By Sefa Yürükel
Security Architecture
The Anatomy of a Fragile Order
The international system has been rapidly dragged from the narrative of liberal triumphalism identified with the theses of Francis Fukuyama (1992) into an era defined by Mearsheimer (2018) as the “tragic return of great power politics.” The full scale military intervention by the Russian Federation in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, is not merely a war between two countries but a systemic crisis that has shaken the ontological foundations of the European security architecture.
The Ontology of the Ukraine Crisis: Historical Continuity and Moments of Rupture
The effort to pinpoint the beginning of the Ukraine crisis is essentially not a matter of factual chronology but a problem of political positioning. The mainstream Western approach codifies February 24, 2022, as a singular and unprovoked act of aggression constituting a grave violation of the fundamental principles of international law (UN Charter, Article 2/4). In this perspective, the 2022 invasion is an isolated starting point in itself and turns the analytical focus toward the aggressive nature of Russian revisionism.
Konstantakopoulos, however, proposes an alternative genealogy that aligns with the work of Mearsheimer (2014) and Sakwa (2015). According to this narrative, the origins of the crisis date back to the granting of a NATO membership perspective to Ukraine and Georgia at the earliest, at the 2008 Bucharest Summit, and more concretely, to the Euromaidan protests and the annexation of Crimea in 2014. While the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych’s government in Kyiv was hailed in Western capitals as a democratic popular uprising, it was defined by Moscow as an unconstitutional coup supported by the European Union and the US. This ontological difference forms the basis of a critical reading that interprets the eight year period between 2014 and 2022 as a “civil war” and a proxy conflict. Indeed, the low intensity conflict in the Donbas and the failure of the Minsk Agreements (Minsk I, 2014; Minsk II, 2015) position the full scale war in 2022 as a tragic and almost inevitable escalation of a prolonged security dilemma (Jervis, 1978). This debate is vital not only for understanding the causality of the war but also for designing future conflict resolution mechanisms.
The US Geo Economic Encirclement Strategy: Decoupling Europe from Russia
At the heart of Konstantakopoulos’s theses lies the claim that the Ukraine war is not only a product of a US strategy targeting Russia, but also Europe. The primary objective of this strategy is to dismantle the Eurasian integration vision, which found its most concrete expression in the idea of a European economic and security space stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Before 2022, the EU Russia economic symbiosis was impressive in scale: Germany sourced 55% of its natural gas needs from Russia, and the Nord Stream 1 and 2 projects constituted the concrete infrastructure of the increasingly deepening interdependence between the two sides. This situation was viewed by US strategists as both an economic threat (competition for US LNG in the European market) and a strategic weakness eroding Germany’s reliability within NATO (see Zbigniew Brzezinski’s “The Grand Chessboard”).
With the outbreak of the war, this interdependence dramatically transformed into a weaponized vulnerability. The European Union, within the framework of the REPowerEU Plan (European Commission, 2022), rapidly reduced its dependence on Russian gas while increasing LNG imports from the US to record levels, leading to a massive price arbitrage and wealth transfer from the European energy hub of Rotterdam to North America. Simultaneously, NATO’s defense spending target of 2% of GDP, established at the 2014 Wales Summit, began to be accepted as a floor rather than a ceiling. The Zeitenwende (historic turning point) policy declared by Germany, involving a special fund of 100 billion euros and the modernization of the Bundeswehr with US weapons systems, deeply undermined hopes for Europe to achieve strategic autonomy in its defense industry. Although mainstream literature reads this transformation as a reactive and necessary response to Russia’s aggressive actions, the critical geopolitical perspective notes that these outcomes align with astonishing perfection with the US’s decades long strategic objectives.
The Contradictory Geopolitical Outcomes of Sanctions Regimes
The effectiveness of the comprehensive sanctions regime imposed on Russia by the West is debatable due to the dual nature of its objectives. The first goal, causing the Russian economy to collapse in the short term, has failed. The tight monetary policy and capital controls of the Russian Central Bank stabilized the Ruble, while energy exports redirected to China and India allowed the state to maintain its fiscal balance. Russia has demonstrated partial adaptation to sanctions by transitioning to a military Keynesian mobilization economy. From this perspective, sanctions have failed in economic deterrence.
