I know it's not a fair request, but if everyone agrees that Europe can't keep doing X and Y, what are they actually supposed to do instead? Description is easier than prescription, not the least when it comes to prescribing innovation, economic growth, or social dynamism.
And, not to be overly pessimistic, but maybe the Europeans just don't have much agency to change pretty structural impediments?
1/ Europe doesn't have the demographics to achieve China-style growth or to reclaim its Wirtschaftswunder Postwar Miracles (Almost nobody does, anymore, including and especially China now!)
2/ Europe has a dearth of indigenous energy resources. It doesn't have sufficient oil and natural gas. It doesn't even have the same potential for renewables that the United States has. A place like Texas, meanwhile, has both! This is a HUGE problem for Europe's industrial competitiveness when it can't or won't access Russian energy exports. East Asian countries also struggle with a lack of indigenous energy supply, of course, but they have no compunctions about importing Russian energy and burning heaps of coal. Neither renewables, nextgen nuclear power, or even a bumper crop of LNG supply will resolve this in time. By the 2030s, Europe will have already been de-industrialized by high energy prices and Chinese competition... permanently.
3/ Europe is much more difficult to defend than the United States or even China, for purely geographic reasons. Even to have "table stakes" of just basic security against invasion from Russia, it has to do more. It's unclear that even if every European NATO member actually spent 4%+ of GDP on its military whether it would be able to reliably deter Russian aggression. The Russians are getting much more ROI for their investment in military power, have a much larger population in one country, and have a much higher tolerance for casualties and privation. But just being able to deter Russia isn't enough to be "great." That's far from the kind of power-projection capability that Europe had historically during the Age of Discovery and colonial eras. Without the latter, it's not going to be a power that "shapes history."
4/ It's no coincidence that the spoils of the latest consumer tech waves have settled almost entirely in the laps of the Chinese and the Americans. No other country has the scale of domestic market to groom a Silicon Valley. Europe could never do this. But, then again, neither could even the rest of Developed Asia or other Western countries like Canada or Australia. This isn't just a Europe problem. It's winner-take-all for the two economic superpowers.
5/ Europe is a victim of diversity. No matter how much integration the EU is able to muster (and the political appetite for more of that is zero), you still have 27 sovereign states with as many languages, cultures, regulatory systems, and manifold barriers to entry for multinational businesses and multilateral policy efforts, alike. Every one a veto point, too. And where are the actual "Europeans?" Single-digit percentages of Europeans actually take advantage of their the most transformative of their EU Four Freedoms: the Freedom of Movement. Most stay home. Imagine if the United States had historically been so immobile! And consider that one of the primary engines of China's economic rise was rural-to-urban migration. When Europeans do manage to move in any noticeable numbers, it causes backlash, as we saw with Brexit.
So, could and should Europe do more to shake itself from fatalism and geopolitical suicide? Yes! But it's not helpful to be delusional about what's actually possible. Europe will almost certainly never be the peer of the Chinese or the Americans on these measures in the coming decades.
2) That’s precisely why the Green jihad against nuclear power is so stupid and self-defeating. Europe should be a world leader in developing peaceful nuclear technology.
3) Had Europe made even a modest effort to integrate Russia into an equitable post-Cold War security architecture, this would be largely unnecessary. Russia isn’t expansionist, they’re paranoid. The Ukraine War is driven by fear of NATO and Russia’s total inability to get anyone else to listen to their security concerns for the past three decades. Trump may well be doing Europe a favor in this regard by putting the entire security structure of Europe onto more stable footing (assuming that is how the negotiations actually turn out).
4) Europe could absolutely do this, they effectively choose not to by having one of the most punitive and kafkaesque business environments around. European entrepreneurs come to the US to launch their ventures because being a founder in Europe is nigh impossible.
5) Europe is not an empire, nor should it become one. Neither is attachment to one’s home and culture a negative thing. Regulatory fragmentation is indeed an issue, but not as much as the sheer volume of regulation, and a lot of the worst of that actually comes from the EU level and applies everywhere.
What Europeans really need to do is deregulate and shrink their states to free up their economies and restore some dynamism. Practically speaking, I don’t know if they can since that would entail drastically scaling back welfare (always difficult to do politically). If they don’t do it soon voluntarily though, they’ll end up being forced to do so by circumstance when the stagnation of their economies and chronic deficits inevitably lead to fiscal crises.
Who’s invaded Russia since 1945? What you call “paranoia” I think you mean “where possible we will only accept vassal states on our borders and in no circumstance former vassals becoming more democratic or less corrupt”. So this “paranoia” is because Russia’s neighbours aren’t so keen at having to adopt kleptocratic vassal status. Perhaps Russia could try not being vile to its neighbours and accept they also have a right to sovereignty and build treaties of co-operation not subjugation.
A polemic tells me nothing about reality. It only tells me how you wish Russia be seen. How about trying something effective, like supplying supporting information. No I’m not defending Russia or saying she’s some innocent here. Countries have interests. They do their best to survive and thrive as they see fit. It’s boring, and ultimately useless, to use a moral framework for this.
Not sure on your age, but the Cold War and its resolution by Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher and others had a moral framework that drove periods of both accommodation and the drawing of red lines. Why don’t you provide me some supporting information of where a vital Russian strategic interest e.g. trade, energy exports etc has been threatened by a NATO member? Which Russian undersea cables have been cut ? Which Russian politicians have been assassinated by Western governments?
Europe and the US did reach out to Russia, for example inviting them into the G7/8 (in retrospect, too optimistically), and to set up a liasion office at Nato headquarters. If Russia had moved genuinely toward democracy, these overtures would have multiplied and solidified.
Russia's "security concerns" are indeed paranoid, without rational basis. Nobody in the West posed any threat to Russia at any point between the Soviet dissolution and the invasion of Ukraine.
And yet at every turn, Europe and the US have staunchly refused to do anything or commit to any form of restraint that would have eased the pressure or shown the Russians that we were willing to take their concerns seriously. Instead, their concerns have always been dismissed out of hand as unwarranted and their warnings not worth taking seriously. We have quite simply refused to listen to them, and that blithely dismissive approach to Russia preceded Putin. The entire war could have likely been avoided if we’d respected their concerns and committed to not expanding NATO into Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia's "concerns" *were* unwarranted. Nobody threatened them. And again, we *did* reach out to Russia, and actively tried to bring them into the Western supranational structures. There was talk of a path for Russia, eventually, to join Nato itself.
It was Georgia's and Ukraine's concerns about Russia that have been demonstrated to be well founded. The Baltics' might have been confirmed by now as well, if they *hadn't* been taken into Nato; at least, there's a fact-based argument in that direction.
Russia's tender feelings do not matter more than those of every other post-Soviet and European people.
Why do you think it would end if only the West had committed not to offer NATO membership after the 2004 expansion? We know from what Putin says and does, that the only good neighbour is a vassal. Neighbours that tried to move away from Russo-kleptocracy faced Putin’s wrath - both for the signal they sent that the empire was dead and for more prosaic reasons - that they represented an alternative socioeconomic development model from Russia’s post-Soviet extractive rent-seeking + “managed democracy” vision.
Completely wrong. Western powers tried very very hard to exploit the fall of the Soviet government and make Russia permanently dependent financially. Putin well knows this because he helped beat back these plans. There’s lots of information on this period if you’re interested in reality rather than fairytales.
Start by properly investing in your defense and perhaps reintroducing the draft (still a living memory even for many European millennials !). Add to that all-in on nuclear energy and radical reforms to your immigration policy. Europe cannot become a peer of us and china in near future but it CAN fend of Russia on its own if it has the political will: europe has a bigger population and a much much biggger economy. It also probably has some time to get its house in order. Not as much time as it had a decade ago with the writing already on the wall but probably still enough time thanks to the Ukrainians noble sacrifices. Just get your house in order
Excellent insight - in regards to energy, nuclear reactors are an option. Actually building solar panels instead of relying on imports from China would be smart too.
Here, too, I fear that the die may have been cast. Nuclear power plants everywhere take anywhere from 10-20 years to construct. And the fastest construction only happens where you've wound up a scalable industry with a deep bench of construction experience, human capital, etc. The likes of which South Korea or China has, for example. But even there, it still takes 8-10 years to get reactors up.
The closest to that you have in Europe is France--the only country to really scale out nuclear enough to provide the vast majority of their electricity demand--but even the French have struggled to keep all their plants online and operational in recent years and haven't constructed a new reactor in a generation! Construction of Flamanville 3 began in 2007, but it has faced numerous delays and is still not fully operational. (This points to an even longer construction timeline than the most recent reactor to open in Finland, Olkiluoto-3 which took from 2005-2023). Before the much-delayed Flamanville 3, the last French reactor to be pulled online was Civaux 2, which was commissioned way back in 1999.
Germany did a very stupid thing by decommissioning their plants, as everyone is fond of reminding them, but they also would have faced this same constraint in not having a sufficient industry to maintain and expand, given how fallow their nuclear capability was. They hadn't built a reactor in Germany since 1988! So a "cold start" to create nuclear power in Germany today wouldn't bear fruit until the late 2030s, if not the 2040s, most likely, and rely on totally imported expertise at the very time that a lot of other countries are trying to "cold start" their own nuclear power with a very limited global pool of expertise and capacity.
The situation in the US and the UK isn't much better, btw, for the same reasons. HUGE delays in the few projects live in both countries. So, contrary to the rhetoric from nuke-boosters, building nuclear power plants is just really hard and really expensive and you need scale to get them constructed at a decent cost and timeline. Back in the 1970s, Sweden built her own nuclear power plants in quick succession because there was a kind of production line. It was the same in the US at that time.
And what about SMRs that are smaller and more modular? They haven't been commercialized anywhere yet, so that means they won't be any faster to scale out now, even if they promise to be in the medium-term. The US NRC only singed-off on the first proof-of-concept NuScale SMR project in 2023, but it's still under construction. There's another project in Romania in regulatory process. But neither of these will represent more than a pilot and neither of them will be producing power in the biggest crunch time this coming winter and the next.
So, as much as I'd love it not to be so, I don't think nuclear is a short- or even medium-term solution to a European energy-crunch which is most acute in the short term.
Solar plus batteries could help and is cheap and easy to produce, but you have both an intermittency and a seasonality issue there: electricity and energy are the most expensive in Europe in the winter when the sun isn't shining.
Wind is more viable in the winter, but faces extremely stiff (and IMO irrational) political resistance. But even without that resistance, wind does suffer from being more expensive than solar. An intermittency-proof solution of wind plus batteries is more expensive than natural gas right now.
I just don't see any good solutions for 2025-2026! After that, there will be a bumper supply of LNG projects coming online glutting the market from Qatar and the US, which should bring energy prices way down in Europe. (And which would also have the perverse effect of undermining the financial ROI of any nuclear projects in the pipeline). But can European industry survive another two years of too-high prices?
Well, yes, and that is happening in many countries as different as the UK, Sweden, and Romania. But it just won't solve any of the very acute issues now.
It's like the dilemma between investing in mitigation or adaptation to Climate Change when you have an opportunity cost for acute social issues today. Do you divert money spent from an "energy transition" or from moving toward a more electrified, "green" industry that will maybe bear fruit in the 2030s or 40s toward goosing competitiveness today in matured, well-established industries and social programs?
