Things have only gotten worse. After the US and Israel started bombing Iran on the 28th of February, new red lines were crossed. There is no clear justification for that war, and no serious attempt has been made to provide one. What followed escalated within a week beyond those borders. The UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain were targeted by Iran in an attempt to draw them into the conflict. Israel immediately retaliated by also starting an invasion of Lebanon. We all read the news, we all know what happened.

Yet, if you take a step back, you won’t be able to tell the difference from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are two sides, they have grievances, and they can only be resolved by force.

What I want to talk about is not the war itself, but the tone.

The Tone

“I care about one thing and one thing only: that the 18, 19, 20, year old kid—who had no choice in where he went, or what threat he was facing—I want him to win and come home. That’s why we do it. Palantir is very helpful in delivering this.”

— Cameron Stanley, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer of the Department of War

That is Cameron Stanley proudly demonstrating Palantir’s Maven Smart System. Clearly great technology. Makes war look like a computer game, or makes it look like Jira, depending on where you are coming from. Click a button here, life perishes over there. But that’s all okay, because they are the good guys.

Note the empathy in that quote. It’s entirely one-directional. The 18-year-old American kid matters. The 18-year-old on the other end of the drone strike does not. He’s not even part of the conversation.

And then there is the commander in chief:

“We may hit [Kharg Island] a few more times just for fun”

— Donald J. Trump, president of the United States

For fun. And to drive the point home, the White House Twitter feed shows a montage of drone strike footage from the war alongside Wii Sports footage with “Hole in one” and “Out of the Park”.

This is the tone. Not the grim resolve of a nation reluctantly at war. Not even the performative gravity of the Bush years.

The Distance

When the US invaded Afghanistan and Iraq it was easy to argue that those were “underdeveloped countries” that needed to be “liberated”. Dick Cheney captured it perfectly in 2003:

“I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

The US knew what was best for them. The deaths along the way were not talked about, but they also did not need much talking about because the videos were blurry and the language was different.

What was so unsettling about the war in Ukraine when it started, was that it was a war of equals. Ukraine and Russia had shared history, they had a shared culture and they, despite what you might read in the news, very much shared a language. They shared it in the sense that a lot of Ukraine was russophone. Sometimes exclusively, sometimes in parallel with Ukrainian. A lot of the Ukrainian diaspora in Vienna that came in 2022 almost exclusively spoke Russian, because they came from the Russian-dominated east. There might be a small wealth difference between Russia and Ukraine, but for the most part they are very similar. Kids go to the same movies, they listen to the same music, they have similar dreams and aspirations. And you could see the war unfold on social media. Dead kid after dead kid came with family pictures. Killed in what looked like your average European country or house.

Iran and Lebanon feel very similar. The people there too have Instagram accounts and social media, even if the Iranian government tries its best to keep the internet turned off. People in Iran and Lebanon are highly educated, many speak English. Not that this matters, because the US has a lot of blood on its hands from the very beginning. They need to justify killing more than a hundred school children in two bombing strikes. And well, Israel seemingly does not have to justify anything. Even prior to the invasions of Lebanon and Iran, they already killed 20.000 children in Gaza.

Controlling The Message

There are different levels of dehumanization. The first and most obvious is that enemy soldiers do not deserve any empathy. If enemy combatants are killed, that is just what war is like. That obviously does not stop anyone from heralding their own soldiers as heroes, but the enemy soldiers are just targets. Then if factory workers or other supporting staff are killed, they are just collateral damage that are not talked about much. Why would you talk about them? They too have families, but they dared to work in a factory that supports a regime, so they should have known what’s coming for them. But really, we have reached the point where in the general discourse civilians are also just possible targets.

When dehumanization isn’t enough, you control the press. The FCC chair is already threatening to revoke broadcasters’ licenses over criticism of the war. The Secretary of Defense attacks journalists for asking uncomfortable questions. The message is clear: match the tone, or be silenced. You are not allowed to be disturbed.

Already Israel’s war in Gaza produced a lot of shocking pictures, but this supercharges the entire thing and it directly pulls the US, the supposedly shining city on the hill right into it.

Here

My kids are playing with toy soldiers. We live in Austria, a neutral country with no desire for war. They are talking about the attacks in Lebanon, because one of their favorite content creators is from there. A real person. Not a target, not collateral damage, not an other. Just someone they watch after school.