However, the second and perhaps deeper objective, structurally transforming Europe’s energy and security architecture, has largely been achieved. The cutting off of access to Western technology and capital markets has undermined Russia’s long term productive capacity and technological modernization, pushing it into asymmetric dependency on China. Sanctions may not defeat Russia on the battlefield, but they function as a strategy to weaken it over time by decoupling it from the advanced technology ecosystem necessary for future global competition. This points to a paradigm shift where the “success” of sanctions is measured not by short term military outcomes but by long term geo economic restructuring.
Axis Shift in the Eastern Mediterranean: The Greek Israeli Strategic Alliance and the Turkish Equation
Konstantakopoulos’s national context, Greece, is a critical laboratory for this geopolitical transformation. Over the last decade, Greek Israeli relations have moved beyond mere normalization, evolving into a comprehensive strategic alliance that redefines the balance of power in the Eastern Mediterranean. This axis has three main pillars: Energy (the geopolitical specter of the EastMed Pipeline Project and the vision of electrical interconnection), security (joint training flights in Greek airspace, the supply of unmanned aerial vehicles and precision guided munitions from Israel to the Greek military), and deepened tripartite/quadripartite strategic frameworks established with the US (the “3+1” format).
A critical view reads this rapprochement as a radical break from the two main pillars of Greece’s traditional foreign policy (European integration and passive balancing focused on the Cyprus issue) and highlights the strategic risks of Athens forming an “encirclement alliance” with Israel against Turkey, which it perceives as a regional revisionist. This situation alienates Greece from Arab public opinion and carries the risk of entangling it, without its own consent, in Israel’s Palestine policies and potential conflicts with Iran. Simultaneously, it can be argued that this subordinates Greece’s independent foreign policy decision making capacity to the security agenda of the US and Israel in West Asia. This transformation exemplifies the strategic fragility inherent in a small state assuming the role of a “stepping stone” in great power competition.
The Digital Panopticon: Europe’s Transformation into a “Data Colony”
One of Konstantakopoulos’s most provocative and far sighted inferences is that, alongside its physical infrastructure and energy dependency, Europe is transforming into a “data colony.” This metaphor signifies the colonization of Europe’s digital public sphere primarily by US based Big Tech companies and the intelligence networks intertwined with them. This new form of colonialism does not only mean the massive scale commodification of personal data and the transfer of economic value from Europe to the US; it also encompasses the surveillance, manipulation, and disciplining of the political sphere, which is the essence of sovereignty.
The Predator spyware scandal in Greece is one of the most concrete and scandalous manifestations of this structural dependency. The revelation that commercial spyware like Pegasus and Predator was widely used by state actors against opposition politicians, investigative journalists, and businesspeople points to an uncontrolled power technology that goes far beyond the legitimate surveillance capacity of the nation state limited by law, as documented in the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee report (European Parliament, 2023). This scandal demonstrates that European states, far from fulfilling their obligation to protect their own citizens, have become passive markets and even active users of such technologies, falling into the position of not only the object but also the practitioner of the regime conceptualized by Shoshana Zuboff (2019) as “surveillance capitalism.” This loss of digital sovereignty constitutes one of the deepest and least discussed dimensions of the strategic autonomy deficit.
Conclusion: The Multi Layered Dependency Spiral and the Quest for Strategic Autonomy
When stripped of conspiratorial implications that are difficult to prove, Dimitris Konstantakopoulos’s theses offer a powerful analytical framework for understanding Europe’s current strategic impasse. The European Union is today simultaneously trapped in a three layered dependency spiral: (1) military technological dependency on the US under the NATO umbrella, (2) cognitive and infrastructural dependency on American digital platforms, and (3) dependency on China in critical supply chains such as semiconductors, clean energy technologies, and the pharmaceutical sector. The Ukraine war has radicalized and reinforced the first of these dependencies, deepened the second, and pushed the third into an effort to manage it under the rhetoric of risk diversification (de risking).
In conclusion, although the possibility of a multipolar rapprochement between Europe, Russia, and China, as put forward by Konstantakopoulos, has been shelved in the post 2022 geopolitical reality, his strongest diagnosis is that the ideal of European strategic autonomy is under systematic siege. Therefore, his views should be evaluated not as absolute truths, but as an alternative and productive dissident line of analysis that exposes the ideological blind spots of mainstream narratives in international politics. The future of Europe will be shaped depending on whether it can manage this triple dependency spiral in favor of “strategic autonomy” or whether it will continue to remain a passive object of these dependencies.
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Sefa Yürükel
Danish ethnographer and social anthropologist (MA)
Aarhus University, 1997
Independent Researcher
Fields of Research: International Politics, Public International Law, Geopolitics, Sociology, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Systems and Structures.
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