The end of Europe’s ‘soft power’ delusion, Part 1
A GIBSON
GEORGE Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four foretells an approaching global order in which the world is divided between three vast powers, locked in perpetual rivalry and war. This was not yet the case when the novel was published in 1949: the United States was the clear Western hegemon but the European powers, although in relative decline, remained important global actors with major imperial possessions; the Soviet Union had emerged as the principal rival power to the West; Japan was in a state of national rehabilitation; and China had not begun its remarkable ascent. It was thus, in today’s nomenclature, a seemingly multipolar world in which the vestiges of the ‘long nineteenth century’ – the age of imperial and national competition between European powers – could still be seen and felt.
Yet Orwell saw that the European epoch had already ended. Instead, power in the new globalised world was destined to consolidate around massive geographic blocs, which would subsume and subordinate the old nation states. And so it has proven. The nations have survived, but they have realigned themselves around a grander interplay between three major nuclear-armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia. The crucial rivalry is now between the United States and China, whose rapid economic ascendancy has anguished American policymakers for decades. In 2011, Barack Obama formally announced the great strategic ‘pivot’ from Europe to Asia – an attempt to forge new economic and military alliances in South-East Asia to contain the rising dominion of China, both in the region and in the wider world.
However, another essential aspect to this restructuring of American priorities has been the drastic decline of the European nations, including Britain, which have failed to retain their strategic relevance in this shifting global landscape. This could not have been made more explicit than by the leaked Signal messages of March 15. Complaining that European allies would benefit from the impending strikes against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, Vice President JD Vance wrote: ‘I just hate bailing Europe out again.’ Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth replied: ‘I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.’
These visceral remarks followed closely on Vance’s incendiary speech at Munich in February, in which he lambasted Europe’s failure to ‘provide for its own defence’, as well as the region’s widespread disregard for voters’ concerns over mass immigration, and the now-routine suppression and prosecution of free speech, including in Britain. The reaction from Europe’s liberal elites was telling for its sheer denialism. The German Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, simply denounced the speech as ‘not acceptable’. Likewise, the EU’s Defence Commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, claimed that ‘[Vance] attracted a lot of attention, but [there were] no substantial messages.’
Of course, the messages were very substantial. The United States formally told Europe’s leadership that continued patrimony is now conditional upon Europe upholding traditional Western values, and that the regional security umbrella traditionally provided by the American taxpayer is a privilege and not an entitlement.
Importantly, this paradigmatic shift eastwards, away from Europe, is not a new development. The writing has been on the wall for decades, becoming ever more vivid through successive administrations; but only now is it being read aloud by the United States, catalysed by the emboldened mandate of this second Trump administration. Through decades of wrongheaded policymaking, European nations have rendered themselves strategically useless to the United States – indeed, the region is now proving to be actively burdensome, as Vance and Hegseth made clear. By contrast, Asian countries at the interface with China, such as India, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Indonesia, are now key regional allies with burgeoning economies, pragmatic governments and surprisingly powerful conventional militaries. South Korea, for instance, has three times as many active military personnel as Britain, the strongest of the European military powers. Malaysia’s army, meanwhile, is twice the size of Britain’s.
By contrast, European militaries are chronically short of service personnel, armoured vehicles, ships and aircraft. Indeed, the United States’ military budget utterly dwarfs that of all European nations combined. Thus, in reality, the Nato alliance consists of the might of the United States’ military, with a few European divisions, and possibly Turkish forces, bolted on. Moreover, Europe’s defence industries are fragmented, depleted and dependent on far more advanced American technologies. So deep-rooted are the problems that the touted grand European rearmament launched in response to Vance’s Munich speech is unravelling already.
Critically, the root cause of this military weakness is the now-entrenched industrial decline of the major European economies. Germany’s long-stable manufacturing industries are in crisis, with soaring unemployment; France is mired by astronomical debt and an unemployment rate of 7.3 per cent; welfare spending has swollen to unsustainable rates in all major European nations, depleting public funds and sapping productivity; and the euro has trended sharply downwards against the dollar for years.
Furthermore, as an excellent piece of research by Bloomberg has shown, not only are European economies collectively far smaller than those of the United States and China, but they have fallen well behind qualitatively as well. Europe is severely lacking in dispersed start-up entrepreneurship and frontier technological innovation. There is nothing in Europe that resembles Silicon Valley or the equivalent Chinese big-tech industry. Part of the problem has been the stifling effect of long-term over-regulation, much of it generated by decree from the European Union.