What is happening to us?

January 2026

• 217 strikes on energy infrastructure
• 9 waves of coordinated strikes on energy infrastructure
• 4,000 drones launched
• 350 missiles launched
• 1,000,000 households without power
• Thousands of buildings without heating
• Average daytime high of -2°C
• Average nighttime low of -7°C

2025 has been the deadliest year for civilians in Ukraine since the beginning of the war: 2,514 dead, 12,142 injured according to HRMMU. As of October 2025, Russia has killed 661 and injured 2,200 Ukrainian children.

Or in other words:

Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed.

— Donald Trump, December 28th 2025

Silicon Valley loves a success story and America celebrates the winner. In podcasts and blog posts, founders tell us how they made it. Luck and starting circumstances are footnotes at best, except for when they can be used to emphasize the story. The message is clear: I made it, so can you.

This belief does something to a person. If success is earned, then failure must be too. If I have then I deserve and if you don’t have, well, then you didn’t try hard enough. Or something else is wrong with you.

And sure, it’s not all luck, you don’t become a billionaire by just being in the right place at the right time. You have to work hard, be smart, take risks. But starting conditions matter a lot, and so do the freedoms you have. Many of the people who built tremendous wealth in the US, were not born there, and came there because the immigration system allowed them to.

Today many of these billionaires are supporting the current US administration. Conversations about inequality, about civil rights, about the vulnerable; they’ve seemingly become annoying to people with money. For years those same people ran DEI programs at their companies, talked about social impact and all this disappear overnight when the winds changed in Washington.

If you have power and money, you deserve being listened to.

I was a lifelong Democrat, I was a megadonor to the Democrats, you know, like, dinner-with-Obama level donor. OK? I couldn’t get a fucking phone call returned from the White House to save my life. The Trump administration is totally different. […]

A friend of mine’s company was really impacted with these tariffs in a bad way. And I was able to call the deputy chief of staff.

— Chamath Palihapitiya

Money buys access and influence. That never was surprising, but in a way we thought of this as being something that you were trying to hide. Not anymore.

It’s so convenient to align with the administration and the solutions of the administration are simple. That they cause fundamental, societal divisions is a price that everybody seems to be willing to pay. After all the message is simple: if you are American, the solution to your problem will emerge once we kicked out the illegals. Then you can take their place and be better off.

Topics of inequality in the world, lack of rights, are cast as distractions, as vibes-killing, as the reason society is supposedly falling apart. The people pointing at problems are blamed for the problems themselves and if for whatever reason the blame cannot be placed there, then it’s other countries.

Many of these billionaires themselves were immigrants, benefiting from America’s immigration system of the past, now they are willing to dismantle it for others.

Without doubt, the numbers indicate that the economy is doing well: stocks are up. Below the surface maybe it’s a bit more complex, after all it seems like the AI boom is carrying it, but still. Many people who are thriving in this economy are cheering on an administration that is dismantling civil liberties at a pace that courts cannot keep up with.

And what does that alignment buy silence on?

People are now powering through any controversy that stands in the way. An innocent woman who was killed by an ICE officer? That person was being attacked and described as the agitator. The victim was attacked online for being gay, for being at the wrong spot, for having not considered her children and provoked the situation. Anyone was at fault, other than the person that pulled the trigger. It really shows how much of humanity is quickly losing out. ICE operates with impunity and with full backing of the administration, even if they cause the deaths and harm to innocents.

What billionaires believe about themselves, America now believes about itself. Might is right and it’s now foreign policy. The US openly discusses seizing Greenland from an ally, captures foreign presidents, wages economic war on partners, inches toward real war. Because it’s powerful, so it deserves. The most powerful economy must also be the most just, the one that deserves to lead.

And the numbers don’t lie, right? The economy is up. It must be fine.

I don’t want to overstate historical parallels. This is not 1938, but there is a pattern worth noticing: economic booms can coexist with and even be fueled by the erosion of social cohesion. Germany’s economy improved dramatically after 1933 and Austria welcomed Hitler’s annexation with open arms. For a while, it felt like winning.

The crash, when it comes, won’t be visible in the economic numbers at first. The changes happen under the surface and they require individual reconciliations. When one’s neighbor is rounded up in the night one will need to come up with a story that makes it okay. If you are a business owner, you will have to come to terms with the fact that rules will become more arbitrary and you need to align with those in power, and why that is how things should be.