That's what Germany did with her auto industry, and that's been a total disaster. German cars aren't selling in China anymore because the Chinese prefer innovative, cheap, domestic EVs. So *poof* there goes that growth market for the last 30 years. Nor are the selling as much in the United States due to Americans suddenly all driving trucks and SUVs, exclusively. As for the other developing growth markets in the world, where they're buying cars maybe for the first time, the Chinese EVs are more interesting than German sports and luxury combustion engines. (American cars... or rather trucks... aren't selling well in export markets, either).
So then the Germans got caught trying to play catch-up, but it's too late! German EVs are overpriced and crappy compared to their Asian competitors. American Teslas have lost their shine a bit and stagnated in innovation lately, but they're still better than German EVs.
Similar story with the rather disastrous energy transition: Germany was fat and happy with cheap Russian energy for decades and didn't invest enough in either a renewables build-out or a nuclear refresh. With the latter, as I said, even keeping the aging plants online was just a slow-motion death rather than a sudden euthanasia. With the former, the time to build-out renewables was 20-30 years ago, *before* you get cut off of imported alternatives. Or maybe invest in some LNG terminals to diversify away from the Russian pipeline supply before? Now Germany has done an impressive job of replacing a lot of that primary energy with renewables in a short timespan, but without sufficient supply to keep energy cheap enough to be competitive. With a flatlined economy for years, there isn't much time left to wait. It's also done impressive work developing LNG terminals in short order, but LNG is never going to be as cheap as pipeline gas.
All of these dilemmas would be alleviated by having the state step in to take on some of the financial risk and investment, but Germany has been very stingy there, too.
I agree. It also reminds me that with every passing day Angela Merkel’s legacy looks bleaker and bleaker. I bet that in a very short time she’d become recognized as the undisputed worst German leader since 1945.
Indeed Merkel was always overrated. In certain circles you once would have been accused of “latent misogyny” for criticising her (something I found deplorable, speaking as a woman: treat us as equals, not as “other”).
Her errors have proven so blinkered and catastrophic for both Germany and Europe (not to mention Ukraine) that even many of her erstwhile defenders struggle to pretend otherwise.
France built 56 nuclear reactors within 15 years in the 70’s and 80’s. Nuclear plants could be built far more quickly with the proper regulatory reforms. What is mostly lacking is willpower, motivation and capital investment. It amazes me that a group of highly intelligent people who are convinced that climate change is a looming catastrophe cannot seem to bring themselves to even consider one of the most obvious solutions. Wind and solar have their place in an energy mix, but neither can provide base load power; you need to either continue using fossil fuels for that, or you switch to nuclear (in some cases hydro power can be used but that’s highly contingent). And that’s to say nothing of what industry needs.
You forget to mention that there is a great problem with nuclear power - climate change. You need immense amount of water to cool down nuclear power plants. France already had to shut down their reactors for several times in the last years because of lacking amount of rain in the summer. Why aren´t people honest in this point ? It is not a sidestep argument, it is a fact that nobody is able to influence rain and water levels. And the problem with the lack of water is getting bigger year by year.
Claiming that nuclear power is a neverending source of power is a lie. I really don´t understand why people are not willing to tell the truth about it.
Europe is in a difficult situation and it is absolutely necessary to put all the facts on the table. What we don´t need to put on the table are half-baked solutions that don´t work.
Germany, by the way, is doing very well in renewable energies. Maybe the mix of different types of producing energy is the way Europe must go. Diversification of producing energy is not a bad thing, quite the opposite...
Yeah, I get frustrated with how people tend to (for understandable reasons) gloss right over the many downsides and limitations of nuclear power in practice. It's not just restricted to (allegedly overblown) concerns about safety! It's not a magic solution. Nothing is.
But the same crowd jumps on any and every limitation of "competing" renewable energy technologies. The fact is that every single energy source or technology has a basket of strengths and weaknesses. And many of the weaknesses aren't well known. How many people in Texas could have predicted that frozen piles of coal or gas pipelines could cripple even fossil fuel sources in the midst of a blizzard?
And, as for nuclear, for all its strengths, even when everything is going well these reactors have significant downtime! Here in Sweden, the (relatively not-old) reactors must go offline at least once per year for at least 4-6 weeks for scheduled maintenance. And my own variable electricity prices shoot up 5-10x during those times, despite them being during "shoulder seasons," when electricity demand from heating (and therefore prices) should be low. That can be a major problem for industrial producers, who rely on predictably low prices.
As you said, a plurality of the 56 French reactors were down at the most inconvenient time at the peak of the energy crunch after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They've struggled to get enough of them online consistently ever since, for many reasons, including the lack of water you've mentioned.
These are the issues with already-constructed, well-matured nuclear energy technology. Any emerging technology has a well-known learning curve involving all manner of unforeseen problems. Even if/when SMR reactors begin to come online in decades hence, there will be "growing pains" as design and operational issues are worked out.
Oh, i see you are talking about german misjudgements in the last years. Well, you are right in a lot of points (not all).
Germany should have invested much more money in renewable energy long before - and in storage technology. Germany has been a big player in
photovoltaics long ago, then China produced cheaper panels and the german government did not support german photovoltaic industrie as much as necessary. The first big mistake...
The second mistake has been the decision of german car producers to produce big, expensive e-cars instead of e-cars normal people would be able to buy. The german government made a mistake, too. There has been a so called E-Prämie. The government gave money to people buying an e-car, but instead of giving money only to the buyers of cheaper cars, expensive cars were subsidized, too. You could buy a car for about 60.000 Euro and still got some money from the government - ridiculous.
In a whole, Germany acted too late and in some parts even contradictory. Then the incumbent government tried to catch up too quickly and without taking the population by the hand.
Behind all that mistakes the incumbent government took a big step forwards.
You should not forget that the fuel rods of the last three nuclear power plants in Germany has been at the end. It was a political decision in 2011 to end nuclear power in 2023 - by all big parties in Germany.
That´s the reason why the operators of nuclear power plants did not get for new fuel rods in time. You don´t build a new roof on a house that is supposed to be demolished one year after...
Besides, there is still no good solution for the storage of atomic waste in Germany. No one wants it to be stored near his own house...
Yes, there are - theoretically. China is building the first one at the moment (i guess, they have already finished, but i am not sure about that) based on thorium, not on uran. It is a 2 megawatts power plant, that means it may support about 1000 households. A modern power plant produces about 1000 to 1400 megawatts, so you need 500 of these chinese power plants to substitute such a power plant currently installed.
Scientists claim that it will take decades to get them on trail professionally.
So what are we talking about ? The power plants currently installed need water, power plants not needing water can be used in some decades. It is not an alternative at the moment.
Of course, I it okay to explore further for the future, but in the next 10-15 years there will be none of those waterless power plants finished in the western sphere. I guess it will take even longer to build them because democratic countries normally need much longer to build up anything.
I agree that the die was cast decades ago. Ideologically, Europe adopted or evolved a dysfunctional culture that believed entrepreneurial free markets are nasty, top down bureaucratic regulations are good, energy is bad, the military is crass, European progress was embarrassing, and that importing tens of millions of (west-hating) Muslim men is open-minded. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these views. They just lead to the long term suicide of any complex state buil tupon them.
I sincerely hope that Europe can wake up and take emergency action to root out this type of thinking. I doubt they will. Second best is that at least a few nations blaze their own course before the point of total societal collapse and set the stage for the second Renaissance.
It doesn’t matter what *you* think is unwarranted. Threat perception is subjective. The only thing that ever mattered was what Russia thought and how we responded to those concerns, whether to engage in reassurance and take confidence-building actions, or to dismiss them. We chose to be dismissive and did things that we knew in no uncertain terms they would see as threatening. We knew because they told us.
It is the stubborn hostility of people like you toward Russia, and the actions taken pursuant to that hostility, that led to your prophecies becoming self-fulfilling.
Sure, they ‘told us’, but there’s not much you can do about it. People tend to forget that even Zelensky was accused of being ‘pro-Russian’ back in the days because of his openness to dialogue. That should tell us something about how hard it is to stop Russian paranoia. For all the anecdotes about Western leaders being a little too enthusiastic about Eastern expansion, there are just as many anecdotes about Western leaders being overly cautious. Countries such as Germany have basically bent over backwards. The truth is that Russia has been and is actively exporting its corruption to Ukraine and other neighbors, creating anti-Russian sentiment.
Geoffrey G writes, "It's no coincidence that the spoils of the latest consumer tech waves have settled almost entirely in the laps of the Chinese and the Americans. No other country has the scale of domestic market."
Well, there's Spotify! That's not saying much, but it could be a model. Perhaps more significant counterexamples (re the spoils of the latest consumer tech waves) are the Japanese, and especially the Koreans.
There are a few tech champions in the Nordics. Indeed, Stockholm is distinguished as the second-biggest per capita incubator of unicorn-type tech companies after Silicon Valley. But even there you run into the scale and funding issue. Spotify, like other Swedish tech giants, had to export and internationalize immediately to get scale. It was able to benefit from (parasitically feed off of?) Sweden's quietly dominant position in the Anglo-American musical industry (Sweden is the second-largest exporter of music in the entire world!).
It's also easier for Scandinavians to accomplish this in B2C consumer tech (another example is gaming) than in B2B, for the same reason that TikTok could take off so well in the US, despite being a Chinese app. But, still, Sweden and the Nordics will never be more than a niche player in tech in my view.
Sweden, an exporter of music? Hey, that's the rhyme scheme for a sonnet: ABBA-ABBA-CD-CD-CD ;-)
But seriously... You still haven't accounted for South Korea's spectacular success in consumer tech without domestic market scale of the US or China -- and unlike Sweden's Spotify, that even includes hardware. Internationalization might not be the exception -- and if it's the rule (throughout the world, potentially including Europe), your notion about domestic market scale starts to unravel.
South Korea's also succeeded in consumer tech despite a lack of domestic energy resources. Of course, it, too, has a dominant position in popular culture (quite likely stronger than Sweden's) -- but here again (considering the creative possibilities for Europe), what's the exception and what's the rule?
Spain’s population has been growing due to immigration from Latin America, as has that of the US. The population of the UK continues to grow. There are probably a couple hundred million people (at least) who would move to Europe if given the opportunity to do so legally, and be law abiding, productive citizens that support European/Enlightenment values.
Maybe I am mistaken, but my understanding is that most European nations banned fracking before even attempting to see if it would be economically feasible. Given that Europe has plenty of coal, and given that there is at least some degree of overlap between coal country and fracking country in the US, I would be surprised if fracking wouldn’t work in some places in Europe. The simple answer to the lack of energy is just to change laws and policy.
There is very limited proven or likely fracking potential in Europe, for better or for worse, for similar geological reasons as to why there's never been much petroleum resource underneath the ground there. The well-known exception is offshore Norway, of course (as an extension of the same desposits that once fed the UK's oil demands offshore Scotland), and the less well-known exception is offshore of the Netherlands. There's also likely some resource in the Eastern Mediterranean. But none of these reserves are at all sufficient even for Europe's own demand. Notice, also, that all of them are underwater.
The bans on fracking in some parts of Europe can after exploration showed that the extractable resources were modest, anyway, so the ROI was unfavorable, while the environmental costs to a much more populated landmass were considerable. There are bans on fracking in certain highly populated parts of the United States for similar reasons: whatever you'd get out of the ground wouldn't be worth much in comparison to the risks.
The reality is that the United States has long been a huge outlier in terms of having a rich and economically retrievable fossil energy endowment (and without even having to drill offshore!). Fully half of that extraction now comes from a single, desolated part of Western Texas, which is conveniently easy to access and far from any population: the Permian Basin. So the natural tendency for Americans is to think that everyone else could have the same if they just weren't so stupid/environmentalist/whatever. But Europeans are energy-hungry and greedy, too, and just don't have the same means to sate their own thirst. Europe's Permian Basin is in... Russia.
