Europe's Decline Was a Choice

Donald Tusk, the prime minister of Poland, might not shock Europe's leaders the way Donald Trump does, but he too has a tough message for them.

"Hear for yourself how it sounds," he said last month:

"500 million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. If you can count, count on yourself. Not in isolation, but with full awareness of your potential. Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power."

Decline is a choice — and for 30 years now, decline is what Europe's political class has chosen.

Poland, like Ukraine, has always been alert to the danger Russia poses.

But Western European leaders can't claim Vladimir Putin surprised them with his full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

He'd already grabbed Crimea eight years earlier and set up pro-Russian secessionist militias in Ukraine's Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Russian assassins even targeted dissidents in England, poisoning and killing Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and attempting to do the same to Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018.

Yet all the while, Western Europe slept.

Islamist terrorism did little to awaken the continent's slumbering leaders, who continued to treat citizens calling for immigration restriction as the real enemy.

Europe didn't choose decline just because voters would rather spend money on welfare states than providing for defense.

In two world wars and the protracted struggle of the Cold War, Europe's democratic governments earned the popular support they needed to carry on their fight or prepare to meet future aggression.

What changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn't the people of Europe but the quality of its leaders.

From London to Brussels to Berlin, from Madrid to Paris to Stockholm, the continent's elites adopted a philosophy that the American political theorist James Burnham described as "the ideology of Western suicide."

They embraced a progressive liberalism that demonized all the traditional sources of a nation's strength — its historic religion, patriotic pride and industrial base.

Green parties and environmentalists emphasized fighting climate change over readiness to fight wars.

Patriotism was treated as synonymous with xenophobia and the worst kinds of nationalism — with which Europe certainly had plenty of experience.

But patriotism, and nationalism at its best, was the motive of those nations and resistance movements that fought the Nazis in World War II and defied communist "internationalism" — really communist imperialism — during the Cold War.

Secularism, meanwhile, taught Europe's leaders to think like materialists: they might talk about "values," but the value of a pipeline deal with Russia was the kind of thing German leaders, in particular, really cared about.

Indeed, energy policy is telling: Germany and others, with the notable exception of France, have abandoned clean and efficient nuclear power, which environmentalists detest.

Less nuclear power means more energy must come from other sources — such as Russian natural gas.

Liberal environmentalists prefer renewable energy from solar panels or windmills to fossil fuels of any kind, but the unreliability and expense of those renewables means Europeans who invest in them often end up having to turn back to fossil fuels in a cold winter, and the Russians, with no qualms about "dirty" energy and plenty of fossil fuels to sell, fill the gap.

All this results in a weaker Europe with less energy available for industry — including defense industries — and dependent on fuel from a hostile neighbor.

European elites up to now have not only been cheapskates when it comes to military spending, they found the very existence of their countries' armed forces distasteful.

When Ursula von der Leyen was Germany's defense minister 10 years ago, German soldiers were reduced to using broomsticks as substitutes for heavy machine guns in NATO exercises — they just didn't have enough real equipment.

Germany is not a poor country; its armed forces were forced to play pretend with broomsticks because leaders didn't care enough to keep them armed and ready for real action.

Today, von der Leyen is president of the European Commission and calls for Europe to rearm.

Her words, however, are belied by her record, the British historian David Starkey has pointed out.

Europe took a 30-year vacation from history; now it is scrambling to make up for lost time, yet its nations are led by many of the same characters responsible for the continent's weakness in the first place.

And when voters demand change, as Germans did by giving the hard-right Alternative fur Deutschland a record 20% in last month's election, establishment parties on the left and center-right form coalition governments that exclude these unwelcome agents of change.

Donald Tusk is correct: Europe's weakness is wholly self-inflicted.

Now the question is whether the leaders responsible for three decades of decline can reverse course completely — or whether Europe needs its own Donald Trump-like figures to replace them.

(COMMENT, BELOW)

