Here is my best guess what happened since January 2025: 1. Trump gets into office and makes Ukraine peace a top priority 2. Calls Putin and agrees on the basic outlines of a peace deal 3. Zelensky starts to play games with Trump and activates the EU "leaders". 4. Merz, Macron, Starmer and Ursula get excited and think "now we can play Trump". 5. They begin coordinating without Trump to escalate the war, including support for attacks inside Russia. They don't have a real strategy but follow their "petty little dictator" instincts. 6. Trump gets really pissed, but understands this is a serious situation and decides to not talk much about it. He also overextended himself bigly on Greenland, which was a mistake and created hard core resistance, especially with the Scandinavians. 7. Trump tones down the Greenland thing and negotiates behind the scenes with Denmark, which calms down the Scandies. 8. He then decides to play silent hardball against the EU: absolutely squeeze them on oil with Iran and sandwich them between Russia and the US, while also coordinating with Xi. Effectively, the absolutely dumb behavior of EU leaders have made them effectively enemies of Trump. He viewed them as feckless and weak before; now, he added "malicious" to the list. I do think Washington came to the conclusion that the EU leadership cannot be trusted at all, neither as partners nor as managers of Europe. The decision was made to absolutely crush and dismantle them. Let's see what happens next, but the Ukraine war is probably over soon. The AfD is likely going to take over Germany within the next 12-18 months with the help of CDU defectors, or a full-on coalition with the CDU as junior partner after the party cleanses itself from the Merz/Merkel loyalists. This change will be driven by a dramatic and exponential decay of the German (and other European) economies in the next 6 months or so, with winter coming, Russian energy drying up for them and the US squeezing them to death. This happens when you allow the most degenrate impulses in your society to elect a bunch of low IQ Karens to run the world's (formerly) most powerful economic block. "Muh Climate Change and Gender Equality" (in Sweden lol) wont't win you the war for energy and intelligence domination. On an ironic footnote: It's kind of funny Europe is losing the age of intelligence because its leaders are so unintelligent. To end on a positive note: Europe still has (by far) the greatest human potential on earth. But while the rest of the world tries to optimize its "progress per potential", European leaders actively suppress, destroy and dilute their populations. Once this stops and reverses, a European golden age (and in extension, a golden age of the greater West from Sydney to Vancouver) will follow. /Civ /Civilization