Last week, leaders of European governments got very upset with the new Trump administration.
First, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said a return to pre-2014 Ukraine-Russia borders was an “unrealistic objective” in the coming peace negotiations and that European leaders shouldn’t assume American troops would be present on the continent forever.
Then, Vice President JD Vance gave a speech at a security conference in Germany in which he admonished European governments for repeatedly violating the liberal democratic principles they loudly proclaim to defend. He cited the recent reversal of an election in Romania after the result went against what the ruling regime and its Western European allies wanted, as well as a plethora of crackdowns on political dissent from some of Washington’s closest allies on the continent.
Finally, President Trump announced that the US government would begin direct talks with the Russian government to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine. Those talks began on Tuesday without any involvement from other European governments, including Ukraine.
Needless to say, these statements and developments greatly angered European leaders who were evidently convinced the US would continue to station troops, send weapons, and provide funding for the continent’s security while letting the governments act however they wanted and while treating them as the primary parties in the proxy war we’ve been bankrolling.
By all indications, the Trump administration’s goal here is to pressure European governments to spend more of their own taxpayers’ money to fund NATO.
Which is unfortunate, because Europe is deep in a self-inflicted decline right now, and US taxpayers should not be forced to take part in it at all.
From an American perspective, the decline of Europe is tragic as some of the best aspects of our institutions and culture can be drawn back to the period of Europe’s rise.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Western Europe splintered into many small political units. The relatively small territories of these states, along with the presence of strong non-state institutions like the Church and an international merchant class, meant power was highly decentralized.
As scholars like Ralph Raico, Nathan Rosenberg, and L.E. Birdzel Jr. have demonstrated, the highly decentralized set-up of Europe in the Middle Ages was the primary factor in generating the prosperity that went on to give the West more power and a safer, more comfortable standard of living than any other civilization in history. A respect for private property rights virtually unseen up to that point helped to create a justice system that only compounded the West’s success.
Unfortunately, the immense amount of wealth also allowed governments to siphon some of it off and grow very powerful. Chief among them was the British government, which used its people’s wealth to build the first truly globe-spanning empire. The British and other European ruling classes presented their lavish governments and foreign expansionism as a sign of national glory. But the rise of these large, powerful states represented the steady abandonment of the very institutions that had fueled Europe’s growth.
The astonishing productivity of the Industrial Revolution kept the party going through the 1800s. But, famously, a series of war guarantees pulled nearly all of Europe into the largest, bloodiest war the world had seen in 1914. The sheer brutality of the war and the decisive defeat of the Central Powers—brought about by the US’s unnecessary entrance—set the stage for the rise of the Nazis and the second world war. And WWII obliterated what remained of European power.
In the decades since, much of Western Europe has sunk to the level of becoming de facto vassals of Washington, DC while moving even further away from decentralized institutions and a respect for private property rights. Which brings us to the European situation that Trump, Vance, and Hegseth confronted last week as they took the reins of the American government.
Western European governments have instituted totalitarianism in the name of averting the rise of totalitarianism and built up another large network of war guarantees in the name of preventing another world war.
The European establishment is seemingly still so traumatized from WWII that it acts like history began in 1933 and ignores all the important lessons from before that date.
After Vance’s comments last week, European officials went in front of the media and mounted a passionate defense of their totalitarian crackdown on dissent.
And, as Trump finally moves to end US involvement in the war in Ukraine, European leaders are scrambling to find ways to independently double down on the same security set-up that helped bring the war about in the first place.
The decline of Europe is a sad thing to watch.
But the reaction from European officials to Vance calling them out on some aspects of that decline confirms that the people currently in charge over there will not be changing direction any time soon.
If Europe is really set on shrinking back into obscurity through domestic totalitarianism, economic stagnation, or by setting off a new continent-wide war, American taxpayers should not be forced to help.
