Like any good entrepreneur who found early success in one market, Elon Musk is now starting to expand to others. Yesterday, Musk—the entrepreneur turned Donald Trump megadonor—hosted a livestream on X with Alice Weidel, the leader of Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD.

“Only the AfD can save Germany, end of story,” Musk said during the 70-minute conversation, endorsing the party ahead of the country’s elections next month. This is not the first time Musk has publicly thrown his support behind the AfD. At the end of last month, he wrote an op-ed in a German newspaper endorsing the aggressively nativist party, whose members and staff have well-documented ties to neo-Nazis and other extremist groups. (The party, for its part, has expelled some politicians and staff over suspected links to such groups, though others still remain).

Musk has spent recent days hyper-focused on replicating the influence campaign he has waged on U.S. politics. In addition to backing the AfD, he has injected himself into British politics, accusing Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party, of enabling child sex abuse by failing to address grooming gangs as a previous head of England and Wales’s Crown Prosecution Services, and calling for his ouster. (Starmer has defended his record, noting that he reopened the cases and was the first to prosecute the perpetrators.) Musk posted a poll on Monday asking X users whether “America should liberate the people of Britain from their tyrannical government.” Musk has also started posting in support of Tommy Robinson, an Islamaphobic far-right political activist in the U.K. who is currently in prison for repeatedly breaching court orders related to a libel case he lost; Robinson falsely claimed in Facebook videos that a Syrian refugee had “violently attack[ed] young English girls in his school.”

After Nigel Farage, who leads the U.K.’s far-right Reform Party, said that he disagreed with Musk about Robinson, Musk posted: “The Reform Party needs a new leader. Farage doesn’t have what it takes.” As Musk has waged this pressure campaign, he has incessantly posted in support of the far right in Europe and their current causes célèbres. On Wednesday, he suggested that there were “Sharia Law courts” in the United Kingdom, that “UK politicians are selling your daughters for votes,” and that “Irish citizens get longer sentences than illegal immigrants. That’s messed up.”

Despite Musk’s ability to become a major political figure in the United States, it’s not clear whether his pressure campaign in Europe will work. Musk’s efforts to influence European politics are hampered by campaign regulations that curb the role of money in politics. In addition to his online campaign during the U.S. presidential election, he donated more than $250 million to help Trump, in part funding ads that ran in swing states. But in Germany, radio and TV ads can air only within a month of the election. In the U.K., national campaign spending in the 365 days prior to an election is capped at about $40 million per party. The perspective of an avaricious billionaire may not mean the same thing in Europe that it does in the U.S.: A YouGov poll in November showed that just 18 percent of people in the U.K. view Musk favorably, down from 23 percent in 2022, after he initiated his purchase of Twitter. In the U.S., by contrast, more than a third of Americans have a favorable view of Musk.

Some European leaders, perhaps sensing that their constituents share a dim view of Musk, have pushed back. Starmer has accused him of spreading “lies and misformation.” Even officials in European countries who haven’t been targeted are speaking out. French President Emmanuel Macron, who recently welcomed Musk to the reopening of Paris’s Notre Dame cathedral, accused him of “supporting a new international reactionary movement and intervening directly in elections.”

But even if Musk falls short of his goals of propelling AfD to power in Germany and ousting Starmer as prime minister, he’ll likely still have made some gains for the European far right. A YouGov poll from earlier this month showed the AfD polling at 21 percent, behind only the mainstream center-right party. The party has gained two points since the beginning of last month, suggesting that Musk’s campaign is at least not stifling the party. Even though the AfD is a formal party with considerable support, it’s still considered taboo in much of Germany. Every other party has agreed not to work with the AfD, effectively ostracizing it. Musk’s endorsement of the AfD “is a problem,” Miro Dittrich, a co-CEO of CeMAS, a Berlin-based nonprofit that tracks the far right, told me. “It’s seen as legitimizing them.” During the conversation with Weidel, Musk tried to sanitize and downplay the Afd’s far-right tendencies and neo-Nazi ties by accusing the media of misportraying the party, and giving Weidel space to do the same: Adolf Hiter “wasn’t a conservative; he wasn’t a libertarian,” she told Musk. “He was a communist, socialist guy, so full stop, no more comment on that, and we are exactly the opposite.” (Hitler, of course, was an anti-communist, anti-Semitic dictator.)

Musk doesn’t need to make endorsements or post aggressively to exert his influence over Europe. Even before he attached himself to the Trump campaign, Musk gained significant leverage over governments through Starlink, his satellite-internet service. In 2022, Musk reportedly made the decision to not provide Starlink service to Ukraine while it was launching an attack on Russian forces in Crimea, after speaking with the Russian ambassador to the United States. In September, he used the company to partially circumvent a temporary ban on X in Brazil, by refusing to block the website for Starlink customers in the country.

