RUTHFULLY YOURS

European elites are greeting the incoming Trump administration with something less than enthusiasm. The UK has sent an ambassador to Washington with a well-expressed disdain for the returning US president. Le Monde, a French publication not known for its pro-American sympathies, called Trump’s election ‘the nail in [the] coffin’ for the US as a ‘democratic model’ for the world. The Guardian, predictably, has called for Europeans to fight to preserve the continent’s welfare and climate regime.

Some seem to think that Trump’s return is the spur Europe needs to finally stand on its own two feet. But they need to recognise, as was the case during the Second World War and the Cold War, that only a strong alliance between Europe and the US offers any hope of resisting the rise of an authoritarian bloc, this time grouped around China.

There are hopeful signs. Since the start of the Ukraine conflict, ties between Europe, Canada and the US have been strengthened. There is some promise in an incipient alliance between North America and India, Japan and Australia. But Europe cannot expect the US to bear the strategic burden itself.

Trump’s insistence that Europe rearm makes sense at a time when the continent is facing immediate threats, most immediately in the Red Sea and Ukraine. Today, almost all European countries outside the UK, Greece and the Baltic states do not spend more than two per cent of their GDP on defence, while the US spends roughly 3.5 per cent.

Although there is an isolationist tendency among MAGA activists, most US voters are in favour of expanding America’s ‘global presence’. In a reinvigorated alliance, Europe has much to offer in terms of production and expertise, particularly given the sad state of the US military industry, as evidenced by shortages of materials to send to allies like Ukraine, Taiwan or Israel.

A similar imperative exists in the economic sphere. Europeans have long prided themselves on producing a stronger, more equitable economy than the military-oriented Americans. Two decades ago, one could legitimately see Europe as a determinative third force in the world economy. This is no longer the case. It’s basically a choice between China and the US.

Europeans might once have hoped that the euro could replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But after last decade’s euro crisis, and with serious economic problems hitting the likes of France, this now looks like a fantasy. The dollar, despite attempts by China and some developing countries to supplant it, still accounts for close to 60 per cent of all foreign currency reserves and almost 90 per cent of all foreign exchange transactions.

Trump’s tariff threats may seem irrational and self-destructive. But the end of unrestrained free trade, without some sense of reciprocity, has long seemed inevitable. It has died amid a trade regime that helped cause the loss of over 3.7million jobs in the US alone. Living standards across the deindustrialising West have worsened, particularly for the middle class, while Europe has endured a decade of stagnation.

Even before Trump’s election, Democrats pursued many of Trump’s MAGA themes, including legislation aimed at boosting US industrial production and a new emphasis on ‘buy American’ government-procurement programmes. Both Biden and now Trump have embraced ‘economic statecraft’ aimed at China.

For Europe, the dilemma is stark. It can align with authoritarian nations like China, Russia or the Gulf states. Or it can try, in a Macron-esque fashion, to strut as an independent power. Ultimately, given their military, economic and political weakness, European countries would only end up becoming vassal states ruled by dutiful, well-funded Chinese satraps. Without the US, the continent is doomed to evolve into a nice place for Chinese, Russian and Arab oligarchs to luxuriate amid Europe’s archaic glories.

Westerners would do well to pay attention to Beijing’s stated aim of becoming the leading global superpower by 2049. It aims to achieve this through mercantile state policies and alliances with resource providers in Asia, Africa and Latin America, notably Brazil and Mexico. The only way to stop, or slow, this ascendancy is to unite the West and find ways to work together.

Right now, the US is the only major Western country that has the oomph to lead a response. Over the past 15 years, the Eurozone economy grew about six per cent, measured in dollars, compared with 82 per cent for the US, according to International Monetary Fund data. The biggest gap is in tech. Of the top 50 tech firms, only three are located in continental Europe. The list is dominated largely by the US, with China second. In artificial intelligence, US firms, venture capitalists and universities dominate.

To put it another way, the most powerful economy in Europe, Germany, is barely economically larger than my adopted home state of California. As China’s mercantilism asserts itself, Europeans have been pouring foreign investment into the US, voting with their chequebooks for a more expansive opportunity.

On Europe’s current trajectory, decline is inevitable. Much of it is self-inflicted. The strict adherence to climate policy places the continent on course for ‘energy suicide’. In particular, Germany’s reliance on renewable energy could lead its economy to go into free fall. What the Germans call Dunkelflaute – a combination of cold weather, cloud cover and light winds – forces Germany to import power from elsewhere. The Scandinavian countries that have been bailing it out in recent years are increasingly fed up with this arrangement. Put simply, the climate agenda is like a return to the Middle Ages, where Mother Nature determines whether there is any power or food at all.

This energy disaster, combined with electric-vehicle mandates, all but guarantees that Europe loses its grip on the car market to Chinese producers. Germany’s entire industrial structure seems likely to decline and it could lose upwards of 400,000 of its estimated 800,000 auto jobs by 2030.

