Europe’s Mad Voyage Meets the Whirlwind

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, October 26, 2026

 

In 2015, facing a migrant crisis that was exacerbated by the collapse of the state in Libya, the ongoing Syrian civil war, and the continuing gains of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Europe’s de facto leader, Angela Merkel, declared, “Wir schaffen das,” or “We can do this.”

 

By the end of that year, the terrorist who had masterminded the horrible massacre at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris and the suicide bombing at the Stade de France in a Parisian suburb was discovered to have used the migrant flows to disguise himself and move freely over Europe. Merkel was at the same time taking a hard line with U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, who was practically begging her to allow some room for national sovereignty within the European Union, which would let the U.K. better control migrant flows. Merkel, seeing herself as the guarantor of the direction of European politics, took a hard line, too: No. The results of this intransigent maximalism — more Europe, more globalism — was Brexit in the U.K. and the rise of populism across the European continent. Even Donald Trump pointed to Europe to motivate his supporters at home in his win over Hillary Clinton.

 

There is a certain kind of folly in human affairs. People, institutions, nations, and empires look for their security in having more. More territory, more resources, more allies, not understanding that these also come with more responsibility, more costs, more risks, and even more unpredictability. By putting faith in ambition over timidity, they lose sight of the virtue of prudence, and the virtue of contentment with present satisfactions. The Athenians chose their expedition to Sicily at the height of their power, then watched their finest men die and their empire unravel. This human fault is given one of its most powerful expositions in Dante’s Inferno. The daring Ulysses takes his ageing crew on another “mad flight” to see the mountain of Purgatory:

 

Joyful were we, and soon it turned to weeping;

For out of the new land a whirlwind rose,

And smote upon the fore part of the ship.

Three times it made it whirl with all the waters,

At the fourth time it made the stern uplift,

And the prow downward go, as pleased Another,

Until the sea above us closed again.

 

Ulysses sent his men to doom with beautiful sentiments ringing in their ears. He told them they are “not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.” They were so stirred that Dante’s Canto 26 says that Ulysses “could scarcely have held them back.”

 

Europe’s leaders have been giving versions of this speech themselves. They can open their own borders without consequences, and they can protect Ukraine’s without serious costs. In both cases, they told themselves they were privileging moral commitments over self-interest. Emmanuel Macron said the very thing that keeps a nation alive is not the self-interest of nationalism, but moral values. Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin has scolded Brexit and critics of Ireland’s refugee and migration politics for holding on to narrow nationalism and a “backward-looking idea of sovereignty” that would lead to division and isolation.

 

But the leaders making such promises did not seriously reckon with their costs. On immigration, it turns out that the national sovereignty is not so easily discarded without throwing out democracy with it. The rise of populist parties and sentiment has led to a quiet change from Merkel’s “We Can Do This” to “We Can Deport.” The EU’s new immigration pact is built to make deportations faster and to process people at the frontier. Denmark’s Social Democrats ran hard against immigration. When running for office, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz promised to “permanently control Germany’s national borders.” After his narrow win, he used a form of literalism to backtrack and insist that he’d never promised to stop entry. “None of us are talking about border closures. . . . None of us want to close the borders,” he said.

 

On Ukraine, the gap is even wider. President Trump waived nearly all the Russia sanctions in a law he signed just a month ago. There have been conflicting reports over the decision to throttle the satellite service guiding Ukraine’s drones, though Elon Musk now says he was closing a “loophole” to enforce terms of service. Europe has promised to take up the burden of supporting Ukraine’s defense. But not if it costs them.

 

Unable to agree on seizing Russia’s frozen assets, the EU borrowed 90 billion euros last December and “lent” it to Kyiv on the understanding that Ukraine will repay it when Russia pays reparations. Could a less secure form of collateral even be imagined? Europe is going to finance a reversal of Russia’s aggressive seizure of Ukrainian land, and the backing for this finance is Russia’s willingness to hand things over to Ukraine. The borrowed money increasingly flows to America anyway, which is producing the weapons. This deepens the sense among Europe’s nationalists that the energy inflation crushing their household budgets is a result of Washington’s foreign policy and that America’s defense industry is gaining capacity in the name of European security, even as the American president talks about shifting burdens to them. Ukraine is already running out of the money Europe lent it, of course, and needs 70 billion more euros. Chancellor Merz promised that it’s coming, but it’s not in the German budget, and Germany itself — fearing populists at home and free riders across the EU — is lobbying against expansion of the EU budget.

 

Now comes the political whirlwind in Europe. We see it in a France consumed by riots. And in the rise of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in the polls, which show not just that the party is likely to lead the first round of next year’s voting but that it will be competitive against any of its likely opponents. We see it in the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD). These parties not only reject mass immigration but also question Europe’s subordinate place in its geopolitical embrace with America, and Europe’s role in supporting Ukraine.

 

The order that was so confident in itself decades ago that it could promise a world where nationalism faded away, where “sovereignty” was a demonic word from centuries of war, where people, goods, and capital would move freely, and where Ukraine would be a member of NATO or an economic partner of the European Union, or both, is now one that is decomposing from within.

 

The modern European order was built by France and Germany, working out political and economic arrangements that would end their national contestation over industry and resources, and that became, in its way, a universalist project — of power and wealth without real work, of security without military investment, of openness without the need for cohesion, of expansion without end. Moral values without moral commitments. The ambitious voyage has run into this trap in a mad flight of idealism. Now the stern rises beneath their feet.