Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson. Each administration, at some point in its first or second year, has a strategic assessment, a strategic strategy of what the United States’ economic, diplomatic, political, and military objectives will be in foreign affairs.
Ours just came out. And one of the more controversial sections—which I think, otherwise, was a pretty sound strategy—was simply saying that our partners, the founders of Western civilization, the Europeans, are in dire trouble. And then the authors of the strategic assessment said they face “civilizational erasure.”
Well, you can see what that did to the Europeans. Nothing is more humiliating or makes the Europeans angrier than we upstart Americans—who our founders came from Europe and many of us did as well—to be lecturing the Europeans on what they’re doing wrong.
So, they’re very angry at us. But why are they angry at us? Because the assessment outlined why Europe’s in trouble. Its radical green proposals, their New Green Deal version is much more deleterious than ours. They have ample amounts of gas in the North Sea and oil. They have gas, natural gas, in France and other places. And yet, they’re hell-bent—if I could use that term—on wind and solar that’s costly and unreliable.
The result is Europe is not competitive in the world economic market, and the EU has lost its place in world gross domestic product rankings. It’s gone way down. It used to be along with the United States, the two preeminent economic powers in the world. But it’s lost its share of world GDP by a substantial margin in just 20 years.
Its fertility rate is not as—ours is 1.71, 1.75. That’s very worrisome. Theirs is 1.39. They are shrinking and aging. And more importantly, their borders are open. They have 45 million people coming in from the Middle East, predominantly. And unlike us, they don’t have a history with the melting pot. There’s no fluidity in classes, as we have.
So, it’s very hard for them to acculturate, assimilate, and integrate immigrants, especially when they come in illegally and from—let’s be honest—mostly from the Middle East. So, you have the force multiplying of Islam. At least the people who come across the southern border legally and illegally have a shared Christian tradition.
But Europe does not have that experience with illegal immigration. And they’re disarmed. They had not been spending 2% until President Donald Trump jawboned them. They say they’re gonna get to 5%, but if you look at their budgetary expenditures and incomes, it seems almost impossible. And now they’re facing a Russian juggernaut that is, you know, moving west, in Ukraine, toward them.
And so, all of this was calibrated by the United States. But here’s what I think got them very angry. The United States’ attitude was not—in this report—you should have done this. You bad, you. We don’t like you. No.
It was more, we should be brothers. We should be equal brothers. You, Europe, is the foundation of the West. Greece. Rome. The Pope. The Renaissance. The Enlightenment. All of this majestic culture came from you. And we are an offshoot, an offspring of it. And we wanna partner with you. And we wanna be equals with you. So, please can you just consider stopping the censorship, opening up discussion, and maybe reassessing your energy, your military, your immigration issues and policies. And get back in the game with us in a 50/50 fashion.
They got very, very angry about this. But here’s what makes us angry about their anger. Europe is, sort of, the proverbial one-eyed Jack, the card that you only see one eye and you flip over and maybe there’s something quite different on the other side.
What do I mean by that? There are 32 NATO nations in the alliance. Outside of the United States and Canada, 30 of them are in Europe. There are 27 European Union members. The European Union members and the European NATO members are like this. They’re almost the same nation, overwhelmingly. And 90% of the cases belong to the EU and NATO.
But here’s the one-eyed Jack metaphor: NATO members say, yes, we want to prepare ourselves against Russia. Yes, we made the 2% investment of GDP and military expenditures. Yes, we want to go to 5%. Yes, we want the United States, by all costs, to be our leader. We used to pay 16%, 18% of our budget. We want to integrate more with you. And we’re so happy that you’re with us again. And Donald Trump is “daddy.”
Flip the card over. Now we’re talking, these same people, now are not talking as NATO members in dire need of military assistance from the strongest military power in the history of civilization. They’re talking as EU globalists and utopians. Don’t lecture us. We can censor X. We can censor Facebook. We don’t have a First Amendment. We don’t allow unfettered speech, like you do. We don’t have a Second Amendment, like your rowdy cowboyism back there. Oh, by the way, we’re much stronger on DEI, even than you are.
And, as Angela Merkel once said, chancellor of Germany, “Yes, we can. We can do it.” We can integrate millions of people who are from the Islamic world into our cultures. Don’t lecture us about that. And oh, yes, we will rearm in our own fashion. And as far as our foreign policy, we don’t understand you people. We feel that Israel is a settler colonial power. Which it isn’t. And we side with Hamas or Hezbollah. Or we have a very different attitude about Iran. We have peaceful solutions. We are not Neanderthals.
So, how are we Americans supposed to deal with Europe when we see this morbidity? And we see it because it’s here in the United States.
So, all this report was basically saying, if you look at the subtext, we have a problem with fertility. We have a problem with immigration. We have a problem with green tyranny. We have a problem with DEI. We have a problem with pacifism. But, unlike you—we didn’t say this—but we’re dealing with it. We have a counterrevolution.
All we’re asking of you is to consider the voices of dissent in your own continent. Maybe they’re on the right track. Maybe, like us, they have discovered that this system is toxic that both us in America and you in Europe have experimented with. We’re both Westerners. And let’s stop this DEI, open borders, pacifism, green energy, and get back in the global game because we have China, we have Iran, North Korea, and Russia as enemies. And we wanna be partners.
So, we’re just offering you advice. And please don’t play this double game where, in terms of military assistance, all of a sudden we’re saints here in America, you NATO face says, but in terms of culture and sociology and politics, we’re Satans. We’ve caught onto that a long time ago.
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