How does Washington View Permanent Confrontation?

This diagnosis is less a prediction than a strategic self-assessment — a window into how Washington’s foreign policy establishment now understands the world it has helped create.

An Architecture in Ruins

First, the authors assume that the security architecture built laboriously after 1991 has been irreversibly destroyed. The NATO-Russia Council is considered effectively dead. The OSCE, once the continent’s primary forum for conflict prevention, has been largely gutted. The dense web of economic ties between the EU and Russia — built over decades and underpinning everything from German industrial supply chains to Southern European energy grids — has been systematically dismantled. Communication channels are reduced to bare formality, and trust is destroyed at every level, from diplomatic to military. The situation is no longer defined as a crisis, but as the new normal.

No Internal Collapse of Russia

Secondly, the analysis openly acknowledges that Russia will not collapse politically or economically even in the event of military defeat. The expectation of internal collapse — on which many Western strategies have implicitly relied, and which has shaped sanctions policy since 2022 — is described as unrealistic. Russia has reorganized its economy around war production, cultivated alternative trade relationships with China, India, and the Gulf states, and shown a capacity to absorb punishment that confounds earlier projections. This means the West is preparing for sustained competition, not for the transformation or liberalization of Russia. The Cold War logic of waiting for an adversary to implode has been quietly abandoned.

Thirdly, the analysis describes a parallel development unfolding across the continent: the EU is systematically remilitarizing, while Russia is reorganizing its military and economic resources for the long term. Defense spending is rising sharply across NATO’s European members. Industrial policy is being redirected toward ammunition production, defense procurement, and strategic autonomy. The central question, as the authors frame it, is no longer whether a future conflict is possible, but when and under what conditions it can be controlled.

The EU’s Energy Dilemma

Nowhere is the structural cost of this new confrontation more visible than in European energy policy. The rupture with Russian gas — accelerated by the sabotage of Nord Stream and compounded by successive rounds of sanctions — forced Europe into a scramble for alternative supplies. Qatar briefly emerged as a potential anchor supplier, but the Gulf state’s own geopolitical calculations have now called long-term contracts into question. Spot LNG markets have partly filled the gap, but at prices that have structurally disadvantaged European industry relative to American and Asian competitors. Germany’s industrial heartland — built on the assumption of affordable Russian energy — faces a competitiveness crisis that no policy package has yet resolved. The energy dilemma is not merely economic. It illustrates how deeply the break with Russia has reached into the foundations of the European model itself.

The Gray Zone and Transatlantic Fear

It is noteworthy that a direct Russian attack on NATO is considered unlikely by the Foreign Affairs authors. The real risk lies in what strategists call the “gray zone”: hybrid operations, cyberattacks, political interference, military incidents, and escalation on the alliance’s fringes. Belarus, Georgia, and Moldova are cited as potential flashpoints. The danger, from a Western perspective, lies less in deliberate planning than in the uncontrollable dynamics that crises in these spaces can generate.

At the same time, the core fear is clearly identified: a disintegration of the transatlantic alliance. From this follows the central strategic priority — keeping the United States permanently anchored in Europe. The proposed combination is the militarization of Europe, limited but maintained communication channels with Moscow, and the gradual integration of post-Soviet states into EU structures. The goal is not détente, but a controlled confrontation below the nuclear threshold.

Missing Framework

Herein lies the fundamental contradiction. The alleged “irreversibility” of the rupture is presented as objective reality, even though it is the result of political decisions made between 2022 and 2025. Institutions don’t disintegrate on their own. They are dismantled. And what has been destroyed politically can, in principle, be rebuilt politically.

Even more serious is the normative premise running beneath the analysis: that Russia should have no legitimate say in its immediate neighborhood. This eliminates any room for compromise, because any recognition of Russian interests is framed as capitulation. What remains is a pure logic of power without a viable model for a stable European order.

A realistic approach would require acknowledging that all actors possess legitimate interests, and that stability arises only from their balance. Without that premise, conflict is structurally reproduced regardless of the military outcome in Ukraine.

For Europe, this marks a turning point. The continent is moving toward a long-term security economy in which rearmament, industrial mobilization, and geopolitical bloc formation become the new foundations of political legitimacy. A sustained confrontation is not inevitable. It is a strategic choice. And every choice has alternatives — alternatives that are, for now, barely being discussed.