The Last March of the Simulation State
As multipolarity demands survival structures, the EU offers only ceremony and bluster.
"Farewell the neighing steed and the shrill trump,
The spirit-stirring drum, th' ear-piercing fife,
The royal banner, and all quality,
Pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war!"
— William Shakespeare, Othello (Act 3, Scene 3)
There are moments in history when ceremony lingers longer than the power it once announced. Institutions continue to wave their banners, draft their declarations, and summon their councils, believing that the rituals of unity can substitute for the reality of force. But reality, indifferent to pageantry, eventually asserts itself. Today, Europe stands at precisely such a threshold. Beneath the polished performances of summits and speeches, beneath the regulations and resolutions, the European Union reveals itself not as a civilizational actor but as a Simulation State—preserving the forms of sovereignty without its substance. The flags still ripple in the wind. The anthems still echo in the halls of Brussels. But the ground is shifting beneath the ceremony. And history, once again, demands more than pageantry.
But the performance belies the reality. Beneath the choreography, Europe has entered the post-sovereign condition—a realm where forms persist but power has fled, where process replaces purpose, and where ceremony becomes the final vestige of political identity.
The events unfolding around the Ukraine crisis make the illusion painfully clear. Brussels speaks of decisive action, of “turning points in history,” of €800 billion defense packages and nuclear umbrellas. "ReArm Europe" echo with the weight of historic mobilization—yet nothing real moves. Macron warns that Europe must prepare for life without American protection, but offers only rhetorical coalitions and dinner-table diplomacy. The European Council promises solidarity while member states fracture beneath the surface, some seeking escalation, others seeking exit.
What remains is not sovereignty. It is the spectacle of sovereignty—carefully curated, institutionally choreographed, and existentially empty.
The Simulation State, as revealed through the lens of Existential Imperative Realism, is not a failed system. It is a system perfected in the wrong era. It performs the gestures of governance, enforces the language of consensus, and manages appearances of unity—but it cannot respond to existential pressures that demand coercive recalibration, demographic hardening, or territorial defense.
Europe, once a civilization that conquered worlds and defined epochs, now governs like a procedural machine executing inherited scripts. It issues values without verifying their survival costs. It signs declarations without securing their conditions. It enforces conformity internally while outsourcing existential security externally. Its vision of the future remains anchored in 1991: a perpetual post-historical peace, guaranteed by American hard power and global economic integration.
But the world has moved on. The United States, under the slow pivot begun by Trump and now tacitly continued even under more traditional leadership, no longer promises unqualified strategic guardianship. Figures like JD Vance and Marco Rubio say openly what the structures themselves now reflect: the U.S. is consolidating around regional resilience, not global stewardship. Tariffs replace trade pacts. Strategic silence replaces ritual affirmations. Multipolarity is not approaching. It is here.
And still, the EU performs. It stages defense summits in Brussels and Paris as if declarations alone can repel tanks or silence drone swarms. It promises joint procurement programs as if pooled budget lines can substitute for industrial rearmament. It proclaims a new doctrine of peace through strength, yet cannot muster coherent force structures without American logistical frameworks. Its leaders draft plans for European security while prohibiting real discussion of demographic implosion, energy vulnerability, or internal cultural dissonance.
To govern without sovereignty is not merely to rule badly. It is to lose the ability to define reality at all. In this state, power is replaced by language, and survival by simulation.
The turning point Macron spoke of has indeed arrived. But it is not the turning toward a new European age of strength. It is the turning inward, toward a civilization retreating from existential assertion and burying its own contradictions beneath the ceremony of procedural governance.
The real actors in this new multipolar world—America, China, Russia, India—are not performers. They are realists, They tend to recalibrate, harden, and enter survival mode. Europe remains impressive only in its spectacle. In its current form it lacks in what matters—existential sovereignty.
Defining the Simulation State
The Simulation State is not a failed state. It is not anarchic, lawless, or collapsed. It is the opposite—rigid, performative, disciplined in its rituals. It governs with procedure, speaks with fluency, and projects legitimacy in the language of institutions. But it does not command reality. It does not project force. It does not adapt under existential pressure. It simulates power, but it does not generate it.
