Victor Davis Hanson: Europe’s Fall to a Second-Class Continent

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Europe is upset. They’re very angry. They’re always angry, but the last two weeks they seem to be particularly angry. There are reports at their winter EU summit, they voiced extreme anger at the U.S. in general and Donald Trump in particular. 

And we know the causes. They were angry that tariffs were applied to them. They didn’t mention that they were running a huge trade surplus with the United States. They were angry of Trump’s chauvinistic and bombastic talk about annexing Greenland. Bombastic though it was, he had a point, didn’t he? That this is a critical piece of real estate in North America that is a colony of distant Denmark, and which was lost to Denmark in World War II, which was restored by the United States and handed back over to Denmark because it could not protect the strategic real estate in World War II. During the Cold War, we protected it, had bases there, and now we are the only power strong enough to prevent Chinese and Russian infiltration in there. 

So there was a, there was a both-sides argument to that controversy. They’re very angry because Donald Trump is going to pull troops out of NATO. Not a lot, just a few, and maybe some air wings, and redeploy them, not to the United States, but to the Pacific and Asia, where he feels the existential threat is not Russia, but China. 

So, why are they so angry? The obvious reasons are that the United States has shouldered about 16 to 20% of the actual NATO budget, but when you look at overhead, logistics, intelligence, the nuclear deterrent, it’s more like 50%. We’re going to be spending a trillion and a half per year, and Europe altogether won’t get close to that number. 

Their argument is that we are now facing Russia, and you don’t understand that Russia may go into the Baltic states, it may go into Poland. We understand that. We have over 70,000 troops there, and they remain under the American nuclear shield, and Trump has already explained to Putin that going into Europe in any place, sector, any time would be a red line. 

But there’s deeper causes why they’re angry. These are just the proximate causes. We saw, during the World Cup, both good and bad parts of Europe vis-à-vis us. The people who actually went to the various games in the middle of the country met people in Kansas and Missouri and the South, and rural America, suburban America, agrarian America, and they liked them. 

They were very shocked that they liked them. They were hospitable. They were generous. They were kind. They were modest. And they had, basically, bought into the bicoastal elites’ characterization of these people as deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, to quote Biden, garbage, trash, chumps. But once they saw them, they liked them a great deal. 

And then at the same time, they were glorifying their win over us, Brussels was, and making fun of Trump, of course, the way he dances and his intervention supposedly to get a player reinstated. So the old anti-Americanism resurfaced. But these deeper causes are, we have to give them some credit. I mean, for 500 years, from roughly 1500 to, I don’t know, we can take an arbitrary date, 1940, they almost ran the world. 

London was the financial capital of the world. Paris was the cultural capital of the world. The U.S. was an upstart. It wasn’t supposed to work. The people who came from Europe that founded the United States were not their aristocracy, not their plutocracy. They were the poor and the downcast. And so, theoretically, Europe believed that an Americratic society, they were getting rid of their worst people. 

But they weren’t. They were getting rid of their most dynamic, their most adventurous, their most risk-taking. And so when the United States assumed global prominence in World War I, but especially after World War II and fought the Cold War, they saw that the ingredients of this strange but unique and brilliant constitution and free market capitalism and the protections of private property and a repugnance for socialism—all of that made a dynamic economy and legal, diverse, and meritocratic immigration, up until recently, was also a plus. 

And so part of what I’m getting at is part of it is lost glory. They have 450 million people in Europe, in the EU alone. The NATO countries have even more. When they overlap, perhaps 500 million Europeans. They’re highly educated. They’re Western peoples. They’re the inheritors or the creators of the Western legacy. 

And yet, on every barometer of economic and cultural influence, they’re failing. And they’re failing not because they’re not talented. They’re brilliant people. They’re failing because they have adopted an agenda—an agenda. And the agenda is simply they were going to replace fossil fuels with green energy that is unreliable and inefficient, and they’ve lost their global competitiveness. 

They’ve adopted a socialist paradigm of redistribution, where they go after people, especially in the upper middle classes and the entrepreneurial class. They still have an aristocracy that they leave alone, but it’s really kind of a drone-like group of people that are not dynamic. They don’t have people that founded Google, or they don’t have a Jeff Bezos, or they don’t have an Elon Musk. Those people would not be able to operate in Europe as they were in the United States.  

They also have open borders. No one’s more responsible for the decline of Europe than Angela Merkel. She was the architect of open borders and rapid illegal immigration influxes, especially from the Middle East. Some of these countries, like Germany, have 16% of their population is foreign-born and is not assimilating, acculturating, or integrating. In addition to that, until Donald Trump came onto the scene, they would not, would not spend money on defense. They relied on lecturing the world that they were pacifistic, socialist, and they used green energy while they bought natural gas and became dependent on Vladimir Putin’s Russia. 

What am I getting at? They know their agenda does not work. They look at the United States and they see that we’re pumping almost 14 million barrels of oil. We’re the biggest natural gas exporter in the world, and we’ve got this booming free market economy. Three hundred and forty million Americans produce $10 trillion more in GDP than 500 million Europeans. 

And they say, Wow. That works and what we are doing does not work. And that gets them very angry, because the malady—that is treatable. And we have a special responsibility because in some ways, because we exported to them DEI and the green fanaticism and the idea of completely open borders under Obama and Biden. 

But unlike them, we changed, and we have correctives. So now when we talk to Europe, we’re not talking in critical fashion. We’re saying, don’t do what we did because it’ll make you a second-class continent. And we were headed in that direction, and we have people today who want to return to that direction—but don’t do it. 

We want to be an equal partner, not a greater partner, an equal partner. If you combined the United States and Europe and they reached their full potentials, they would be unstoppable on the world stage. I don’t mean in an aggrandizement or imperialist or colonialist sense, but their borders would be secure and no one, not China, not Russia, not terrorists from the Middle East, would dare to attack them. 

But unfortunately, right now, the Europeans know that the medicine to recapture their dynamism and importance and influence seems to be worse than the disease.