Global predators are circling a weak and unstable continent

Is Europe entering a dangerous new age of instability? Not since the height of the cold war with the Soviet Union has it looked so vulnerable to hostile forces.

- Simon Tisdall

Accumulating external threats and internal divisions, coupled with a weakening US security alliance, relentless Russian subversion and power-hungry China’s war on western values are exposing fundamental strategic weaknesses.

Europe increasingly resembles a beleaguered democratic island in an anarchic world, where a rising tide of authoritarianism, impunity and international rule-breaking threatens to inundate it. Some leaders understand this, notably French President Emmanuel Macron, yet long-term policy remedies elude them.

For example, Belarus dictator Alexander Lukashenko’s use of migrants to pressure the EU is plainly outrageous. Yet it worked, in the sense that Germany’s caretaker chancellor, Angela Merkel, phoned him for a chat, ending his post-coup isolation. It was a concession to a thug, not a lasting solution.

Talking of thugs, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s ongoing intimidation of Ukraine risks a widening conflagration. The latest border build-up of 90,000 Russian troops may be sabre-rattling, similar to provocations in the Donbas and Black Sea last spring. If not, Europe will only have itself to blame. Putin’s importunities stem directly from its de facto acquiescence in his illegal 2014 annexation of Crimea.