Donald Trump and his administration’s haphazard approach to alliance discipline, strategic continuity, and the maintenance of American primacy supplied the final lesson: Europe can no longer rely on the American security order.
Sweden, and Europe more broadly, may yet create something beautiful out of the Ukrainian war: a client state worth keeping, and a cornerstone in a new era of European-controlled spheres of influence. Serious powers do not expend resources for isolated effects. A weapons transfer should not merely strengthen a client state in the field. It should bind that client state to Europe through spare-parts dependency, training pipelines, software control, doctrinal alignment, maintenance contracts, intelligence interfaces, and future procurement habits.
Reconstruction, once the Russian threat has been sufficiently managed, should not merely rebuild. It should define the essential features of a new state configuration: the foundations of a protectorate in all but name. That means deciding who lends, who rebuilds, who arbitrates, who insures, who teaches, and who writes the history books. Education, no less than infrastructure, must be instrumentalised as part of the client state’s long-term orientation. An instrument that produces only one result is either broken or poorly designed.
Georgia should have been enough. Ukraine should have removed all doubt. Donald Trump, President of the United States, and his administration’s haphazard approach to alliance discipline, strategic continuity, and the maintenance of American primacy supplied the final lesson: Europe can no longer rely on the American security order, nor pretend that its inherited form will survive merely because Europeans find the alternative too unpleasant to contemplate. At that point the liberal vocabulary should have been retired. It was not. That failure still governs much of Europe’s external language.
I therefore use the term soft power here in stripped-down realpolitik terms, not in the liberal language of attraction and moral aspiration, which rests on a wilful refusal to confront the human condition. Within the framework that I deliver, soft power no longer means attraction, prestige, or the passive diffusion of values beneath a stable international canopy. Instead, the term comes to mean something significantly more honest: a continuous hybrid mechanism of control, employing finance, regulation, training, infrastructure, education, elite cultivation, narrative management, and selective dependency to construct a durable relationship between metropole and client state, and to maintain that relationship below the threshold of open occupation.
Liberal dogma has to be stripped out of Europe’s external-facing language. It is the idiom of those who moralise because they cannot compel, and who mistake packaging for machinery. The strong act first and moralise later, once command and control are already in place. Europe has spent too long doing the reverse.
The world has returned to a simpler grammar: capital, production, coercion, organised force, and the ability to arrange political space around oneself. Europe therefore faces a plain choice. It can become a power that governs its own realm, or it can remain a rich but strategically unserious inheritance, too weak to order its neighbourhood and too wealthy to be left alone by others.
Dominion is not a dirty word. It is merely the honest description of what durable powers seek in the zones nearest to them. A serious power does not want unconstrained neighbours. It wants neighbours whose room for manoeuvre is narrowed, whose elites calculate inside its framework, whose industries depend on its markets, whose officer corps trains to its standards, and whose governing class learns that continuity is safest when aligned with its interests. This need not be announced. It only needs to be built.
Soft power is the preferred instrument because it is cheaper than war, less visible than coercion, and often more durable than either. Annexation creates resistance. Dependency creates habit. Occupation invites hatred. Interoperability invites invoices. Standards, maintenance contracts, procurement chains, credit lines, educational systems, and infrastructure finance often produce the same political result at lower cost and with less melodrama. The ideal client state does not feel conquered. It feels modernised, protected, funded, and included.
“The law of force governs the world.” — Ludwig von Rochau
What should Europe do?
First, Europe must build layered military dependence. Not declarations, but systems. Ammunition compatibility. Maintenance monopolies. Air defence integration. Officer education. Intelligence-sharing architectures with asymmetric access. Secure communications. Joint logistics. Software locks. Battlefield medicine. Spare-parts chains. Drone doctrine. Electronic warfare standards. The purpose is not solidarity in the abstract. It is to make separation technically, financially, and operationally painful. A state whose armed forces cannot function efficiently without European inputs is a state already pulled inside Europe’s effective sphere.
Second, Europe must treat reconstruction as a strategic instrument, not a humanitarian afterthought. Post-war rebuilding should decide ownership patterns, insurance markets, banking channels, transport corridors, industrial contracts, arbitration forums, labour certification, and debt relations. The party that rebuilds does not merely restore. It writes the operating manual for the next phase of sovereignty. Reconstruction is the most polite form of conquest available to modern powers. It should be used accordingly.