Previously:
• 02/25/25: How Trump Makes Europe Stronger
• 02/20/25: Tax-payers funding a sham of democracy
• 02/11/25: What Kind of a Populist Is Elon Musk?
• 02/03/25: Can Trump Win Trade Wars Before They Start?
• 01/21/25: Trump Inaugurates a New Era
• 01/14/25: Dems Aren't Democracy's Party
• 01/07/25: Donald Trump's Worldwide Election
• 12/31/24: Harmless self-deception?
• 12/17/24: Communism thriving, including HERE
• 12/10/24: Birthright Citizenship Is a Breach in the Border
• 12/03/24: Identity Politics, Not Biden, Cost Dems the Election
• 11/19/24: Why Dems Are Losing Tomorrow's Elections Today
• 11/12/24: Dems Are at a Dead End, Unless They Learn From Trump
• 10/29/24: Harris Targets Married Women
• 10/22/24: Vibes Turn Bad for Kamala Harris
• 10/15/24: Why Veterans Are Voting for Trump
• 10/08/24: How Donald Trump Can Win the Popular Vote
• 10/01/24: Iran Targets America's Elections -- and Trump
• 09/24/24: Trump's Would-Be Assassin's Explanation
• 09/17/24: When Character Assassination Becomes the Real Thing
• 09/10/24: Kamala Harris Runs Like a Republican -- and Misleads
• 09/04/24: Where Trump Is Moderate -- While Kam Is Maximalist
• 08/27/24: Donald Trump Is Reagan's Heir
• 08/20/24: Will Voters Settle for Joe Biden's Wing(wo)man?
• 08/13/24: Trump Has to Run Like It's 2016 Again
• 08/07/24: Is Trump Running Against Harris -- or Donald Trump?
• 07/30/24: Kamala Harris' 'Mean Girls' Election
• 07/23/24: Kamala Harris Is the Opponent Donald Trump Wants
• 07/16/24: Ready for Biden's Counterattack?
• 07/09/24: Biden Faces Richard Nixon's Choice
• 07/02/24: Should Biden Drop Out -- or Resign?
• 06/18/24: Separate Sexual Identity and State
• 06/18/24: Nigel Farage Makes the Trump Moment Permanent
• 06/04/24: State that's long eluded GOP turns toward Trump
• 05/21/24: Trump's Sun Belt Hopes and Rust Belt Needs
• 05/14/24: What Trump Sees in Doug Burgum
• 05/07/24: The Vietnam Era Never Ended for Biden's Party
• 05/06/24: Nationalists of the World, Unite?
• 04/25/24: Foreign Policy Splits
• 04/16/24: How pro-lifers stand to lose everything gained in overturning Roe
• 04/02/24: PBS Misremembers William F. Buckley Jr.
• 04/02/24: Who Wants to Be House Speaker?
• 03/26/24: Trump Hunts for a VP Close to Home
• 03/19/24: Princess Kate and Democracy's Discontents
• 03/12/24: Can Biden Buy the Voters?
• 03/05/24: Veepstakes Give Trump an Edge
• 02/20/24: Do Americans Trust Either Party?
• 02/13/24: Vladimir Putin -- A Passive Aggressor
• 01/23/24: Will 'Lawfare' Take Trump Off the Ballot?
• 01/16/24: Will Africa Save America?
• 01/09/24:'The Sopranos' at 25: A new world tragedy
• 01/02/24: Trump, Biden and a Fight for the Heart
• 12/12/23: What Happened to Ron DeSantis?
• 12/12/23: Biden Looks Doomed -- But Is He?
• 12/05/23: A Test for Trump and His Rivals
• 11/21/23: When Inequality Is Fatal for Men
• 11/14/23: Nevermind, The Battle's Over
• 11/07/23: War in the Dem Party -- and at the Opera
• 10/24/23: Israel's Lesson for 2024: A Lib Crackup
• 10/17/23: Libs' Dilemma: Immigration or Israel?
• 10/10/23: Why Bidenflation Defines Bidenomics
• 10/03/23: Will Gavin Newsom Copy Trump?
• 09/26/23: Biden's a Loser -- but Dems Can't Ditch Him
• 09/19/23: Do Sex Scandals Matter?
• 09/12/23: Cornel West Spells Doom for Biden
• 09/05/23: What Trump Does for Democracy
• 08/2/23: Ramaswamy: A Trump Versus Trump?
• 08/22/23: Take 'Rich Men North of Richmond' Seriously
• 08/16/23: How America Kills Its Own
• 08/08/23: The Biden Pardon That Can Spare America
• 08/01/23: Harding, a consevative for the ages
• 07/25/23: Demography Destiny, for Us and China
• 07/18/23: The Frontrunner Who Looks Like a Loser Is Biden
• 07/11/23: Britain's Bad Example for American Conservatives
• 07/05/23: Could We Still Win a Revolutionary War?
• 06/27/23: Civilizations Clash -- in Ukraine and at Home
• 06/20/23: China Comes for the Caribbean
• 06/13/23: Fertility, Family and Bio-Socialism
• 06/06/23: From American Dream to Orwell's Nightmare
• 05/23/23: Ukraine war is an existential struggle --- for the West
• 05/23/23: Learn the Right Midterm Lessons -- or Lose in 2024
• 05/16/23: Feinstein Today Is Biden Tomorrow
• 05/09/23: Trump, DeSantis and Political Courtship
• 05/02/23: RFK Jr.'s Threat to Biden
• 04/25/23: Biden's Lost Generation
• 04/25/23: Who's In Charge of Clarence Thomas?
• 04/11/23: Beyond AI, Our Cyborg Future
• 04/04/23: 2024: 3 Leaders, 1 Way to Win
• 03/28/23: Climate Science Makes a Bad Religion
• 03/21/23: All the Conspiracy That's Fit to Print