This distinction is critical in the age of civilizational reformation. As great powers revert to hardened survival structures—securing borders, reshoring industry, asserting identity—the Simulation State remains suspended in a framework of post-historical managerialism. It was born in the liberal interregnum between Cold War and multipolarity, when appearance and consensus were mistaken for substance and alignment. Its core belief: that governance is a matter of performance, not pressure.
The European Union is the premier example. It hosts summits, enforces digital regulations, mandates diversity targets, and standardizes carbon limits. But it cannot defend its eastern border without American troops, cannot maintain its industrial base without imported energy, and cannot reproduce its demographic core without mass immigration. When faced with existential stress—such as Russia's invasion of Ukraine—it reacts not by generating its own power, but by redistributing the emotional and financial costs of war while still relying on the U.S. to lead the actual fight.
One does not have to look far for examples of this dynamic. Consider the €800 billion “ReArm Europe” proposal announced by Ursula von der Leyen—a bold numerical headline designed to simulate wartime urgency. Yet what does it entail? Loosening deficit rules to permit more national debt. Redirecting EU cohesion funds from economic development to defense investment. And encouraging joint procurement to stimulate European arms production. But these are financial mechanisms, not existential recalibrations. Germany, the bloc’s economic core, still refuses to meet its basic NATO spending obligations. France offers rhetoric and dinner diplomacy, not tanks. And Hungary and Slovakia resist the entire premise, viewing escalation as suicide rather than strategy.
The Simulation State is not limited to Europe. One sees fragments of its logic embedded in U.S. domestic bureaucracies, particularly in institutions captured by procedural politics: academic credentialism that no longer generates knowledge, HR governance structures that suppress internal dissent while accelerating internal decay, or intelligence agencies that project power inward against domestic political opponents while failing to anticipate foreign disruption.
But Europe’s supranational structure is unique in its purity. It was never designed to be a nation-state. It does not contain a demos, a shared mythos, or a military doctrine. It was built to harmonize, not to survive. And in the age of rising civilization-states—China with its digital sovereignty and population control; India with its long-view demographic policy and cultural fusion; Russia with its hardened territorial realism; and now the United States, which is beginning to rediscover its continental identity—the EU remains trapped in simulation.
Simulation is not deception. It is the unconscious continuation of rituals once anchored to force. The European Commission can still issue press releases about “European values” and “security solidarity,” but these proclamations are not backed by force generation or energy independence. They are statements meant to preserve the idea of Europe, not the survival of it.
When Zelensky walks into the summit chamber in Brussels, he arrives in search of real support: arms, manpower, deterrence. What he finds is narrative, bureaucracy, and applause. Macron declares a turning point in history, and offers a nuclear umbrella—a symbolic gesture that, without consensus or logistics, is neither umbrella nor doctrine. The UK now negotiates independently with the U.S. over intelligence sharing, bypassing Brussels altogether. Washington pauses aid. Berlin hesitates. Orban abstains.
The simulation continues. But the power has moved on. This is the defining feature of the Simulation State: it exists to preserve the symbols of legitimacy even after it has lost the instruments of survival. It does not fail like a fragile state. It lingers. It manages. It curates. It writes itself into the footnotes of history until the world stops citing it.
To mistake this condition for irrelevance is a misunderstanding. Simulation states are dangerous not because they collapse—but because they persist long enough to obstruct recalibration. They perform governance in a way that inhibits the emergence of new structures. They suppress dissent not to protect the population, but to protect the narrative. They do not seek clarity. They seek continuity. And continuity, without coherence, becomes the enemy of survival.
Europe as Archetype
Of all governing bodies in the postwar order, the European Union represents the most complete form of the Simulation State. It is not just the pioneer of proceduralism. It is the perfection of it. No other entity has so successfully transformed the logic of survival into the language of continuity—governing not by force or myth, but by ritual, regulation, and moralized bureaucracy.
