Victor Davis Hanson
Nothing bothers the European elite as much as American conservatives praising the European foundations of their shared, but threatened, Western civilization.
Europeans especially resent having their social-welfare state system critiqued by upstart, crass Americans.
Their pique only increases as they push back against the condescending American idea that the U.S. could possibly offer any constructive advice, much less help a more civilized Europe follow the “American model.”
Americans, in turn, are worried that Europe is not just stagnating but is on a trajectory of permanent decline — with dire consequences for the entire Western world.
As for symptoms, the U.S. cites a steadily declining European share of world GDP. It points to Europe’s unsustainable 1.39 fertility rate, which ensures a steadily smaller, older, and costlier native population.
More than 10 percent of Europe’s resident population is now foreign-born — some 45 million people. However, the European host, unlike a classless America, does not have a long tradition of melting-pot assimilation, integration, and acculturation.
Unlike America’s mostly Christian-nation immigration patterns, European immigrants are predominantly from the Middle East and North Africa, Islamic, and increasingly anti-Western.
Far too many of Europe’s immigrants profess too little desire to assimilate into what they consider a culturally decadent place — one that, ironically, they have no desire to leave.
The Christian Church, the linchpin of Western civilization, was born in Europe. Yet nowhere do atheism, agnosticism, and open hostility to Christendom grow stronger.
Europe, the birthplace of a dynamic Western military tradition, has been, by contemporary standards and at least until recently, virtually disarmed and unable to protect its own borders or interests.
Europe’s overregulation and war on fossil fuels, combined with a generous social welfare state, have resulted in too little revenue and too many costly dependents.
Americans dare to lecture Europe because the same Western pathologies — open borders, unassimilated immigrants, tribalism, declining fertility, green fanaticism, unsustainable budget deficits, and massive national debt — are likewise beginning to threaten America.
But unlike Europe, millions of Americans at the eleventh hour are galvanizing to stop their own insidious downward spiral.
So Americans claim to know firsthand the causes for these shared, but even more distressing, European symptoms of decay.
And their answers are the threats of several dangerous ideologies.
One pathology is green fanaticism, which has led Europeans to not only ignore their fossil fuel resources but also to dismantle existing coal, nuclear, and natural gas plants.
That suicidal folly ensured that transportation fuels and electrical power became so exorbitant that once sought-after European exports are now uncompetitive, while Europe’s strapped middle classes slip into poverty.
Meanwhile, China funds green causes in the West, exports below-cost cheap wind and solar systems, and then builds three coal or nuclear plants a month to ensure that it has much cheaper energy than the green West.
Other existential threats are diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI) mandates — a precivilizational emphasis on tribal affinities of race and religion rather than shared national values and unity. The results are legions of drone DEI commissars who sow disunity, spike racial tensions, wage war on meritocracy, and increase overhead.
America further warns Europe that only cutbacks in unsustainable entitlements can allow it to reboot its militaries enough to prevent Russian bullying and threats of attack, protect supply lines of imported fuels and natural resources, and deter terrorists.
And what happens if a petulant and snarky Europe utterly rejects the American diagnosis, therapy, and prognosis?
America will decide that it can no longer afford, as NATO’s leader, to protect European borders when it struggles at home to ensure its own.
Nor can the U.S. understand an increasingly two-faced Europe.
One of its faces is the self-righteous 27-member European Union that is becoming increasingly anti-American.
The EU attacks the U.S. nonstop on matters of culture, energy, trade, censorship, and foreign policy.
Yet nearly the same nations of a 32-member NATO alliance — Europe’s other face — praise America for its military leadership and call for closer U.S.-European strategic relations.
This one-eyed Jack policy of censoring and fining American companies, blasting American allies at the United Nations, and belittling conservative, Christian, and traditional American culture, while praising the U.S. military and courting its armed assistance, is simply not sustainable.
Is there a solution? Perhaps, given that both civilizations are offering diametrically opposed correctives to their shared morbidities.
Europe is only growing more socialist, censorious, globalist, pacifist, multicultural, atheistic, and green.
In contrast, the U.S. is undergoing a counter-revolution toward smaller government, fewer regulations, more fossil fuels, an expanding military, less DEI and woke, more secure borders, legal-only immigration, and renewed faith.
Only one of these competing solutions will solve the shared crisis of Western civilization.
And let us hope the one remedy that works will be fully adopted by both.
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books.
