended. We don't have a proper terminology for it yet. I would say we will probably call it something like the unipolar moment, the unipolar 30 years. And we are now past the unipolar 30 years, in a new multipolar structure. This multipolar structure seems to me to be moving and driven to a large extent by Asia—East and South Asia. North Asia as well, with Russia covering large parts of North Asia, along with China, India, and also the ASEAN states in Southeast Asia. Naturally, Africa and South America are also part of this entire development, especially within -- 2 of 14 -- the BRICS. But the structural heavyweights are located on the eastern part of the Eurasian continent. I think what we are witnessing is a shift of political gravity toward that region, which is not to say that the others will not matter anymore, but this is a new phenomenon. #M3 Let me take one of the most shocking pictures, or at least one of the most symbolic pictures, that we've seen during those four weeks. Actually, at the SCO Summit, we had this picture—I think it was even reposted, republished by Trump—this picture where we could see Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi smiling and holding each other's hands, in a context in which the US is establishing sanctions only against India because India is still buying, and will keep on buying, Russian oil. Based on that, what do you think Trump is trying to do? There has been this debate you've talked about on your channel about Trump and what his real position is with regard to foreign policy. Is Trump a peacemaker who is not allowed to do his job as he theoretically wanted to do? Or is he actually another representative of US imperialism in this so-called continuity agenda or position? What do you make of that? #M2 Good question. You know, there's this large debate online about whether or not Donald Trump is serious and whether the Trump administration is actually the first sign of a genuine shift in US foreign policy, or if it is what Brian Berletic calls just the latest version of the continuity agenda. Overall, what we see is that time and again, the US will try to break its strategic rivals—Russia and China in this case. And whenever they run into a brick wall, they kind of retreat, reload, and then pretend to want to be friends with everybody else. But what they're really doing is just getting ready for the next kind of attack, overt or covert. And what's currently happening with Russia is just the latest version of that, right? And this is a very important and serious argument. The thing is, we cannot exactly know what it is, because there are instances when US foreign policy and the foreign policy of great powers seriously shift. One of these moments happened between '41 and '45 in the US, because the US had a neutrality policy on its books for 150 years, and it was a pillar. It was a pillar of US foreign policy toward the Europeans—not the kind of neutrality Switzerland or Austria are practicing. Very different, very bellicose neutrality. But let me not get into this one. But it was important that they said, "We are not going to get embroiled in stupid European little wars, petty war fighting." And after '45, they changed that. They said, "We're not going to do what happened after the First World War." We're not going to retreat. We're actually going to do the opposite. We're going to put our soldiers everywhere, and we're going to have a completely new strategy toward Europe and the Eurasian continent, actually. We're going to try to put as many military bases as we can in all corners of the world. And that was genuinely new. You didn't have that before '45. So there is this legitimate question also: are we currently seeing another several-year transition into a different foreign policy, -- 3 of 14 -- or is it, as Berletic says, just the same as before? I view Donald Trump, on the one hand, as probably really different from part of the previous—especially the neoconservative—establishment that we have seen. And we also saw that he seems to have learned from his first term, because not all the important positions are staffed with neocons. Let's remember, in the first administration he had people like John Bolton and Pompeo in there—arch-neocons in very sensitive security positions—and his foreign policy followed them to a good degree. Not completely, but to a good degree. What we're seeing now is that at least you have some restrainers in the cabinet, like Tulsi Gabbard, like Kennedy— although Kennedy is working, of course, on health questions—but you have some restraints. Also, his vice president actually is not a complete arch-hawk, although he does have bellicose rhetoric as well. But you see something of a more, let me call it, balanced in some sense, cabinet, although people like Besset, his commerce secretary, and also Keith Kellogg are definitely on the neocon side. But you can see how there is a mix—quite an eclectic mix, I would say. And on top of that is his personal nature, which we've learned so far is more or less that of a schoolboy bully. So I do believe that sometimes his instincts take over, where he thinks that bullying others into submission will win him victories. And he definitely gets very far with that with the Europeans, having the Europeans cave to him when it came to all of these trade negotiations and so on. Very quickly, Ursula just went over there to basically nod to everything and praise the "daddy," including Margrethe, praising their protector. And I don't think that he understands the difference between the Europeans and, let's say, the Indians. In his mind, probably, if the Europeans followed, then the Indians naturally should follow, because—I mean—they're not even on the same plane. So I don't think he has the understanding of what's happening in the rest of the world, in the global majority, in the Global South, and that India is on a completely different trajectory than the Europeans are. And hence, he applies the same approach. You can also see how the approach is one of picking out countries one by one, right? Negotiate with Japan, negotiate with Korea, with—well—the Europeans collectively, but you've got them on a very short leash already, and with the Indians, and one by one, so that they cannot gang up against you. And then threaten each one, and also try to play the bilateral negotiations against each other, right? Because what he very well understands is that if he gives 15% tariffs to the Japanese, then the others will want that too. So by threatening 30%, 40%, 50%, and then giving one 15%, you create an incentive for the others to agree to be tariffed, but at the same rate, because they want to be on the sam