The European Union has no military core. It has no coherent cultural identity. Its borders are porous by design, its population in decline by statistical fact, and its strategic relevance—now that the American umbrella is closing—openly contested even by its own members. Yet its institutions still speak as if it is sovereign. This is the essence of simulation: the ability to perform authority after authority has left the building.
Von der Leyen’s recent announcement of the €800 billion “ReArm Europe” initiative is illustrative. On paper, it’s a wartime plan. In reality, it’s an economic stimulus dressed as a defense doctrine—one that hinges not on mobilization or sacrifice, but on budget flexibility, joint procurement schemes, and industrial coordination. It is not strategy. It is managerial compensation for the absence of strategic will.
Meanwhile, Emmanuel Macron's speech warning that Europe must prepare for a world without American protection was delivered with Churchillian solemnity—but followed by little more than diplomatic theater: invitations to Viktor Orban for late-night dinners, promises of nuclear umbrellas without delivery systems, and meetings of army chiefs with no common army. The rhetoric is urgent. The response is ritual.
This is not to say that Europe lacks nations with strategic awareness. Eastern Europe—particularly Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia—has shown signs of Realist recalibration. Poland, recognizing the United States as its sole security guarantor, is pursuing direct bilateral military integration. Hungary and Slovakia, more hesitant to embrace Brussels’ ideological escalation, are calling for negotiated settlement rather than war prolongation in Ukraine. Even France, beneath its performative layer, hints at some flicker of civilizational instinct. But these impulses remain suppressed within the broader EU framework, which is engineered to resist existential recalibration in favor of legal continuity.
This structural misalignment becomes catastrophic in moments of pressure. In times of peace, the EU’s design appears elegant: a continental legal system without a coercive core, a diplomatic bloc without a singular voice, a trade zone without a culture. But in war—or the threat of it—that elegance reveals itself as fragility. The EU cannot secure its eastern flank without American troops. It cannot produce energy without Russian supply, expensive American LNG, or Middle Eastern imports. It cannot maintain technological sovereignty without Chinese rare earths or American semiconductors. It cannot replace its population without massive immigration—immigration that increasingly imports cultural values in conflict with the postmodern European ideal.
And yet, instead of confronting these fractures, Europe represses them. The demographic crisis is addressed not with natalist policy but with public silence. Cultural dissonance in cities like Malmö, Paris, and Berlin is explained away as a failure of integration rather than as a symptom of irreconcilable imperatives. Civilizational anxiety is reframed as extremism. National loyalty is dismissed as populism. Strategic realism is derided as regression. The simulation must be maintained—even as the data undermines its narrative.
This is why the European Union is not merely failing—it is obstructing its own survival. It cannot become a civilization-state, because it denies the very ingredients of civilization: territorial defense, reproductive continuity, cultural coherence, and energy sovereignty. It cannot dissolve either, because its bureaucratic architecture is self-reinforcing. It exists to preserve itself, not its constituents. And in doing so, it drags its member nations into a theater of paralysis—performing governance while suppressing recalibration.
Ukraine has become the stage on which this contradiction plays out in full view. Zelensky, still pleading for unity and victory, stands on a platform of moral symbolism. But the EU cannot give him what he wants, because it no longer possesses the reality he is asking for. It can offer sanctions, applause, and legal frameworks. But it cannot wage war. It cannot hold territory. It cannot deter Russia without the U.S., and the U.S. is leaving.
In this sense, the EU has become not merely irrelevant, but dangerous to itself. It insists on post-sovereign ideals in a world returning to pre-modern realities. It enforces ideological cohesion while neglecting existential alignment. It is, in the truest EIR sense, a structure misaligned with its environment—unable to adapt, unwilling to collapse, and structurally incapable of surviving without external force.
That force—American protection—is receding. And as it goes, the Simulation State finds itself exposed.
The U.S. Pivot and the Collapse of the Subsidy
For decades, the European simulation was sustainable because it was subsidized. American security, American deterrence, American intelligence, and American wealth underwrote the European experiment in post-sovereign governance. Europe could afford to outsource war, energy, and cultural reproduction because someone else guaranteed the conditions in which simulation could replace survival. That era is ending.
