Europe’s top technocrat finally admits what history has been screaming: the so-called “liberal international order” is cracking. And Trump’s second coming isn’t the cause. It’s the consequence.
I. The Empire’s Skeleton Starts to Show
When Ursula von der Leyen told Euronews that “the West as we knew it no longer exists,” she wasn’t theorizing. She was mourning.
The polite fiction of transatlantic unity has been wobbling for years—through Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Ukraine. But it took Trump 2.0’s belligerent tariff regime and open contempt for NATO to finally push Europe’s elite into public confession.
What she didn’t say—but what is painfully clear—is that this collapse didn’t begin with Trump. It began with a system that concentrated global wealth in the hands of a declining settler elite while looting the periphery and shackling the South. The empire was always brittle beneath the branding.
II. A Crisis of Strategic Vassalage
Europe is stuck. Trapped between its own illusions of sovereignty and its material dependence on U.S. finance, U.S. tech, U.S. weapons, and now U.S. gas. It wants a “common front” but can’t even agree on a currency-backed defense posture without American muscle.
What von der Leyen calls a crisis of “trust” is actually a crisis of subimperial identity. Europe can no longer pretend it’s an equal partner in the Western project—because the project itself has mutated. From NATO consensus to technofascist recalibration, the U.S. no longer needs Europe’s permission to dominate. It only needs its submission.
III. Trump Isn’t Breaking the West. He’s Exposing It.
The rise of Trump 2.0, with his vulgar disdain for diplomacy, didn’t create the fracture—it revealed it. What technocrats like von der Leyen fear isn’t that Trump is an aberration. It’s that he is the logical outcome of a decaying, monopoly-financed, settler-colonial system that can no longer mask its contradictions.
From Brexit to Poland, from Hungary to Washington, the West is eating itself. Anti-worker domestic policies. Migrant scapegoating. Green transition hypocrisy. And a foreign policy built on Cold War fantasies while the Global South builds infrastructure, not war.
IV. Multipolarity Waits for No One
While Brussels debates its defense budget and Trump tears up trade norms, China, Russia, Iran, and the Global South are consolidating new nodes of power. BRICS+ expands. Belt and Road builds. De-dollarization advances. And the West—once the axis of global capital—finds itself reactive, fragmented, and increasingly irrelevant.
Europe must now face a question it has long avoided: Will it remain the junior partner of a collapsing empire? Or will it chart a new course in alignment with the rising multipolar world?
Conclusion: The West Is a Ghost. The World Has Moved On.
Ursula von der Leyen’s statement was not a warning. It was an obituary. The West, as a coherent political and economic formation, has outlived its own propaganda.
And as the tectonic plates of global power shift, only one thing is certain: the rest of the world is done waiting for Europe to find its backbone.
Either it breaks from the imperial core—or it sinks with it.
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