Unless something truly intractable stands between Musk and a goal, he will relentlessly go for it, no matter how trivial or ill-advised it may be, often no matter the cost to those around him. That pattern is probably how Musk’s political ambitions will play out. Unless he gets bored, governments across the world will be forced to at least listen to his whims—especially as European leaders contend with the possibility of retaliation from the president of the United States. Perhaps a fallout between Trump and Musk is coming. Trump has reportedly started complaining about how much Musk is hanging out in Mar-a-Lago, where he pays $2,000 a night to stay at a villa to regularly dine with Trump. Still, even without the president-elect, he has the wealth and connections to exert his will on politics worldwide. Musk is here for as long as he wants to be.

For the past three years, Russia has used missiles and drones to locate and destroy vital infrastructure in Ukraine—power plants, dams, electrical-transmission lines. Everyone understands that these attacks are acts of war, no matter how steadfastly President Vladimir Putin describes them as part of a “special military operation.” When Russia targets other European neighbors, though, the West resorts to its own euphemisms to avoid directly acknowledging what Putin is doing.    

Last month, the undersea power cable Estlink 2, which connects Estonia with fellow European Union and NATO member Finland, was suddenly cut. The EU’s top foreign-policy official described the incident somewhat dryly and without explicitly blaming Russian agents: It was, she said, merely “part of a pattern of deliberate and coordinated actions to damage our digital and energy infrastructure.” Obviously, cutting a power line is a less overt form of aggression than the full-scale invasion that Putin launched in Ukraine. The common thread, though, is that Russia is using force to undermine a recognized country’s independence and its ability to fight back.

Undersea cables have been vital to the sovereignty of Estonia, a former Soviet republic that borders Russia and desperately needs to maintain power and communications channels that are free from Moscow’s control. Soon after Estlink 2 was sabotaged, Finnish authorities seized the oil tanker Eagle S, which was en route from St. Petersburg, Russia, to Egypt. Registered in the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean, the ship is likely part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet—a collection of foreign-flagged tankers that Putin’s regime uses to sell Russian oil and skirt international economic sanctions imposed after his invasion of Ukraine.

[Read: What Europe fears]

The Eagle S, however, apparently had a covert military purpose as well: Investigators discovered that the vessel was crammed full of advanced surveillance equipment, which used so much power that the ship suffered from periodic blackouts. Finnish authorities concluded that the Eagle S had dragged its anchor across the Baltic Sea bed for “dozens of kilometers” in an attempt to break the Estlink 2 line.

Still, in this and other cases across the continent, European officials seem terrified of admitting what is happening. Authorities in multiple countries are investigating parcels that spontaneously caught fire or exploded in the custody of cargo airlines, perhaps in preparation for a broader operation that would threaten many large aircraft. Saboteurs have targeted a number of other strategically significant assets in Europe—munitions factories, crucial rail lines—along with civilian infrastructure such as warehouses and malls.

Investigators believe that Russia is behind the attacks. In December, the EU imposed sanctions on certain Russian individuals and entities in response to recent sabotage. Still, the official announcement declined to use the word war to characterize Moscow’s activities outside Ukraine. Instead, the EU condemned Russians’ “destabilising” and “malicious actions.”

The inability to describe acts of war as acts of war is part of a culture of distortion and denial regarding the subject of state-sponsored violence. Over generations, policy makers have created many subclasses of conflict: cold wars, police actions, hybrid wars, cyber wars. Different euphemisms serve different purposes. Putin prefers special military operation because he doesn’t want to publicly admit that he is waging a brutal war on Ukrainians. Many in Europe avoid describing Russia’s sabotage campaign outside Ukraine as war because they’d rather not have to do anything in response.

European officials would be better off honestly admitting the reality of what they are confronting. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is only the most conspicuous part of what looks like an ever more globalized war. Late last month, an Azerbaijani passenger jet was shot from the sky over Russia and forced to land in Kazakhstan. North Korean troops have been transported thousands of miles to fight and die on European soil. European governments have dithered over how much to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion, and they have no clear strategy for deterring or limiting the sabotage campaign now happening on their own soil. Acknowledging that Russia is engaging in acts of war would not oblige the EU or individual countries to immediately retaliate with military force. But the term war has a way of concentrating the mind—and using it might make European leaders think much harder about defending themselves when they cannot rely on the United States.

[Read: The most consequential act of sabotage in modern times]

Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, and arguably since the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945, democratic Europe has been predisposed to think about war as an issue for Washington to handle, not as a problem requiring their own leadership. European states might provide some soldiers and equipment but do not have the burden of any serious planning or strategizing. That lax attitude is no longer tenable. Every leader on the continent needs to understand that Putin wishes to upend the entire European order—and that the United States is no longer trustworthy as a long-term ally. President-Elect Donald Trump is openly disdainful of many governments in Europe and seems willing to walk away from America’s role as the continent’s protector.  

Although European leaders have largely refused to think about war, the EU’s member nations and other democracies on the continent still have all the prerequisites for military power. Although the economies of the United States, China, and many developing countries are growing much faster, the EU, Britain, and other European democracies together have a population of about half a billion people and account for about one-fifth of world GDP. EU member nations maintain military forces with some of the most advanced equipment in the world. The combination of Putin’s aggression and Trump’s indifference should be an opportunity for Europe to take charge of its own defense. The first vital step in this realization is to acknowledge what’s already happening: Call a war a war.