The bombs never fall on Washington, and that has always been Europe’s problem.

Europe often claims it is finally awake and that the war in Ukraine has clarified the stakes of this century. The deeper lesson is older and harder: the continent is positioned, not protected. The logic that shaped NATO’s nuclear scripts—from early exercises that mapped firestorms onto German soil to the WINTEX-CIMEX drills of the 1980s—has returned, updated and layered beneath the language of values. Europe now faces a war it did not choose, under a doctrine it did not write, inside a strategic architecture that has long treated it as expendable terrain for other powers.

From the Cold War to the war in Ukraine, the strategic equation has stayed the same: Europe is not what the United States protects. Europe is where the United States protects itself.

This remains the truth buried beneath decades of alliance rhetoric, moral vocabulary and political illusion—a truth European governments have avoided naming because doing so would unravel the foundations of their security identity.

Ukraine did not create this logic. It exposed it. For all the talk of shared values and mutual defense, the geographic reality has not changed. Europe absorbs the risk so the United States can wield the power.

This structure has defined the transatlantic relationship for seven decades, a design etched into nuclear planning documents of the 1950s and refined through the late 1980s in the WINTEX-CIMEX exercises.

Europe remembers little of these records. The United States remembers everything. The archives tell a story Europeans no longer tell themselves.

WINTEX-CIMEX, a series of classified NATO war games conducted through the Cold War, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, was not a minor planning activity. Declassified segments released through the Bundesarchive and German historical museum show it served as the operating script for a potential war with the Soviet Union. In every scenario, the pattern was consistent:

• The first U.S. nuclear warheads struck European soil.
• The battlefield was Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
  The expectation was mass European casualties, destroyed cities and radioactive terrain. The United States remained geographically insulated—committed politically, not territorially.

Carte Blanche, a 1955 NATO exercise, simulated hundreds of nuclear detonations over Germany, as shown in declassified assessments. WINTEX-CIMEX in 1983 reproduced the same logic with more advanced tools.

Across three decades, the message stayed the same: Europe remained the expendable theater of U.S. strategy—a shield, not a partner; a buffer, not a beneficiary.

In 1989, during WINTEX-CIMEX, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl withdrew his country from the exercise after seeing that NATO’s nuclear script still envisioned detonating atomic weapons on German soil. The incident, later noted in foreign policy retrospectives, underscored that even forty years after Carte Blanche, Europe was still treated as the sacrificial zone of U.S. strategy.

One question Europeans rarely ask is what replaced Carte Blanche and WINTEX-CIMEX. Those major strategic exercises did not end because Europe became inviolable. They ended because NATO shifted to planning regimes that are now classified, digitized, and embedded in a far more complex—and far less publicly understood—nuclear posture.

The alliance no longer releases nuclear-use maps for journalists to analyze. It no longer discloses how many European cities would be sacrificed to halt an advance. The logic did not disappear; it simply moved out of public view.

Current NATO exercises—framed as deterrence, readiness, or resilience—now operate behind layers of restricted access, encrypted simulation, and multinational secrecy. The public sees the choreography: jets refueling in formation, armored columns crossing borders, command centers lit by screens. What the public does not see is the escalation ladder built into these rehearsals. And if past planning documents teach anything, it is the first rungs still stand on European soil.

The geography has not changed. The alliance structure has not changed. The underlying assumption—that Europe absorbs nuclear risk so the United States does not have to—has not changed.

If anything, today’s silence is more disturbing than the Cold War’s limited transparency. Then, Europe could at least read the plans that condemned it. Today, it is asked to trust those plans no longer exist simply because they are no longer shown.

Yet every classified rehearsal, every tabletop escalation scenario, and every closed-door nuclear consultation echoes the same uncomfortable premise that guided Carte Blanche and WINTEX-CIMEX: Europe remains the battlefield of last resort, and Washington is again preparing for a war it does not intend to fight on its own soil.

Still, European leaders continue to speak of NATO as if it were a benevolent insurance policy—a moral community, a shared destiny, a family.

Families do not rehearse the nuclear destruction of their own members for thirty years. What is striking is not American behavior—which follows the predictable cadence of great-power strategy—but Europe’s refusal to interpret that behavior.

