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 truly mattered is force. That has not changed. It will not.
For three decades this truth was muted by the asymmetry of American primacy. With China's rise to peer competition and Washington's relative decline and rebalance toward the Indo-Pacific, that asymmetry is over.
Multipolarity is not a return (competition was never absent) but a re-acquaintance with what the system always was. We are rediscovering, perhaps painfully, that everything ultimately depends on capability.
Europe, as currently constituted, is unprepared for this world. Its architecture was built around the Pax Americana — security underwritten, strategy outsourced, politics reduced to administration.
As that protection thins, intra-European tensions long suspended (economic divergence, energy dependence, frontier insecurity) resurface, and European states regard one another with strategic suspicion.
Already a secondary theatre and a civilization in measurable decline, Europe risks becoming what every great power has incentive to make it: terrain on which others manoeuvre.
One trend cuts the other way. The infrastructure of integration (single market, free movement, common currency, shared education) has unintentionally produced a generation for whom Europe is not 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 that would translate it into power.
The conditions for European sovereignty exist for the first time in modern history. To realize them is the task of our generation; to miss them is to surrender the century — and what comes after.