Trying to import LNG gas from the US and/or the Middle East is probably more expensive than fracking for it in Poland. Though maybe that will change if the war in Ukraine ends and Russia’s supply comes back online for Europe.
It would be momentous if we could get gas from Poland, which is ideally located close to Germany and an industrial center in Europe, itself.
But behind every story like this is the question of *why* that alledged resource wasn't tapped long ago. Notice the language here:
"...estimated 14 trillion cubic meters (tcm) of *technically recoverable* shale gas reserves in Europe."
"Technically recoverable" is a very different thing from *economically recoverable.* Remember back during the Afghanistan War, when there were supposedly trillions in technically recoverable mineral assets under the Hindu Kush mountains there? Well, not as much as a dust pile was ever actually recovered, and not just because it was a warzone. What matters in any extraction is whether the resource can be pulled out of the ground at scale *at a price that covers the effort, with profit.*
Fracking is tricker, still, because unlike with traditional oil and gas drilling, prices for extraction are much higher, but you get all the benefit from a well right up front and then production trickles off very quickly to nothing. So you have to keep drilling and drilling and, best case, you get a few years of production out of a successfully fracked well. But worst-case, you're on a wild goose chase with all the costs front-loaded and a few anemic wells that don't produce enough to make the effort worth it. That's a very dicey financial proposition!
Now, for these energy analysts, an "optimistic" scenario for Polish (or French, Romanian, German, or Danish gas) is one where energy prices are unusually high and expected to remain there, which would make this development worth the risk:
"Gas prices are now significantly higher which could potentially create a sensible business model for shale gas production in Poland," Zajdler told DW.
But what if they start drilling in Poland for the next few years and aren't lucky to find some amazing seams of Permian Basin-like productivity and there's a "meh" amount of gas trickling out by 2027... JUST IN TIME for a bumper crop of planned LNG to come surging into global markets from Qatar and the US. Those Polish fracking players are cooked and the whole nascent industry goes bankrupt. Not even enough time to justify building pipelines to Germany.
As for fracking, it’s probably not the answer. Nuclear power is what makes the most sense by a long shot for most of Europe. The French were smart enough to understand that decades ago, which is why they get something like 70% of their power from nuclear plants and have since the 80’s. It’s a shame that their recent leadership isn’t nearly as good and that they’ve allowed their nuclear industry to languish when they could literally be building and exporting reactors to the rest of Europe and even outside of Europe. If they’d kept investing in it they could be global leaders in the technology by now. Instead the workforce of nuclear engineers and scientists is aging out and their plants are old and starting to reach the end of their lifetimes, while very few new ones are being built to replace those that are aging.
I think your opinion that migrants are going to be law abiding and support European/Enlightenment values at the same rates as the natives is rather blindly optimistic given the actual, observable real world consequences of the last ten years of excessive and largely uncontrolled migration to Europe from non-Western countries. I mean how much evidence do you need that the experiment isn’t going well before you admit that there might be some issues?
Europe just sucks at immigration. The vast majority of immigrants to the US come from India (Hindus) Latin America (Christians) and East Asia. Pretty much all of their kids are so deep in Western/Enlightenment values that they cannot conceive that other people have different values, as opposed to just being evil people. If Europe actually controlled their borders, they could have very large amounts of immigration without much in the way of crime, etc. Australia, Canada, and Singapore have done that for decades. The technology isn’t hard. The political will just isn’t there.
your point 5 "victim of diversity" is probably the most meaningful one.
Russia has an aging population, have a ton of threat-surface, and are not part of the winner-take-it-all tech wave.
existential threat is a great motivator for uniting, but as you correctly mention - why would a retiree in Spain agree to a cut in his pension for a war that does not threaten him, and might even cause his energy price to rise (in 2022 and 2023 it increased imports of russian gas e.g. https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/spain-increased-its-import-of-russian-gas-1705627354.html).
i think that as long as Russia avoid naming countries by name, countries with port on the atlatic ocean - will continue to think they can wait this one out.
perhaps the right thing is for NATO to start churning members who are more of a drag than a real benefit to the alliance.
Yeah, I'm skeptical that countries like Spain and Italy will come to the party in terms of actually properly funding their own defense needs.
They're further from the danger in time/space. And, unlike the Nordic and Eastern European countries, they were never actually under direct threat even during the Cold War.
They also still rely more on imported energy, including LNG from Russia.
And their internal politics are more fraught because of the secular problem of lower economic growth and collapsing demographics in recent decades. Italy's economy essentially hasn't grown since the turn of the millennium, compared to a 60 per cent expansion for the US, 30 per cent growth for France and Germany, and 40 per cent for the UK.
So, this concept that "perhaps the right thing is for NATO to start churning members who are more of a drag than a real benefit to the alliance" would perhaps give some surprising answers for who is a drag: The likes of Poland and Latvia are investing more in their own defense and they have more to gain from a strong alliance than, say, Italy, the third biggest economy in Europe. Germany is clearly strategic and a lynchpin of any viable alliance, but they've been a "drag" for decades in terms of actually showing any "skin in the game" or military or diplomatic leadership. The likes of Finland, which wasn't even technically in NATO until recently was more of a member than others who have been nominally core members for decades.
So why are these fair-weather countries even in NATO? A lot of it is down to their strategic importance, even if their ally-ship is wobbly. Turkey is a perfect example of that: better to have them in than out, when they have one of the largest and most capable militaries in Europe, geographically control the entrance to the Black Sea, and directly border the most unstable and dangerous border that Europe has. Spain and Italy's locations are crucial for anyone who wants to be able to project power in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. And no NATO land operation could work without Germany's middle-European rail, river, and road network.
Spain/Italy don't actually really have any defense needs because nobody is capable of harming them - other than being overrun by a "demographic weapon" like mass immigration as engineered by Belarus against Poland. Realistically even France has no real threat and can maintain only a "postcolonial policing" military.
They would be better off funding a Euro collective military infrastructure like satellite networks etc and Germany, Poland, Baltic nations providing the combat muscle. IE contribute in specialised domains that form a large whole military rather than each country having a "mini military".
I can see why some of these items might be upsetting to the European elites. Perhaps they should look to their own backyards, though. There's very little that the United States could do to Europe which would be worse than the effects of millions of unassimilated, violent, and unproductive immigrants. THAT should be their primary concern.
I can't speak for other European countries, but I have lived in Portugal for 3 1/2 years, and while Portugual has a large number of immigrants, it has much less violent crime than the US. Mass shootings are unheard of here, and there us very little homelessness. And immigrants here are far from being unproductive - they are a critical part of the labor force.
And that is true in Germany, as well. Violent crime rates are going down year over year, and *always* were lower than in the US anyway (despite popular belief, not all is worse in Europe). Immigration is necessary, or we will indeed go the way of economic decline like Russia (which just lost a generation to war) and soon also China, who will not be able to keep up the pace, AI or not, due to their catastrophic demographics and lack of immigration. Russia is no imminent threat to the rest of Europe, they will need some time to recover and regroup, should the conflict in Ukraine ever end, at all. I would not be surprised if that continues for years on a smaller scale, after whatever "deal" the orange man brokers with Putin. So not all is lost, yet, in good old Europe.
I concur. What everyone at MSC failed to grasp is, that censorship is an anathema to Americans. This is where western Europe no longer has a common value base with the USA .
Merciless lawfare, armed police raids, jail and fines are now normal across Western Europe. Poland too, is prosecuting an MEP because he liked a meme.
Why should the USA spend say $100 Billion per year on EU defense , when that money is then used to reinforce a censorious woke antisemitic , anti American world view ?
Censorship under Trump—law suits, threats of law suits, Musk’s X bans, attacks on media, erasing of race, sex, gender from government and higher ed—is destroying freedom of speech and press in America.
Excuse me ? The people censoring in the USA is the left. They effectively had control of the academic and media narrative for decades. Please do not invert the facts. Thank you.
You are aware, or should be, that USAID got their pants pulled down in public demonstrating it was an elitist playpen of the left funding their pet media darlings with money from the pockets of the chuds.
No one can “erase race, sex, gender” from higher ed. Those are categories which people fit into. You can erase the massive, useless bureaucracy which hires people based on these categories, which Trump is very right to do. But that is not an attack on free speech or democracy
In the UK, the police visited a person accused of 'hate' speech. He wrote
“I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.
From a NYT analysis titled pessimistically "Germany’s Economy Was Once the Envy of Europe. Not Anymore." But immigration isn't the issue. If anything, it's the only thing that has kept low-birthrate, fast-aging Germany on life-support!
"The workforce crisis would look even worse if not for the millions of refugees and other migrants Germany has taken in from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past decade. Economists say they’ve helped fill in the holes left by retirements and the shift to part-time work.
"Last year, researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris reported that Germany had a 70 percent employment rate for immigrants in 2022. That was significantly higher than most other European Union countries."
There are all sorts of "legitimate" reasons for people to be unemployed, of course, including being a child, student, or retired person. There's also the share of people who are disabled, incarcerated, or otherwise unemployable (which is largely to blame for the relatively low and recently declining employment rate in the US).
I do not consider what the NYT writes of any value. The NYT is a censorious, woke activist pamphlet .
Employment rates are manipulated by classing workers in politically favourable categories.
The vast majority of these Muslims, supposedly “working” have been parked in low wage dead end jobs like security watchmen, parcel delivery drivers. They are actively channelled into these jobs by government funded mini courses, which then enables the, to put on a uniform and watch a door.
Meanwhile knife crime is through the roof, lethal Muslim terror is now normal. Society is deeply polarised furthering parties who seek to deindustrialise Germany.
Vance's critique struck a chord in Germany , especially with the regressive left in parliament ( Greens, SPD , FDP ) who have been expanding censorship , policing speech. Penalties have increased during this government.
The Greens also make sure to pork barrel hundreds of millions in state, EU and federal budgets for their NGOs and CSOs. This is on top of the tens of millions other private and semi private financial supporters of this work.
Many of these so called NGOs also police speech and act as informants to the police. Again Law Fare is unleashed on the average citizen who needs public disciplining. They lobby other civil society players and drive a narrative which enables more censorship down the road.
What ever is next in line for the regressive left and needs protection. Examples abound and more are sure to follow.
Why should the US tax payer help fund a world view which is antithetical to his ?
The FDP enabled the last government , they voted laws into effect. More censorship, more open borders, more Green New Deal, the misogynistic self ID law. I could go on. The FDP betrayed itself and its voters and made the ultimate sacrifice for horrific strategic votes and decision making.
MSC Director Heusgen, who ended up crying on the podium is a Merkel man and Soros fan boy. So it was no surprise to see him in tears as the fairy tale he also represented during his UNSC time came crashing down as JD Vance laid down the law.
I wonder what Frank Walter Steinmeier and Mogherini are thinking ?
I've literally never feared for my personal safety nearly as much in any developped country as I have in the US. Canadian cities are wildly multicultural and very safe, London has issues with petty crime but it's still better than any large American city (and it used to be much, much worse, when the UK had net emigration). I keep hearing this completely fact free statement from Americans. Yes, assimilation is a much bigger issue in Europe than it is in Canada or Australia, (see e.g. South Asian Muslims in the UK) but it's more of a cultural coherence problem than a law and order or economic growth one.