The pivot did not happen all at once. It began with tremors—grumblings about NATO burden-sharing under George W. Bush, sharper accusations under Barack Obama, open confrontation under Donald Trump, and now, under the second Trump administration, the first real strategic abandonment. What had once been whispered by Pentagon analysts is now said openly by elected officials: the United States no longer views subsidizing European security as a core existential interest.
The signs are everywhere. Trump’s announcement to suspend military aid to Ukraine is not a tactical bargaining move. It is a civilizational signal. Washington no longer regards Ukraine as the frontline of its own security, but as a European problem requiring a European solution. JD Vance’s public statements—that Europe must “step up and defend itself”—are not personal opinions. They are reflections of the new strategic doctrine emerging within the American core.
Marco Rubio, once a staunch Atlanticist, now speaks in openly multipolar language, recognizing that the U.S. cannot afford to manage every theatre indefinitely. Even voices once seen as moderating influences, like Jeffrey Sachs, now frame the U.S. posture not as world manager, but as regional operator—securing its hemisphere, rebuilding internal sovereignty, and engaging externally only where existential interests are clear and direct. This is not isolationism. It is civilizational recalibration.
The United States is beginning to reconstitute itself as a continental power—fortifying its industrial base with the CHIPS Act, insulating its food and energy systems through strategic deregulation, imposing global tariffs to end dependency chains, and reasserting immigration control not as a matter of economics, but as a matter of national coherence. It is, slowly and imperfectly, abandoning the post-Cold War dream of liberal empire in favor of hemispheric fortification.
In EIR terms, the United States is attempting to realign its structure with its imperatives. The Simulation State model—outsourcing core survival functions while performing global leadership—is no longer viable under internal demographic, economic, and technological pressure. This leaves Europe exposed.
For decades, NATO was the shield behind which Europe performed post-national diplomacy. American intelligence protected European borders while European elites debated borderlessness. American nuclear forces deterred Russian aggression while European leaders disarmed morally and materially. American industrial and energy dominance allowed Europe to overregulate its own industries into ritualized decline without facing immediate collapse.
Now, as the subsidy retracts, Europe is discovering that it possesses none of the organs necessary for survival: no territorial army ready for existential war, no cohesive energy policy capable of sustaining its industry, no demographic vitality to regenerate its civilization, and no spiritual confidence to rally its population under existential stress.
The “ReArm Europe” plan announced in Brussels is a bureaucratic attempt to simulate what no longer exists—a continent ready to assume full sovereignty without the instincts, structures, or cohesion required to do so. Loans and deficit exemptions cannot replace factories, soldiers, or will.
The irony is sharp. Macron warns of a “turning point in history,” but continues to operate within the procedural theater that guaranteed this outcome. Von der Leyen calls for “unleashing Europe’s industrial potential,” while presiding over regulations that strangled it in peacetime. Germany hints at nuclear sharing, but cannot commit to rearmament without coalition collapse. Britain, once the imperial bastion of maritime realism, now negotiates separately from Brussels to secure American intelligence feeds, acknowledging the collapse of the Atlanticist dream even as it clings to its symbolism.
The European security order was a performance staged under American protection.
That protection is fading and the Simulation State cannot survive the exposure. The subsidy was not simply material—it was existential. It allowed Europe to pretend that survival was automatic, that history had ended, that civilization could be managed like a regulatory framework. Now the imperatives are returning. Scarcity. Conflict. Demographic tension. Ideological hardening. Sovereignty.
The United States has made its choice. It will no longer underwrite the simulation. Europe must now choose: recalibrate—or dissolve.
Multipolarity and the Death of Simulation
The post-Cold War illusion that international institutions and shared liberal values could govern the globe was always sustained by the absence of credible alternatives. While the United States functioned as the world's unipolar guarantor, and Europe basked in its curated peace, the performance of global governance systems seemed plausible. Power was centralized, the rules were stable, and dissenting actors—whether Russia, China, or Islamic states—could be safely framed as outliers rather than emerging poles of competition.
