A Disgrace, Apparently
Ukraine's president said his country has the right to defend itself. Somewhere across an ocean, a strike was called "a disgrace." Which strike, by whom, in what order — these details change by the week. What does not change is the pattern: a democracy under invasion keeps needing to ask permission to be defended, from a partner who may answer differently depending on the news cycle.
This week also brought a quieter story that explains the louder one. A group of US senators is asking for an investigation into restrictions placed on Ukraine's access to Starlink — the satellite network that keeps its army connected, its hospitals online, its artillery coordinated. One company. One owner. One switch.
Ask yourself a simple question: would you build your house's electricity on a cable that your neighbour can unplug whenever he is in a bad mood? Most people would say no, not because the neighbour is necessarily unkind, but because a good arrangement should not depend on anyone's mood at all.
Neighbourliness Is a Habit, Not a Headline
Europe has spent seventy years building something unglamorous: treaties, courts, shared currencies, joint procurement rules, a parliament that argues in twenty-four languages and still passes laws. None of it trends. All of it is boring in exactly the way that good infrastructure is boring — you only notice it when it is missing.
Compare that to an alliance that depends on one man's approval of one general's decision on one particular Tuesday. The first kind of cooperation survives elections, scandals, even mediocre leaders, because the rules outlast the rulers. The second kind survives only as long as the mood holds.
This is not an argument against the United States, nor an invitation to smugness from Brussels, which has its own thickets of paperwork and its own talent for turning solidarity into a committee. It is an argument for a particular kind of maturity: institutions that do not require a benevolent strongman to function, because benevolence is not a form of government.
The Sea Does Not Ask Permission Either
Far from Kyiv, ship-attack reports near the Strait of Hormuz have reached a record high, and oil exports are slowing because of it. Few headlines connect a drone over a Ukrainian refinery to a tanker near Iran, but the connection is simple: when shared rules of the sea and shared rules of sovereignty weaken anywhere, the cost travels everywhere, in the price of fuel, in the fragility of supply chains, in the sense that no border is quite as settled as it looked last year.
Neighbourliness across borders was never meant to be a mood either. It was meant to be a set of agreements sturdy enough that a bad week in one capital does not reroute an ambulance in another.
What a Wiser Alliance Looks Like
So here is the standpoint, plainly stated: Europe — and any democracy that calls itself a neighbour rather than a client — should treat this moment as a prompt to build its own redundancy. Its own satellites if it must, its own defence production, its own capacity to say yes to Ukraine without first checking another country's weather forecast for outrage.
This is not anti-American sentiment. It is the same logic that makes a marriage healthier when both partners can pay the rent alone if they had to. Dependence dressed up as friendship is still dependence. Interdependence, chosen and reciprocal, is something sturdier — and it is the only kind of alliance that free peoples should be willing to bet a war on.
Trump may call a strike a disgrace today and something else tomorrow. Treaties, by design, are not supposed to have moods. That dullness is not a flaw in European cooperation. It is, quite possibly, the whole point.