The United States has more pressing matters than fixing Europe, but Americans cannot afford to leave Europeans unsupervised. Europeans resent American supervision, but they expect the U.S. to protect their interests, whether they fit with American interests or not. These are not new problems. They were there in 1919, when President Woodrow Wilson got lost in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. They were there in 1947, when the Truman Doctrine admitted that only the U.S. could resist Soviet expansion.
They were still there in the 1990s, when the first Bush administration directed the reunification of Germany and the Clinton administration supported the issue of the Euro currency and made NATO’s borders the European Union’s borders. And they are still here today. We say Europe is moribund, but Europeans are as ingenious and productive as ever at devising new ways to mess up their affairs and create trouble for themselves and the American babysitter.
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The hot war in Ukraine and the enrichment of Western European cities by millions of undocumented and unassimilable immigrants are merely the most eye-catching aspects of Europe’s current problems. Solve them tomorrow, and the structural problems will remain and intensify. Europe has lost a generation since the crash of 2008 and the consequent Eurozone crisis that took almost a decade to ricochet through Europe’s national economies. Read David Marsh’s recent book, Can Europe Survive?, and it’s clear that Europe might not. It’s also clear that Europe’s reflexive responses could make it more of a problem for a U.S. that is deepening its commitments in the Middle East and Asia.
The overpriced Euro currency is the old Deutschmark under another name, but the German motor of the Eurozone economy has stalled. The German economy’s stagnation between 2018 and 2025 was its longest and weakest phase of low growth since 1945. The Franco-German relationship is Europe’s economic and political core, but the adoption of a common currency did not lead to systemic convergence. The French and German banking, finance, and defense sectors remain patriotically fragmented. On energy policy, France sought self-sufficiency through nuclear power, while Germany decommissioned its nuclear power stations and pressed weaker European states to buy Russian gas.
The Ukraine war exposed their divergence of political priorities. Germany returned to its historic preoccupation with Russia. France resumed its historic preoccupation with megalomaniac freelancing. The third Western European power, Britain, also reverted to its historical habit and armed Ukraine to prevent the emergence of a dominant power on the European continent. The problem wasn’t just that Britain lacked the means and money to go it alone. Even if the Europeans had managed a united policy, they lacked the weapons. The U.S. spends twice as much on defense as the EU’s entire membership. The U.S. also produces one main battle tank, while the Europeans produce a dozen. Ukraine became America’s war, as every European war since 1917 has been.
The war fulfilled Donald Rumsfeld’s prophecy about the birth of a New Europe of pro-American Eastern states. Poland’s emergence as a military force deprives Russia and Germany of their historic option, carving up central Europe over the heads of its peoples. Despite Viktor Orban’s departure from office, Hungary will remain a singular and pivotal state, wedged between Russia and Turkey. The band of states between the Baltic and the Black Sea, including a future western Ukrainian state, will need American support if they are to thrive. Apart from being more appreciative than Old Europe, the New Europe states will be more stable partners.
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Old Europe’s states face social collapse due to immigration, which is a euphemism for Islam, and economic collapse due to the resulting welfare tab. These issues consume their domestic politics and foreshorten their political horizons. We are seeing the beginnings of course correction in Western Europe. Not in the retrenchments of a failed elite, which commits to increases in defense spending that it knows the current political settlement cannot support, but by public demand. In Germany, Chancellor Friedrich Merz admits that the gravy train has run out of steam. In Britain, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK triumphed in the May 7 local elections. In France, polling shows that the nationalist Jordan Bardella has a good chance of becoming president in 2027. But fixing Old Europe, if it can be fixed, will take a generation or more.
Meanwhile, it’s all too easy to see Europe seeking survival by lurching into the kind of quick but strategically reckless fixes that David Marsh recommends. An uncompetitive European currency is caught between “American monetary colonisation” and an onrush of cheap Chinese imports. The answer, Marsh writes, is to make Europe “less dependent on America,” with Britain and Switzerland helping the Eurozone’s capital market integration, and Britain adopting Germany’s pro-China trade policies to “offset political complications with Trump’s Washington.” Marsh doesn’t explore how the US might react to Europe rushing into alignment with China. As ever, Europe is not the most important issue for American policy makers, but it’s too important to be left to the Europeans.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
