The end of Europe’s “soft power” delusion: part one

On Europe's drastic civilisational decline

This essay was published in The Conservative Woman on 28 April 2025.

The Course of Empire - Destruction by Thomas Cole (1836). The painting is part of a series depicting the rise and fall of an imaginary city, and has long provoked thought on the potential demise, and annihilation, of the modern West.

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four foretells an approaching global order in which the world is divided between three vast powers, locked in perpetual rivalry and war. This was not yet the case when the novel was published in 1949: the United States was the clear Western hegemon, but the European powers, although in relative decline, remained important global actors with major imperial possessions; the Soviet Union had emerged as the principal rival power to the West; Japan was in a state of national rehabilitation; and China had not yet begun its remarkable ascent. It was thus, in today’s nomenclature, a seemingly multipolar world in which the vestiges of the “long nineteenth century” — the age of imperial and national competition between European powers — could still be seen and felt.

Yet Orwell saw that the European epoch had already ended. Instead, power in the new globalised world was destined to consolidate around massive geographic blocs, which would subsume and subordinate the old nation states. And so it has proven. The nations have survived, but they have realigned themselves around a grander interplay between three major nuclear-armed powers: the United States, China, and Russia. The crucial rivalry is now between the United States and China, whose rapid economic ascendancy has anguished American policymakers for decades. In 2011, Barrack Obama formally announced the great strategic “pivot” from Europe to Asia — an attempt to forge new economic and military alliances in South-East Asia so as to contain the rising dominion of China, both in the region and in the wider world.

However, another essential aspect to this restructuring of American priorities has been the drastic decline of the European nations, including Britain, which have failed to retain their strategic relevance in this shifting global landscape. This could not have been made more explicit than by the leaked Signal messages of 15 March. Complaining that European allies would benefit from the impending strikes against the Houthi rebels in the Red Sea, Vice President JD Vance wrote: “I just hate bailing Europe out again.” The Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth, replied: “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”

These visceral remarks followed closely behind Vance’s incendiary speech at Munich in February, in which he lambasted Europe’s failure to “provide for its own defence”, as well as the region’s widespread disregard for voters’ concerns over mass immigration, and the now-routine suppression and prosecution of free speech, including in Britain. The reaction from Europe’s liberal elites was telling for its sheer denialism. The German Defence Minister, Boris Pistorius, simply denounced the speech as “not acceptable”. Likewise, the EU’s Defence Commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, claimed that “[Vance] attracted a lot of attention, but [there were] no substantial messages.”

Of course, the messages were in fact very substantial. The United States formally told Europe’s leadership that continued patrimony is now conditional upon Europe upholding traditional Western values, and that the regional security umbrella traditionally provided by the American taxpayer is a privilege and not an entitlement.

Importantly, this paradigmatic shift eastwards, away from Europe, is not a new development. The writing has been on the wall for decades, becoming ever more vivid through successive administrations; but only now is it being read aloud by the United States, catalysed by the emboldened mandate of this second Trump Administration. Through decades of wrongheaded policymaking, European nations have rendered themselves strategically useless to the United States — indeed, the region is now proving to be actively burdensome, as Vance and Hegseth made clear. By contrast, Asian countries at the interface with China, such as India, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Indonesia, are now key regional allies with burgeoning economies, pragmatic governments and surprisingly powerful conventional militaries. South Korea, for instance, has three times as many active military personnel as Britain, the strongest of the European military powers. Malaysia’s army, meanwhile, is twice the size of Britain’s.

By contrast, European militaries are chronically short of soldiers, armoured vehicles, ships and aircraft. Indeed, the United States’ military budget utterly dwarfs that of all European nations combined. Thus, in reality, the NATO alliance consists of the might of the United States’ military, with a few European divisions, and possibly Turkish forces, bolted on. Moreover, Europe’s defence industries are fragmented, depleted and dependent on far more advanced American technologies. So deep-rooted are the problems that the touted grand European rearmament launched in response to Vance’s Munich speech is unravelling already.

Critically, the root cause of this military weakness is the now-entrenched industrial decline of the major European economies. Germany’s long-stable manufacturing industries are in crisis, with soaring unemployment; France is mired by astronomical debt and an unemployment rate of 7.3%; welfare spending has swollen to unsustainable rates in all major European nations, depleting public funds and sapping productivity; and the euro has trended sharply downwards against the dollar for years.

Furthermore, as an excellent piece of research by Bloomberg has shown, not only are European economies collectively far smaller than those of the United States and China, but they have fallen well behind qualitatively as well. Europe is severely lacking in dispersed start-up entrepreneurship and frontier technological innovation. There is nothing in Europe that even closely resembles Silicon Valley or the equivalent Chinese big-tech industry. Part of the problem has been the stifling effect of long-term over-regulation, much of which has been generated by decree from the European Union.

This absence of a strong technological base dampens long-term growth in two ways. First, the modern major tech firms are economic powerhouses in their own right: Apple alone has a greater market-share than all but six of the world’s top national economies. Second, almost all other industries now depend for their competitiveness and development on big-tech innovation. The German car industry, for example, has failed to keep pace with technological adaptations in the global car market, leading to the loss of thousands of jobs.

This same technological dearth has deeply afflicted Europe’s defence industries, which cannot hope to compete with the intricate advancements, or massive investment, seen in the US industry. Moscow, too, has developed frighteningly capable equipment during its campaign in Ukraine, including the dreaded ZALA Lancet drone, which would certainly prove lethal against Western forces in the event of a conventional war.

Inextricably woven into our industrial decline has been Europe’s foolish indulgence of the fashionable “green” energy delusion. The United States, by contrast, has guarded its energy security wisely. It has the largest stocks of fossil fuels in the world, fracks routinely, generates only 23% of its power via renewable energy sources, and holds massive reserves. Europe, meanwhile, has aggressively pursued the economically untenable net-zero fantasy at the behest of an outspoken and shrill political minority. Britain generates 45% of its power from renewable sources, and is increasingly forced to turn to the United States and Russia for crude oil and natural gas in order to check dangerously high consumer prices. Likewise, Germany, which derives 46% of its power from renewables, was forced to re-start coal-fired power stations in 2023 due the volatility of the Russian gas supply causing a spike in prices.

These mounting economic failures, combined with profound anger over untrammelled migration into Europe, are causing an ever-widening groundswell of political discontent. The so-called “centrist”, liberal parties that implemented this status quo in the major European states are losing ground rapidly to insurgent parties, principally on the Right, but also on the Left. Indeed, controversial legal and political moves have been made against right-of-centre parties recently in Romania, Germany and France, inflaming tensions and deepening ill sentiment against the liberal centre. This, along with the steady rise of a new and complex sectarianism, is morphing steadily into a societal maelstrom at the heart of Europe. By contrast, the United States’s two major parties, although deeply imperfect, retain massive bases of support and offer the American voter an authentic choice between governance from the Left or the Right.

It is clear, then, that Europe is in the grip of a profound and long-term civilisational malaise. In the second part of this essay, I will explore how this sickness, combined with China’s increasingly aggressive global power-games, is threatening to consign Europe to the dustbin of history.

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