This was the world in which the Simulation State thrived. Its function was not to enforce existential alignment, but to maintain the illusion of consensus. NGOs, supranational organizations, and elite bureaucracies became the custodians of ritual: issuing reports, hosting summits, developing “action frameworks” and “shared standards.” Their relevance depended not on their capacity to project force or manage material scarcity, but on their ability to anchor narrative continuity within a system that was structurally subsidized by unipolar power.
Multipolarity has destroyed that equilibrium, not in a dramatic rupture, but through cumulative erosion. As China built its digital sovereignty and re-engineered global infrastructure under the Belt and Road Initiative, as Russia reasserted its role through territorial pressure and ideological endurance, and as India emerged as a civilizational wildcard capable of balancing between spheres without ideological attachment, the illusion of Western universalism began to collapse. Today, there is no single center of power—only civilizational cores, each increasingly defined not by their belief in universal values, but by the durability of their internal structure under stress.
Within this environment, Simulation States can no longer perform meaningfully because the conditions that allowed simulation to substitute for survival have disappeared. In the absence of uncontested global legitimacy, legitimacy must now be derived from the alignment between internal structure and external threat. States must possess coherence, deterrence, sovereignty, and redundancy. Those that do not possess these qualities cannot compete as equals. And those that continue to perform without recalibrating become liabilities—both to themselves and to their former patrons.
The European Union, which once imagined itself as the moral center of a post-national world order, now faces the full consequence of this shift. It cannot project meaningful force. It cannot independently secure its population or economy. It cannot regulate its own information environment without triggering popular backlash, nor manage its borders without violating its founding principles. Its declarations of unity ring hollow in the face of existential divergence, and its institutional outputs are increasingly bypassed by nation-states acting on their own imperatives.
The emergence of multipolarity does not merely marginalize the EU as an actor—it actively undermines the simulation model on which it depends. In a world where China enforces ideological conformity through AI surveillance and social credit systems, where Russia weaponizes energy and culture to maintain loyalty within its sphere, and where the United States retreats into its own hemisphere while rebuilding its manufacturing and military capacity, there is little room left for institutions that neither govern nor protect.
Moreover, multipolarity renders simulation politically toxic. Populations under stress seek clarity, not performance. They demand results, not rituals. In the absence of coherent direction, simulation increasingly appears not as technocratic neutrality, but as elite evasion. The ceremonies of the simulation class—their language codes, regulatory frameworks, and consensus documents—become symbols of weakness, disconnection, and decay.
This is why Europe’s current attempt to reframe its role as a defense actor through financial packages and moral declarations feels fundamentally dissonant. It is not the content of the initiatives that fails, but their architecture. Europe proposes more integration, more pooled procurement, more institutional complexity—believing that simulation, refined and expanded, will produce sovereignty by accumulation. But sovereignty cannot be simulated. It must be enacted through control over territory, resources, population, and production. Without these levers, Europe cannot lead. It can only mediate its own decline.
Meanwhile, multipolar actors are building with very different assumptions. They are not pursuing consensus. They are securing imperatives. China does not seek moral affirmation from international bodies; it seeks dominance in critical infrastructure, energy corridors, and narrative sovereignty. Russia no longer performs diplomatic credibility; it asserts presence, endures pressure, and maintains internal cohesion through cultural and spiritual fortification. Even America, which for decades pursued the illusion of liberal globalism, is now drawing lines around what it can preserve and what it must release.
In this landscape, simulation is not a neutral strategy—it is a form of disarmament. To continue performing without recalibrating is to expose oneself to encirclement, dependency, and irrelevance. The Simulation State cannot survive multipolarity because multipolarity demands real power, not institutional choreography.
Europe has not yet internalized this truth. It still believes that its moral vocabulary, its treaties, and its rules-based order carry binding force. But these tools no longer shape outcomes. They shape language. And the language no longer governs the world.
