Should the E.U. appoint and
send an envoy to Russia in spite of the fact that E.U. and state officials are
not of one mind on a strategy to pressure Russia’s head, Putin, to the
negotiating table to compromise? The power of the state governments at the federal
level complicates efforts by Commission officials to present Putin with a
specific list of sanctions because the governors are not on the same page even
after Viktor Orbán’s electoral defeat in April, 2026. Ironically, desperately
needed reforms to the E.U.’s federal system itself have been as politically
difficult even to propose as has getting Putin to the negotiating table.
Focusing on the latter while ignoring the former is a self-inflicted wound that
has weakened the Europeans on the world stage. Incidentally, another
self-inflicted state of denial involves assuming that such drastic cultural
differences exist between two small E.U. states, such as Denmark and the
Netherlands, while assuming that all of the U.S. states across a continent
and beyond are basically the same, culturally. Recently, a European, who is
actually a U.S. citizen, said as much to me! Denial is the main defense
mechanism in the E.U. Even painstaking effort to render this political
brain-sickness transparent is no match for the underlying ideological fervor
that has so severely enervated the European Union from becoming a more perfect
union.
The full essay is at "An E.U. Envoy to Russia."
