The powerful 27-nation European Union’s controlling elites are foundering in a self-destructive nervous breakdown as their fear drives them deeper into the Eurasian quagmire of Ukraine’s crumbling fight against implacable Russian invaders.

Here is a disaster unfolding despite the EU’s undeniable assets for peaceful living. The group has 450 million people, a nearly $20 trillion GDP, a nuclear-armed member (France) with a veto in the UN Security Council, the world’s fourth most lethal military collectively, and awesome technological, industrial and civilizational achievements and potential.

This lemming-like march to self-harm should keep Americans awake at night because European delusions could push humankind back by decades while also making a nuclear Third World War a nearer possibility. Right now, this is not at an outrageous scenario.

The most destabilizing strikes against EU elites have come from US President Donald Trump’s haste to overturn the current world order while filing down the NATO alliance’s teeth.

That enfeeblement is happening when Russia stands on the verge of inflicting a strategic defeat on those disoriented elites, led by Germany and France, who are still urging Ukrainians to continue fighting while slow-walking Trump’s one-on-one peace efforts with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.

At the same time, those elites are being painfully battered by the humbling realization that they have long been Washington’s vassals because they are incapable of ensuring their peoples’ military defense against Russia or their prosperity without currying favor with the US presidents.

Yet, swallowing bitter brew, they seem bent on maneuvering Trump to ensure that American tax payers remain their eternal protectors at any cost.

Worse, there is no meaningful unity among EU members even at a time of crisis. As such, they have insignificant collective power in the face of America, China and Russia as well as rising powers like India and Brazil, while also being leaderless.

A demonstration of desperation was the reckless blow dealt by EU leaders to the trust of creditors, which is the sole sacrosanct pillar of global capitalism. Rashly, they recently froze about $245 billion in Russian state assets indefinitely in the hope of generating new credits to finance Ukraine. Thus, they have fully transformed its war of survival into their own proxy war against Russia.

They have entrapped themselves into becoming the only financiers and weapons suppliers to Ukraine without hope of support from Trump, who is unambiguously against providing any more American taxpayer money.

Yet, neither separately nor collectively does the EU have the economic depth to deliver on that role even in the short term.

Fortunately, on Friday EU leaders chose to provide Kyiv with $105 billion backed by the EU budget rather than the frozen Russian assets. But that choice is expensive and puts each member country’s taxpayers in hock for years or decades.

That decision was a political defeat for the EU’s self-styled leaders, German chancellor Friedrich Merz and European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, who lobbied enthusiastically for the first option.

Merz tried to spin it as “a decisive message for an end to the war”. He stuck his neck out by adding, “Putin will only make concessions once he realizes his war will not pay off.”

That’s a surprising assertion since Putin is far from defeat and EU funds will not last for long in Kyiv’s hands. Meanwhile, Trump has flatly refused to supply weapons without prior payment or provide additional financial aid to support Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Nor are banks likely to pony up since Zelensky’s regime is already flailing under bankruptcy, internal dissension, corruption scandals and growing opposition to his dictatorial rule.

Above all, Zelensky cannot defeat Putin because he simply does not have enough soldiers to recruit. Nor can he expect reinforcements because Trump and all EU members have vowed never to send their soldiers to fight at Ukraine’s frontlines.

Zelensky will also never receive enough lethal weapons from the EU because its member economies are too debilitated to quickly expand their arms manufacturing or put up more money to buy weapons from Trump.

The likely results will be much worse destruction of Ukraine, the possible fall of the vital harbor city of Odesa, which is the country’s economic lifeline, and yet more voracious demands by Moscow. Many war-fighting experts have detailed this as the most likely scenario but EU elites are in denial.

Merz and von der Leyen still persist in feigning that Germany and NATO’s European members are in no way responsible or accountable for Moscow’s feelings of encirclement, despite its many loud warnings ever since the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s.

Soviet Moscow agreed to peaceful German reunification, which finally ended World War II, in return for German and American promises to ensure security for the new Russian Federation but both pretended they were never made.

Even Putin’s claims of self-defense in violating Ukraine’s frontiers failed to make Berlin and Brussels acknowledge that their behaviour during pre-Trump NATO’s advance to Russia’s borders with nuclear weapons gave cause to at least hear out Moscow’s arguments.

Since February 24, 2022, nearly three years before Trump, no meeting was held with Putin’s people to learn why the seasoned leader of a nation that lost 25 million people in World War II and suffered 70 years of massacres under totalitarianism decided to risk submitting his people again to the pain of a potentially great war.

Worse, those EU elites are busy turning modern Russia, which is no longer the totalitarian Soviet Union, into a determined enemy armed with the most experienced war fighters in Eurasia, some 5,500 nuclear warheads including 1,700 deployed on launchers, quasi-undetectable hypersonic missiles, bombers, submarines, and cyber-attack capabilities.

If the US stays out, Russian missiles could hit all EU capitals in less than eight minutes and no member country has defenses capable of detecting the destroying them in time.

All of that and a much deeper capacity to absorb pain that cradle-to-grave welfare-state Europeans cannot match currently.

EU elites are so deeply in disavowal that they seem blind to the evident fact that Europe’s people would face huge destruction even in a conventional war with Russia. Especially, absent Trump’s unstinting support using America’s vast weapons manufacturing base and its unmatched financial depth, military logistics and cyber targeting capabilities.

As such, the behaviour of EU elites is profoundly incomprehensible! And it puts all of Eurasia, if not the entire world, at risk of catastrophe.