Rich, Disarmed, Divided
Why a wealthy continent risks becoming the object others contend over
In the world now displacing the Western-led liberal order, the great powers are reorganising themselves into blocs, each ordered around its own centre and intent on contesting the others for space and resources. In such a configuration, the question Europe must ask is not what seat it will occupy at the table, but whether it will sit at the table at all — or whether it will be what those at the table divide among themselves. A continent that commands one of the planet’s largest concentrations of wealth, industry, and population, yet has delegated its security to an external guarantor for eighty years without ever building a strategic centre of gravity of its own, is not a pole: it is spoils. This report argues that Europe now risks precisely that condition — confronting not an aggressor bent on erasing it, but actors bent on controlling it and parcelling out its influence — and that two revisionist powers are moving in that direction by different means: Russia through military pressure and subversion, China through economic penetration. The argument is not an alarm but a diagnosis. The condition of spoils flows not from geographic fate but from a weakness Europe can still correct, provided it does so before the window closes. What follows sets out how that weakness arose, how the two powers exploit it, why their two campaigns reinforce one another, and what it would take to escape it.