Two things happened the other week in Europe that are connected to the forces shaping the future of the union for years to come. One is tangential, yet telling, another is the stuff of the media feeding frenzy despite delivering little. To me, as a European citizen, both of these events signal a painful reality of the EU’s systemic decline in its geopolitical power projection. Not a “plaything of the great powers”? The first event was a statement made by the German Chancellor Merz in the Bundestag. “We are not a plaything of the great powers. We must decisively stand…