As a European i wish the smartest people here would get OFF their high horse and listen to people like you and even Vance even if they disagree with them on other issues, but the level of narcisism seems of the charts especially in Brussels. All news here at the start of the Ukraine war was that Ukraine had it in the bag and Putin was dumb for even trying. And noone has ever admitted thet they misjudged the situation. Same thing with the economy and climate change. They can never perceive themselves as capable of mistakes, it must have been luck or randomness and we keep doing the same
The us-funded Global Order that started in 1945 was intended in part to moderate the over-charged testosterone of Europeans that led to two world wars. It worked so well that it transformed the continent into a population of effeminate Karens with a looter and moocher mentality.
The US has culpability here. It's Wall Street backed elite managerial class prolonged the Global Order way beyond its original mission of global peace and prosperity, to one that supported a global corporatocracy that the US would perpetually dominate. That worked well for Europe as they would export to the massive US consumer market. However, the idiot US globalist managerial corporatists gave away the store to China for short-term profits. And that is the source of the problem for Europe as the US has to implement a hard stop of the Global Order due to the economic destruction it has caused for the majority of the American people.
The memo to Europe should have been "You need to stop mooching and start producing. You need to stop relying on the US to care for you and bail you out. The US can no longer afford it."
But just like American Democrats, they ignore the memo and stay stuck in denial. The power and money flowing from the looting and mooching game is a very hard habit to break.
How much of this denialism (at least the national security, energy security and industrialization parts) is just a Western European problem? I think Eastern Europe is much more realistic and has been trying hard to get Western Europe to listen to their warnings. But Western Europe is used to ignoring / looking down on Eastern Europe…..,.
Excellent article, really pointing out the need for we Europeans to take responsibility for our culture and security.
How quickly attitudes and reputations change. Being from the UK, I was so passionate about staying in Europe, where Brexit seemed to exchange a world that was connected and relevant for one of deliberate poverty and isolation. Europe seemed a force to be reckoned with.
But the identity politics culture wars finally got me to reexamine what was - and in my ignorance, had been for decades - going on, which was a poisonous internal self-funded discourse of European original sin, where we lost the ability to stand up for our beliefs, which have helped humanity's great escape from drudgery into a world of unimaginable plenty, not only without slavery, but also with fast-diminishing absolute poverty and death from infectious diseases.
The passing of 80 years without a European war after a millennium of conflict shouldn't be downplayed, but at the same time, just as Yascha describes, we've descended into a rather pathetic postmodern irrelevance, who assume that someone else (the US) should look after us while we carefully record non-hate crimes and beat ourselves up for barely-existent discrimination
What's remarkable about the new Trump administration is that they are speaking their simple truths, rather than diplomatic ambiguities that we can easily reinterpret, and just as with the naked Emperor, people are suddenly realising, and able to discuss, what they'd known all along. The Americans are once again offering us a way out, this time through self-knowledge. Forget Trump, Vance is speaking truths.
It will be interesting to see if there are are actually any European statesmen who can respond well to this. The UK should have a little more scope, being non EU, but they (embarrassingly, significantly assisted for 14 years by what is supposed to be a Conservative party) currently seem to be embracing decline, shovelling coal into the train heading for oblivion.
I often say to my partner how different Europe felt just 20 years ago. It’s been alarming to see our slide into a decreasing consequential continent, lying somewhere between the twin giants of America and China. Perhaps we can yet find some way back, I don’t know anymore. When you consider that Britain, France, or Germany (my homeland) would all be the poorest of the 50 US states (poorer than Mississippi), that really sums it up in our book.
Another patronising lecture for Europe from across the Atlantic. Liberal America should lay off Europe and concentrate on opposing their own decline into hell.
Now for an entirely upsetting and unpleasant point of view: If a new pope remains attached to the multicultural Muslim apologetics of the current flickering pope, Europe will be done. But if the Church has the courage to embrace Western Civilization, and we gain a new pope similar to John Paul or Benedict then the West has a chance to recover. When a pope without embarrassment says again Western Catholicism with its Jewish and Platonic heritage is the best of all religions, that Judeo-Greco-Christian theology is the source of all that is beautiful and good in the West, from laws to science -- when a pope whose words guide billions of people is willing to simply say Islam is not the future of the world then, and only then, will Europe arise again from its apparent catastrophe of stagnation. Western Culture has been an indisputable a net Good for the World, and that is absolutely not the case with the ever-degenerating Islamic culture. (And for the Bibas children and their mother: השם יקום דמם!)
On behalf of the Bibas children and their mother, I'd like to remind you that the Inquisition and the Crusades weren't good for the Jews. In Spain, things were better under the Muslims.
This is what happens when you believe that "history is over"... and you think that government is just a vending machine that dispenses everything you need in your life.
Yascha you and the readers comments say it all. A rather depressing birds eye view into an uncertain economic future for the Western world. One Think Tank advocates this. Another Think Tank recommends that.
When uncertainty stalks the land and political opportunism raises it's ugly head, political alliances, political dissonance, and human nature bubble to the surface to suggest solutions - because there are just none that are clear.
This past decade of the Woke has wrought untold damage to western culture, diverting what should have been a cohesive drive of The West to understand what are their economic problems - which was side tracked and we were forced by the ruling classes into just naval gazing and had to endure all that "self loathing" that took hold, as us hoi polloi were told how bad we should feel about our past and repentance is top priority, to wash away the generational guilt we 'must" all be feeling. That and the trillions of $$$$'s needed for the "Great Reset" and the WEF's support of climate alarmism, the headlong rush to shutter the fossil fuel industry and achieve Net Zero, and the covid debacle all played their part in unfocusing the Western Democracies as to how far their decline had progressed.
When humans are governed by a ruling class whose only interest is to enforce their ideology, this sort of practical torpor envelopes nations.
Vance was right. But threatening the withdrawal of America and their monetary sponsorship, from Europe is a too simple solution as "nature abhors a vaccuum."
But it might just be the much needed "wake-up" call that European nations need. It may take two Republican Administrations to really sort this out. This alone is hightly unlikely unless something more catastrophic happens in the next four years.
Unrelated but also sort of related: all the big European soccer clubs these days seem to be owned by non-Europeans (including a truly disturbing amount of sportswashing by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.)
The Germans still don’t get it. A telling interview with Habeck at MSC with Marvin Neumann on YouTube .
Habeck , whose party and its world view is partly responsible for Europes predicament still is in denial and actually believes , he says so, that Europe can offer solutions for what is coming.
Yet his parties economic policy has introduced wide scale deindustrialisation , with significant price hikes across the board. The SPD is no better. Go woke , go broke.
None of this is news however, and this been a topic of discussion by federal politicians for years. Industry players have also talked bout this for years. To no avail. Green woke policies trumped everything and ultimately crippled the economy. Every strategic decision since Merkel has been wrong. Carried through and enabled by the federal administrative state. Habeck actually thinks he is the bees knee's.
This is a monumental failure and proves that the people who make the decisions in most of Western Europe no longer solve any problems.
The one-world holdovers from the post WWII era can’t allow Germany- or any European country- to get too big for its britches. The UK was brought to heel. But Brussels can’t do it without zero interest money and the military backing of the US. The one world dream is dying a slow painful death.
Very good piece. Yes, you are right about Europe's leaders. Cowards. Lacking imagination. Forever waiting to be saved by the Americans. And glad you too had the same feeling about Vance's speech. I think people misinterpreted his words about the "danger from within" for obvious reasons (Russia-related). He had a point.
Thank you for your article. I think Trump's chaos us absolutely deliberate.
If Europe is to survive, then I think they should consider suspending the membership of countries like Hungary and Slovakia.
I think they need to recognise that geopolitically, at present there are four main power structures in the world. America. Russia. China. And Europe.
And it appears that Russia and the USA are conspiring to reduce that to three players, by splintering Europe into parts under Russian influence, and parts under US domination, but in even more fractured way than during the Cold War.
I think Europe should organise itself as essentially anti-Putin and anti-Trump. America should be expelled from NATO, and European countries should militarily support Canada (and Denmark/Greenland too of course) should the US invade Canada.
I think this is potentially a realignment, and it could be a magnificent opportunity to defeat the forces of darkness that Trump and Putin represent.
Trump would laugh his ass off if the US was "expelled" from NATO, since the US is the only country that provides any meaningful amount of NATO funding.
Without the US, Trump's private golf courses would each individually have bigger budgets than NATO.
I think you underestimate NATO's military expenditure significantly.
Also, you have to consider what you're getting with those hard-earned Euros. Expensive high-tech glossy fancy American weapons at great expense, hurting your own economies while supporting America's economy and their military-industrial complex.
And in some ways, the worst part of the deal is that America automatically has backdoors to all of the advanced weapons that it provides, so that they'll be able to effectively hit a kill-switch and render those weapons ineffective whenever they want to.
What we need first and foremost from the Americans is their logistical, combat coordination, and unparalleled intelligence capabilities. These are not easy to replace at all, let alone quickly, at least not to the superior standard we’re currently accustomed to. You can find many papers examining this from places like RUSI and the ISI.
Hear, hear. I think this can be a tremendous opportunity for us, if we can just stop chasing our tails and seize it. Just how likely that is I'm not sure of, but I do think that we'll stand a better chance the sooner we stop taking intellectual cues from America. American ideas only (kind of, sort of, some of the time) work for Americans, and that's because they've lucked onto a downright sickening amount of geographic advantages. We need to start thinking for ourselves again.
Gosh Baeraad (Nordic?), that's a solid point about taking intellectual cues from America. America is used to setting the agenda in so many way - such as setting the global pre-eminence of the dollar, establishing the World Bank, not to mention their exhausting cultural dominance in so many ways.
I think if you set the agenda, you have an almost unassailable head-start
I think Trump's behaviour is presaging the end of world dominance
Excellent and real analysis, as tough as describing reality needs to be. Reading this in Brussels makes me nod in agreement all the way, and despair what the future holds here. Thank you, Yascha.
I know it's not a fair request, but if everyone agrees that Europe can't keep doing X and Y, what are they actually supposed to do instead? Description is easier than prescription, not the least when it comes to prescribing innovation, economic growth, or social dynamism.
And, not to be overly pessimistic, but maybe the Europeans just don't have much agency to change pretty structural impediments?
1/ Europe doesn't have the demographics to achieve China-style growth or to reclaim its Wirtschaftswunder Postwar Miracles (Almost nobody does, anymore, including and especially China now!)
2/ Europe has a dearth of indigenous energy resources. It doesn't have sufficient oil and natural gas. It doesn't even have the same potential for renewables that the United States has. A place like Texas, meanwhile, has both! This is a HUGE problem for Europe's industrial competitiveness when it can't or won't access Russian energy exports. East Asian countries also struggle with a lack of indigenous energy supply, of course, but they have no compunctions about importing Russian energy and burning heaps of coal. Neither renewables, nextgen nuclear power, or even a bumper crop of LNG supply will resolve this in time. By the 2030s, Europe will have already been de-industrialized by high energy prices and Chinese competition... permanently.
3/ Europe is much more difficult to defend than the United States or even China, for purely geographic reasons. Even to have "table stakes" of just basic security against invasion from Russia, it has to do more. It's unclear that even if every European NATO member actually spent 4%+ of GDP on its military whether it would be able to reliably deter Russian aggression. The Russians are getting much more ROI for their investment in military power, have a much larger population in one country, and have a much higher tolerance for casualties and privation. But just being able to deter Russia isn't enough to be "great." That's far from the kind of power-projection capability that Europe had historically during the Age of Discovery and colonial eras. Without the latter, it's not going to be a power that "shapes history."
