Bear With Me

Good Strategy, Bad Strategy

Doomberg ‘s powerful conversation with Grant Williams on his “This Week in Doom” podcast surfaced an interesting geopolitical conundrum, which has been much on my mind since. Prompted by the experience of the World Economic Form’s recent annual jamboree in Davos, which, whilst slowly decaying into satire still manages to attract enough of the Great and the Good to give it some relevance, Grant and Doomie’s conversation focused in part on the possibility of what Doomberg referred to as “The Grand Bargain” between the USA, Russia and China, as follows:

Doomberg (23:00) : And if there’s a grand bargain between Trump, Putin and Xi, and I don’t think there is, but you can’t rule it out yet.

Grant Williams (24:02): No, but let’s game it out anyway because it’s worth doing.

Doomberg: The arc of that grand bargain is Putin gets Ukraine, Xi gets Taiwan and the US gets the Western Hemisphere basically. And that leaves the giant gaping question of Brazil, which we’ll come back to. But in a world where the Western Hemisphere gets its act together, and slowly but surely that incremental 10 million barrels a day of oil comes online, there’s less and less need for the Middle East, and China has a desperate need for the Middle East. And so, one could imagine the US ultimately washing its hands of the Middle East, although Trump’s seeming obsession with regime change in Iran would run counter to that, which makes us wonder whether a deal was struck. But if such a deal was struck or the US has unilaterally decided to go in that direction, both are consistent with the observable news flow, it’s bad news for Europe, terrible news for Europe, disastrous news for Europe, which has painted itself in an impossible corner of having a volatile and a relationship that is in perpetual conflict between Russia and China and the US all at the same time and mix in India while you’re at it.

I don’t know what the European Union’s overarching strategical objectives are, but that they’ve certainly picked every large enemy on the planet all at once, which we find amazing. And I’m sure we’ll talk about Greenland here soon, but what does that mean for Ukraine? Not bullish for Ukraine. What does that mean for Taiwan? It means that the Beijing aligned wing of the Taiwanese political scene, which is actually quite large, will rise in prominence and likely the outcome would be a Hong Kong style reconciliation between Taiwan and China, the mainland, without any shots being fired at all, which I think if you put truth serum into Xi Jinping would be his desired outcome. And so in that world, the true multipolar world, the US flexes its muscle in the Western Hemisphere, which includes Greenland and leaves Canada surrounded, and Europe is on an island politically and energetically floating along some giant ocean without an oar to steer itself.

And I think if the situation in Ukraine continues to devolve at the pace at which it currently is, that is going to be disastrous for the current slate of European leaders, Micron, Starmer, von der Leyen, Merz, Tusk, they’ll all be wiped out of power. And then who replaces them will decide the future of Europe, which is a whole other third dimension to all of this.”

‘The Week in Doom” podcast ~ Grant Williams (Episode 25 The World’s Gone Caracas! PUBLISHED: JANUARY 22, 2026 [Emphasis mine, although Doomberg was also quite emphatic, it has to be said}.

The Bear, the Snake, the Eagle and the Ostrich - a Fable

The key question raised here, is I think, the one of strategy and downstream of that the evaluation of the quality of critical strategic thinking in Europe. I have often held that in a business in crisis, the most important factor determining the ability to act appropriately is the admission that the crisis exists at all. Once leadership has articulated the words “we are in a crisis” if only in the boardroom, then the paradigm shifts and the way is opened for priorities to be set and actions to be executed that would be unthinkable in the non-crisis paradigm. European leadership in the last twenty years especially has seemed to me stuck in a paradigm which effectively denies that other countries, especially powerful ones have strategies and that those strategies will necessarily act - for good or, more likely for bad - on their own constraints, rooms of manoeuvre and optionalities. Denying that your competitive partners on the international stage have strategies at all and dismissing the mere talk of them as conspiratorial nonsense, is at best willfully naïf and at worst deeply irresponsible and dangerous. As ostriches throughout evolution have found, sticking ones head in the sand in the hope that danger will pass, does not help much (Actually they don’t and is fake news, but Pliny the Elder first pointed this out in Naturalis Historia in 78 AD and he was an expert, so science..).

Fourscore years of having the USA and to a lesser extent the UK look after the security interests of Europe both at home and on the high seas have led to a dangerously blithe unwillingness to engage in the sort of hard, trade-off based strategic thinking necessary to protect national and supra-national particular interests and, as a natural consequence, to neglect critical defence infrastructure. European nations and the EU in particular have convinced themselves after decades of skipping strategy classes, coz boring and irrelevant are just starting to wake up to the fact that their default position of lecturing the rest of the world’s powers from a position of supposed moral superiority is - as I would argue it always has been - indefensible and irresponsible. European states, especially Germany and the whole dishonest project of the EU is currently being exposed for what it is - in Doomberg’s words - “politically and energetically floating along some giant ocean without an oar to steer itself.”

I would be wrong in stating that the EU has not been directed by an overarching strategic imperative, one baked into its DNA by its founding intellectual architects. It certainly has. The strategy of the EU, which it was allowed to execute without much if any resistance until recently was to undermine and then ultimately replace the individual nation states that constituted its membership and to “manage” Europe on technocratic, rational and well-ordered (statist) principles thus avoiding the jingoistic inefficiencies and barbarous tribalist passions to which nation states have shown themselves to be regularly prone. Monet and his buddies conceived of a supra state in which the horrors of the preceding century of national chauvinism would be consigned to the dustbin of history and set out a strategic frog-boiling blueprint for how this might be achieved in increments and subtly so as not to alarm the individual nations whose demos would - with a few exceptions - never have signed up - ie. voted - for the whole monty. Which for the largest part they were never invited to do.

So, it is not as if the EU mandarins were not perfectly capable of formulating and then executing a long term strategic plan - their actions prove that indisputably. They have nonetheless proven themselves to be blinkered in the extreme in their ability to identify similar abilities in those with whom they are forced to share the global stage. So absorbed have they been in the grand project of creating a regulatory behemoth, abrogating ever more budget, power and self-appointed dominance over the entire continent, and so firm in the believe in the infallibility and moral superiority of their statist, welfare expanding and climate and social ideological program, that they react to even the slightest intrusion of evolving reality as an affront. And why they continuously ignore or misunderstand the deeply serious strategic imperatives of the geopolitical actors with whom they must needs interact.