Third, Europe must cultivate administrative capture. This matters more than speeches and often more than elections. Ministries, regulators, customs services, central banks, public procurement offices, and judicial training pipelines determine how a state actually behaves once slogans fade. Scholarships and policy exchanges are not cultural niceties. They are recruitment systems. The next generation of deputy ministers, central bankers, military planners, anti-corruption commissioners, telecom regulators, and constitutional lawyers should be trained inside European assumptions long before they hold office. Once installed, they will reproduce the architecture voluntarily.
Fourth, Europe must weaponise standards more deliberately. Regulation is not mere governance. It is low-visibility power projection. Compliance regimes can exclude rivals, redirect investment, lock in technologies, and create quiet but durable dependency. This is one of the few instruments Europe already understands, and it still understates it in public as though embarrassed by its own competence. It should stop apologising and start integrating standards into a larger bloc-building strategy tied to procurement, finance, digital infrastructure, and legal access.
Fifth, Europe must differentiate access. Market entry, visa regimes, education opportunities, labour mobility, infrastructure financing, and security cooperation should all become conditional tools of ranking and discipline. Reward alignment. Delay or narrow benefits for recalcitrant actors. Do not subsidise ambiguity indefinitely. Any system that offers equal rewards to aligned and unaligned elites teaches the wrong lesson and purchases its own future sabotage.
Sixth, Europe must learn to work through factions rather than pretending societies are unitary moral subjects. In every peripheral state there are networks, clans, regions, ministries, officer groups, business blocs, media circuits, churches, universities, and security services competing for position. Work with the ambitious, not the eloquent. Work with those who can deliver machinery, access, and continuity. Sentimental attachment to procedural symmetry is a luxury. Influence is built through unequal relationships with unequal actors.
Seventh, Europe must relearn denial. Not every neighbouring state needs to be transformed into a showcase. Some need only to be kept from falling fully into rival hands. A corridor denied to Moscow, Beijing, Ankara, Washington, or a Gulf capital can be a success even if it is not elegant. Strategy is often negative. Preventing adverse consolidation is frequently more important than achieving full alignment. A power that insists on perfection will lose workable positions while waiting for ideal ones.
This approach is simply a recognition of how things work and what competent statecraft entails. A weak Europe cannot save Ukraine. It cannot save itself. Only a Europe willing to construct strength as part of its architecture can shape the space around it.
“A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.” — Henry Kissinger
Ukraine should be the laboratory for this exercise, with the aim of becoming a model client. The process has already begun. Weapons transfers create interoperability; training produces doctrinal dependence. Maintenance and reconstruction generate reliance beneath a veil of ownership. Lines of credit, if structured with sufficient care to avoid the Romanian lessons of old, can ensure that the country feels itself to be prospering, while learning to experience westernisation not merely as aspiration but as patronage, and therefore as leverage. Shared intelligence structures produce a state that cannot operate without context, framing, and narrative supplied by the metropole, while the elite formed within the reconfigured order will know no other political life than the one created for it. That is how durable preference is made. This is how modern clientage is built among states that dislike hearing the word.
The same logic applies elsewhere: the Balkans, the Eastern neighbourhood, the Mediterranean approaches, selected African corridors, and the logistical belt tied to European prosperity. Aid should orient. Investment should bind. Security assistance should purchase future obedience. Infrastructure should channel dependency in the correct direction. Anything less is self-humiliation disguised as generosity.
Europe still possesses the means to behave seriously. It has the money, the market, the legal reach, the industrial residue, the educational prestige, and the administrative cadres. What it lacks is not capability but nerve, a culture of action, and the will to create. The only question is whether Europe prefers to govern its neighbourhood or be governed inside someone else’s.
John Sjoholm, for LIMA CHARLIE WORLD
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John Sjoholm is Lima Charlie’s Middle East Bureau Chief, Managing Editor, and founder of the consulting firm Erudite Group. A seasoned expert on the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans, he has a background in security contracting and has served as a geopolitical advisor to regional leaders. He was educated in religion and languages in Sana’a, Yemen, and Cairo, Egypt, and has lived in the region since 2005, contributing to numerous Western-supported stabilisation projects. He currently resides in Jordan.
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