4/ It's no coincidence that the spoils of the latest consumer tech waves have settled almost entirely in the laps of the Chinese and the Americans. No other country has the scale of domestic market to groom a Silicon Valley. Europe could never do this. But, then again, neither could even the rest of Developed Asia or other Western countries like Canada or Australia. This isn't just a Europe problem. It's winner-take-all for the two economic superpowers.
5/ Europe is a victim of diversity. No matter how much integration the EU is able to muster (and the political appetite for more of that is zero), you still have 27 sovereign states with as many languages, cultures, regulatory systems, and manifold barriers to entry for multinational businesses and multilateral policy efforts, alike. Every one a veto point, too. And where are the actual "Europeans?" Single-digit percentages of Europeans actually take advantage of their the most transformative of their EU Four Freedoms: the Freedom of Movement. Most stay home. Imagine if the United States had historically been so immobile! And consider that one of the primary engines of China's economic rise was rural-to-urban migration. When Europeans do manage to move in any noticeable numbers, it causes backlash, as we saw with Brexit.
So, could and should Europe do more to shake itself from fatalism and geopolitical suicide? Yes! But it's not helpful to be delusional about what's actually possible. Europe will almost certainly never be the peer of the Chinese or the Americans on these measures in the coming decades.
A genuinely insightful comment among a pool of sewage. Thank you.
1) Migration is not the solution to this.
2) That’s precisely why the Green jihad against nuclear power is so stupid and self-defeating. Europe should be a world leader in developing peaceful nuclear technology.
3) Had Europe made even a modest effort to integrate Russia into an equitable post-Cold War security architecture, this would be largely unnecessary. Russia isn’t expansionist, they’re paranoid. The Ukraine War is driven by fear of NATO and Russia’s total inability to get anyone else to listen to their security concerns for the past three decades. Trump may well be doing Europe a favor in this regard by putting the entire security structure of Europe onto more stable footing (assuming that is how the negotiations actually turn out).
4) Europe could absolutely do this, they effectively choose not to by having one of the most punitive and kafkaesque business environments around. European entrepreneurs come to the US to launch their ventures because being a founder in Europe is nigh impossible.
5) Europe is not an empire, nor should it become one. Neither is attachment to one’s home and culture a negative thing. Regulatory fragmentation is indeed an issue, but not as much as the sheer volume of regulation, and a lot of the worst of that actually comes from the EU level and applies everywhere.
What Europeans really need to do is deregulate and shrink their states to free up their economies and restore some dynamism. Practically speaking, I don’t know if they can since that would entail drastically scaling back welfare (always difficult to do politically). If they don’t do it soon voluntarily though, they’ll end up being forced to do so by circumstance when the stagnation of their economies and chronic deficits inevitably lead to fiscal crises.
How do you know Russia isn’t expansionist ? Putin makes speeches lamenting loss of empire. Is he not to be believed?
Europe has invaded Russia many more times than the reverse. Russia is paranoid not expansionist nails the reality.
Who’s invaded Russia since 1945? What you call “paranoia” I think you mean “where possible we will only accept vassal states on our borders and in no circumstance former vassals becoming more democratic or less corrupt”. So this “paranoia” is because Russia’s neighbours aren’t so keen at having to adopt kleptocratic vassal status. Perhaps Russia could try not being vile to its neighbours and accept they also have a right to sovereignty and build treaties of co-operation not subjugation.
A polemic tells me nothing about reality. It only tells me how you wish Russia be seen. How about trying something effective, like supplying supporting information. No I’m not defending Russia or saying she’s some innocent here. Countries have interests. They do their best to survive and thrive as they see fit. It’s boring, and ultimately useless, to use a moral framework for this.
Not sure on your age, but the Cold War and its resolution by Gorbachev, Reagan, Thatcher and others had a moral framework that drove periods of both accommodation and the drawing of red lines. Why don’t you provide me some supporting information of where a vital Russian strategic interest e.g. trade, energy exports etc has been threatened by a NATO member? Which Russian undersea cables have been cut ? Which Russian politicians have been assassinated by Western governments?
Even if you reach to 1812 Russia/SU has been invaded 3 times: Crimean, WW1 & WW2 which was partly of its own making.
They have invaded: Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Afghanistan...
Europe and the US did reach out to Russia, for example inviting them into the G7/8 (in retrospect, too optimistically), and to set up a liasion office at Nato headquarters. If Russia had moved genuinely toward democracy, these overtures would have multiplied and solidified.
Russia's "security concerns" are indeed paranoid, without rational basis. Nobody in the West posed any threat to Russia at any point between the Soviet dissolution and the invasion of Ukraine.
And yet at every turn, Europe and the US have staunchly refused to do anything or commit to any form of restraint that would have eased the pressure or shown the Russians that we were willing to take their concerns seriously. Instead, their concerns have always been dismissed out of hand as unwarranted and their warnings not worth taking seriously. We have quite simply refused to listen to them, and that blithely dismissive approach to Russia preceded Putin. The entire war could have likely been avoided if we’d respected their concerns and committed to not expanding NATO into Ukraine and Georgia.
Russia's "concerns" *were* unwarranted. Nobody threatened them. And again, we *did* reach out to Russia, and actively tried to bring them into the Western supranational structures. There was talk of a path for Russia, eventually, to join Nato itself.
It was Georgia's and Ukraine's concerns about Russia that have been demonstrated to be well founded. The Baltics' might have been confirmed by now as well, if they *hadn't* been taken into Nato; at least, there's a fact-based argument in that direction.
Russia's tender feelings do not matter more than those of every other post-Soviet and European people.
Why do you think it would end if only the West had committed not to offer NATO membership after the 2004 expansion? We know from what Putin says and does, that the only good neighbour is a vassal. Neighbours that tried to move away from Russo-kleptocracy faced Putin’s wrath - both for the signal they sent that the empire was dead and for more prosaic reasons - that they represented an alternative socioeconomic development model from Russia’s post-Soviet extractive rent-seeking + “managed democracy” vision.
Completely wrong. Western powers tried very very hard to exploit the fall of the Soviet government and make Russia permanently dependent financially. Putin well knows this because he helped beat back these plans. There’s lots of information on this period if you’re interested in reality rather than fairytales.
Start by properly investing in your defense and perhaps reintroducing the draft (still a living memory even for many European millennials !). Add to that all-in on nuclear energy and radical reforms to your immigration policy. Europe cannot become a peer of us and china in near future but it CAN fend of Russia on its own if it has the political will: europe has a bigger population and a much much biggger economy. It also probably has some time to get its house in order. Not as much time as it had a decade ago with the writing already on the wall but probably still enough time thanks to the Ukrainians noble sacrifices. Just get your house in order
Excellent insight - in regards to energy, nuclear reactors are an option. Actually building solar panels instead of relying on imports from China would be smart too.
Here, too, I fear that the die may have been cast. Nuclear power plants everywhere take anywhere from 10-20 years to construct. And the fastest construction only happens where you've wound up a scalable industry with a deep bench of construction experience, human capital, etc. The likes of which South Korea or China has, for example. But even there, it still takes 8-10 years to get reactors up.
The closest to that you have in Europe is France--the only country to really scale out nuclear enough to provide the vast majority of their electricity demand--but even the French have struggled to keep all their plants online and operational in recent years and haven't constructed a new reactor in a generation! Construction of Flamanville 3 began in 2007, but it has faced numerous delays and is still not fully operational. (This points to an even longer construction timeline than the most recent reactor to open in Finland, Olkiluoto-3 which took from 2005-2023). Before the much-delayed Flamanville 3, the last French reactor to be pulled online was Civaux 2, which was commissioned way back in 1999.
Germany did a very stupid thing by decommissioning their plants, as everyone is fond of reminding them, but they also would have faced this same constraint in not having a sufficient industry to maintain and expand, given how fallow their nuclear capability was. They hadn't built a reactor in Germany since 1988! So a "cold start" to create nuclear power in Germany today wouldn't bear fruit until the late 2030s, if not the 2040s, most likely, and rely on totally imported expertise at the very time that a lot of other countries are trying to "cold start" their own nuclear power with a very limited global pool of expertise and capacity.
The situation in the US and the UK isn't much better, btw, for the same reasons. HUGE delays in the few projects live in both countries. So, contrary to the rhetoric from nuke-boosters, building nuclear power plants is just really hard and really expensive and you need scale to get them constructed at a decent cost and timeline. Back in the 1970s, Sweden built her own nuclear power plants in quick succession because there was a kind of production line. It was the same in the US at that time.
And what about SMRs that are smaller and more modular? They haven't been commercialized anywhere yet, so that means they won't be any faster to scale out now, even if they promise to be in the medium-term. The US NRC only singed-off on the first proof-of-concept NuScale SMR project in 2023, but it's still under construction. There's another project in Romania in regulatory process. But neither of these will represent more than a pilot and neither of them will be producing power in the biggest crunch time this coming winter and the next.
So, as much as I'd love it not to be so, I don't think nuclear is a short- or even medium-term solution to a European energy-crunch which is most acute in the short term.
Solar plus batteries could help and is cheap and easy to produce, but you have both an intermittency and a seasonality issue there: electricity and energy are the most expensive in Europe in the winter when the sun isn't shining.
Wind is more viable in the winter, but faces extremely stiff (and IMO irrational) political resistance. But even without that resistance, wind does suffer from being more expensive than solar. An intermittency-proof solution of wind plus batteries is more expensive than natural gas right now.
I just don't see any good solutions for 2025-2026! After that, there will be a bumper supply of LNG projects coming online glutting the market from Qatar and the US, which should bring energy prices way down in Europe. (And which would also have the perverse effect of undermining the financial ROI of any nuclear projects in the pipeline). But can European industry survive another two years of too-high prices?
Time flies. Invest now for 2030s and 2040s. They’ll come sooner than you think.
Well, yes, and that is happening in many countries as different as the UK, Sweden, and Romania. But it just won't solve any of the very acute issues now.
It's like the dilemma between investing in mitigation or adaptation to Climate Change when you have an opportunity cost for acute social issues today. Do you divert money spent from an "energy transition" or from moving toward a more electrified, "green" industry that will maybe bear fruit in the 2030s or 40s toward goosing competitiveness today in matured, well-established industries and social programs?
That's what Germany did with her auto industry, and that's been a total disaster. German cars aren't selling in China anymore because the Chinese prefer innovative, cheap, domestic EVs. So *poof* there goes that growth market for the last 30 years. Nor are the selling as much in the United States due to Americans suddenly all driving trucks and SUVs, exclusively. As for the other developing growth markets in the world, where they're buying cars maybe for the first time, the Chinese EVs are more interesting than German sports and luxury combustion engines. (American cars... or rather trucks... aren't selling well in export markets, either).
So then the Germans got caught trying to play catch-up, but it's too late! German EVs are overpriced and crappy compared to their Asian competitors. American Teslas have lost their shine a bit and stagnated in innovation lately, but they're still better than German EVs.
