Can Europe Be Saved?

One will be forgiven for thinking that a Bret Stephens column will enlighten a foreign policy issue. After all, New York Times columnists are an array of mediocrities, so there must be at least one who is worth reading.

But then, it does not take two full Stephens paragraphs to read something that is so stupid that it might have been written by Tommy Friedman.

See if you can catch the glaring error. Or is it a Freudian slip:

Trump’s truculent brand of American nationalism is a terrible idea for many reasons, not least in the encouragement it gives to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping to target weaker American allies.

Apparently, Stephens has a short memory. During the Trump administration, what with its truculent nationalism, Vladimir Putin did not invade Ukraine. He did not conduct a war in Ukraine. 

It’s Biden’s weak-kneed internationalism that incites autocrats like Putin to invade weaker countries. Even I can figure that one out.

While China has been relatively restrained, militarily, it has built up a formidable military force. And let’s not forget that Trump was not president-- Biden was-- when Hamas conducted its October 7 massacre. While Biden has been sucking up to the ayatollahs, these latter are producing every manner of mischief across the Middle East. 

That includes attacks by Iranian proxies against American troops and the efforts of Yemeni Houthis to hamper shipping through the Red Sea. After having removed the Houthis from the terrorist watch list, the Biden crowd has said that it was going to shut them down. As of now, they have not.

True enough, if only Stephens had rewritten his sentence to say that under the weak-kneed Joe Biden bad actors around the world have felt emboldened to attack American allies, he would have been on to something. Then again, he might have been banned from the pages of the New York Times.

If you did not choke on that sentence, Stephens begins his rehabilitation in the very next sentences:

But Trump is also the messenger of a warning Europeans desperately need to heed.

In a nutshell: Shape up.

Did you catch the problem in the last sentence?

In a better world, in a better newspaper and in a better analysis, an editor would have deleted, “Shape up” and replaced it with: “Man up.”

In our current cultural configuration you are certainly not allowed to replace the notion of shapeliness with manliness. And yet, what else was President Trump saying when he was inveighing against our European NATO allies for failing to spend money on their defense?

These countries have squandered resources on social welfare programs and have relied on America to pay for their defense. 

Lest we be too obvious, social welfare programs are motherly and charitable. Defense spending involves competitive striving. But it also involves winners and losers, a concept that the welfare queens of Europe cannot grasp.

Note how well my thesis suits the information that Stephens provides. He begins by pointing out that Europe has become economically stagnant:

In 1960 the E.U. 28 — the 27 countries currently in the European Union, plus Britain — accounted for 36.3 percent of global gross domestic product. By 2020 it had fallen to 22.4 percent. By the end of the century it is projected to fall to just under 10 percent.

Europe does not innovate, perhaps because the capital is being thrown at the poor, or perhaps because it abhors risk. We recognize that one of the two sexes is more risk averse. More empowered women seems to lead to more risk aversion.

Think of any leading-edge industry — artificial intelligence, microchips, software, robotics, genomics — and ask yourself (with a few honorable exceptions), where’s the European Microsoft, Nvidia or OpenAI?

And, of course, as Donald Trump has pointed out-- perhaps not in the most elegant way-- Europe no longer spends money on the military:

When the Cold War ended in 1990, the West German military fielded more than 500,000 troops and spent 2.5 percent of its G.D.P. on defense. As of last year, it was down to 181,000 troops and 1.57 percent. Britain’s Royal Navy, the most powerful in the world at the outset of World War II, can now deploy just 10 submarines and fewer than two dozen major surface warships, some of which are inactive.

In an all-out war, the British would exhaust their defense capabilities in about two months, according to a report to the House of Commons defense committee. The same would likely be true — if not much sooner — for every E.U. member-state apart from Poland, which aims to spend as much as 5 percent of its G.D.P. on defense next year.

European countries are incapable of defending themselves, and do not really care. They have Big Daddy America defending them. 

And, of course, Europe has a migrant problem. It has chosen to open its borders to hordes of Middle Eastern migrants, many of whom have brought crime with them. 

While native Europeans are not reproducing at replacement levels, the Muslim migrants are doing so. And these migrants do not favor European cultural values. They are more likely to become criminal gang members, as has happened in Sweden, than to assimilate:

Under a “medium migration” scenario estimated by Pew, by 2050 Britain will be nearly 17 percent Muslim, France 17.4 percent and Sweden 20.5 percent. Those wondering about the ascendence of far-right European parties, who are heavily favored to sweep this week’s elections in the E.U. Parliament and who are often sympathetic to Vladimir Putin, know this is a factor. And they need to be honest that the values of depressingly notable segments of these Muslim populations are fundamentally at odds with European traditions of moral tolerance and political liberalism.

Stephens bemoans the fact that these new migrants are opposed to political liberalism.

And they need to be honest that the values of depressingly notable segments of these Muslim populations are fundamentally at odds with European traditions of moral tolerance and political liberalism.

How forceful are European leaders willing to be in insisting that their values — including freedom of speech, women’s rights and gay rights — must be protected against the illiberal instincts of a growing share of their voters?

When he wrote those lines Stephens must have been having a bad hair day. He should understand that the migrant population does not want to assimilate. It does not want to buy into a culture that promotes gay rights and that places women in charge of their armies.

I suspect that the armies of Islam see these signs of cultural decadence and concludes that Europe is ripe for a takeover, by Islam. 

In a culture that is being girlified, what happens to manliness? Good question. As I have sometimes noted, it turns into a negative caricature of itself. When men are incapable of protecting and providing for women and children, a new form of manliness takes root. Some call it machismo. It lacks gentility and a sense of purpose. It makes conspicuous shows of faux masculinity by committing crime and by visiting abuse on non-men.

And besides, Stephens notwithstanding, there is no requirement that citizens of the West buy every piece of liberal democracy. You need not be a feminist to be a good American. You do need to speak the language, to respect the constitution and to conduct yourself with decorum and propriety. You have a right to believe whatever you want to believe.

Obviously, Donald Trump has seen a Europe mired in decadence and unwilling to admit its decline. For which writers like Stephens, after analyzing said failings, blame Donald Trump:

Trump’s ideas about NATO, his zero-sum attitudes about winning, his fondness for strongmen and his ignorance of and indifference to history are all, rightly, causes for European alarm. But people, and nations, succeed or fail to the extent that they refuse to hand over responsibility for their fates to others.

Columnists succeed or fail, not just by collecting information, but by being willing to analyze situations outside of their ideological comfort zone.

If you take the Stephens analysis as worthwhile, you would need also to assume that Donald Trump has seen the same facts and has offered a cogent solution. He has done so boisterously and aggressively, but the weak and ineffectual Europeans might not have been able to hear anything else.

Does Europe need another D Day, another invasion by the armies of the Anglosphere in order to grow a spine and to reject not only the internal decadence but also the reactionary fascism? 

I am sorry to say, on this anniversary of D Day, that Bret Stephens, a writer who is often intelligent and illuminating, managed to live up to his initials.