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...