Similar story with the rather disastrous energy transition: Germany was fat and happy with cheap Russian energy for decades and didn't invest enough in either a renewables build-out or a nuclear refresh. With the latter, as I said, even keeping the aging plants online was just a slow-motion death rather than a sudden euthanasia. With the former, the time to build-out renewables was 20-30 years ago, *before* you get cut off of imported alternatives. Or maybe invest in some LNG terminals to diversify away from the Russian pipeline supply before? Now Germany has done an impressive job of replacing a lot of that primary energy with renewables in a short timespan, but without sufficient supply to keep energy cheap enough to be competitive. With a flatlined economy for years, there isn't much time left to wait. It's also done impressive work developing LNG terminals in short order, but LNG is never going to be as cheap as pipeline gas.
All of these dilemmas would be alleviated by having the state step in to take on some of the financial risk and investment, but Germany has been very stingy there, too.
I agree. It also reminds me that with every passing day Angela Merkel’s legacy looks bleaker and bleaker. I bet that in a very short time she’d become recognized as the undisputed worst German leader since 1945.
Indeed Merkel was always overrated. In certain circles you once would have been accused of “latent misogyny” for criticising her (something I found deplorable, speaking as a woman: treat us as equals, not as “other”).
Her errors have proven so blinkered and catastrophic for both Germany and Europe (not to mention Ukraine) that even many of her erstwhile defenders struggle to pretend otherwise.
France built 56 nuclear reactors within 15 years in the 70’s and 80’s. Nuclear plants could be built far more quickly with the proper regulatory reforms. What is mostly lacking is willpower, motivation and capital investment. It amazes me that a group of highly intelligent people who are convinced that climate change is a looming catastrophe cannot seem to bring themselves to even consider one of the most obvious solutions. Wind and solar have their place in an energy mix, but neither can provide base load power; you need to either continue using fossil fuels for that, or you switch to nuclear (in some cases hydro power can be used but that’s highly contingent). And that’s to say nothing of what industry needs.
I agree 100%. Major reforms would be required however, as you also highlighted which makes me doubtful this will happen.
You forget to mention that there is a great problem with nuclear power - climate change. You need immense amount of water to cool down nuclear power plants. France already had to shut down their reactors for several times in the last years because of lacking amount of rain in the summer. Why aren´t people honest in this point ? It is not a sidestep argument, it is a fact that nobody is able to influence rain and water levels. And the problem with the lack of water is getting bigger year by year.
Claiming that nuclear power is a neverending source of power is a lie. I really don´t understand why people are not willing to tell the truth about it.
Europe is in a difficult situation and it is absolutely necessary to put all the facts on the table. What we don´t need to put on the table are half-baked solutions that don´t work.
Germany, by the way, is doing very well in renewable energies. Maybe the mix of different types of producing energy is the way Europe must go. Diversification of producing energy is not a bad thing, quite the opposite...
Yeah, I get frustrated with how people tend to (for understandable reasons) gloss right over the many downsides and limitations of nuclear power in practice. It's not just restricted to (allegedly overblown) concerns about safety! It's not a magic solution. Nothing is.
But the same crowd jumps on any and every limitation of "competing" renewable energy technologies. The fact is that every single energy source or technology has a basket of strengths and weaknesses. And many of the weaknesses aren't well known. How many people in Texas could have predicted that frozen piles of coal or gas pipelines could cripple even fossil fuel sources in the midst of a blizzard?
And, as for nuclear, for all its strengths, even when everything is going well these reactors have significant downtime! Here in Sweden, the (relatively not-old) reactors must go offline at least once per year for at least 4-6 weeks for scheduled maintenance. And my own variable electricity prices shoot up 5-10x during those times, despite them being during "shoulder seasons," when electricity demand from heating (and therefore prices) should be low. That can be a major problem for industrial producers, who rely on predictably low prices.
As you said, a plurality of the 56 French reactors were down at the most inconvenient time at the peak of the energy crunch after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They've struggled to get enough of them online consistently ever since, for many reasons, including the lack of water you've mentioned.
These are the issues with already-constructed, well-matured nuclear energy technology. Any emerging technology has a well-known learning curve involving all manner of unforeseen problems. Even if/when SMR reactors begin to come online in decades hence, there will be "growing pains" as design and operational issues are worked out.
Oh, i see you are talking about german misjudgements in the last years. Well, you are right in a lot of points (not all).
Germany should have invested much more money in renewable energy long before - and in storage technology. Germany has been a big player in
photovoltaics long ago, then China produced cheaper panels and the german government did not support german photovoltaic industrie as much as necessary. The first big mistake...
The second mistake has been the decision of german car producers to produce big, expensive e-cars instead of e-cars normal people would be able to buy. The german government made a mistake, too. There has been a so called E-Prämie. The government gave money to people buying an e-car, but instead of giving money only to the buyers of cheaper cars, expensive cars were subsidized, too. You could buy a car for about 60.000 Euro and still got some money from the government - ridiculous.
In a whole, Germany acted too late and in some parts even contradictory. Then the incumbent government tried to catch up too quickly and without taking the population by the hand.
Behind all that mistakes the incumbent government took a big step forwards.
You should not forget that the fuel rods of the last three nuclear power plants in Germany has been at the end. It was a political decision in 2011 to end nuclear power in 2023 - by all big parties in Germany.
That´s the reason why the operators of nuclear power plants did not get for new fuel rods in time. You don´t build a new roof on a house that is supposed to be demolished one year after...
Besides, there is still no good solution for the storage of atomic waste in Germany. No one wants it to be stored near his own house...
There are reactor types that don’t rely on water as either coolant or for electricity generation.
Yes, there are - theoretically. China is building the first one at the moment (i guess, they have already finished, but i am not sure about that) based on thorium, not on uran. It is a 2 megawatts power plant, that means it may support about 1000 households. A modern power plant produces about 1000 to 1400 megawatts, so you need 500 of these chinese power plants to substitute such a power plant currently installed.
Scientists claim that it will take decades to get them on trail professionally.
So what are we talking about ? The power plants currently installed need water, power plants not needing water can be used in some decades. It is not an alternative at the moment.
Of course, I it okay to explore further for the future, but in the next 10-15 years there will be none of those waterless power plants finished in the western sphere. I guess it will take even longer to build them because democratic countries normally need much longer to build up anything.
Insightful comment, GG.
I agree that the die was cast decades ago. Ideologically, Europe adopted or evolved a dysfunctional culture that believed entrepreneurial free markets are nasty, top down bureaucratic regulations are good, energy is bad, the military is crass, European progress was embarrassing, and that importing tens of millions of (west-hating) Muslim men is open-minded. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with these views. They just lead to the long term suicide of any complex state buil tupon them.
I sincerely hope that Europe can wake up and take emergency action to root out this type of thinking. I doubt they will. Second best is that at least a few nations blaze their own course before the point of total societal collapse and set the stage for the second Renaissance.
It doesn’t matter what *you* think is unwarranted. Threat perception is subjective. The only thing that ever mattered was what Russia thought and how we responded to those concerns, whether to engage in reassurance and take confidence-building actions, or to dismiss them. We chose to be dismissive and did things that we knew in no uncertain terms they would see as threatening. We knew because they told us.
It is the stubborn hostility of people like you toward Russia, and the actions taken pursuant to that hostility, that led to your prophecies becoming self-fulfilling.
Sure, they ‘told us’, but there’s not much you can do about it. People tend to forget that even Zelensky was accused of being ‘pro-Russian’ back in the days because of his openness to dialogue. That should tell us something about how hard it is to stop Russian paranoia. For all the anecdotes about Western leaders being a little too enthusiastic about Eastern expansion, there are just as many anecdotes about Western leaders being overly cautious. Countries such as Germany have basically bent over backwards. The truth is that Russia has been and is actively exporting its corruption to Ukraine and other neighbors, creating anti-Russian sentiment.
Geoffrey G writes, "It's no coincidence that the spoils of the latest consumer tech waves have settled almost entirely in the laps of the Chinese and the Americans. No other country has the scale of domestic market."
Well, there's Spotify! That's not saying much, but it could be a model. Perhaps more significant counterexamples (re the spoils of the latest consumer tech waves) are the Japanese, and especially the Koreans.
There are a few tech champions in the Nordics. Indeed, Stockholm is distinguished as the second-biggest per capita incubator of unicorn-type tech companies after Silicon Valley. But even there you run into the scale and funding issue. Spotify, like other Swedish tech giants, had to export and internationalize immediately to get scale. It was able to benefit from (parasitically feed off of?) Sweden's quietly dominant position in the Anglo-American musical industry (Sweden is the second-largest exporter of music in the entire world!).
It's also easier for Scandinavians to accomplish this in B2C consumer tech (another example is gaming) than in B2B, for the same reason that TikTok could take off so well in the US, despite being a Chinese app. But, still, Sweden and the Nordics will never be more than a niche player in tech in my view.
Sweden, an exporter of music? Hey, that's the rhyme scheme for a sonnet: ABBA-ABBA-CD-CD-CD ;-)
But seriously... You still haven't accounted for South Korea's spectacular success in consumer tech without domestic market scale of the US or China -- and unlike Sweden's Spotify, that even includes hardware. Internationalization might not be the exception -- and if it's the rule (throughout the world, potentially including Europe), your notion about domestic market scale starts to unravel.
South Korea's also succeeded in consumer tech despite a lack of domestic energy resources. Of course, it, too, has a dominant position in popular culture (quite likely stronger than Sweden's) -- but here again (considering the creative possibilities for Europe), what's the exception and what's the rule?
Spain’s population has been growing due to immigration from Latin America, as has that of the US. The population of the UK continues to grow. There are probably a couple hundred million people (at least) who would move to Europe if given the opportunity to do so legally, and be law abiding, productive citizens that support European/Enlightenment values.
Maybe I am mistaken, but my understanding is that most European nations banned fracking before even attempting to see if it would be economically feasible. Given that Europe has plenty of coal, and given that there is at least some degree of overlap between coal country and fracking country in the US, I would be surprised if fracking wouldn’t work in some places in Europe. The simple answer to the lack of energy is just to change laws and policy.
There is very limited proven or likely fracking potential in Europe, for better or for worse, for similar geological reasons as to why there's never been much petroleum resource underneath the ground there. The well-known exception is offshore Norway, of course (as an extension of the same desposits that once fed the UK's oil demands offshore Scotland), and the less well-known exception is offshore of the Netherlands. There's also likely some resource in the Eastern Mediterranean. But none of these reserves are at all sufficient even for Europe's own demand. Notice, also, that all of them are underwater.
The bans on fracking in some parts of Europe can after exploration showed that the extractable resources were modest, anyway, so the ROI was unfavorable, while the environmental costs to a much more populated landmass were considerable. There are bans on fracking in certain highly populated parts of the United States for similar reasons: whatever you'd get out of the ground wouldn't be worth much in comparison to the risks.
The reality is that the United States has long been a huge outlier in terms of having a rich and economically retrievable fossil energy endowment (and without even having to drill offshore!). Fully half of that extraction now comes from a single, desolated part of Western Texas, which is conveniently easy to access and far from any population: the Permian Basin. So the natural tendency for Americans is to think that everyone else could have the same if they just weren't so stupid/environmentalist/whatever. But Europeans are energy-hungry and greedy, too, and just don't have the same means to sate their own thirst. Europe's Permian Basin is in... Russia.
Trying to import LNG gas from the US and/or the Middle East is probably more expensive than fracking for it in Poland. Though maybe that will change if the war in Ukraine ends and Russia’s supply comes back online for Europe.
https://www.dw.com/en/is-polish-shale-gas-the-answer-to-the-eus-energy-shortage/a-65190723
It would be momentous if we could get gas from Poland, which is ideally located close to Germany and an industrial center in Europe, itself.