This absence of a strong technological base dampens long-term growth in two ways. First, the modern major tech firms are economic powerhouses in their own right: Apple alone has a greater market-share than all but six of the world’s top national economies. Second, almost all other industries now depend for their competitiveness and development on big-tech innovation. The German car industry, for example, has failed to keep pace with technological adaptations in the global car market, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs.
This same technological dearth has deeply afflicted Europe’s defence industries, which cannot hope to compete with the intricate advances or massive investment seen in the US industry. Moscow, too, has developed frighteningly capable equipment during its campaign in Ukraine, including the dreaded ZALA Lancet drone, which would certainly prove lethal against Western forces in the event of a conventional war.
Inextricably woven into our industrial decline has been Europe’s foolish indulgence of the fashionable ‘green’ energy delusion. The United States, by contrast, has guarded its energy security wisely. It has the largest stocks of fossil fuels in the world and fracks routinely. Europe, meanwhile, has aggressively pursued the economically untenable Net Zero fantasy at the behest of a shrill political minority. Britain generates 45 per cent of its power from renewable sources, and is increasingly forced to turn to the United States and Russia for crude oil and natural gas in order to check dangerously high consumer prices. Likewise, Germany, which derives 46 per cent of its power from renewables, was forced to re-start coal-fired power stations in 2023 due the volatility of the Russian gas supply causing a spike in prices.
These mounting economic failures, combined with profound anger over untrammelled migration into Europe, are causing an ever-widening groundswell of political discontent. The so-called ‘centrist’ liberal parties that implemented this status quo in the major European states are losing ground rapidly to insurgent parties, principally on the right, but also on the left. Indeed, controversial legal and political moves have been made against right-of-centre parties recently in Romania, Germany and France, inflaming tensions and deepening ill sentiment against the liberal centre. This, along with the steady rise of a new and complex sectarianism, is morphing steadily into a societal maelstrom at the heart of Europe. By contrast, the United States’s two major parties, although deeply imperfect, retain massive bases of support and offer the American voter an authentic choice between governance from the left or the right.
It is clear, then, that Europe is in the grip of a profound and long-term civilisational malaise. In the second part of this essay, I will explore how this sickness, combined with China’s increasingly aggressive global power-games, is threatening to consign Europe to the dustbin of history.
This article (The end of Europe’s ‘soft power’ delusion, Part 1) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author A Gibson
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The end of Europe’s ‘soft power’ delusion, Part 2
A. GIBSON
IN THE first part of this essay I showed that Europe is in a state of prolonged and worsening civilisational decline – economically, militarily, culturally and politically. The consequence of this collapse is that the United States is now openly and humiliatingly deriding the region’s governance, but also explicitly looking to the Indo-Pacific theatre for its strategic partnerships. This is not a spontaneous development: it is merely the new, bolder expression of a dynamic that has been fomenting in the West for decades.
To be sure, the United States is not itself a societal paragon: it has been the furnace of the Western culture-war of recent years; many of its cities are beleaguered by drug addiction and violence; it has made poor foreign policy decisions over the last half-century; and its relative global military dominance has begun to wane. Yet, despite this, the United States remains the most prosperous and productive, and freest, nation on earth, with formidable economic and military power. Its living standards are also generally higher – the average American salary is $80,000 per annum, compared with $47,000 per annum in Britain. Moreover, it has developed in recent years far greater intellectual and cultural vitality than Europe: of the world’s top twenty-five universities, sixteen are American. Britain has four universities on the list and the remainder of Europe has just one.
We see, then, the farce of the European establishment’s recent grandstanding against Trump’s America. The self-declared ‘soft-power’ states suddenly want to act as a collective superpower. But with no economic or military foundation on which to stand, this tough talk proves over and again to be nothing but a hollow charade. One of several recent examples illuminates the point. In March, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced retaliatory tariffs on American imports in response to Trump’s introduction of tariffs on European steel and aluminium. Trump immediately threatened to impose 200 per cent tariffs on European wines and champagnes. The Commission backed down without hesitation.
