President Donald Trump’s national strategy document “upends” America’s long-standing policy toward European nations, which have been this country’s closest allies for a century or more.
The president and his lieutenants focus on Europe’s feckless immigration policies, chronic unwillingness to pay for its own defense, its weakness in defending the Western values that undergird democratic freedom, and even its moves actively to undermine them and erase their identities and cultures.
As the Wall Street Journal noted, Trump’s biggest target is not the individual nations but the European Union itself, the bureaucratic superstructure weighing down and increasingly dictating bad policy to its constituent countries.
Trump’s approach has been widely excoriated but is largely welcome, for it holds out what had previously been a forlorn hope that Europe’s nations might again act as robust sovereign countries rather than allowing themselves to dwindle into ailing frogs slowly cooking in a Eurocratic sous vide.
In the 1980s and 1990s, as the EU changed from a trading bloc into an “ever deeper” political union — the language is the EU’s own, not that of its critics. Many of us decried what was going on and inveighed against the ambitions and methods of the Brussels oligarchs. Rather than a superstate, we wanted a free association of diverse self-governing peoples. That’s what Britain, at least, thought it had signed up for.
The 2016 Brexit vote and Britain’s eventual escape from the EU were accompanied by relief on one side and gnashing of teeth on the other. “Remainers” now say Brexit has been an economic disaster, but this isn’t true. What the data does show is that the British economy competes well against European rivals and is pretty much where it would have been if it had stayed in the embrace of Brussels. But you can’t stop losers from resorting to, “I told you so.” What you can say is that few countries in Europe are thriving, economically and in other ways.
Until the arrival of Trump, Washington supported the creation of the EU superstate. This frustrated us “leavers,” for the union was supported by shallow reasoning, such as that the EU meant Washington needed only to deal with a single European authority rather than with a couple of dozen separate ones.
One American president after another failed to see or at least to acknowledge that the Europhile goal was antithetical to America’s interests. The builders explicitly saw the EU as a “counterbalance” to America rather than a like-minded ally. The EU loved protectionist trade barriers long before using Trump as a scapegoat for them. It wanted a big, central oligarchical government rather than democracy and free people.
Ever-deeper union has brought the EU weakness, not strength. Instead of emerging as a vaunted counterweight to America, the continent has become a sclerotic and declining burden. There is a strong case that the very process of deepening the union is what weakened it.
As Matt Ridley noted on X this week, European weakness today is connected to its failure to understand the “fractured land” hypothesis mused by David Hume. The 18th-century philosopher and economist wrote, “If we consider the face of the globe, Europe, of all the four parts of the world, is the most broken by seas, rivers and mountains; and Greece of all countries of Europe. Hence these regions were naturally divided into several district governments. And hence the sciences arose in Greece, and Europe has been hitherto the most constant habitation of them.”
Europe became great and gave birth to the United States, in other words, precisely because it was a continent divided into nation-states and regions with distinct peoples, cultures, mores, and prejudices. It had the advantage of a long coastline out of all proportion to its area, with more natural harbors, and was thus ideally constructed as a compact area in which widely different peoples could trade goods and ideas with each other. This gave it a huge advantage over other parts of the world and allowed it to take the lead in scientific, technological, and economic development.
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Ridley was responding to professor Andrew A. Michta of the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, who wrote a cogent analytical thread, arguing that Europe needed “fundamental rethinking” if it is to avoid a “slide into geopolitical irrelevance.” It needs to be restructured so that smaller states do not lose their sovereignty. There “can be no such thing as a federalized Europe, as there is no European nation … A centralized mega-state … would be a democratic polity in name only.” EU elites and bureaucracy are “disconnected from electorates” and so push policies that “have crippled the EU’s competitiveness.”
Trump’s dislike of the EU superstate recognizes what most European leaders refuse to accept, which is that they cannot be a real power if they insist on creating a superstate of peoples overlaid with a wet blanket of conformity. What Trump and his strategy document say is shocking. But shock is sometimes effective.