Speaking after his meeting
with U.S. President Trump in Alaska during the summer of 2025, Russia’s
President Putin said that if no agreement is reached with Ukraine, the force of
arms would decide the matter. In other words, might makes right, or at least
military incursion is a legitimate way to decide political disputes between
countries. I would have hoped that such a primitive mentality would be
antiquated in the twentieth century, but, alas, human nature evolves only at a
glacial pace undetected within the lifespan of a human being. In September,
2025, the United Nations was under attack from within the General Assembly because
of the continuance of the veto held by five countries in the Security Council;
the U.S. had just vetoed a resolution for an immediate cession of Israeli
destruction in Gaza. As a former deputy secretary of the UN had admitted to me
during the fall of 2024, the veto itself renders the UN unreformable; a new
international organization would have to be established sans vetoes for
efficacy to be possible. Even so, absent a real enforcement mechanism, such as
a military force, a resolution even of a vetoless organization would merely be
parchment. The impotence of the UN is one reason why NATO, a defensive military
transatlantic alliance, has been valuable in the face of military threats by
Russia. Yet in September 2025, after Russian drones had flown into four E.U.
states, E.U. President Von der Leyen felt the need to take the lead by again stressing
her proposal for a drone wall along the E.U.’s eastern border; she was not
deferring to any international alliance, much less to the United Nations. I
submit that Von der Leyen’s initiative is yet another means by which the E.U.
can be distinguished from international “blocs,” alliances, and organizations. Unlike
the latter three, the E.U. has exclusive competencies and is thus
semi-sovereign (and the same goes for the state governments).
After “two or three large
drones were spotted at Copenhagen Airport,” which is in the E.U., on September
23, 2025, the E.U.’s Commission “called for a drone wall, a novel initiative
first unveiled by President Ursula von der Leyen” in her State of the Union
speech.[1]
“For those who still doubted the need to have a drone wall in the European
Union, well, here we get another example of how important it is,” a spokesman at
the Commission said.[2]
Why had not the Commission pursued this proposal in time to block the incursions
in August and September?
Euroskeptic, or
anti-federalist, Europeans, which included at least two governors at the time,
loathed the idea of federalizing defense (and foreign policy). Also, just as in
the early decades of the U.S., some state governments resisted the
federalization of “collective” debt. That the E.U.’s executive branch was “rolling
out a €150 billion loan programme to boost defence spending, which could be mobilized
to promote domestic production of drones,” represented to some governors a
giant leap on the way to a central federal state that would eventually encroach
on the state governments.[3]
This fear, by the way, is precisely what led several U.S. states to try to exit
the U.S. in 1861.
Whereas in the U.S., the state
government’s direct power at the federal level had been weakened when state
governments no longer appointed delegates to the U.S. Senate, E.U. state
governments could wield veto power over a significant number of proposed
federal laws and regulations. Whereas the U.S. state governments could no
longer adequately protect their turf against federal encroachment, the E.U.’s
federal governmental institutions could still be paralyzed by blocs of states
or even just one state. So, it is incredible that the Commission was able to act
on the incursions of drones once this had been in a north-western state (i.e.,
Denmark) to create a drone wall and issue significant “collective,” or federal
debt. Unlike international organizations, the E.U. has some governmental
sovereignty that had been delegated by the states, and this means that it is no
surprise that the E.U. rather than NATO or the UN would take action in the face
of Putin’s use of force of arms to decide the question of Ukraine. The problem
is that the Commission has too often been paralyzed by the state governors,
which is particularly damaging because the E.U. is not an international
organization, and those that existed as of 2025 could not be relied upon.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
