In the relations among great powers, the ultimate currency is force. It has always been. It always will be.
The international system has no sovereign and no judge. International law exists only insofar as power enforces it; principles bind no one once interest dictates otherwise.
Among great powers, the only currency that has ever mattered is force. That has not changed. It will not.
For decades, this truth was muted by the asymmetry of American primacy. With China's rise as a peer competitor, Washington's relative decline and its strategic rebalancing toward the Indo-Pacific, that asymmetry is over.
What returns is not competition — it was never absent — but our re-acquaintance with what the system has always been. We are rediscovering, perhaps painfully, that everything ultimately depends on capability.
For decades, Europe lived inside a strategic exception. American power underwrote its security, absorbed its geopolitical risks and made European fragmentation appear manageable.
Under that shelter, strategy could be outsourced and politics reduced to administration. Europe was not built to act as a sovereign force in the world. It was built to function within an order guaranteed by someone else.
That exception is ending.
As American protection thins, internal tensions long contained by the postwar order return to the surface: economic divergence, energy dependence, frontier insecurity and the old habit of strategic suspicion between European states.
Externally, the danger is no less clear. In a multipolar system, a fragmented Europe does not remain neutral ground. It becomes a theatre of competition: a space to be pressured, divided and manoeuvred by others.
The deeper problem is not capability. It is imagination: Europe's institutions and political reflexes were formed in a world where power could be ignored.
One trend cuts the other way. The infrastructure of integration (the single market, free movement, the common currency, shared education) has unintentionally produced a generation for whom Europe is no longer a normative project, but an empirical condition: a lived reality.
The cultural premise of European unity now exists. What is missing is the political form: the federal architecture capable of translating that reality into power.
The conditions for European sovereignty exist for the first time in modern history. To seize them is the task of our generation; to squander them is to surrender the century — and what comes after.