But these reconciliations are already happening — and not just among billionaires. The logic trickles down. If you’re not the target, you must be on the right side. If you’re safe, you must deserve to be. The neighbor who got detained must have done something wrong. You didn’t, so you’re fine.

By the time the economy reflects the rot, the damage is already deep.

I don’t have a conclusion here. I just keep watching people I know — smart people, successful people — look at what is happening and see only the upside. And all I can think is the upside can’t be the whole picture.

Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.

Except, of course, popular opinion does not care about international law and increasingly does not care about refugees either. In the mind of many, crossing a border without permission is illegal and if courts argue in favor of asylum seekers, then the courts are “activist” and “overstepping their bounds”. Or a variation of that. The debate around immigration is about as broken as the debate around many other social issues today. Which is why, when you turn on the TV or you partake in online discussions, all of this is colloquially referred to as “illegal immigration.”

Every country has their own rules around immigration but rarely are those rules set in stone. They are changing frequently, and they rarely last a lifetime. It’s not uncommon for people to immigrate legally one year, only to find out that the rules have changed the next year and they are now out of status. Even if their rights are grandfathered, they might find themselves unable to demonstrate their rights in the future. In some cases even the definition of citizenship has changed. The rules and implications are so bizarre at times, that it becomes impossible for anyone to keep track of them, let alone understand them, and that includes the officials enforcing them.

There are children born to mixed citizenship couples who only found out years later, that in the eye of the law, they were never citizens of their own country. There are others, who never questioned their citizenship, only to be thrown into a legal limbo when they first get a job.

If the powers in charge want to change the rules, they can. Japanese Americans lost their rights during World War II. German Jews lost their citizenship under the Nuremberg Laws. Even in the 2000s in the UK the Windrush generation of immigrants discovered decades later that they were not able to demonstrate their right to stay, despite having lived there for decades and fully legally.

The path to a green card for spouses in the US typically goes through a temporary period of lack of status. One could call it illegal, but it was common practice for years. Except now, ICE is collecting foreign spouses of US citizens at their interviews and arrests them.

It’s easy to picture immigration as being linked to the crossing of borders. But it really is not. It’s just a legal status related to some degree with citizenship. You can be born in one country, and not be a citizen of that country. You can also be a citizen and just lose that right later, something that has happened many times throughout history.

Europe has a history of deportations. Jews were often seen as being in a permanent state of “not integrated” and “not immigrated.” Jews were expelled from Vienna multiple times over the centuries. Jews gained and lost their rights repeatedly in the Hapsburg Empire. Sometimes they just lost their rights, other times their lives.

It wasn’t just Jews though, it was also various European minorities in other countries. There was no shortage of ethnic groups settling in other countries only to be expelled later. Catholics were also not great friends of own Christian neighbors in many places. 20.000 protestants had to flee from Salzburg in Austria all the way to Königsberg (modern Kaliningrad) in the 18th century.

So rather than talking about legal and illegal immigration, it would be much more honest to just recognize that we did not quite move past the point of dividing immigration into the people we like, and the people we don’t like, and that tastes are subject to change.

“Here in our fatherland of Austria, conditions lie such that the Jews have seized an influence that extends far beyond their numbers and their significance. (Interjection: Quite true!) In Vienna the poor artisan must go begging on Saturday afternoon if he wishes to turn the labor of his hands to account — he must beg the Jewish furniture dealer. (Very right!)

— Karl Luegers, Mayor of Vienna, in a speech to the Christian Socialist Workers’ Association, 1899

There won’t be any [special military] operations if you treat us with respect, if you respect our interests just as we’ve always tried to respect yours.

— Vladimir Putin, December 2025

I have been thinking a lot about forgiveness. The kind of forgiveness that we would need to de-escalate the Russian invasion of Ukraine. How do you move on without lying to yourself? How do you insist on accountability without turning it into a permanent vendetta? Can we build a modern world, governed by tit for tat but no lasting remembrance, pushing for retaliation of historic wrongdoings?

I believe we are at a point where these questions are not at all philosophical — not just in light of a war we already have, but in anticipation of darker things to come. Not because I believe people are eager for war, but because it increasingly feels like we are building a world in which war becomes the default. We got so used to the war in Ukraine that we no longer think of it as extraordinary. Regardless of the conflict, crippled young men and disfigured children have become so common in the news that we no longer respond to it.

