Futurearly Dialogues: The Patient in Denial

Hussein Askary on Europe's Reckoning with a Fractured World

Europe is a patient in denial. That is the unsettling diagnosis at the heart of this conversation between myself and Hussein Askary , a Swedish-Iraqi geopolitical analyst and vice chairman of the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden.

Hussein, who came of age in Scandinavia during its golden era of diplomacy—when Stockholm and Oslo were cradles of secret peace talks and United Nations secretary-generals—witnesses something profoundly broken. The continent that once gave the world Olof Palme and the Oslo Accords has traded its diplomats for ideologues, its engineers for lawyers, and its vision of coexistence for a militarised trance.

From Stockholm to Berlin, the story is the same: energy security sacrificed, industrial bases hollowed out, and a generation of complacent, career-seeking politicians marching toward a confrontation with Russia that no rational strategist believes can be won.

The numbers are staggering and almost surreal. While European leaders borrow hundreds of billions from private banks to feed a military-industrial complex that profits spectacularly—Rheinmetall’s stocks up 1,400 percent, Saab up 800 percent since the Ukraine war began—the real economy crumbles. Germany, once the engine of European prosperity, lost over 100,000 industrial jobs in 2024 alone. Its legendary car industry, built on cheap Russian energy and the Chinese market, now watches as Chinese electric vehicles roll past Mercedes and BMW in the very Gulf countries where Rolls-Royces once reigned.

The former German chancellor Scholz recently admitted a devastating truth: Germany was once a nation of engineers; now it is a nation of lawyers. And he was standing next to Joe Biden in February 2022 when the US president promised that Nordstream would be no more. Scholz did not blink. That failure to blink, Askary suggests, is Europe’s tragedy in miniature.

The China-Europe railway express—over 20,000 trains annually carrying industrial inputs from China to Poland—continues running. European industry depends on it. China has moved from being the world’s factory to being the world’s industrial partner, offering the Persian Gulf states something the United States cannot: a genuine pathway to industrialisation, not just luxury consumption and real estate bubbles.

In March 2023, Beijing brokered the normalisation of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran, a diplomatic coup that upends the Anglo-American strategy of keeping Arabs and Persians, Sunnis and Shia, perpetually at odds. Hussein calls this the emerging architecture of “peace through economic development”—a direct challenge to the old imperial playbook of divide and conquer.

What does this mean for Europe and for the GCC? For Europe, the urgent question is whether it can disentangle from the American security umbrella before its industrial base vanishes entirely. Askary is blunt: Europe cannot defeat Russia. It must coexist. And coexistence, in the twenty-first century, means turning toward Eurasia, toward the Belt and Road, toward the very BRICS nations that European elites have been taught to fear.

For the GCC States, the old model of exporting oil for dollars and parking the proceeds in Western banks is finished. As I note in the dialogue, geography never lies. And geography places the Arabian Peninsula squarely between Iran, India, China and Africa.

The only sustainable future is one of dialogue, harmony, and shared prosperity—not chokepoints, not blockades, and not the false comfort of a security umbrella that burned to ash in the recent wars. The patient in denial still has time to choose a different prescription. But not much time.