The problem, to use Trump’s jargon, is that the United States ‘holds all the cards’. Not only does Europe run a large trade surplus with the United States, meaning that equivalent tariffs will always disproportionately affect Europe, but Trump also holds the option of denying Europe access to the American financial markets, which would devastate European economies overnight. Although a drastic and unlikely measure, its very possibility illustrates the sheer fantasy and hollow hubris at the centre of the European elites’ posturing against their de facto patron.
Furthermore, the recent diplomatic overtures made by the European Commission and the British state towards China’s sly, totalitarian government in response to Trump’s tariffs are a shameful symbol not only of our strategic bewilderment and desperation, but also of the naivety, short-termism and foolishness that is now endemic in European policymaking.
How, then, can Europe’s malaise be treated? In answering this, it is crucial to recognise that decline resulted from policymaking choices: high industrial regulation; the prioritisation of excessive welfare states over defence; the refusal to incentivise technological innovation; the enablement of untrammelled immigration; and the driving of the Net Zero energy policies that have undermined Europe’s economic security. The solution, therefore, is to reverse this destructive chain-reaction of policymaking – although this will first require a deep and widespread realignment of the political status quo.
Certainly, the effects of a modern European restoration could be profound. The United States’s own policymakers have long understood that Europe inherently holds great – potentially dangerous – economic and military potential. A document leaked from the Pentagon in 1992 stated that by ‘convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests’, the United States ‘must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine Nato . . . [Europe is] a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power’.
Hence, the United States is now, in a sense, reacting against the success of its own long-standing policy to stifle strategic competitors in Europe. The American security shield that has been afforded to the region since the end of the Cold War has created burdensome dependants, not merely subordinate partners. This, contra most liberal commentary, is not a figment of Donald Trump’s imagination: George W Bush and Barack Obama also repeatedly called on European states to increase their defence expenditure significantly. This is not a new, sudden grievance, but rather a public rupturing of an old, deteriorating dynamic that could not have continued indefinitely.
To understand why the United States is suddenly impatient to extricate itself from Europe’s strategic woes, we must return to Orwell’s prophecy of the three power blocs. Importantly, the war in Ukraine has disproportionately benefited China’s strategic positioning. In mid-2024, the Chinese yuan accounted for 54 per cent of all trades on the Russian stock exchange. Beijing also provides Moscow with 90 per cent of its high-priority dual-use goods – radars, sensors and other technologies that could in theory be for civilian use, but which are certainly being employed to military ends in eastern Ukraine. In exchange, China is receiving access to top-end Russian military equipment, including submarine, missile and aeronautical designs that would, in previous years, never have been provided. Whereas the two powers formerly had tenuous, fractious relations, Russia is now the de facto client-state of China.
Between them, the two powers control vast swathes of territory from the Arctic Circle to the Pacific, including great reserves of natural resources, and their combined nuclear and conventional arsenals are immense. Furthermore, a China-Russia axis presents the United States with the prospect of an unwinnable two-front war in the event of a military confrontation with China. This is one vital reason why the Trump administration is eager to end the war in Ukraine immediately, for it is sapping the United States of military resources and money, while simultaneously strengthening China’s global strategic leverage. The imperative to terminate this harmful dynamic and transition into the ‘Indo-Pacific region’ to contain Chinese imperialism has therefore never been felt more keenly.
Orwell understood that the interplay between civilisations is the key to understanding what happens within them. The three blocs of Nineteen Eighty-Four are internally dystopic precisely because they are locked in a state of perpetual war and rivalry. By the same token, the second Trump Administration’s frustrations with Europe can be understood fully only through the grand-strategic lens. Europe is now a dull shadow of its former self – economically, militarily, even culturally and politically. And at the same time, across the Pacific, a great storm is brewing in the form of a rival civilisation. The liberal analysis claims that Trump is upending the ‘post-war status quo’ . Yet, as we have seen, Trump is in fact merely reacting to a pre-existing global dynamic – not magicking one from thin air.
The old world, and the international order that upheld it, vanished with the rise of China, propelled by Europe’s own startling and self-imposed decline. Consequently, the battle for world power is now in Asia – and it has been for decades. Europe is faced with a choice: either restore that which has been lost by reversing the policies that have so damaged its inner foundations, or accept a dystopic future of further decay and sad, shameful irrelevance.
This article (The end of Europe’s ‘soft power’ delusion, Part 2) was created and published by Conservative Woman and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author A Gibson
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