War is the ultimate failure, but what worries me is not necessarily the war, but what enables it. Those conditions come from a more general disintegration: a slow loss of trust in institutions, in shared facts, and in the basic premise that other people are acting in good faith. Once that trust is gone, de-escalation becomes hard and escalation becomes easy. Not because it is desired, but because it is the path of least resistance.

There is a mundane version of this that everyone recognizes. You go to an office and the process is worse than it used to be. The person behind the counter cannot help you, or will not, or is overwhelmed. You leave frustrated. You tell friends. You post about it. The conclusion is that “the state” is broken, corrupt, or hostile. Sometimes that conclusion is justified.

But the more common pattern is a vicious cycle. A lack of trust makes people disengage. The capable people stop showing up, stop applying for these jobs. To build a building, you need a permit. To get the permit, you need a bureaucrat to approve it. These rules and regulations come from good intentions but they require motivated people to balance them. Once they become a perversion of their original purpose, they repel good people which creates a vacuum. The vacuum is then filled by the unmotivated, by the opportunist, and by those who want to sabotage the process. The process becomes worse and trust falls further. The next iteration starts with worse people and less patience.

This dynamic is slow in normal times. The terrifying part is how quickly it accelerates when society is stressed. The same low trust that makes a permit office dysfunctional also makes countries reach for self-protection first.

The Corona crisis was probably the most noticeable stress test where we saw countries recognize their weaknesses. The scramble for medicine and PPE taught everyone the same lesson — when push comes to shove, countries prioritize themselves over others.

Once you believe that, the liberal world order starts to look like a fair-weather arrangement. Strong states hedge and defect first; weaker states learn to do the same but their abilities are limited. And rules built for long-term collective goods — like climate policy — are quickly seen as unilateral economic self-harm in a world where others no longer reciprocate.

But the erosion of trust is only half the story. What sets this version of disintegration apart is the role of social media, which did not exist in this form before. During prior wars, people who ran illegal radio stations were prosecuted and jailed. Today, anyone with a phone can broadcast to millions. This is powerful, and liberating, but social media acts as an accelerant for whoever controls the narrative that way. It turns every failure into a spectacle and every spectacle into a moral verdict.

A small, personal example: Vienna might not have everything figured out, but the tone about our city on social media is often hatred toward immigrants — amplified by people who do not even live here. Simply being noticeable in immigration statistics has made the city an easy target for imported outrage.

Social media also encourages performative outrage and quasi-philosophical discussions about betrayal and justification of almost anything. Rather than finding solutions to conflicts, people are spending time on arguing about who is at fault for how we got there. That blame is not always abstractly placed on organizations or governments, but also on individuals.

In an earlier time, if an official was incompetent, you might have ranted to your family and a few friends, and then you would have kept going. Maybe escalated it to a local court. Now the same incident can be pulled into a larger narrative within hours. Someone finds a name. Someone clips a video. Someone quotes a person out of context. Suddenly the story is not about a specific problem that can be fixed, but about a person who can be punished or an organization that needs to be destroyed.

Due process is increasingly being replaced by something darker. We have seen vigilante justice against people who were incorrectly labelled as the perpetrators of a shooting. Even the publishing of the Epstein documents feels more like a spectacle than an earnest attempt at justice. Anyone can be caught in the crosshairs of a mob that does not know them, cannot be reasoned with, and never has to pay for being wrong. Some countries that are pushing against this, like the UK, are branded as enemies of free speech. There are real tradeoffs here, but notice what gets lost: the argument stops being about facts and due process; it becomes about who you’re allowed to hate.

In an attention-seeking environment, sabotage trumps repair. There is little reward for making institutions work better; the reward is for making them look incompetent and illegitimate, and social media pays out instantly for that. Politicians like Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and Donald Trump have learned to exploit hypocrisy, point to it, and turn it into proof of bad faith. Mirroring them, European politicians find it easier to attack the Union than to suggest improvements. On a global scale, outsiders push into foreign politics not because they care, but because it is an easy place to manufacture chaos.

