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OPINION:
Team Trump decided to tell Europe some truths last week. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth offered the most unremarkable truth: Ukraine can’t win its war with Russia, so it will need a negotiated settlement. Vice President J.D. Vance was a bit more provocative and said attempts to impede artificial intelligence are a modern-day version of book burning and the United States would not be a party to it.
The Europeans, as always, were defiant, with the German prime minister insisting that Europeans would decide the fate of Ukraine. That’s great news. The Germans should get on it right away. But first, maybe they can let us know why they haven’t done that at any other point in the past three years.
It’s understandable. Europe is in decline just about everywhere. The French, the first daughter of the Church and for 1,000 the greatest warriors in Europe, are unable to keep their churches from being burned. The Germans, masters of order and discipline, could not stay either in their own nation or Mitteleuropa. Even the English, who built and sustained an empire that ruled the world and brought literacy, the rule of law and Christianity to billions, are reduced to watching television shows depicting how great they used to be.
Europe is losing its will to live. Not a single nation on the continent has a fertility rate above the replacement level. They are all growing older. In 1990, the American and European Union economies were approximately the same size. Now, the U.S. economy is about 50% larger. The poorest state in the union, as measured by gross domestic product per capita, is Mississippi, at about $53,000. That compares with the EU’s average per capita GDP of about $41,000.
As the Ukraine experience shows, European militaries cannot project power even a few miles beyond their borders.
The world we have known for the past 1,000 years or so — where Europe set the tone and led the way in science and technological advances, such as weapons, building, agriculture, seafaring and exploration — has passed away in a single lifetime.
For those of us in the United States, this dissolution of once mighty peoples will require us to think about the world in new ways, create new alliances and, most importantly, avoid sentimentalism about our native lands.
It also requires us to understand that our responsibilities will often require us to be more concerned about the slaving genocidal regime in China and the immediate risk it poses to our partners in India, Australia, Japan and the Philippines. The challenge from communist China also reminds us that our initial and most important theater of action is the Western Hemisphere. The Monroe Doctrine is and needs to remain foremost in our strategic thinking.
We also need to be cognizant that our peaceful neighbors to the north and south are strategic blessings and whatever disagreements we might have are trivial compared with the challenges we will face together. If we are going to successfully counter communist China, we are going to need the healthy nations in our immediate neighborhood to be firmly committed to our efforts.
In short, as the Old World wanes, the New World we build will require American leadership.
It is sad to watch one’s grandparents, parents, uncles and aunts fade away and eventually go the way of all flesh. At some point, though, it is time to bury the dead and get on with one’s life.
So it is with the United States and our civilization’s homelands in Europe.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.
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