Europe’s political imagination was forged in the warm afterglow of its reconstruction. Marshall Plan aid became mythology. The postwar consensus hardened into narrative. Europeans came to believe that what the United States wants for Europe is what Europe needs.

Ukraine has shattered that belief. Not because the United States is malicious, but because the United States is strategic—and strategy does not care about sentiment.

Viewed through an American lens, the war in Ukraine offers a chance to:

• Weaken a rival without risking American territory.
• Reassert NATO discipline after decades of drift.
• An opportunity to shift Europe away from Russian energy and toward U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG).
• Expand arms sales and revitalize the U.S. defense industry.
• Lock Europe into a dependency structure that will remain long after the war ends.

It is a geopolitical windfall—nearly frictionless for Washington, because the friction falls on Europe. European economies absorb the energy shock. European industries lose competitiveness. European publics absorb the refugee flows. European borders absorb escalation risk. European leaders absorb the moral burden of “staying the course.”

Meanwhile, Washington repeats the same promise it made during WINTEX-CIMEX: The United States will help, but Europe will pay.

Europe prefers to describe the Ukraine war as a defense of values, because values feel noble, safe, and nonnegotiable. But the United States does not defend values; it uses values to legitimize interests. The difference is fundamental. Europe seeks a moral narrative. The United States seeks a strategic outcome.

Ukraine, tragically, supplies both: a moral story for Europe and a strategic outcome for Washington. Russia pays in blood. Ukraine pays in destruction. Europe pays in exposure.

What makes this moment particularly stark is that Europeans believe they have moved beyond the nuclear logic of the twentieth century. They have not transcended anything. They have simply stopped reading the scripts.

WINTEX-CIMEX was not a relic. It functioned as the operating system behind NATO’s posture—a posture that remains intact, only updated, digitized and rebranded under terms like deterrence, forward presence and collective defense.

The underlying truth has not changed. If a NATO–Russia confrontation escalates, Europe is the battlefield. If it goes nuclear, Europe is the sacrifice. If it ends in ashes, the United States remains intact.

This is geography, it is doctrine, it is the logic of an alliance designed by a superpower that needed a buffer and a continent too traumatized to refuse becoming one.

What makes the moment even more precarious is NATO’s growing emphasis on cognitive warfare—an explicit effort to shape not only behavior but perception. NATO’s Allied Command Transformation has openly advanced a cognitive warfare framework for that purpose.

The Cold War destroyed European cities in planning documents. The new era undermines European autonomy through narrative architecture. Controlling Europe’s strategic imagination does not require occupying Europe. It requires ensuring that negotiation appears as weakness, restraint appears as betrayal, escalation appears as responsibility, alignment appears as virtue, doubt appears as disloyalty.

The war in Ukraine has become the ideal testbed for this psychological grammar. Europeans remain emotionally committed to a narrative that places them on the right side of history, even as that narrative pushes them toward the brink WINTEX-CIMEX once rehearsed in chilling detail.

Europe is aging, industrially shrinking, politically fractured, and spiritually exhausted. It clings to the United States not because the partnership is equal but because the alternative feels unmanageable. Yet the cost of this dependence is increasingly clear. Europe cannot imagine a future not written in Washington.

And Washington does not write for Europe—it writes for itself.

This is why every crisis—Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Ukraine—draws Europe deeper into a strategy it does not design, for outcomes it does not define, with risks it cannot contain. This is why European autonomy collapses precisely when it matters most. This is why Europe continues to be surprised by events U.S. documents anticipated decades earlier. And this is why Europe, in 2025 and soon in 2026, again finds itself drifting toward a confrontation whose escalation ladder resembles those charted in WINTEX-CIMEX. Because the logic endures: Europe is the terrain and the United States is the beneficiary.

The purpose of this article, and those that follow, is neither praise nor condemnation. It is recognition. Europe must confront its own reflection—not the flattering version promoted in Brussels, but the one drawn across seventy years of U.S. planning.

Europe was never the protected. Europe was always the protection. The question now is whether Europe will continue confusing the two—or finally confront the cost of failing to understand.