This is where the topic starts looking like a pre-war symptom. We have grown used to describing war as a thing that happens “over there.” But conflict has been bleeding into civilian life for years in ways that do not require declarations. There is the hybrid layer: cyber attacks, disinformation, sabotage, pressure on infrastructure, and the deliberate poisoning of political discourse. The point is not always to win a specific battle. Often the point is to make you doubt your own society. We don’t know who sabotaged Nord Stream, but it also no longer matters. We don’t know why drones are interrupting airports in Europe, why weather balloons are disrupting airspace, or why freighter planes explode. Maybe it’s not sabotage, but it’s the uncertainty that does all the damage.

A divided society is easier to intimidate and a cynical society is easier to manipulate.

An uncomfortable question, then, is what “after” looks like. Let’s take the war in Ukraine: even in the most optimistic case, if the war were to end tomorrow, can one forgive Russia? I do not mean forgiving in the sense of pretending it did not happen. I mean the practical question of how Europeans are supposed to live on the same continent with a state that did this, and may do it again. And what justice even means at scale.

Accountability is not optional. Without it any “peace” is just a pause. It’s hard for me to imagine how tensions in Europe can defuse, particularly given the current political landscape in the US which favors the aggressor. Is there even a path that does not involve extended hostility for half a century?

Forgiveness, if it ever comes, needs to be real and lasting. It would be a set of decisions about what kind of future we accept. Germany was reintegrated into Europe after 1945, but not by pretending that nothing happened. It required recognition of defeat, rebuilding, and a long, difficult process of confronting what had been done. I tend to think what has helped was a universal recognition that it lost, and to show it the consequences of its actions. A societal understanding of the victims it created, the atrocities it committed. There are memorials everywhere in Europe reminding us of that past. I take that as a prerequisite for moving on. I do not see a path that resembles that right now. Not for the war in Ukraine.

What frightens me is that we are degrading the very mechanisms that any “after” depends on. Courts are treated as enemies. Not only are the courts shown as enemies, some judges are personally persecuted. Some of the judges at the International Criminal Court (ICC) are personally sanctioned by the US. Due to fear of secondary sanctions, those judges have no credit cards, no bank accounts, no online services. There is no due process and society is accepting this as normal.

So many foundations are simultaneously under attack. Journalism is treated as propaganda, most types of media are being discredited. Elections are treated as fraud by default. Expertise is treated as self-serving. The basic idea that a process can be legitimate even when it disappoints you is disappearing.

It pains me to see that even the United States is degrading. Whatever idea we had of the US as “a shining city upon a hill”, that idea is gone. It is massively engaged in dividing society and creating chaos. The new mass deportations do not just remove people; they overwhelm courts and administrative systems. They create backlogs, errors, cruelty, and every day more distrust, more chaos, more fear. That fear makes people avoid institutions entirely, which makes integration harder and crime easier. Then the resulting problems are used as justification for harsher measures. It is another vicious cycle: produce dysfunction, point at dysfunction, claim the only solution is power without restraint.

The same logic is increasingly applied outward. The US is attacking its former allies, levying heavy tariffs, undermining international institutions, and withdrawing from treaties. It’s running Russia’s playbook better than Russia itself. Divisions between genders, between races, religions, political beliefs, income brackets are all being amplified and encouraged at home and abroad.

It is tempting to see this as someone else’s collapse, something to watch with horror and from a distance. But the pattern is general. Once the logic takes hold that decency is weakness and that law is merely a tool for your side, it spreads across borders faster than any army. One of Vienna’s largest rallies was “Black Lives Matter” — not because black lives should not matter here, but because the movement was prominent in the US, it was easy to adopt, even while ignoring local forms of racism that had little to do with American police brutality. That was organic spread. What we see now is something more deliberate: the US government is beginning to export its domestic culture war, requiring adherence to “anti-woke” policies as a condition for doing business. The export of division has become official policy.

I am trying to pay attention to the ways in which I contribute to this, but it feels like being a tiny cog in a huge machine. Every day you risk being recruited into someone else’s outrage. I want to do the boring work that keeps societies from sleepwalking into escalation: insisting on processes, supporting institutions even when they are imperfect, resisting the urge to turn every conflict into a moral apocalypse. Maybe if we collectively put energy into strengthening trust and reforming our institutions, we can avoid disintegration — and with strong institutions that have trust across borders, find a way to restart international cooperation.

