Is Europe kaput? Washington says this is Europe’s last chance to choose

The Trump administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy dropped last week, and if you are in Brussels or Berlin, you might want to pour yourself a stiff drink before reading it. This is not the usual diplomatic pablum about “shared values” and “transatlantic partnership.” This is an ultimatum dressed up as strategy, but will Europe listen?

The diagnosis is brutal but accurate: Continental Europe’s share of global GDP has collapsed from 25 per cent in 1990 to 14 per cent today. Cratering birthrates, migration-driven social fragmentation, and what the document calls “the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure” threaten to make the continent “unrecognisable in 20 years or less.” Washington’s message is simple: America will help defend a Europe that believes in itself, but not a civilisational hospice.

Let’s start with the aspect European elites most want to avoid: The cultural crisis. The strategy doesn’t mince words about “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife” or the “loss of national identities and self-confidence.” This language (which is unprecedented in an American security document) will trigger howls of protest from Brussels. But as I’ve written before, we’ve reached the point where Taylor Swift concerts and Christmas markets require counterterrorism operations. The multicultural fantasy has collapsed into a tribal reality where an overbearing state manages conflicts between incompatible communities.

You cannot build strategic autonomy on top of civilisational self-loathing. The strategy makes this explicit: Washington wants to “restore Europe’s civilisational self-confidence and Western identity.” For decades, European leaders promised that diversity would be our strength while presiding over societies where Dutch taxpayers spend €17 billion annually subsidizing immigration, and nearly 50 per cent of welfare recipients in Austria and Germany have a migrant background. Meanwhile, the same governments that cannot secure their borders demand ever more surveillance powers. Powers that will inevitably be turned against populist parties asking uncomfortable questions.

The energy dimension makes the contradiction even starker. As I documented previously, the European Union consumes 38 exajoules of fossil fuel energy annually but produces only five domestically. Europe is a vassal dependent on foreign energy suppliers while simultaneously lecturing those suppliers about sustainability standards. When Qatar threatened to halt LNG deliveries unless Brussels watered down its Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, the EU caved immediately. If you are a global energy vassal, you have no cards to play.

This becomes critical when discussing European rearmament. The strategy demands NATO members spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2035, put in writing in the so-called Hague Commitment agreed in June. European leaders claim this target is impossible. Yet if EU states had simply met the 2 per cent standard from 2006 to 2020, they would have generated approximately €1.1 trillion in additional defence spending. Instead, decades of free-riding created the European Commission’s estimated €1.8 trillion defense capability gap.

But here is the problem: you cannot manufacture tanks and artillery shells without energy-intensive industrial production. Germany’s response to the energy crisis has been to close remaining nuclear plants while burning more coal than any time since 2019. Steel mills across the continent have shuttered due to uncompetitive energy prices. ArcelorMittal Poland shut down blast furnaces. Acciaierie d’Italia closed its only operating facility. Europe demands energy independence while threatening suppliers, pursues military rearmament while dependent on geopolitical rivals for essential materials, and announces defence spending while systematically dismantling the industrial capacity needed to convert spending into capability.

The contradiction becomes explicit in Ukraine policy. Washington identifies “an expeditious cessation of hostilities” as a core interest. When a 28-point U.S. peace proposal surfaced in November, drafted without meaningful European consultation. European officials reacted with alarm. Yet as one analysis noted, Europeans fear “negotiations in which they hold limited sway, despite having supplied Ukraine with roughly €180 billion in aid.”

Here is the uncomfortable truth: If you want a seat at the table, you need to bring something to it. European leaders demand consultation while 78 per cent of their military purchases go to third countries. They talk about strategic autonomy while depending on American satellites, intelligence, logistics, and precision munitions. This is not a partnership of equals but a protectorate pretending to be an alliance.

The strategy’s most controversial element is its explicit support for what it terms “patriotic European parties” and its criticism of “activities of the European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” Brussels will view this as intolerable interference. But European elites created this dynamic by constructing what Stefan Auer calls a “post-political, post-national polity” that deliberately weakens democracy at both the national and supranational levels. The result: minority governments suppressing opposition through accusations of “disinformation” while citizens become hostages in their own countries.

Washington is offering Europe a choice, not a guarantee. It will help defend a Europe of sovereign nations confident in their identity and willing to bear the costs of their own defence. It will not indefinitely subsidise a civilisational project that appears bent on self-erasure through demographic replacement, industrial suicide via energy policy, and political paralysis.

Some will call this blunt language offensive. I call it overdue honesty. Europe’s energy crisis demonstrates what happens when engineers are shown the door and ideology drives policy. The migration disaster shows what occurs when elites believe they can summon spirits they cannot control. The defence spending gap reveals decades of assuming American protection would continue regardless of European free-riding.

As I’ve argued previously, Europe cannot be ruled as an empire. Every conqueror from Charlemagne to Napoleon discovered this. The EU faces the same reality: Push too hard for political unification without popular legitimacy, and you accelerate disintegration rather than integration.

The question facing Europe is whether it possesses the political courage to change course: to restore energy security through nuclear power and domestic fossil fuel production, to acknowledge that mass migration from premodern cultures creates inevitable conflicts unless newcomers fully assimilate, to rebuild the industrial base necessary for military production, and to rediscover the civilizational self-confidence that once made Europe a global force.

Washington’s strategy offers Europeans a mirror. The reflection is unflattering but accurate. The only question is whether European leaders will keep averting their gaze or finally confront the crisis they have created.