What You Won't Give Up Is What You Are
Here is a simple idea, and almost everything in this essay follows from it: what you refuse to give up, even under pressure, is what actually makes you you. Not your size. Not your power. Not whether you win. What you're built from.
This is true of a person. It's also true, in ways that are easy to check, of a country and of the institutions it builds. And it leads somewhere very concrete: a recommendation for what Europe should do about a single, specific website.
An Enemy You Can't Make Surrender
After the attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States declared war — not on a country, but on an idea. "Terror." Congress passed a law, the Authorization for Use of Military Force, giving the government power to act against whoever had planned or helped the attacks.
Here's the problem hiding inside that law, and it's a structural one, not a political one: a country can surrender. An idea cannot. Nobody can sign a piece of paper on behalf of "terror" and end the war. So the emergency powers that law created never had a natural stopping point. Today, more than two decades later, that same 2001 law is still being used to justify military action — against groups that didn't even exist when it was written.
Along the way, the methods used inside that permanent emergency did real, lasting damage. Indefinite detention without trial. Interrogation methods now widely recognised as torture. A prison at Guantanamo Bay that, twenty-five years on, still holds people who have never been convicted of anything. None of this made America safer in any way that can be clearly measured. What it did do is change what America was — a country that had spent nearly two centuries building a reputation for due process spent the following twenty years quietly walking away from it, in the name of a war with no possible ending.
A City That Won the Battle and Lost Itself
France fought a similar war a generation earlier, in Algeria, and the story is even starker because it played out in a single city over less than a year.
In 1956 and 1957, French paratroopers under General Jacques Massu set out to break the Algerian independence movement's network inside the city of Algiers. They succeeded, tactically, within months — using systematic torture as a standard interrogation method, not an occasional excess. The insurgent network in the city was broken.
France still lost Algeria five years later, in 1962, after a war that cost hundreds of thousands of lives. And the torture used to win one battle in one city became one of the deepest, most lasting wounds in French public memory — argued over in French courts, in French classrooms, and in French politics to this day. France won the Battle of Algiers. It did not win the war, and it never fully recovered its own sense of who it had been before.
The shape is the same one this essay keeps returning to: give up what you're built from to survive a threat, and the thing that survives isn't you anymore.
It Isn't Only Terrorism
The exact same pattern shows up in the decades-long War on Drugs, declared in 1971 and still running in various forms today. Drugs, like terror, are not an actor. No cartel can sign a peace treaty on behalf of drug demand and supply worldwide. So the special legal powers built to fight that war — expanded police powers, mandatory sentences, military-style tactics used against a country's own citizens — never got a natural stopping point either, and the well-documented costs, particularly mass incarceration, have piled up for fifty years with no end in sight.
There's also a useful contrast hiding inside the Cold War, which shows this isn't really about how long a conflict lasts — it's about how the enemy gets defined. Containment, the actual American strategy against the Soviet Union, was aimed at a real country with real borders, and it stayed relatively disciplined and bounded for over forty years. But the domestic period of real civil-liberties damage — the 1950s "Red Scare," blacklists, loyalty oaths, congressional hearings into people's private beliefs — happened specifically when the enemy was reframed as an abstract idea: "communism," an "enemy within," rather than a specific foreign government. Same conflict. Two different framings. Only one of them corroded the country from inside.
The lesson repeats every time: name your enemy as a country, and the war can end. Name your enemy as an idea, and it never will — and everything given up along the way stays given up.
This Isn't Just History. It Happened Yesterday.
On August 26, 2026, the United States government designated Autistici/Inventati — an Italian non-profit collective founded in 2001 — a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity. Autistici/Inventati isn't a militant group. It's a digital infrastructure provider: free encrypted email, web hosting, video conferencing, and a blogging platform called Noblogs, offered to groups the collective judges to share its anti-fascist, anti-militarist politics.
Part of the case against it is genuinely serious. US Treasury states the collective has knowingly provided services to the PKK, a group designated as a terrorist organisation by the US, the UK, and the EU alike. If that's accurate, it's a real concern, not an overreach — providing infrastructure to an already-designated group is exactly the kind of material support sanctions law is meant to catch.
But the rest of the case shows the pattern this essay has been describing, playing out in real time. The State Department also linked the collective to European rail sabotage attacks and to a claimed connection between American Antifa groups and Hamas. According to detailed reporting that followed the announcement, the entire basis for the Hamas connection was that one unrelated, unnamed blog — among what is likely thousands of blogs hosted on the same platform — had once republished a Hamas statement. That's not evidence the collective built anything for terrorism. That's evidence the platform hosts a lot of blogs, the way any hosting service does, and a small number of bad users can now be used to indict the whole service.