As new civilizational states assert their imperatives, simulation must give way to strategy. And institutions that refuse to adapt will not be attacked. They will be ignored.
The Fork in Europe’s Future
Europe now stands at a threshold it was never structurally prepared to confront. It can no longer coast on the subsidies of unipolarity, nor can it summon the internal cohesion necessary to dictate its own destiny without external scaffolding. The Simulation State model has carried it as far as the absence of existential pressure allowed. But in a world where survival is once again contingent on sovereignty, Europe must face the reality it spent three decades circumventing: either it adapts into a coherent civilizational actor—or it dissolves into managed irrelevance.
Analyses of Europe's wartime industrial performance suggest that the Simulation State's weaknesses are no longer hypothetical. In "Winning the Industrial War," researchers conclude that Europe remains critically unprepared for industrial-scale conflict, relying on boutique defense models and fragile logistics chains unsuitable for existential contests. Even with rearmament plans, the gap between Europe's simulated sovereignty and its material capabilities continues to widen. Without radical recalibration—territorial, demographic, and industrial—the Simulation State cannot survive the strategic climate multipolarity has now imposed.
The first path, the path of civilizational reconstitution, demands a transformation of existential magnitude. It would require the European Union to abandon the comforting rituals of procedural liberalism and instead forge the pillars of a hard survival system: a unified territorial defense command, a sovereign energy strategy insulated from external coercion, a demographic renewal project rooted in cultural coherence, and a re-industrialization program capable of sustaining military and economic autonomy without reliance on distant powers.
It would also require a reckoning with ideological taboos long treated as sacred: that multiculturalism, as it has been practiced, has not secured cohesion; that secular cosmopolitanism, while emancipating in theory, has failed to reproduce the demographic foundations of survival; that institutional moralism, without force projection, does not prevent war but merely invites it. To pursue civilizational reconstitution would mean embracing the hard, often brutal realities that Europe abandoned after 1945—territory, blood, identity, faith, and will to endure.
There are embryonic signs of this instinct emerging, but they remain marginalized and suppressed by the institutional inertia of the Simulation State. Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia have already recalibrated partially toward civilizational thinking: prioritizing border integrity, cultural self-preservation, and realist engagement with external threats. Even Macron, for all his rhetorical theatrics, has begun gesturing toward the necessity of European nuclear sovereignty and continental military readiness. But these impulses remain isolated, sporadic, and politically dangerous to articulate fully within the dominant structures of the EU, which continue to view sovereignty through the lens of moral suspicion rather than survival logic.
The second path, more probable but far more precarious, is managed fragmentation. Under this scenario, Europe acknowledges its inability to function as a unified actor and begins a slow process of internal differentiation. Eastern Europe would harden into an American-oriented defensive frontier, aligned by necessity rather than love. Western Europe, led by Germany and France, would retreat into regulatory spheres focused on financial services, green technology governance, and soft-power diplomacy. Southern Europe would drift toward regional economic coalitions, seeking energy security and trade flows with North Africa and Latin America. The Scandinavian states, having abandoned neutrality for NATO integration, would anchor themselves within a smaller, militarized northern bloc.
Fragmentation would not mean immediate collapse. It would mean the erosion of pan-European ambitions into smaller, culturally and economically coherent units, capable of survival in a limited scope but incapable of projecting continental authority. The EU would persist bureaucratically, but as a legal-financial consortium rather than as a strategic actor. In many ways, it would become what it already is becoming—a clearinghouse for regulatory standards, investment coordination, and internal subsidy redistribution, rather than a source of geopolitical initiative.
The third path, the path Europe appears most likely to stumble into by default, is ceremonial irrelevance. In this outcome, the EU doubles down on simulation even as its strategic environment demands recalibration. It continues issuing statements, hosting summits, passing resolutions, and celebrating integration milestones while its material capacity to shape events withers. It would remain a museum of liberal cosmopolitan ideals, curated by aging managerial classes who no longer command the loyalty of their populations nor the fear of their adversaries. Over time, as real power structures—civilizational states like the U.S., China, Russia, and India—determine the shape of the global order, Europe would be gradually marginalized, consulted occasionally for optics but excluded from decisions of consequence.