This is where the question of forgiveness becomes concrete. Germany’s reintegration after 1945 was not merely an act of collective will — it required the very institutions we are now dismantling or rejecting. Courts that could deliver verdicts recognized as legitimate. Media that could document what happened. Schools that could teach it. Above all, it required trust: trust that processes would be fair, that facts would be recorded, that justice would be imperfect but real. Without those institutions, forgiveness at the scale of nations becomes structurally impossible. For tensions to de-escalate, we need to believe that there is a path forward that does not involve endless revenge.

If we are at risk of an even larger war, I do not think it will be because humanity collectively decided to return to barbarism. It will be because too many of us accepted disintegration as normal, and too many institutions became too brittle to absorb shocks without breaking. Because we treated the world as a zero-sum game where the optimal strategy was narrow self-interest over the common good.

Because with this thinking, at one point, the unthinkable will be described as inevitable.

Yesterday evening, at the closing of the gates of Hamburg, where in fair weather several thousand persons had been shut out, a tumult arose. The populace hurled stones at the Dutch troops on guard, who at first fired blindly, and then with aimed shots, whereby some persons were killed and several others wounded. — The demand made upon the city of Hamburg in the past autumn, that it should contribute monthly 400,000 francs toward the pay of the army of the Prince of Ponte Corvo, it is said, has now been renewed.

— Augsburgische Ordinari Postzeitung, Nro. 105, 2nd of May, 1808

Borders are a curious thing. They can be physical or invisible, but they almost immediately have an effect. Nowadays most borders surround countries, but not exclusively so.

I personally have a strong aversion to borders. There is a road in Vienna called Ketzergasse (Heresy Lane). Except it’s not really a road in Vienna — one side is Lower Austria, the other is Vienna. They are both in the same country, but depending on which side you are on, different parking rules apply, different local taxes, different garbage collection rules. The side of the street you live on determines which Kindergarten or school your child can attend. Thankfully, nowadays these are all minor inconveniences. But the days when we had physical gates between cities and countryside, gates that closed at night, are only a few hundred years behind us.

The moment a border has been placed, it creates opportunity for those who want to exploit it. It always fascinates me how quickly the mere existence of a border not only creates forces that want to take advantage of it, but also how little time it takes for people to become supportive of it. Once we are used to a border, there will be those of us who want it to remain. The longer it exists, the larger the differences on either side grow, and the more some will want to retain it.

It requires some external shock to remove a border again. The borders between cities in German-speaking Europe and the surrounding countryside were not just administrative lines determining who could live where; they were physical walls. Crossing with goods meant paying customs duties. Living within the walls for a year and a day made you a free citizen, whereas living outside made you a serf to the local lord.

My childhood was defined by borders coming down. Where once we had to show passports to unfriendly border control guards to cross the mountains into Italy, suddenly we could just drive across without any checks. The borders between European countries became less and less relevant. Gradually, that also meant more and more workers in the service industry came from all across the Union.

People are drawn to borders. All your frustrations and disappointments in life can be projected onto the “other side.” And if a border has friction to pass, it inspires some to cross it.

The division between East and West Germany was one of the most extreme examples. There was very little that divided those parts of Germany from one another. They spoke the same language, and prior to the Cold War, they were not even along typical historical divisions. Yet the border was guarded, militarized, and divided a growing economy from an increasingly failing one. The existence of that border created competition through different economic systems, and ultimately a desire to escape from one side to the other.

The stories of that border are numerous and harrowing. People dug tunnels, built hot air balloons, hid in trucks, and swam across rivers to escape from East to West Germany. Many died trying. When you hear stories of families crossing with their children, knowing they might die in the attempt, it is hard to imagine the desperation that must have driven them.

And it never ended. It’s just easier to defend the existence of a border when it keeps those out that you don’t understand — those who don’t share your culture, your customs, your language.

Getting rid of borders is unpopular right now. Not only are we putting borders up, we’re also trying to put people back on the other side if we can. Some call it remigration, but really, the destination does not matter as long as it’s not within that one’s border. No story exemplifies this more than the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The US government tried and proposed multiple destination countries for him, none of which he had any connection to.

Being on the better side of the border is a privilege, and it feels good. Wanting to get rid of the border is natural for those on the worse side. Defending the removal of the border by those who benefit from it is unpopular. In fact, it can be seen as irresponsible, even treasonous. Yet without that border, both sides would be better off as commerce and culture would flow more freely.