This is the actual mechanism the earlier sections of this essay describe, not a metaphor for it. A "war on terror," once declared broadly enough, hands whoever controls it — in this case, a justice department already reshaped around one administration's political priorities — a tool that can reach far past its stated target. Reporting on the same announcement noted that legitimate, unrelated users of the same hosting platform include community book fairs, local radio projects, and researchers who track far-right extremism — including some who helped identify participants in the 2017 Charlottesville rally where a counter-protester was murdered. None of that stopped the whole platform from being swept into a terrorism designation over the actions of a fraction of its users.
That's the risk of "terrorist," used loosely, made concrete: once the label exists, it doesn't stay pointed only at what it was built for.
Europe's Own Version of This Problem
Europe is now living through something with the same permanent shape. Pressure on European countries — through border manipulation, cyberattacks, disinformation, and territorial threats calibrated specifically to avoid triggering a full military response — isn't a single crisis with an end date. It's an ongoing condition. It doesn't have a surrender scene waiting at the end of it.
That makes it genuinely dangerous in exactly the way this essay has been describing. If Europe responds to a permanent, low-level threat with the emergency-powers playbook — special authority, suspended rights, war-footing legal exceptions — it risks the exact same decades-long corrosion that followed 9/11, just spread across a whole continent instead of one country.
The way through is not complicated, even if it sounds strange at first: name the threat honestly as ongoing, and respond to it using completely ordinary tools. Not emergency ones.
The Actual Case: A Single Website
Which brings this essay to something concrete. X, formerly known as Twitter, is owned and controlled by one person. Its recommendation algorithm — the system deciding what millions of people see every day — can be changed overnight, by that one person, with no outside approval and no way for anyone else to continuously check what changed or why.
That algorithm is the platform's rulebook. It decides what gets seen and what quietly disappears, for millions of people, every day. And when that rulebook can be rewritten in private, by one unaccountable person, at any moment, for any reason — including political reasons — there is no way to reliably verify, on an ongoing basis, that it's being run in the public interest rather than one person's interest.
Should the EU respond by declaring X some kind of hostile foreign asset, or reaching for a designation of its own? No — and this is exactly where the Autistici/Inventati case earlier in this essay becomes the warning rather than a side note. That's precisely the move that just went wrong in the other direction: a broad label, applied loosely, that ends up catching far more than its stated target and hands whoever controls the label a tool to use against whoever they choose next. Calling X names and formally designating it as a threat would be Europe learning nothing from what it just watched happen to a hosting collective in Italy. Banning it outright for an entire population would also require exactly the kind of extraordinary, emergency-style authority this essay has spent its length warning against.
There's a much smaller, much more boring answer sitting right there already, and Europe has used it before.
The Boring Answer Europe Has Already Used Once
In February and March 2023, all three of the EU's main institutions — the European Commission, the European Council, and the European Parliament — banned TikTok from staff devices. Not for everyone. Not with a court order or a special law. A simple administrative decision, made on ordinary cybersecurity and data-protection grounds, that EU institutions would not use this particular app for official business.
Nobody needed a war-powers vote for that. It was the same kind of decision any organisation makes about which software it trusts with its own systems — boring, procedural, entirely reversible, and requiring no special justification beyond "we don't think this is safe enough for us to use."
The same logic applies cleanly to X. EU institutions, and individual member-state public offices, can simply stop using it for their own official communication — not because of any particular post or political opinion, but because of the structural fact that one person can silently rewrite its rules at will, and nobody outside can verify what changed. That's a content-neutral, ownership-and-governance-based standard, which matters enormously: it isn't a judgment about what anyone posts, so it can't easily be twisted into a tool for punishing views a government doesn't like. It's a rule about structure, applied the same way regardless of who's in charge or what they believe.
And it doesn't need one giant EU-wide order to work. The TikTok bans themselves rolled out institution by institution, country by country, not from a single central command. The same should hold here — each public office deciding, on its own authority, which tools are safe enough for its own name to be attached to. That's not a weakness. It's the version of this decision least likely to be misused by whoever happens to be in charge next.
The Thread Running Through All of This
A country that tortured its way to a tactical win and lost its own reflection in the mirror along the way. A war on an idea that can never formally end, and the rights it quietly took with it and never gave back. A hosting collective in Italy, swept into a terrorism designation this week over what a handful of its users did. A website whose entire rulebook lives in one person's hands.
Different centuries, different technologies, same structure underneath all of it. What refuses to bend, even under real pressure, is what something actually is. Europe doesn't need extraordinary new powers to make a good choice here, and it doesn't need to reach for the same broad, loosely-aimed label that just misfired in Washington. It needs the same ordinary, unglamorous kind of decision it already made once, about a different app, for exactly the same reason — and the discipline to keep making decisions like that instead of reaching for something bigger than the moment actually requires.
JP Ahonen is a transformation director, Finnish defence reservist, and independent analyst based in Porto Rafti, Greece.