This summer’s screen Odyssey ends with Ulysses admitting that the victory never tasted like one. Troy did not end an order. It made plain that the order had already ended.
Europe now blames Putin for shattering the rules-based order and Trump for dismantling what remains of it. Both charges are fair, but also convenient: if the fires are the problem, firefighting is the answer.
And Europe has become very good at firefighting. The euro survived, NextGenerationEU broke taboos, sanctions held. But each rescue proves the system works and defers the question of why it keeps needing rescuing. Crisis competence has become the alibi for structural drift.
The vulnerabilities are not new: strategic dependence without alternatives, decision-making that cannot turn shared interests into common action, democratic foundations eroding from within and no strategy for a world that no longer arranges itself in Europe's favour. They are what made Ukraine possible and what leaves Europe improvising in the face of Washington.
Von der Leyen's upcoming State of the Union should therefore be measured not by how many storms Europe has weathered, but how much less exposed each one has left it.
Putin may be defeated, and Trump will eventually leave office. Europe could win both contests and still return, like the Greeks, to a world it no longer recognises, and no longer shapes.
Corina Stratulat is Associate Director and Head of the European Politics and Institutions Programme
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