Violence Is Back as a Tool of National Policy
2nd September 2025
News broke yesterday that a jet carrying European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen had to land using paper charts after its GPS navigation systems were apparently jammed by Russia. Traveling to Plovdiv in Bulgaria, VDL’s jet apparently circled for an hour before the pilot took the decision to do things the old-fashioned way and consult the map.
Such an incident targeting a head of not-quite-a-state is shocking to say the least, but serves as a neat metaphor for relations between Russia and Europe in recent years (decades?): European liberal internationalists assume old norms apply -> Russia disagrees and demonstrates that it views violence as a legitimate tool of national policy -> Europeans left stunned.
Some will remember the images of German diplomats guffawing at the United Nations in 2018 as Donald Trump admonished Germany for placing itself at the mercy of Russia for its energy supplies. Fast-forward to 2022 and suddenly Trump’s speech wasn’t so funny, and anyone who cares to bring up a chart of German industrial production can see the fruits of the lack of imagination of Germany’s leaders. Germany’s factories are now struggling to replace lost production for civilian applications with new production for military applications. But how to do this without cheap energy?
So, yes, violence is back as a tool of national policy. Russia is unapologetic about this. So is Israel. So is the United States if you consider the decisiveness of using B-21 bombers to drop bunker busters on Iranian nuclear facilities. Hamas and the Houthis are certainly unapologetic and China has also been stepping up the frequency and scale of ‘rehearsals’ for the invasion of Taiwan while the Chinese navy and coast guard have had semi-regular clashes with the Philippines over territories that China claims as its own through the ten-dash line. Those Chinese territorial claims are not supported by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, but that is really part of the point.
The Chattering Class in the U.S. is spending its time running around in circles and jumping up and down about the supposed ‘authoritarianism’ of Donald Trump, in the meanwhile ignoring the actual authoritarian regimes in Russian and China. This will not end well.