IN A 1920 poster by the Soviet artist Dmitrii Moor, a snake-like behemoth is prodded and repelled by a colourful army waving bayonets and red flags — the world’s colonised and oppressed. 

The snake is coiled around a giant factory, representing not only the precious spoils of imperial plunder but also, as hawk-eyed students of Marx might recognise, the fetters that monopolisation imposes on development. “Death to imperialism!” the poster reads. 

The image comes across as a curious relic today, if we take the snake to be those European leaders who, with notable snubs and omissions, met in London on Sunday to discuss Ukraine’s humiliation by Washington. Like a century ago, the snake is all grimace and panic. But where is the factory? And where, really, is the threat? 

This is what we learned: as the US retreats from the transatlantic order, “Europe” will spend more money on guns and less on the things their people need to live decent lives. That much is normal; Europe has a coterie of reliable scapegoats — from refugees to Xi Jinping — for the crises produced by its austerian spasms. 

But if the teeth were bared, they seemed blunt. On Sunday, we also learned that Europe would not do very much more without Washington’s support, which seems to be evaporating. 

The growing rift reveals that Europe never had much of a part in the transatlantic theatre. Instead, it played a carefully staged role, underwritten and constrained by the imperatives of US hegemony. Now, the huffs and puffs from Washington have blown the curtain aside, revealing a harsh reality: Europe’s dependence on the US has left it politically irrelevant, strategically impotent and trapped in a pantomimic performance of imperial cliches.

With a bit of self-reflection and a lot of hindsight, Brussels might have seen this coming. In more ways than one, the entire edifice of imperialism’s post-war order represented western Europe’s controlled surrender to the US. 

As World War II ended and the Soviet Union, China and much of Europe lay in ruins, Washington emerged as a dominant industrial force. It moved quickly to pursue what its officials referred to as “preponderant power” — that is, unfettered imperialist expansion, requiring the methodical annihilation of movements towards liberation. 

By the end of the 1940s, US dollars were powering fascist and reactionary forces that would strangulate socialism in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. US troops and nuclear bombs, deployed permanently to Germany and Britain, would produce tensions that could not allow alternative political projects to bloom. The Marshall Plan, Truman Doctrine and the gradual consolidation of the European capitalist class under what would become the European Union laid the ground for a fragile political contract built within parameters determined largely in Washington. 

Although “Europe” — the colonising, parasitic Europe — suffered a profound setback with the loss of its colonial possessions in the years and decades after World War II, it would be allowed to retain a piece of the imperial pie. This residual right of plunder was underpinned by US military might and cocooned within its nuclear umbrella. Nato not only secured the anti-communist consensus, but also helped power the European colonial wars in Africa that fed their ruling classes back home.

This created in western Europe an empire of appearances: a pantomime of power that masked the firm constraints imposed on it by US primacy. We forget that when West Germany’s Willy Brandt signed a deal for the delivery of Soviet gas to Europe through the jointly funded Druzhba (“Friendship”) pipeline, Ronald Reagan imposed sanctions on the project and, according to the memoirs of former US secretary of state Antony Blinken, blew it up in a clandestine operation. The message was unambiguous: you can benefit from the system, but we benefit first.   

This system would be governed by a complex matrix of constraints on the nation state. Nato removed questions of war and peace from the equations of democratic governance. The EU, in turn, evolved to do the same for decisions about spending. Its founding mythos — that integration would prevent war — obscured its function: to consolidate a capitalist bloc that could extract wealth from the global South, throttle Europe’s social democratic compact and insulate its elites from popular accountability. The financial and sovereign debt crises, of course, burst our illusions wide open, revealing both the fragility and profoundly anti-democratic character of this architecture. 

Nato and the EU thus represented two central pillars of a post-war order that consolidated the once fractious world of Western imperialism into a whole. Together with the other post-war “institutions,” they ensured that the imperialist model of neoliberal globalisation could not be challenged at the level of the nation state, and neither could the cudgel that secured its expansion. Transnational capital has fettered national sovereignty. 

Today, the material pillars of that order are collapsing. Neither western Europe nor the US are industrial powerhouses. Their global influence is waning. Russia — which European leaders have tried so hard to will into crisis with words and premonitions — has outmanufactured and outmanoeuvred Nato. And the colourful armies who once wielded bayonets and red flags against the imperialist snake now give each other low-interest loans, railways and bridges. 

But the illusions stubbornly persist. It would be harder to find a more fitting symbol than the figure of Kaja Kallas of Estonia. An honorary member of the “NAFO” disinformation club and former prime minister of a country with a population slightly larger than Birmingham or Cologne, the EU’s top diplomat recently vowed that Europe would “defeat China.” With what industrial might, she could not say. All teeth, no factory. 

Having staked their credibility on a proxy war they cannot win, European leaders now resort to magical thinking. Hours after a dressed-down Volodymyr Zelensky got his dressing-down in the Oval Office — an experience no doubt familiar to his proxy forebears in the global South — European leaders responded in unison. “Be strong, be brave, be fearless,” they tweeted, as if the mantratic command could alchemise into military force and national conviction — as if the chorus of determined and gleeful cheers could drown out the screams of those resisting forced mobilisation, or the short breaths of those huddled in the trenches under volleys of artillery fire.

The bluster underscores a sobering reality. While Russia’s defeat of Nato in Ukraine is humiliating for the US, it is fatal to Europe’s hollow empire. 

The US can manage — for now. It has its own imperial military infrastructure. It can continue plodding along its path of decline with or without the Atlantic alliance. Europe, not so much. As the war is lost, it will become increasingly difficult for Europe’s leaders to justify the costs they imposed on their people. So they turn to what they know best: new rounds of austerity —  backed by equal measures of obfuscation, deflection, and fantasy — to satisfy a renewed hunger for guns. 

This moment of illusions marks perhaps the most dangerous phase of Nato’s proxy war. Despite lacking the material power to sustain the killing, Europe is determined to prolong it. The next few months could very well see new rounds of provocations and dirty tricks designed to shroud the diplomatic table in an atmosphere of tension. That is one reason, of many, why I am holding my breath about the prospects of peace in Ukraine. Peace must come — but only on terms that do not embolden the snake. 

Europe’s left, it must be said, also bears responsibility. Too many within our ranks have become junior partners in the militarist frenzy, readily volunteering as shock troops in the ideological war. Even as Western imperialism enters a period of terminal decline, Europe’s left rejoices at the chance to join in the imperial chorus of moral condemnation against official enemies, lest they find their tenuous positions threatened by liberal opprobrium. Again and again, we fail at building the alliances with those resisting imperialism in the global South, writing our own irrelevance. Unserious politics produces unserious outcomes. 

It is time for clarity. The self-anointed “international community” is reduced to a dwindling number of bickering states tainted in the eyes of the world by their unwavering support for the holocaust in Gaza. But the European ruling class, gripped by a fierce glaucoma that increasingly blinds it to the world beyond Brussels or Berlin, insists on a place on the mantle of global leadership. And it is prepared to kill for it. Blindness is setting in, and time is running out. The left can no longer afford to play a supporting role in Europe’s empire of appearances — it is time to move with the grain of history.