Thread by @KevorkAlmassian

THREAD: Fear was the fuel of pandemic politics.
Now it’s the fuel of war politics.

From corona to Russia, the ruling elites have found a method: govern through urgency, sell security above all, and leave prosperity behind.

Here's why you should be concerned 🧵

1/ At the Poland–Belarus border, Ursula von der Leyen declared: “Putin is a predator.”

The message is simple: only “strong deterrence” can keep him in check.

The subtext is simpler: Europe is remaking itself around war.

2/ In the days around that border tour, Brussels rolled out the vocabulary of acceleration—scorecards for defense spending every six months, loans-for-arms facilities, and “pretty precise plans” for post-war “guarantees” in Ukraine.

3/ The Commission is no longer selling prosperity-plus-protection; it is selling security-above-all.

Budgets become sermons, procurement the new catechism.

4/ Every euro that clicks into an artillery line item is a euro that doesn’t fix a hospital roof, fund social housing, or insulate a school before next winter.

The reply is ready-made: we’d love to—but Russia.

5/ You can see the pivot in von der Leyen’s social media feed: generals, kit, hazard-tape graphics, munitions unboxing.

6/ This is not just optics. Europe is attempting to maintain cohesion through rearmament at a time when it can no longer promise widespread improvements in living standards.

7/ When elites cannot deliver higher wages or cheaper energy, they promise safety. That’s a dangerous swap. Security can complement prosperity; it cannot replace it.

8/ When elites cannot deliver higher wages or cheaper energy, they promise safety. That’s a dangerous swap. Security can complement prosperity; it cannot replace it.

9/ Losers are equally obvious: workers and households asked to swallow another round of austerity, the debt-strained South Europe told to tighten belts while the North buys more armor and audits.

10/ Eastern Europe pushes against maximalist hawkishness, while Western Europe pushes for more militarism.

It’s a Cold War remake without the prosperity that once cushioned the fear.

12/ My friends, fear works. Pandemic politics proved that emergency framing can reorder budgets, centralize procurement, and marginalize dissent.

13/ Whatever one thinks about the corona era, the method of politics-by-urgency was normalized.

14/ Today, a similar grammar is at work: a Russia that is simultaneously too weak to defeat Ukraine and yet strong enough soon to threaten the Baltics, Poland, and even Germany.

16/ These can’t both be true at once, but they can both be useful at once—useful for sustaining a tempo of spending that the peacetime economy and social state cannot actually support.

17/ The problem isn’t deterrence per se; it’s the absolutism around it. When “predator” becomes the soundbite, policy becomes a cartoon.

18/ Strategy shrinks to procurement schedules; diplomacy is outsourced to sanction regimes; and domestic politics is told to wait its turn—again.

19/ Elites promise that war is the new glue. But societies don’t cohere around procurement schedules; they cohere around a believable future.

20/ If Europe remembers that its power grew from prosperity and restraint, it still has time to choose a strategy that fits its capacities and honors its citizens.

If it forgets, the bill won’t just come due; it will come due with interest.

Also, read this thread by @420GHz

https://x.com/420GHz/status/1962493498331906433

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