West Winning Wars, Turning on Itself Over How to End Them

For two years the hard part of the world’s two biggest wars was the fighting. This week the fighting in both finally started to stop — and the hard part turned out to be everything that comes after. In a Swiss resort, American and Iranian negotiators signed a roadmap meant to end their war within sixty days. In southern Ukraine, a senior NATO official concluded that Russia can no longer keep Crimea supplied. On paper, the West is winning. In practice, the same few days revealed a coalition that no longer agrees on what the winning is for, and is beginning to turn on itself over how to finish the wars it is winning.

Start with Iran. After a war that killed more than 7,300 people, negotiators meeting at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland agreed on June 21 to a “roadmap” toward a final settlement within sixty days, brokered by Pakistan and Qatar. The terms are concrete: the Strait of Hormuz reopens toll-free for at least sixty days, hostilities end — including the grinding fight between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon — and Iran invites IAEA inspectors back to begin dismantling its enriched-uranium stockpile. Vice-President JD Vance, who has run the American side, called the inspections “the first step in permanently denuclearising.” Commercial traffic through Hormuz, down ninety percent at the war’s peak, was already recovering; the US energy secretary said oil flows were “back towards normal.”

The catch is that almost no one at the table fully trusts it. The framework leaves out the two things Israel cares about most — Iran’s ballistic missiles and its regional proxies — and Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has made its anger plain. Vance’s answer to that anger was extraordinary for a sitting American vice-president: he told Israel that Trump is “your only ally left in the world.” Trump himself nearly blew up the talks midweek, issuing public threats that briefly sent the Iranian delegation walking out before the mediators coaxed them back. As Al Jazeera’s analysts put it, this is peace as optics first and details later. The sixty-day clock, which runs to late August, will test not whether the two sides can settle the technical questions of enrichment and sanctions, but whether a ceasefire built to stop one war can be turned into an agreement that prevents the next.

Ukraine’s war is bending the same way, but through force rather than diplomacy. A concerted campaign to cut the roads, rail and bridges feeding Russian-occupied Crimea and Zaporizhzhia is now visibly working. A senior NATO official said Russia simply cannot resupply the peninsula effectively: fuel is short, bridges have been hit, and Moscow now hesitates to use the Kerch crossing for fear of the next strike. The weapon is cheap and Ukrainian-made — mid-range drones such as the FP-2 and the 70-kilogram Behemoth, with the number of such strike missions up twenty-eight-fold over the past year. On June 22 Ukraine reached deep inside Russia to hit a missile-electronics plant at Voronezh and a satellite centre at Dubna. The Australian military analyst Mick Ryan has named this “the interdiction war,” and its logic is patient strangulation rather than the storming of trenches: the Azov Corps now openly predicts it can force Russia out of Kherson and Crimea by severing supply alone. Even the peninsula’s tourist operators feel it — eighty percent of June bookings cancelled.

And yet the very week the West can finally point to results is the week its unity is cracking — and the fault line is Russia itself. On the night of June 18, EU leaders met in Brussels in a session so sensitive that aides and even mobile phones were barred and the talks ran two hours past their scheduled end. The subject, once it leaked, was a revelation: European Council President António Costa had quietly directed his office to open a channel to the Kremlin, and his chief adviser had held two calls with a senior aide to Putin. Macron and Merz were furious; the Baltic states, Denmark and the Netherlands rallied behind them with what officials called unprecedented anger. But — and this is the part that matters — a majority of member states sided with Costa. After five years of war, more of Europe now wants someone, anyone, talking to Moscow than wants to keep holding the line in silence. The coalition that looks victorious is quietly split over whether victory means fighting on or starting to deal.

The fracture is personal as well as strategic. In the same days, Poland and Ukraine — neighbours, and the most load-bearing of frontline allies — fell into an open feud over the dead of eighty years ago. Polish President Karol Nawrocki stripped Zelensky of the Order of the White Eagle after Kyiv named a military unit for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, blamed in Poland for the wartime massacres of Poles in Volhynia. Zelensky returned the decoration by courier and pointedly thanked the Polish people rather than their president; his intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, and his foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha, gave back their own Polish honours. Donald Tusk, Poland’s own prime minister, named the only winner: the row, he said, “pleases Putin.” Budanov was blunter still — a “gift to the Moscow aggressor.”

Europe’s leaders know how all this looks, which is why Friedrich Merz has summoned them to Berlin on Wednesday. The so-called E5 — Germany, France, Britain, Italy and Poland — will try to coordinate Ukraine policy and, above all, to agree a common pitch to keep Donald Trump onside before NATO’s summit in Ankara on July 7-8. But the repair table is itself wobbling. Keir Starmer arrives as a lame duck: he resigned on June 22 after Labour’s drubbing in May’s local elections, becoming Britain’s seventh prime minister in a decade, with the former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham now favourite to replace him. Tusk arrives mid-feud with Kyiv. Giorgia Meloni arrives fresh from trading public insults with Trump over a G7 photo opportunity. The five powers meant to hold Europe’s line are each, in their own way, distracted or diminished.

While the leaders argue abroad, the costs are arriving at home. Germany’s industry federation, the BDI, cut its 2026 growth forecast to a near-flat 0.4 percent, blaming the Iran war’s blow to energy prices and business confidence; Berlin is openly debating extending coal-fired power to cope with the gas bill, and a government pension commission has proposed tying the retirement age to life expectancy and scrapping early retirement at 63. Nature piled on its own emergency: a second heatwave in a month settled over the continent, with France placing more than half the country under a red alert and temperatures touching 43°C, Spain bracing for 44°C, and Britain issuing only its second-ever red extreme-heat warning as forecasters expect 40°C and the breaking of long-standing June records by the 25th. France logged a 20-to-30 percent surge in emergency calls and at least three elderly deaths; the World Health Organization counts more than 200,000 heat-related deaths in Europe over the past four years. The war’s bill and the climate’s bill are landing in the same week, on the same governments already stretched thin.

Beyond Europe and the Gulf, the week carried a quiet warning about where the next contest is forming. Chinese strategists, several analyses noted, are studying Iran’s slow strangulation as a template for Taiwan — now widely named the likeliest flashpoint for a US-China war — even as Xi Jinping spent the week pressing Trump to redefine American policy toward the island. And the tools of war kept shifting under everyone’s feet: the Pentagon confirmed it had used Elon Musk’s Grok AI in combat operations, while the Five Eyes intelligence alliance warned that frontier AI models could destabilise governments within months. The immediate tests, though, are nearer and dated. The sixty-day Iran clock runs to late August. Merz’s leaders sit down in Berlin on Wednesday and again at Ankara in July. Each will measure the one thing this week just exposed: not whether the West can win its wars, but whether it can still agree on what to do once it has.