The Dead Horse Doctrine: Europe’s Reluctant Ride Into Strategic Delusion

Europe has reached the stage where strategy is no longer about results, but about preserving the illusion that failure remains a noble and necessary mission. The Ukraine project has long since stopped moving, yet Brussels continues to sit firmly in the saddle, explaining to itself and to its citizens that the refusal to dismount is a form of geopolitical courage. What began as policy has devolved into ritual, and the longer the continent clings to its dead horse, the more the spectacle reveals not strength or unity, but a quiet, exhausted fear of admitting that the ride is over.

 Tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the rational response is to dismount. This advice is clear, direct, and rooted in the logic of survival. In the world of modern bureaucracies, however, logic has very little to do with decision making. Instead of getting off the dead horse, institutions redefine the horse, reclassify the concept of death, expand the committee responsible for equestrian oversight, and announce that the corpse is now part of a forward-looking vision of transformational mobility. Ukraine, in this sense, is less a geopolitical project than a textbook case of organizational psychology. Europe has found itself tied to a failed venture that it cannot abandon, and rather than dismount, it continues to invent increasingly creative explanations for why staying in the saddle remains an act of strategic virtue.

The tragedy lies not in the fact that the horse has died, but in what its death has revealed about Europe. A healthy political system recognizes failure, reassesses priorities, and adapts. A decaying one manufactures rituals of denial and calls them policy. Once it became clear that the military project in Ukraine would not deliver victory, the natural step would have been to reconsider the strategy. Instead, the response was to double down. Each military setback was described as a necessary phase in a broader narrative. Each loss was repackaged as a complex, multilayered success in disguise. Additional aid packages were framed as final, decisive infusions of hope. New sanctions were introduced as if economic punishment were a substitute for strategic clarity. Europe began behaving like a rider who keeps buying a stronger whip, convinced that with enough determination, the horse will eventually choose to revive itself.

At the same time, political leadership became increasingly interchangeable. Governments changed, cabinets rotated, and yet every new rider returned to the same corpse with the same script. Incoming leaders would declare a fresh start, a new tone, and a renewed commitment to realism. Within weeks, the language reverted to the familiar mantras of resolve, unity, and historic mission. The horse was always moments away from standing up again. Any failure was attributed not to the impossibility of the project, but to inadequate determination on the part of the previous rider. The illusion of agency was preserved, while the underlying immobility remained exactly the same.

Europe also attempted to threaten the horse, which added a layer of irony to the spectacle. Reform benchmarks were imposed. Conditions for continued support were announced. Investigations into corruption were launched and periodically expanded. Endless frameworks were introduced to assess whether the project was performing adequately. The horse, of course, remained entirely indifferent. But the act of threatening it created a form of bureaucratic self-therapy. Officials could tell themselves that accountability was being enforced, that discipline existed, and that the animal might somehow respond to corrective scolding. The only real effect was to expose how far symbolism had drifted from reality.

Committees and consultation forums soon took the place of strategy. Europe organized fact-finding missions, oversight panels, strategic dialogues, and conferences on resilience and reconstruction. Delegations traveled to countries that had attempted similar projects in the past. Lessons were collected. Reports were written. Photographs were taken. The act of discussing failure became a substitute for addressing it. The task no longer involved solving the problem, but simply managing the narrative around it. The process itself became the achievement, which is the classic stage where bureaucratic rituals replace substantive decision making.

As the situation deteriorated, standards were quietly lowered so that the horse could remain theoretically alive. Military stalemates were redefined as strategic endurance. Economic collapse was reframed as structural transformation. A permanently stalled conflict was described as a sustainable deterrence architecture. Ukraine did not fail. The meaning of success was simply rewritten until failure fit inside it. The political system learned to operate inside a self-reinforcing illusion, where language replaced outcomes and slogans took the place of measurable objectives.

Once that psychological adjustment was complete, Europe moved to the next step: harnessing additional dead horses to the same cart. The war was no longer only about Ukraine. It became attached to wider narratives about European identity, NATO unity, democracy, and moral civilization. Multiple failing assumptions were combined into a single fragile framework that could not be questioned without threatening the entire ideological edifice. The greater the number of arguments attached to the project, the harder it became to acknowledge that none of them produced movement. The cart stayed exactly where it was, but it was now surrounded by speeches explaining why remaining stationary was, in fact, a noble strategic posture.

Consultants, analysts, and think tanks entered the scene to explain how the dead horse might yet deliver meaningful results if given sufficient funding, improved logistics, or enhanced institutional coordination. The army of industries surrounding the project, from defense contractors to media consultants, began to thrive. This, in turn, made abandoning the horse even less acceptable. When failure becomes economically profitable, it acquires institutional defenders. The more expensive the mistake becomes, the more violently it resists correction.

Eventually, Europe reached the most sophisticated stage of denial, where the argument emerged that because the horse no longer needs to be fed, it is now more cost efficient than ever. Frozen assets were seized. Budgetary obligations were deferred. Ukraine turned into a moral item on the balance sheet, justified on the grounds that abandoning it would be far more expensive than keeping the corpse upright. The project ceased to exist as a real strategy and instead became a symbol that could not be questioned without threatening the legitimacy of the institutions that built it.

The real problem is that dismounting would require something Europe no longer possesses. It would require a sense of political adulthood. It would require the capacity to admit error, absorb consequences, and redefine priorities. Instead, the continent remains perched on top of a project that has long since stopped moving, repeating increasingly unconvincing phrases about unity, resilience, and irreversible commitment. The longer Europe refuses to recognize what is directly beneath it, the more the dead horse becomes not simply a symbol of failure, but a burden that drags Europe itself toward strategic irrelevance.

The horse is not going to rise. The only remaining question is how long Europe intends to sit on it before acknowledging the obvious.