In September 1788, a drunken brawl broke out among different regiments of the Austrian army. The army had been put together to repel the invading Ottomans, but confusion and bad communication made the soldiers open fire on each other, killing and wounding 10,000 of their own troops. It’s one of the biggest mistakes in military history and one that made the Ottoman conquest of the now-Romanian town of Karánsebes that the Austrian army had set out to protect a walk in the park.

For a continent with such a rich history of strategic mistakes, Europe’s political class seems to have learned very few lessons indeed. After the Eurogroup reconvened this weekend to discuss the Greek crisis, Syriza and Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras were forced to accept a deal that not only is in opposition to to his pre-electoral pledges to end austerity, but intensifies it and cedes more of Greece’s sovereignty to the European Union.

The “agreement” handed to Syriza was reached, as one EU official put it, after a “mental waterboarding" session. It was struck after Greece voted “No” by 61 percent to the proposal drafted by European Commission President Jean Claude Juncker a week earlier.

Rather than paying attention to what the Greek people — the ostensible recipients of the bailout — thought, the country’s creditors decided to come up with an even harsher bundle of measures that included labor-market reforms and deregulation, and also the harsh pension cuts and tax hikes that Syriza characterized as “red lines” after it was elected.

Let’s be clear: This isn’t a “cruel to be kind” kind of deal. This is cruelty for cruelty’s sake. The alternative, officially spelled out in a document leaked by German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble for the first time, was for Greece to leave the euro “temporarily” for five years, sort itself out, and then come back into the fold.

With this in view, it’s no longer a stretch for someone to wonder: Why is Europe so keen to fire upon itself?

For a brief moment, the result of the most recent Greek referendum rejecting austerity was a triumph, if an unexpected one, for Syriza and its coalition government. Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras believed that the result would strengthen his hand in the negotiations. More importantly, it could showcase Syriza’s political power, challenging those looking to undermine and potentially replace them with a “national unity” government under a technocrat prime minister (as certain members of the European Commission would have liked.)

But Syriza ultimately caved to a proposal that looked an awful lot like the one forwarded by Juncker a week earlier. As per the terms of the bailout, a fund will be created to sell off 50 billion euros of Greek state assets such as the national energy grid, regional airports and ports. If you look at the revenue generated by previous sales, the figure seems to be entirely in the realm of fiction. From the revenue they hope to generate, 50 percent will go towards debt repayments, 25 percent for bank recapitalization, and the rest, toward reviving the real economy by way of direct investment, the nature of which is yet to be defined.