Maybe Europe needs Trump
Summary
Tough love from the US could spur the Continent to deal with problems on its own.
It’s been another tough year for our European friends. As mobs stormed through the streets of Amsterdam baying for Jewish blood in one of the most shocking European pogroms since the Nazi era, French statisticians reported that 2023 saw the fewest live births in France in any year since World War II. Economies have stagnated across the eurozone, India is poised to leapfrog Germany and become the world’s third-largest economy, China’s surging exports threaten key European industries, and Europe’s struggling tech companies are falling further behind their American, Chinese, Indian and Israeli competitors.
The Continent’s security situation is equally dire. As North Korean forces gear up for battle in Ukraine, the fragile Western consensus over Ukraine policy has collapsed. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, presumably fishing for votes in the coming election, broke ranks with his European colleagues to make a phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The response wasn’t propitious. Since the chancellor and the president ended their chat, Russia has dramatically escalated its missile attacks on Ukraine. Isolating Germany further, on the other side of the Atlantic the Biden administration relaxed restrictions on Ukraine’s use of long-range missiles to attack targets deep inside Russia.
To make matters worse, Europe will be the biggest loser from Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Whether the topic is security, trade, tech or climate change, Mr. Trump’s approach is almost diametrically opposed to European hopes and plans. The president-elect’s planned tariffs will hit important European companies in the bottom line. European diplomats at this week’s Group of 20 summit in Rio de Janeiro are grieving the likely demise of the global taxation regime designed to allow governments to collect more revenue from multinational corporations. At the COP29 climate-change conference in Azerbaijan, European diplomats (and their lame-duck counterparts from Team Biden) could only wring their hands as they contemplated what will become of the Paris Agreement when President-elect Trump returns to power. Any attempts by the European Union to impose “green tariffs" on U.S. goods are likely to elicit a strong reaction, and while Mr. Trump has had his problems with Silicon Valley tech lords, he is unlikely to sympathize with European efforts to collect multibillion-dollar fines against U.S.-based companies.
Europeans will blame Mr. Trump’s brashness, his embrace of protectionism and his climate denialism for the troubles about to hit the trans-Atlantic relationship. They won’t be entirely wrong. But the root cause is deeper. The EU has failed to build an economy, tech industry, political system or security strategy that is adequate to the demands of the 21st century. It’s not only Mr. Trump’s America that is less deferential to European wishes these days. Turkey, China, India, Russia, Israel, Saudi Arabia—nobody cares as much about European interests as they used to. To much of the world, Europe seems less a model to emulate than an example of what not to do. As the Indo-Pacific emerges as the critical theater in world politics and economics, neither the European Union nor any single European country plays a significant role in the region’s affairs.
Although many Americans, especially on the right, enjoy gloating over Europe’s problems, we need to understand that Europe’s decline is a problem for the U.S. It’s in America’s interest for Europe to succeed. When George Marshall, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman promoted European recovery and integration after World War II, they hoped that their work would result in a strong Europe that could stand on its own two feet. They wanted a rich and dynamic Europe that would be a growing market for American goods, a strong partner in the defense of international peace, and a compelling example of peaceful, democratic success.
That’s not where the Continent is headed today, and European fragility is a significant factor in the developing world crisis. It’s easy to blame Europeans for these failures, and most of the responsibility for Europe’s choices rests on the policymakers who made them. But Americans too need to reflect. Is the fecklessness of most countries’ security policy a consequence of an American security blanket that spared them the necessity of making hard choices? Have we been too much of a helicopter parent—for example, by intervening in Kosovo in 1999 rather than forcing Europeans to deal with major issues in their region on their own?
In France particularly, there are Europeans who are almost looking forward to tense trans-Atlantic relations under President Trump. They say Europe will never grow up to be a serious actor in international affairs unless the Americans stand back. The coming Trump presidency will, they hope, be the kind of wake-up call that finally makes even the Germans think realistically about the dangers Europe faces.
The French could be right. Some Trumpian tough love may be exactly what Europe needs.