But behind every story like this is the question of *why* that alledged resource wasn't tapped long ago. Notice the language here:
"...estimated 14 trillion cubic meters (tcm) of *technically recoverable* shale gas reserves in Europe."
"Technically recoverable" is a very different thing from *economically recoverable.* Remember back during the Afghanistan War, when there were supposedly trillions in technically recoverable mineral assets under the Hindu Kush mountains there? Well, not as much as a dust pile was ever actually recovered, and not just because it was a warzone. What matters in any extraction is whether the resource can be pulled out of the ground at scale *at a price that covers the effort, with profit.*
Fracking is tricker, still, because unlike with traditional oil and gas drilling, prices for extraction are much higher, but you get all the benefit from a well right up front and then production trickles off very quickly to nothing. So you have to keep drilling and drilling and, best case, you get a few years of production out of a successfully fracked well. But worst-case, you're on a wild goose chase with all the costs front-loaded and a few anemic wells that don't produce enough to make the effort worth it. That's a very dicey financial proposition!
Now, for these energy analysts, an "optimistic" scenario for Polish (or French, Romanian, German, or Danish gas) is one where energy prices are unusually high and expected to remain there, which would make this development worth the risk:
"Gas prices are now significantly higher which could potentially create a sensible business model for shale gas production in Poland," Zajdler told DW.
But what if they start drilling in Poland for the next few years and aren't lucky to find some amazing seams of Permian Basin-like productivity and there's a "meh" amount of gas trickling out by 2027... JUST IN TIME for a bumper crop of planned LNG to come surging into global markets from Qatar and the US. Those Polish fracking players are cooked and the whole nascent industry goes bankrupt. Not even enough time to justify building pipelines to Germany.
As for fracking, it’s probably not the answer. Nuclear power is what makes the most sense by a long shot for most of Europe. The French were smart enough to understand that decades ago, which is why they get something like 70% of their power from nuclear plants and have since the 80’s. It’s a shame that their recent leadership isn’t nearly as good and that they’ve allowed their nuclear industry to languish when they could literally be building and exporting reactors to the rest of Europe and even outside of Europe. If they’d kept investing in it they could be global leaders in the technology by now. Instead the workforce of nuclear engineers and scientists is aging out and their plants are old and starting to reach the end of their lifetimes, while very few new ones are being built to replace those that are aging.
I think your opinion that migrants are going to be law abiding and support European/Enlightenment values at the same rates as the natives is rather blindly optimistic given the actual, observable real world consequences of the last ten years of excessive and largely uncontrolled migration to Europe from non-Western countries. I mean how much evidence do you need that the experiment isn’t going well before you admit that there might be some issues?
Europe just sucks at immigration. The vast majority of immigrants to the US come from India (Hindus) Latin America (Christians) and East Asia. Pretty much all of their kids are so deep in Western/Enlightenment values that they cannot conceive that other people have different values, as opposed to just being evil people. If Europe actually controlled their borders, they could have very large amounts of immigration without much in the way of crime, etc. Australia, Canada, and Singapore have done that for decades. The technology isn’t hard. The political will just isn’t there.
insightful.
your point 5 "victim of diversity" is probably the most meaningful one.
Russia has an aging population, have a ton of threat-surface, and are not part of the winner-take-it-all tech wave.
existential threat is a great motivator for uniting, but as you correctly mention - why would a retiree in Spain agree to a cut in his pension for a war that does not threaten him, and might even cause his energy price to rise (in 2022 and 2023 it increased imports of russian gas e.g. https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/spain-increased-its-import-of-russian-gas-1705627354.html).
i think that as long as Russia avoid naming countries by name, countries with port on the atlatic ocean - will continue to think they can wait this one out.
perhaps the right thing is for NATO to start churning members who are more of a drag than a real benefit to the alliance.
Yeah, I'm skeptical that countries like Spain and Italy will come to the party in terms of actually properly funding their own defense needs.
They're further from the danger in time/space. And, unlike the Nordic and Eastern European countries, they were never actually under direct threat even during the Cold War.
They also still rely more on imported energy, including LNG from Russia.
And their internal politics are more fraught because of the secular problem of lower economic growth and collapsing demographics in recent decades. Italy's economy essentially hasn't grown since the turn of the millennium, compared to a 60 per cent expansion for the US, 30 per cent growth for France and Germany, and 40 per cent for the UK.
So, this concept that "perhaps the right thing is for NATO to start churning members who are more of a drag than a real benefit to the alliance" would perhaps give some surprising answers for who is a drag: The likes of Poland and Latvia are investing more in their own defense and they have more to gain from a strong alliance than, say, Italy, the third biggest economy in Europe. Germany is clearly strategic and a lynchpin of any viable alliance, but they've been a "drag" for decades in terms of actually showing any "skin in the game" or military or diplomatic leadership. The likes of Finland, which wasn't even technically in NATO until recently was more of a member than others who have been nominally core members for decades.
So why are these fair-weather countries even in NATO? A lot of it is down to their strategic importance, even if their ally-ship is wobbly. Turkey is a perfect example of that: better to have them in than out, when they have one of the largest and most capable militaries in Europe, geographically control the entrance to the Black Sea, and directly border the most unstable and dangerous border that Europe has. Spain and Italy's locations are crucial for anyone who wants to be able to project power in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. And no NATO land operation could work without Germany's middle-European rail, river, and road network.
Spain/Italy don't actually really have any defense needs because nobody is capable of harming them - other than being overrun by a "demographic weapon" like mass immigration as engineered by Belarus against Poland. Realistically even France has no real threat and can maintain only a "postcolonial policing" military.
They would be better off funding a Euro collective military infrastructure like satellite networks etc and Germany, Poland, Baltic nations providing the combat muscle. IE contribute in specialised domains that form a large whole military rather than each country having a "mini military".
I can see why some of these items might be upsetting to the European elites. Perhaps they should look to their own backyards, though. There's very little that the United States could do to Europe which would be worse than the effects of millions of unassimilated, violent, and unproductive immigrants. THAT should be their primary concern.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/case-study-elite-capture
I can't speak for other European countries, but I have lived in Portugal for 3 1/2 years, and while Portugual has a large number of immigrants, it has much less violent crime than the US. Mass shootings are unheard of here, and there us very little homelessness. And immigrants here are far from being unproductive - they are a critical part of the labor force.
And that is true in Germany, as well. Violent crime rates are going down year over year, and *always* were lower than in the US anyway (despite popular belief, not all is worse in Europe). Immigration is necessary, or we will indeed go the way of economic decline like Russia (which just lost a generation to war) and soon also China, who will not be able to keep up the pace, AI or not, due to their catastrophic demographics and lack of immigration. Russia is no imminent threat to the rest of Europe, they will need some time to recover and regroup, should the conflict in Ukraine ever end, at all. I would not be surprised if that continues for years on a smaller scale, after whatever "deal" the orange man brokers with Putin. So not all is lost, yet, in good old Europe.
That is not the picture I have of Portugal, where you recently had race riots after the police killed someone during a chase.
The return to the Golden era of Al-Andalus of a 1000 years ago? I doubt that very much.
You spelled Al-Andalus wrong.
corrected!
I concur. What everyone at MSC failed to grasp is, that censorship is an anathema to Americans. This is where western Europe no longer has a common value base with the USA .
Merciless lawfare, armed police raids, jail and fines are now normal across Western Europe. Poland too, is prosecuting an MEP because he liked a meme.
Why should the USA spend say $100 Billion per year on EU defense , when that money is then used to reinforce a censorious woke antisemitic , anti American world view ?
Censorship under Trump—law suits, threats of law suits, Musk’s X bans, attacks on media, erasing of race, sex, gender from government and higher ed—is destroying freedom of speech and press in America.
Excuse me ? The people censoring in the USA is the left. They effectively had control of the academic and media narrative for decades. Please do not invert the facts. Thank you.
Thinking censorship is anathema to Americans is not entirely true. Don’t deny the truth with what Trump is doing.
I do not take your posts seriously.
9 out of ten professors in the humanities are Dems. Conservative careers have been made impossible in large parts of academia and the press.
Please stop posting your disinformation here.
How many television networks, newspapers, and social media platforms do the humanities professors own?
Blaming Republicans for censorship is like blaming Democrats for attacking abortion rights - it's pure projection.
Don't deny the truth that Republicans are trying to protect abortion rights from Democrats who seek to limit women's rights.
You are aware, or should be, that USAID got their pants pulled down in public demonstrating it was an elitist playpen of the left funding their pet media darlings with money from the pockets of the chuds.
No one can “erase race, sex, gender” from higher ed. Those are categories which people fit into. You can erase the massive, useless bureaucracy which hires people based on these categories, which Trump is very right to do. But that is not an attack on free speech or democracy
In the UK, the police visited a person accused of 'hate' speech. He wrote
“I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.
From a NYT analysis titled pessimistically "Germany’s Economy Was Once the Envy of Europe. Not Anymore." But immigration isn't the issue. If anything, it's the only thing that has kept low-birthrate, fast-aging Germany on life-support!
"The workforce crisis would look even worse if not for the millions of refugees and other migrants Germany has taken in from countries like Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine over the past decade. Economists say they’ve helped fill in the holes left by retirements and the shift to part-time work.
"Last year, researchers at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris reported that Germany had a 70 percent employment rate for immigrants in 2022. That was significantly higher than most other European Union countries."
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/21/world/europe/germany-economy-election.html
30% unemployment means those migrants are still a huge net drain on the welfare state.
Well, the overall unemployment rate in Germany is 77%, so it's actually pretty close to the same: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/employment-rate
Both rates are higher than the United States, btw (only 60%): https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employment-rate
There are all sorts of "legitimate" reasons for people to be unemployed, of course, including being a child, student, or retired person. There's also the share of people who are disabled, incarcerated, or otherwise unemployable (which is largely to blame for the relatively low and recently declining employment rate in the US).
Importing a bunch of retirees, criminals, and welfare bums isn't exactly sound economics.
I do not consider what the NYT writes of any value. The NYT is a censorious, woke activist pamphlet .
Employment rates are manipulated by classing workers in politically favourable categories.
The vast majority of these Muslims, supposedly “working” have been parked in low wage dead end jobs like security watchmen, parcel delivery drivers. They are actively channelled into these jobs by government funded mini courses, which then enables the, to put on a uniform and watch a door.
Meanwhile knife crime is through the roof, lethal Muslim terror is now normal. Society is deeply polarised furthering parties who seek to deindustrialise Germany.
Cheap labor ftw amirite?
Vance's critique struck a chord in Germany , especially with the regressive left in parliament ( Greens, SPD , FDP ) who have been expanding censorship , policing speech. Penalties have increased during this government.
The Greens also make sure to pork barrel hundreds of millions in state, EU and federal budgets for their NGOs and CSOs. This is on top of the tens of millions other private and semi private financial supporters of this work.
Many of these so called NGOs also police speech and act as informants to the police. Again Law Fare is unleashed on the average citizen who needs public disciplining. They lobby other civil society players and drive a narrative which enables more censorship down the road.
What ever is next in line for the regressive left and needs protection. Examples abound and more are sure to follow.
Why should the US tax payer help fund a world view which is antithetical to his ?
In what world is the FDP, a pro-free trade, pro-welfare reduction, neoliberal party, "left"?
The FDP enabled the last government , they voted laws into effect. More censorship, more open borders, more Green New Deal, the misogynistic self ID law. I could go on. The FDP betrayed itself and its voters and made the ultimate sacrifice for horrific strategic votes and decision making.
