Wake Up, Europe
The continent must take charge of its own fate.
Last week, Die Zeit, the German magazine on whose board of publishers I serve, asked some of the world’s leading thinkers to answer a deceptively simple question: Should Europe break with the United States? Here is my answer.
A few weeks ago, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and a host of other European nations sent troops to Greenland to protect the Danish territory against… the United States. Even a year ago, as Donald Trump took office for the second time, it would have been hard to imagine such a turn of events. But the realization that an old political order is breaking apart, and that we are unlikely to return to the relative calm of the postwar years anytime soon, has slowly been dawning on political leaders desperate to keep living in the past.
That practically forces the question of whether Europe should break up with the United States. But natural though it may be to ask that question at this moment, it betrays naivety about the sorry state of the continent—and risks pushing it in the wrong direction.
It is clear that Germany, in particular, can no longer rely on the United States the way it once did. The extent to which European countries outsourced their military security to America in the postwar era relied on the knowledge that, despite all of their differences, both Democratic and Republican presidents would value NATO and tolerate the EU. Given the hostility that Trump—and, crucially, other parts of the rising right—harbor towards NATO and the EU that reliance has become a liability.
But by the same token it is clear that Europe can’t fully break up with the United States. For all of the understandable rage that Europeans have towards the Trump administration over his flirtations with the Kremlin, for example, it is still American arms and intelligence reports that are making it possible for Ukraine to keep defending itself against the Russian invasion. And which paragons of European values should substitute for the United States if Europe decided to make a clean break with Uncle Sam: Narendra Modi in Delhi? Xi Jinping in Beijing? Vladimir Putin in Russia? MBS in Saudi Arabia? The mullahs in Iran?
The answer to Europe’s weakness is therefore twofold. First, the continent must work with the countries that actually exert power and influence in the world in a less sentimental way. This of course includes being willing to deal with uncomfortable partners even if they don’t fully share Europe’s values. But it also includes trying to sustain the increasingly rocky alliance with the United States, Europe’s most longstanding partner. NATO may well break apart over the next three years; but Europe should do what it can to forestall, not to provoke, that outcome.
Second, Europe must at the same time do everything it can to get back on its own two feet. The last months have made it painfully obvious that a strong yet declining economy combined with an extensive and ever-increasing bureaucracy are not enough to have a real voice in the world. If Europe wants more autonomy, the key is not breaking with Washington; it is being able to provide military security on its own continent, to generate genuine economic growth, and most of all to play a real role in the technologies of the future, from electric cars to artificial intelligence.
The real obstacles to Europe’s ability to shape its own fate have nothing to do with the people in charge in some faraway capital. They are rooted in the lack of ambition and imagination that has slowly come to characterize contemporary Europe. After a disastrous first half of the 20th century, the model onto which the western part of the continent stumbled in the wake of the Second World War has worked incomparably better. This makes it tempting to stick with it even as it has come to be increasingly ill-adapted to the changing times. But if Europe wants to play a leading role in the world—or simply to stand up for its own values on its own continent—it must recognize that this model has now run out of road. For Europe to thrive in a new historical era, the continent must adopt a new vision for its own future.
Promises of breaking with the United States are as tempting as they are easy. But if Europe doesn’t get its act together first, reducing its reliance on the White House only means increasing its reliance on the Kremlin or the CCP. The only way for Europe to take its fate into its own hands is to awaken from its slumbers and resolve that it no longer wants to be a museal continent.
After his divorce and being fired from his job, my brother lived with us for a year until I kicked him out because he needed to get his ass back out there. Even today, decades later, he cannot admit this... wiped it from his memory banks.
This is the analogy of old western Europe. They divorced themselves and tried to kill each other. The US funded global order stopped it from happening again. It was US generosity and the US has suffered many ills from it. The Global Order empowered the US military industrial complex, and the globalist expansion made American financial institutions too big to fail. US infrastructure fell behind along with the gutting of industry and manufacturing and the decline of working-class economic opportunity. National debt and state debt skyrocketed. Homelessness increased. Inflation increased. Wages did not keep up. Life expectancy declined. The upper 10% did very well financially, but everyone else in the US suffered comparable downward trends.
But the Europeans were living fat and happy for years. The Marshall plan bailed them out and repaired their cities. They were given almost unfettered access to US consumer markets. They did not need to pay for their own security and national defense. They could afford fat social benefits for their people.
They have been like my brother being taken care of.
Now we are kicking them off the couch and telling them they need to make their own way.
Like my brother they are denying that they ever got any help, and the US is only bullying them.
Yascha, you said that Europe "must simply stand up for its own values on its own continent"—do those values include immiserating their own populations by importing Muslims from the MENA and giving them the vote to beat the "far-right" in the polls, as Spain has just announced? "Far-right" being a slur used against the normies in all western European countries that want immigration stopped and the migrants deported, just as the left in the US calls anyone to the right of Bernie "fascist" and "Nazi"? Ceding all their European values to EU courts on human rights that demand all "refugees" be let in, and international courts that redefine genocide and other war crimes to suit their ideology? Churches are routinely being burned down in Europe while Macron and Starmer allow mass demonstrations by jihadists who are driving their Jewish populations out.
Tell me, please, what are they gaining by this behavior? Whom does this serve? Certqainly not the US.
And instead of accusing the US of "flirting with the Kremlin," the Germans are finally admitting that denuclearizing and becoming totally dependent on Russian oil and gas was really stupid.
Americans value and respect NATO; my sense is they hate the EU with its preaching and preening, overbearing antidemocratic and anticapitalist bureaucracy, and its crippling of the western European states like Italy that want to stop migration.
Would it really be so hard to take a clue from eastern Europe?
There was a recent poll in Germany which showed that eastern Germany is totally AfD while the west is green and CD/SD. Seems like those who remember living under totalitarianism have got it right, and don't like the growing totalitarianism in the west. And a commenter ended with saying how funny it would be if this time around Poland invaded Germany to save them from jihadi communism.