This is not a path that leads to spectacular collapse. It is a path that leads to irrelevance through ritual. Europe would become a continent of enclaves and exhibitions, preserved as a symbolic achievement of postwar idealism but ultimately disconnected from the mechanisms of real survival.
The new multipolar environment, as recognized even by mainstream strategic planners, rewards only those actors who can secure their own imperatives without external scaffolding. As the Belfer Center notes, the rising alignments between Russia, China, Iran, and other powers place Europe in an environment of existential pressure it is ill-prepared to endure. Simulation states that rely on bureaucratic rituals, rather than existential recalibration, are treated not as peers—but as afterthoughts. Multipolarity is not managed through ceremonies of consensus. It is governed through structural survival.
The choice between these futures is narrowing. The time for theoretical debate has passed. Existential Imperative Realism makes clear that in the presence of structural pressure, systems either adapt, fragment, or are bypassed. Simulation cannot substitute for power. Identity cannot be negotiated indefinitely. Sovereignty cannot be outsourced forever.
Conclusion — Simulation Cannot Survive Multipolarity
There was a time when simulation could mask structural fragility. When appearances, policies, and rhetorical performance could maintain the illusion of sovereignty so long as the real engines of power—military deterrence, demographic vitality, and energy autonomy—were outsourced or temporarily suspended. For a generation, the European Union lived inside that window. It refined its symbolism, harmonized its regulations, expanded its institutions, and convinced itself that the performance was the power.
But the logic of the world has shifted. And simulation cannot survive inside the atmosphere of multipolarity.
In a unipolar order sustained by a single hegemon, systems could exist that neither produced their own security nor generated their own imperatives. The EU, along with many supranational and NGO-led institutions, operated under this borrowed umbrella, presiding over a landscape in which force was assumed and danger was managed. But multipolarity reintroduces volatility, asymmetry, and raw existential competition. It rewards coherence and punishes abstraction. It selects for systems that can endure scarcity, conflict, and civilizational pressure—not systems that perform virtue while suppressing their contradictions.
The Simulation State, by definition, is not equipped for this environment. It is built for ceremonial continuity, not survival. It excels at protocol, consensus, and narrative curation. But it cannot reindustrialize, rearm, or repopulate itself. It cannot control its borders, command loyalty, or project deterrence. It speaks with elegance while others prepare for war. It debates morality while others enforce reality.
Europe now stands at the end of this historical illusion. With the American subsidy collapsing, with Russia entrenched, with China assertive, and with the United States itself reverting toward civilizational consolidation, the Simulation State can no longer claim strategic centrality. It has no leverage in the emerging order because it has no imperatives of its own. Its institutions still govern the flow of regulation, but they no longer command outcomes. Its leaders still speak of unity, but their nations move in opposite directions. Its declarations are still issued, but fewer are listening—and even fewer are complying.
The post-sovereign ideal, once treated as an evolutionary endpoint, now appears as a brief interlude—an experiment possible only under the conditions of global protection, energy abundance, and ideological monopoly. Those conditions are gone. And without them, the only structures that can persist are those rooted in the imperatives that define existence itself: security, cohesion, fertility, territory, and sovereignty.
Multipolarity does not permit simulated power. It is not managed by rituals. It does not defer to credentialed language. It is a system governed by actors who align their internal systems with their external environments—who respond to stress not with declarations, but with transformation.
If Europe wishes to endure as a strategic actor in this emerging world, it must let go of the performance. It must shed the simulation. It must become again what it has not dared to be in decades: a civilization capable of defending its body, its borders, and its belief in its right to continue existing.
History has returned. Multipolarity has settled in. And in this new order, the Civilization State is the sovereign—the Simulation State is the fool.
Sources Consulted:
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, A New Transatlantic Bargain (2025).
RUSI, Winning the Industrial War: Comparing Russia, Europe, and Ukraine, 2022–2024 (2024).