If Europe seeks to save its economy, an alliance with the US makes logical sense. Trump’s foreign-policy approach is largely based on the power of US energy. Today, the US and Canada produce twice as much oil as either Russia or Saudi Arabia, and even more so if Mexico is included. Despite the protestations of our cognitive elites, fossil fuels still account for a vast majority of all power generation. They continue to grow and will do so for the foreseeable future. Europe’s elites may like to preen about ‘energy leadership’, but their policies are weakening the continent’s industrial competitiveness and social order.

As we gradually shift away from fossil fuels, it makes little sense to allow authoritarian powers like Russia, Qatar, Iran and Saudi Arabia to control oil markets. Nor is it intelligent to cede manufacturing to China and allow it to dominate. An exchange – essentially oil for manufactured goods – between Europe and the US could prove mutually beneficial. Exports from the US, now the world’s biggest natural-gas exporter, could help solve Europe’s current energy crisis, while reducing the trade imbalances that so enrage Trump.

Of course, some Europeans might prefer a courteous kowtow to the Russians or the mullahs to enriching brash Texans or pleasing The Donald. Here, the cultural disdain of the continental elites works against Europe’s long-term future. Simply put, Europe and the US need to draw the lessons spelled out in Adam Tooze’s Wages of Destruction, reflecting on the Second World War. Focussing on defence modernisation and using resources to power the industrial economy led to victory in 1945. Ultimately, Germany, Italy and Japan could not keep up with the British Empire, the US and the USSR in terms of access to energy, food and vital minerals.

Given the current balance of power, it is absurd for Keir Starmer to cosy up to China and tie the UK to the EU in an attempt to ‘Trump-proof’ his declining realm – as if enlisting as vassals to Beijing offers a brighter future. European leaders also seem to have missed that many of their own citizens are already voting for anti-immigration, nationalist and culturally conservative candidates in the Trumpian vein. This has produced leaders like Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who have strong ties to Trump.

Yet in any conflict, hot or cold, morale and beliefs are perhaps even more important. Britain’s deep-seated political culture kept the country going against Hitler. Meanwhile, France, divided between anti-war Communists and fascist-leaning rightists, could not withstand the Blitzkrieg. Love for the Motherland also sustained the Red Army during its titanic and decisive battle against the Nazis.

In the West today, including the US, there is a deadening loss of belief in the values of our civilisation. There is a clear decline in such institutions as the family, evidenced by very low and plunging birthrates. Christianity, the bulwark of Europe’s civilisation, is also in retreat, while Islamic terrorism makes allies in elite universities. As the Guardian noted five years ago, a majority of young adults in 12 European countries have no faith at all. Christianity will be the minority faith across Britain and in some other European countries by 2050.

Clearly, the West needs a wake-up call. Perhaps Trump is that discordant, annoying buzzer. In these times, we cannot afford a Western defence establishment and intelligence services focussed on green absolutism or transgenderism (the head of MI6 seems to genuinely believe this is the purpose of his organisation). The obsession of NATO and the US military with fighting climate change is borderline insane at a time when they should be more concerned about their faltering war-fighting abilities. Watching this absurd Western spectacle, China boosts its defenses at a rapid rate, including a massive increase in nuclear missiles. It surely gives groups like the Taliban a good laugh, too.

The good news is that China is far from invulnerable. Now that China is again seeing exports as its saviour, Trump’s much-dissed tariff policy hits China where it hurts, as companies return on-shore or find new places to manufacture. China is also facing a looming demographic decline. By 2050, it is expected to have 60million fewer people under the age of 15, a loss approximately the size of Italy’s total population. The country also suffers rising unemployment and emigration by its young, educated people.

This, it turns out, is an ideal time for the West to push back. The Chinese Communist Party’s assault on property rights and the rule of law is driving foreign companies to reconsider their tech investments there. Private equity is finding it difficult to get its funds out. It was once commonly projected that China could surpass the US in terms of aggregate economic output as soon as 2028. These are now being readjusted to 2036. It may never occur at all.

Nonetheless, Trump needs to realise that the US cannot do this on its own. For their part, European leaders need to stop spewing righteous indignation and work to win over Trump. Ignore his imbecilic statements about taking over Canada, Greenland or the Panama Canal. They need to instead recognise that Trumpism reflects a deep appreciation for the limits of American predominance. Trump pushes for capital infusions, and for sales of American energy and food, because he sees the US as being both cheated and too ‘weak’. This imperative will continue, even as the US’s economy vastly outperforms Europe’s.

A weak power, at least comparatively, needs allies. What Europe needs is not virtue-signallers, but leaders strong enough to stand up to Trump and make a good deal with him. Sadly, it’s hard to find anyone who fits the bill.

In the coming years, European and British leaders need to negotiate hard for their own interests, as Trump will do for the US. But without a vital alliance between North America and the old continent, there is no future for us, our civilisation.

Joel Kotkin is a spiked columnist, a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas’ Civitas Institute.