Interesting thought, this goes way beyond Europe and Russia.
Interesting thought, this goes way beyond Europe and Russia.
The War on Error has made the West completely oblivious to the number of very big elephants in the room while politicians were playing the War on Error as if it was some kind of CounterStrike game, and then wasted time on refugee crisis, Trump, Brexit, and various other piss contests.
(Of course, Putin's invasion of Ukraine is its own variety of stupid, but not quite the same one.)
Herodotus (https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2707/pg2707.txt)
Instead, the enemy is what it always was, corruption and violent subpopulations. Every democracy that falls, goes through both of those.
On the autocracies side, it looks like they also are as they always were: blind by subservience. About every single time one of them is tested, the ruler doesn't know up from down and the population don't know (or don't want to know) what to follow.
Or external threats. Eastern Europe was battling with both the enemies you mentioned, but then the Soviets came and sealed the deal for almost 50 years.
We get a new war with the same objectives a century later.