MSC Director Heusgen, who ended up crying on the podium is a Merkel man and Soros fan boy. So it was no surprise to see him in tears as the fairy tale he also represented during his UNSC time came crashing down as JD Vance laid down the law.
I wonder what Frank Walter Steinmeier and Mogherini are thinking ?
I've literally never feared for my personal safety nearly as much in any developped country as I have in the US. Canadian cities are wildly multicultural and very safe, London has issues with petty crime but it's still better than any large American city (and it used to be much, much worse, when the UK had net emigration). I keep hearing this completely fact free statement from Americans. Yes, assimilation is a much bigger issue in Europe than it is in Canada or Australia, (see e.g. South Asian Muslims in the UK) but it's more of a cultural coherence problem than a law and order or economic growth one.
That cultural coherence problem will bite Europe in the ass.
As a European i wish the smartest people here would get OFF their high horse and listen to people like you and even Vance even if they disagree with them on other issues, but the level of narcisism seems of the charts especially in Brussels. All news here at the start of the Ukraine war was that Ukraine had it in the bag and Putin was dumb for even trying. And noone has ever admitted thet they misjudged the situation. Same thing with the economy and climate change. They can never perceive themselves as capable of mistakes, it must have been luck or randomness and we keep doing the same
And this is precisely why they need other people to shut up
The us-funded Global Order that started in 1945 was intended in part to moderate the over-charged testosterone of Europeans that led to two world wars. It worked so well that it transformed the continent into a population of effeminate Karens with a looter and moocher mentality.
The US has culpability here. It's Wall Street backed elite managerial class prolonged the Global Order way beyond its original mission of global peace and prosperity, to one that supported a global corporatocracy that the US would perpetually dominate. That worked well for Europe as they would export to the massive US consumer market. However, the idiot US globalist managerial corporatists gave away the store to China for short-term profits. And that is the source of the problem for Europe as the US has to implement a hard stop of the Global Order due to the economic destruction it has caused for the majority of the American people.
The memo to Europe should have been "You need to stop mooching and start producing. You need to stop relying on the US to care for you and bail you out. The US can no longer afford it."
But just like American Democrats, they ignore the memo and stay stuck in denial. The power and money flowing from the looting and mooching game is a very hard habit to break.
How much of this denialism (at least the national security, energy security and industrialization parts) is just a Western European problem? I think Eastern Europe is much more realistic and has been trying hard to get Western Europe to listen to their warnings. But Western Europe is used to ignoring / looking down on Eastern Europe…..,.
Listening to the Estonians (and possibly the Poles) is one thing. Orban (along with his "warnings") is quite another.
Excellent article, really pointing out the need for we Europeans to take responsibility for our culture and security.
How quickly attitudes and reputations change. Being from the UK, I was so passionate about staying in Europe, where Brexit seemed to exchange a world that was connected and relevant for one of deliberate poverty and isolation. Europe seemed a force to be reckoned with.
But the identity politics culture wars finally got me to reexamine what was - and in my ignorance, had been for decades - going on, which was a poisonous internal self-funded discourse of European original sin, where we lost the ability to stand up for our beliefs, which have helped humanity's great escape from drudgery into a world of unimaginable plenty, not only without slavery, but also with fast-diminishing absolute poverty and death from infectious diseases.
The passing of 80 years without a European war after a millennium of conflict shouldn't be downplayed, but at the same time, just as Yascha describes, we've descended into a rather pathetic postmodern irrelevance, who assume that someone else (the US) should look after us while we carefully record non-hate crimes and beat ourselves up for barely-existent discrimination
What's remarkable about the new Trump administration is that they are speaking their simple truths, rather than diplomatic ambiguities that we can easily reinterpret, and just as with the naked Emperor, people are suddenly realising, and able to discuss, what they'd known all along. The Americans are once again offering us a way out, this time through self-knowledge. Forget Trump, Vance is speaking truths.
It will be interesting to see if there are are actually any European statesmen who can respond well to this. The UK should have a little more scope, being non EU, but they (embarrassingly, significantly assisted for 14 years by what is supposed to be a Conservative party) currently seem to be embracing decline, shovelling coal into the train heading for oblivion.
I often say to my partner how different Europe felt just 20 years ago. It’s been alarming to see our slide into a decreasing consequential continent, lying somewhere between the twin giants of America and China. Perhaps we can yet find some way back, I don’t know anymore. When you consider that Britain, France, or Germany (my homeland) would all be the poorest of the 50 US states (poorer than Mississippi), that really sums it up in our book.
Another patronising lecture for Europe from across the Atlantic. Liberal America should lay off Europe and concentrate on opposing their own decline into hell.
Now for an entirely upsetting and unpleasant point of view: If a new pope remains attached to the multicultural Muslim apologetics of the current flickering pope, Europe will be done. But if the Church has the courage to embrace Western Civilization, and we gain a new pope similar to John Paul or Benedict then the West has a chance to recover. When a pope without embarrassment says again Western Catholicism with its Jewish and Platonic heritage is the best of all religions, that Judeo-Greco-Christian theology is the source of all that is beautiful and good in the West, from laws to science -- when a pope whose words guide billions of people is willing to simply say Islam is not the future of the world then, and only then, will Europe arise again from its apparent catastrophe of stagnation. Western Culture has been an indisputable a net Good for the World, and that is absolutely not the case with the ever-degenerating Islamic culture. (And for the Bibas children and their mother: השם יקום דמם!)
Wow, way to erase the contributions of Arabic scientists and philosophers. For your analysis, I give you a score of... Zero.
Even Catholics don't care what the pope has to say anymore. The cardinals could elect a capybara and it wouldn't change geopolitics one iota.
Huh? Leave your bible verses in church! Religious zealots of whatever color is certainly the last thing Europe needs.
On behalf of the Bibas children and their mother, I'd like to remind you that the Inquisition and the Crusades weren't good for the Jews. In Spain, things were better under the Muslims.
This is what happens when you believe that "history is over"... and you think that government is just a vending machine that dispenses everything you need in your life.
Yascha you and the readers comments say it all. A rather depressing birds eye view into an uncertain economic future for the Western world. One Think Tank advocates this. Another Think Tank recommends that.
When uncertainty stalks the land and political opportunism raises it's ugly head, political alliances, political dissonance, and human nature bubble to the surface to suggest solutions - because there are just none that are clear.
This past decade of the Woke has wrought untold damage to western culture, diverting what should have been a cohesive drive of The West to understand what are their economic problems - which was side tracked and we were forced by the ruling classes into just naval gazing and had to endure all that "self loathing" that took hold, as us hoi polloi were told how bad we should feel about our past and repentance is top priority, to wash away the generational guilt we 'must" all be feeling. That and the trillions of $$$$'s needed for the "Great Reset" and the WEF's support of climate alarmism, the headlong rush to shutter the fossil fuel industry and achieve Net Zero, and the covid debacle all played their part in unfocusing the Western Democracies as to how far their decline had progressed.
When humans are governed by a ruling class whose only interest is to enforce their ideology, this sort of practical torpor envelopes nations.
Vance was right. But threatening the withdrawal of America and their monetary sponsorship, from Europe is a too simple solution as "nature abhors a vaccuum."
But it might just be the much needed "wake-up" call that European nations need. It may take two Republican Administrations to really sort this out. This alone is hightly unlikely unless something more catastrophic happens in the next four years.
Unrelated but also sort of related: all the big European soccer clubs these days seem to be owned by non-Europeans (including a truly disturbing amount of sportswashing by Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds.)
The Germans still don’t get it. A telling interview with Habeck at MSC with Marvin Neumann on YouTube .
Habeck , whose party and its world view is partly responsible for Europes predicament still is in denial and actually believes , he says so, that Europe can offer solutions for what is coming.
Yet his parties economic policy has introduced wide scale deindustrialisation , with significant price hikes across the board. The SPD is no better. Go woke , go broke.
The WSJ has had some excellent , on point reporting how Germany is cratering
https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/why-germanys-confidence-is-shattered-and-its-economy-is-kaput-d1d95890?page=1
None of this is news however, and this been a topic of discussion by federal politicians for years. Industry players have also talked bout this for years. To no avail. Green woke policies trumped everything and ultimately crippled the economy. Every strategic decision since Merkel has been wrong. Carried through and enabled by the federal administrative state. Habeck actually thinks he is the bees knee's.
This is a monumental failure and proves that the people who make the decisions in most of Western Europe no longer solve any problems.
Yuri Bezmenov talks about this in some detail.
The one-world holdovers from the post WWII era can’t allow Germany- or any European country- to get too big for its britches. The UK was brought to heel. But Brussels can’t do it without zero interest money and the military backing of the US. The one world dream is dying a slow painful death.
Very good piece. Yes, you are right about Europe's leaders. Cowards. Lacking imagination. Forever waiting to be saved by the Americans. And glad you too had the same feeling about Vance's speech. I think people misinterpreted his words about the "danger from within" for obvious reasons (Russia-related). He had a point.
Thank you for your article. I think Trump's chaos us absolutely deliberate.
If Europe is to survive, then I think they should consider suspending the membership of countries like Hungary and Slovakia.
I think they need to recognise that geopolitically, at present there are four main power structures in the world. America. Russia. China. And Europe.
And it appears that Russia and the USA are conspiring to reduce that to three players, by splintering Europe into parts under Russian influence, and parts under US domination, but in even more fractured way than during the Cold War.
I think Europe should organise itself as essentially anti-Putin and anti-Trump. America should be expelled from NATO, and European countries should militarily support Canada (and Denmark/Greenland too of course) should the US invade Canada.
I think this is potentially a realignment, and it could be a magnificent opportunity to defeat the forces of darkness that Trump and Putin represent.
Trump would laugh his ass off if the US was "expelled" from NATO, since the US is the only country that provides any meaningful amount of NATO funding.
Without the US, Trump's private golf courses would each individually have bigger budgets than NATO.
I think you underestimate NATO's military expenditure significantly.
Also, you have to consider what you're getting with those hard-earned Euros. Expensive high-tech glossy fancy American weapons at great expense, hurting your own economies while supporting America's economy and their military-industrial complex.
And in some ways, the worst part of the deal is that America automatically has backdoors to all of the advanced weapons that it provides, so that they'll be able to effectively hit a kill-switch and render those weapons ineffective whenever they want to.
What we need first and foremost from the Americans is their logistical, combat coordination, and unparalleled intelligence capabilities. These are not easy to replace at all, let alone quickly, at least not to the superior standard we’re currently accustomed to. You can find many papers examining this from places like RUSI and the ISI.
Hear, hear. I think this can be a tremendous opportunity for us, if we can just stop chasing our tails and seize it. Just how likely that is I'm not sure of, but I do think that we'll stand a better chance the sooner we stop taking intellectual cues from America. American ideas only (kind of, sort of, some of the time) work for Americans, and that's because they've lucked onto a downright sickening amount of geographic advantages. We need to start thinking for ourselves again.
Gosh Baeraad (Nordic?), that's a solid point about taking intellectual cues from America. America is used to setting the agenda in so many way - such as setting the global pre-eminence of the dollar, establishing the World Bank, not to mention their exhausting cultural dominance in so many ways.
I think if you set the agenda, you have an almost unassailable head-start
I think Trump's behaviour is presaging the end of world dominance
Juvenile
Lame brain
Excellent and real analysis, as tough as describing reality needs to be. Reading this in Brussels makes me nod in agreement all the way, and despair what the future holds here. Thank you, Yascha.