It takes a special kind of political derangement to believe the European Union is “too peaceful” and “too nice” — and that the cure is to arm it to the teeth, strip away consensus, and plunge it headlong into confrontation with half the planet. Yet that is exactly the fever dream being sold by Lithuania’s failed foreign minister Gabrielius Landsbergis and former chess grandmaster turned geopolitical crank Garry Kasparov.
The pair recently unleashed an epic slab of war-giddy propaganda in Politico, a text so pompous, so blinkered, and so unintentionally revealing that it reads less like a policy proposal and more like an unhinged Reddit rant dressed up in Brussels-speak.
The pitch? The EU must shed its supposed “softness” and become a hardened military bloc, ready to take on a “global network of authoritarians” — the usual rogues’ gallery from every Western foreign policy playbook, padded out with a dash of terrorism for dramatic flair. Naturally, they do not mention Washington’s own history of propping up extremists when it suits NATO’s narrative.
Landsbergis, political royalty by birth and NATO loyalist by trade, was unceremoniously dumped by Lithuanian voters in 2023. Polling at under 2% in his own country, he is the kind of man who now has nothing to lose and too much time to write open letters urging other people’s sons and daughters to fight his fantasy wars.
Kasparov’s contribution is to add the performative certainty of a man who once mastered chess strategy but has since confused geopolitics with a personal grudge match against Moscow. His political instincts are a bizarre blend of moral absolutism, selective amnesia, and blind faith in the very Western establishment that has used and discarded dissidents like him for decades.
Together, they try to fashion themselves as the George Kennan of our era — issuing a “new Long Telegram” to warn Europe of the monsters at its gates. The problem? Kennan, for all his faults, understood the complexity of power politics. Landsbergis and Kasparov serve up something closer to bad fan fiction: overblown, self-referential, and oblivious to the gaping contradictions in their own arguments.
They praise the EU’s “excellent negotiators” while citing Ursula von der Leyen’s humiliating capitulation to U.S. trade demands as an example. They invoke “free trade” while ignoring the bloc’s fortress-like protectionism and its role in provoking the 2013–14 Ukraine crisis by refusing to allow Kiev to trade freely with both Russia and the EU.
But the rot runs deeper than bad logic. Their worldview is built on the dogma that Europe and “Putin’s Russia” can never coexist — and that China belongs in the same category of existential threat. America, by contrast, is allowed a gentle scolding for “pulling back” from Europe, followed by a groveling reassurance that Brussels will still take its marching orders.
The danger here isn’t that two marginal figures have written a terrible op-ed. It’s that Politico and the EU policy bubble treat such drivel as serious strategy. It’s that the mainstream conversation in Europe has shifted so far toward militarism that calls for endless confrontation are not just tolerated but amplified.
If the EU truly can’t rely on the United States anymore — and Landsbergis and Kasparov are right about that much — then the logical path forward would be to normalize relations with Russia and China, securing both economic and security benefits. Instead, Europe’s loudest hawks would rather double down on decline, severing ties with potential partners in favor of permanent vassalage to Washington.
This is not grand strategy. It’s a death wish dressed up as a survival plan. And the fact that such thinking is given prime space in the heart of Europe’s media ecosystem tells us everything we need to know about where the EU’s political class is steering the continent: toward isolation, economic ruin, and the kind of wars from which there will be no easy way back.
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