Nowadays it sounds ridiculous that people once lost their lives on a warm summer day because they did not make it back into the city before the gates closed, and army guards shot at them to enforce the border. Yet that event was once nothing more than a small note in a newspaper. I hope that one day society will look back at the enforcement of present-day borders with the same incredulity.

Until the moment when the first bombs dropped, life continued as normal. I did not think much of my note, but I did think back about it a few times since. That note felt like a quiet indictment: the world was offering all the signals, and we were still behaving as if nothing fundamental could break. We’re in year four of the war, and the war is now the new normal. Except the discourse got worse and worse.

I read Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday once more. It is his memoir of Europe before and between the wars. Zweig describes a Vienna confident in progress, convinced that tolerance, trade, and culture had made war obsolete. What gives the book its power is not hindsight, but how sincere that belief was. His world did not feel fragile to the people living in it — until it all came crashing down. The book contrasts the time and freedom of the author before the wars with the horrors that followed.

The book is quite eerie to read in 2025 and map to current events. Who wants a war? Who can think of a war? Yet the rhetoric of war was there, in December of 2021, and it became real in February of 2022. Kyiv as a city has meaning to us. My wife’s and my first real date was there. We have a map of the city hanging in our living room.

The war itself is distant, but I am reminded of it every day. Ukrainian license plates are commonplace in Vienna, my kids go to kindergarten and school with Ukrainian refugees. The news shows power outages, fires, explosions, destruction — every day. We learned about deaths of distance acquaintances, we know of sons and fathers who are prevented from leaving the country.

Even though I grew up with the concept of war — after all, Austria bordered former Yugoslavia which had a hot war throughout my childhood — I did not really have a clear image of it. I did not appreciate the nuances of what life in a country at war looks like. Social media gives you a view into the lives of people there. The absurd normalcy of people celebrating weddings, giving birth, bringing their kids to school and having nights out, while bombs are dropping.

But for all the good parts of social media letting people share their pain, it mostly just brings out the worst in us. Particularly now, as this year something else has shifted. The tone is no longer that of a war that must be stopped. The online discourse has hardened and simplified against the backdrop of the US becoming, for lack of a better word, annoyed with the fact that Ukraine keeps defending itself.

Perhaps not only because of Ukraine, but unmistakably alongside it, we seem to be losing the liberal order many of us assumed was stable. Realpolitik has returned with a vengeance. The aggressor is no longer clearly framed as the problem. Worst of all for me, Europe’s perceived ally, the United States, is itself falling victim to authoritarian tendencies.

I grew up with a naive belief in peace and cooperation between nations. In the project of the European Union, which can bridge division and ignorance. That we would not see something like the Yugoslav wars of my childhood if we were all part of an economic union. Sadly, it progressively looks like there was not much that supported that belief. The signs of disturbance were there years ago, but their dramatic effects and fast acceleration were not clear to me.

Who wants a war? The tone in news and on social media couldn’t be more binary. New lines are drawn and sides are taken. Allies of half a century are now becoming enemies. For minerals, energy and data, new alliances are being formed and old ones broken. The US and Europe are no longer on the same side. The US would rather see Europe splintered into small pieces to have one fewer rival to deal with. Whatever forces are pushing towards the dissolution of European bonds are also acting from within. For years now, even educated Europeans have been projecting all failures towards Brussels.

What unsettles me the most is that this shift is no longer confined to one theater or one aggressor. The war in Gaza, the bombing of Iran, the eruption of yet another conflict in Venezuela — taken individually, each is explained away. Taken together, they read differently. They suggest a world in which force is once again a legitimate first resort, and where legal and moral constraints are treated as optional depending on who acts. The language used to justify these actions has changed completely. It is no longer evasive or apologetic; it is openly authoritarian. Nothing is hidden anymore. Civilian deaths are brushed aside as inevitable. Online discourse argues them away as the product of AI image manipulation. International law has lost any meaning.

Reading Zweig is unsettling because it reminds you how quickly confidence dissolves. Today the possibility that the war spreads no longer feels like paranoia; it feels like something that would once again be described as “unthinkable” until it isn’t.

“Barbaric relapses, such as wars between the peoples of Europe, seemed no more believable than witches or ghosts; our fathers held fast to their faith in the irresistibly binding force of tolerance and conciliation. They honestly believed that the lines dividing nations and creeds would gradually blur into a common humanity, and that peace and security, the highest goods, would thereby be granted to all humankind.”

— Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday