Volker Wittpahl: If I had a wish for Christmas, I would say if we had a kind of driving license for any smartphone and for every internet service for every citizen, no matter what age, then we wouldn't have this problem. But we will never get this license like a driving license for a car.

There is no common objective of what NATO wants to achieve, be it a common military industrial production facility, increasing the efficiency of its output, or a procurement policy. Rather, Europe made itself content with pleasing the old Trumpian rhetoric, which puts ‘paying’ as the paramount metric to determine what foreign policy to implement.

War can no longer be seen as a local failure; it is reproducing itself within a system that has failed to regulate it. And democracies, far from being immune, are active participants. The challenge is no longer just to stop a war. It is to prevent more from joining the wave.