We have grown accustomed to treating war as a distant abstraction, a grainy video game played out on screens far from our comfortable living rooms. But the breaking news from Romania shatters that illusion with brutal finality. Families are fleeing in terror as drone strikes hit a residential block. This is not Kyiv. This is not Gaza. This is Bucharest, or some other corner of a NATO member state, and the walls of our civilised order are crumbling.
Let us pause and consider the historical parallels. We fancy ourselves citizens of a peaceful, post-modern age, but we are in fact reliving the 1930s, or perhaps the late Roman Republic. The signs are everywhere: the erosion of international law, the rise of strongmen who treat borders as mere suggestions, and the gradual acceptance of violence as a legitimate tool of statecraft. The drone strike on a residential block is not an isolated incident. It is a symptom of a deeper rot.
The response from our leaders will be predictable: condemnation, stern warnings, perhaps some sanctions. But these are the gestures of a decadent empire, too comfortable and too divided to mount a serious defence of its values. We have outsourced our security to machines and our morality to bureaucrats. Meanwhile, real people with real fears are fleeing their homes, their suitcases packed with memories, their children clutching toys.
The intellectual elite, of course, will offer nuanced takes. They will speak of 'escalation management' and 'asymmetric warfare'. They will write op-eds in the Guardian and the New York Times, dissecting the geopolitical calculus while ignoring the human cost. But I am here to tell you that this is a moral crisis, not a strategic problem. We have allowed ourselves to become so numb to violence that we react to a residential block being bombed as if it were a traffic accident.
And what of national identity? The Romanian families fleeing in terror are not just victims of a military strike. They are victims of the collapse of the nation-state, a structure that once provided a modicum of safety and sovereignty. Now, borders are porous, alliances are shaky, and every country is a potential battleground. We have traded the clear-eyed realism of the Victorians for a fuzzy globalism that protects no one.
The drone strike is a harbinger. It is a sign that the so-called rules-based order is unravelling. The barbarians are not at the gates. They are already inside, piloting the drones, or perhaps just clicking 'like' on the videos of the aftermath. We have become a civilisation that watches its own destruction with a mixture of horror and indifference.
What is to be done? First, we must stop pretending that this is someone else's problem. The flight of Romanian families is our flight. Their terror is our terror. Second, we must rediscover the virtues that made Europe more than just a geographic expression: courage, solidarity, and a willingness to fight for what we believe in. The alternative is a slow descent into chaos, punctuated by moments of stark, horrifying violence.
I do not offer easy answers. I offer a challenge: Look at the photos of those fleeing families. Imagine their faces in your own neighbourhood. And then ask yourself if you are willing to accept this as the new normal. Because if you are, then we have already lost.
