President Donald Trump added insult to injury in an interview this week, calling European leaders “weak” and describing the continent as “decaying.”
There was more: “I know the bad leaders,” the president said, “I know the smart ones. I know the stupid ones. You get some real stupid ones, too. But they’re not doing a good job. Europe is not doing a good job in many ways. They’re not doing a good job.”
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The problem with these comments is not that they are untrue, but if it is indeed a problem, they are deeply uncivil. Perhaps they were unnecessarily harsh, but it’s arguable that the message — both its substance and its unvarnished contempt — needed urgently to be delivered. Europe has missed so many wake-up calls recently that a tone of exasperation might be its last hope. The danger, of course, is that some will take such bluntness as sufficient reason to dismiss the criticism rather than take it seriously.
Trump’s comments follow swiftly behind his new national security strategy, published Dec. 5. It is a document flawed not because it deprecates Europe, but because it doesn’t treat Russia and China as the threats they are. This fault makes it incoherent as a whole.
But Europeans know that what it says about them is valid, even though they cannot wholly admit it. The continent really is in danger of erasure because it will not stand up for itself, will not make itself economically vibrant and robust, and has allowed an inflow of people from hostile cultures in perverse compensation for an unmerited shame about its own glorious past.
Its leaders understandably don’t like Trump’s new posture. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz commented warily that Europe will need to become “much more independent” of the United States. But more independence — more inherent strength and resolve, and an instinct for its own survival — is what America has needed from Europe for decades.
It has been easy for European nations to huddle cozily under the umbrella of American protection and sneer at America while proclaiming the virtues of their more refined civilization, excessive regulation, and socialized economies. But, as Margaret Thatcher noted, the problem with dependency is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. Europe has finally run out of America’s money and patience.
So now it is scrambling for relevance. The site of its leaders’ meeting this week at British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s residence, 10 Downing Street, for “talks aimed at influencing the US-led Ukraine peace process,” as the Wall Street Journal put it, was a pathetic one. These nations struggling to be heard, Britain, France, and Germany, were once referred to without irony as great powers.
As the continent’s leaders sat on a line of chairs for their photo op, they brought to mind Benjamin Disraeli’s derisive observation of William Gladstone’s front bench, “You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest.”
Pushing for a bigger say in the peace process is an act necessary only to weakened nations that have lost their clout. The same was apparent when Britain and France disgracefully recognized Palestinian statehood early this autumn, rewarding terrorists for their genocidal attack on Israel. Britain and France did so to look more important than they are — it was also, of course, to appease their Muslim and left-wing voters at home, which emphasized their decline — but they would not have done it if their recognition mattered anymore, if they remained important states relevant to the issue at hand. It became doable only because Europe, as Trump pointed out so rudely, has weak leaders, and the continent is decaying.
European nations are relevant to the war in Ukraine, for it is on their continent and threatens them directly. But they have spent each day since Russian missiles and artillery began pounding Ukrainian citizens in February 2022 looking incapable of acting with strength and independence, and thus seeming irrelevant.
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Their talk of greater independence for European security now is welcome and overdue. It is a sign of realism, just as is their recent retreat from economically crippling climate change alarmism and their belated efforts to stanch illegal immigration and keep Europe for Europeans. If these are all straws in a new wind that brings some hard-headed resolve to govern the continent as though it had a future worth fighting for, then it is welcome.
It will also indicate that Trump’s belligerent criticisms are having their desired effect.
