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.
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.
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 ?
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 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
Another patronising lecture for Europe from across the Atlantic. Liberal America should lay off Europe and concentrate on opposing their own decline into hell.
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
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!)
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…..,.
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.
Your paragraph beginning, “Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified…, took umbrage… are apoplectic…” is high school sophomore-level condescending.
In the fall of 2016, Mounk was a Junior Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund . . .
And:
A couple of weeks ago, Mounk spoke on a panel at the Harvard European Conference alongside a recent vice president of the European Commission and a current Member of the European Parliament . . .
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.
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
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.
It’s heartbreaking to see such hubris in these American critiques of Europe. You have just endured what may be the most shameful week in your postwar history—betraying your truest friends while excluding us from the room as you did so. And yet, you presume to lecture us.
I share Pinker’s revulsion at what America has become. Your vaunted checks and balances have failed. Your pendulum politics lurches from one extreme to another, rendering you unreliable—schizophrenic, even. Yes, Europe has misread the room, but then, keeping up with America’s convulsions is no easy task.
One of Europe’s failings was trusting you. No more. You are like a quantum waveform that refuses to collapse. Will it be the madness of Ivy League wokery or the crudeness of saloon-bar politics?
For goodness’ sake, find a centre. One moment, a $7 trillion deficit; the next, chainsaw libertarianism. You teeter on the brink while dispensing sanctimony. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment values that made America great are abandoned by both left and right.
It is a measure of your decline that you think this is our problem. Wake up.
As Rahm Emanuel stated, never let a good crisis go to waste. Collectively, the European nations have many strengths and advantages as well as the disadvantages noted in this piece. They can survive together or fall one by one — but selling this to a group of disparate nations with millennia of distinct cultures, with long histories of being at war with each other, will be incredibly hard. Were the UK to reverse course and return, their willingness to accept such a a painful and unpopular step would be a powerful statement recognizing that the fate of each country is at stake. I don’t have much faith that Starmer is up to it. It would be amazing if King Charles actually showed some initiative — he is very traditional but also quirky.
It would take considerable bravery for any national leader to commit to a substantially more unified Europe. Unlike the US, though, European countries seem to still have national organizations and leaders outside the political realm who could make a difference. Putin and Trump’s actions may have the unintended result of forcing European nations to react together. I can only hope.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 ?
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
Another patronising lecture for Europe from across the Atlantic. Liberal America should lay off Europe and concentrate on opposing their own decline into hell.
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
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!)
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…..,.
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.
Your paragraph beginning, “Over the last few weeks, European officials were horrified…, took umbrage… are apoplectic…” is high school sophomore-level condescending.
But but but . . .
In the fall of 2016, Mounk was a Junior Fellow at the Transatlantic Academy of the German Marshall Fund . . .
And:
A couple of weeks ago, Mounk spoke on a panel at the Harvard European Conference alongside a recent vice president of the European Commission and a current Member of the European Parliament . . .
I guess the bigwigs like mean girls.
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.
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
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.
It’s heartbreaking to see such hubris in these American critiques of Europe. You have just endured what may be the most shameful week in your postwar history—betraying your truest friends while excluding us from the room as you did so. And yet, you presume to lecture us.
I share Pinker’s revulsion at what America has become. Your vaunted checks and balances have failed. Your pendulum politics lurches from one extreme to another, rendering you unreliable—schizophrenic, even. Yes, Europe has misread the room, but then, keeping up with America’s convulsions is no easy task.
One of Europe’s failings was trusting you. No more. You are like a quantum waveform that refuses to collapse. Will it be the madness of Ivy League wokery or the crudeness of saloon-bar politics?
For goodness’ sake, find a centre. One moment, a $7 trillion deficit; the next, chainsaw libertarianism. You teeter on the brink while dispensing sanctimony. Meanwhile, the Enlightenment values that made America great are abandoned by both left and right.
It is a measure of your decline that you think this is our problem. Wake up.
As Rahm Emanuel stated, never let a good crisis go to waste. Collectively, the European nations have many strengths and advantages as well as the disadvantages noted in this piece. They can survive together or fall one by one — but selling this to a group of disparate nations with millennia of distinct cultures, with long histories of being at war with each other, will be incredibly hard. Were the UK to reverse course and return, their willingness to accept such a a painful and unpopular step would be a powerful statement recognizing that the fate of each country is at stake. I don’t have much faith that Starmer is up to it. It would be amazing if King Charles actually showed some initiative — he is very traditional but also quirky.
It would take considerable bravery for any national leader to commit to a substantially more unified Europe. Unlike the US, though, European countries seem to still have national organizations and leaders outside the political realm who could make a difference. Putin and Trump’s actions may have the unintended result of forcing European nations to react together. I can only hope.
Gosh that was patronising.