a fixation that borders on the monomaniacal
That's a great turn of phrase. It really cannot be understated just how obsessed the European elites are with Russia. It is all-consuming psychosis at this point.
As a European i can confirm pretty much everything you wrote in this piece. Here in Germany the situation is getting worse every day. Energy prices are increasing with no end in sight, rents are becoming unaffordable, wages are stagnating, decent paying jobs are nowhere to be found for normal (non labor aristocracy) people, and in the meantime social programs are getting slashed left and right and all that the media and our politicians can talk about is Russia. How much we need to be afraid of them, how Russia is behind everything bad that ever happens, how they are about to invade Europe any day now, and how we urgently need to remilitarize and reintroduce the draft.
Dissent is ruthlessly repressed, anyone who speaks out against this war hysteria is immediately labeled a Putinist. People getting arrested and prosecuted for social media posts, and not just on the issue of war with Russia. Of course just like in Britain we have the effective criminalization of anti-genocide protests. We have jewish holocaust survivors being arrested for "anti-semitism" for calling out the genocide in Palestine. They are making support for the Zionist project into a litmus test for not just German citizenship but even just residence. Immigrants are scared to express support for Palestine for fear of having their residency permits revoked.
Anti-war leftist voices are virtually non-existent in the mainstream discourse and even in the niches that we do have we are constantly under siege by the state apparatus, raids on political gatherings, looking for any excuse to keep our candidates from standing for elections, surveilled by the Verfassungsschutz, and always the looming threat of having our orgs and political parties declared anti-constitutional ("verfassungswidrig") for anti-capitalist advocacy. And the far right is gaining more and more support with each election, to absolutely no surprise since the establishment is completely failing to address the rapidly declining material conditions.
a Europe that clings to delusions of unipolar supremacy
The best way to describe present day Europe. A continent completely detached from the current global reality and operating on assumptions of a world that no longer exists. A continent drowning in its own fantasies, high on the conceit of cultural and moral superiority.