The end of Europe’s “soft power” delusion: part two
The pivot to Asia and European irrelevance
This essay was published in The Conservative Woman on 29 April 2025.
In the first part of this essay I showed that Europe is in a state of prolonged and worsening civilisational decline — economically, militarily, culturally, and politically. The consequence of this collapse is that the United States is now openly and humiliatingly deriding the region’s governance, but also explicitly looking to the Indo-Pacific theatre for its strategic partnerships. This is not a spontaneous development: it is merely the new, bolder expression of a dynamic that has been fomenting in the West for decades.
To be sure, the United States is not itself a societal paragon: it has been the furnace of the Western culture-war of recent years; many of its cities are beleaguered by drug addiction and violence; it has made poor foreign policy decisions over the last half-century; and its relative global military dominance has begun to wane. Yet, despite this, the United States remains the most prosperous and productive, and freest, nation on earth, with formidable economic and military power. Its living standards are also generally higher — the average American salary is $80,000 per annum, compared with just $47,000 per annum in Britain. Moreover, it has developed in recent years far greater intellectual and cultural vitality than Europe: of the world’s top twenty-five universities, sixteen of them are American. Britain has four universities on the list; and the remainder of Europe has just one.
We see, then, the farce of the European establishment’s recent grandstanding against Trump’s America. The self-declared “soft-power” states suddenly want to act as a collective superpower. But with no economic or military foundation on which to stand, this tough talk proves over and again to be nothing but a hollow charade. One of several recent examples illuminates the point. In March, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, announced retaliatory tariffs on American imports in response to Trump’s introduction of tariffs on European steel and aluminium. Trump immediately threatened to impose 200% tariffs on European wines and champagnes. The Commission backed down without hesitation.
The problem, to use Trump’s jargon, is that the United States “holds all of the cards”. Not only does Europe run a large trade surplus with the United States, meaning that equivalent tariffs will always disproportionately affect Europe, but Trump also holds the option of denying Europe access to the American financial markets, which would devastate European economies overnight. Although a drastic and unlikely measure, its very possibility illustrates the sheer fantasy and hollow hubris at the centre of the European elites’ posturing against their de facto patron.
Furthermore, the recent diplomatic overtures made by the European Commission and the British state towards China’s sly, totalitarian government in response to Trump’s tariffs are a shameful symbol not only of our strategic bewilderment and desperation, but also of the naivety, short-termism and foolishness that is now endemic to European policymaking.
How, then, can Europe’s malaise be treated? In answering this, it is crucial to recognise that decline resulted from policymaking choices: high industrial regulation; the prioritisation of excessive welfare states over defence; the refusal to incentivise technological innovation; the enablement of untrammelled immigration; and the driving of the net-zero energy policies that have undermined Europe’s economic security. The solution, therefore, is to reverse this destructive chain-reaction of policymaking — although this will first require a deep and widespread transformation of the political status quo.
Certainly, the effects of a modern European restoration could be profound. The United States’ own policymakers have long understood that Europe inherently holds great — potentially dangerous — economic and military potential. A document leaked from the Pentagon in 1992 stated that by “convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests”, the United States “must seek to prevent the emergence of European-only security arrangements which would undermine NATO…[Europe is] a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power”.
Hence, the United States is now, in a sense, reacting against the success of its own long-standing policy to contain strategic competitors in Europe. The American security shield that has been afforded to the region since the end of the Cold War has created burdensome dependants, not merely subordinate partners. This, contra most liberal commentary, is not a mere figment of Donald Trump’s imagination: George W. Bush and Barrack Obama also repeatedly called on European states to significantly increase their defence expenditure. It is not a new, sudden grievance, but rather a public rupturing of an old, deteriorating dynamic that could not have continued indefinitely.
To understand why the United States is suddenly impatient to extricate itself from Europe’s strategic woes, we must return to Orwell’s prophecy of the three power-blocs. Importantly, the war in Ukraine has disproportionately benefited China’s strategic positioning. In mid-2024, the Chinese yuan accounted for 54% of all trades on the Russian stock exchange. Beijing also provides Moscow with 90% of its high-priority dual-use goods — radars, sensors and other technologies that could in theory be for civilian use, but which are certainly being employed to military ends in eastern Ukraine. In exchange, China is receiving access to top-end Russian military equipment, including submarine, missile and aeronautical designs that would, in previous years, never have been provided. Whereas the two powers formerly had tenuous, fractious relations, Russia is now the de facto client-state of China.
Between them, the two powers control vast swathes of territory, from the Arctic Circle to the Pacific, including great reserves of natural resources, and their combined nuclear and conventional arsenals are immense. Furthermore, a China-Russia axis presents the United States with the prospect of an unwinnable two-front war in the event of a military confrontation with China. This is one vital, and entirely rational, reason why the Trump Administration is eager to end the war in Ukraine immediately, for it is sapping the United States of military resources and money, whilst simultaneously strengthening China’s global strategic leverage. The imperative to terminate this harmful dynamic and transition into the “Indo-Pacific region” to contain Chinese imperialism has therefore never been felt more keenly.
Orwell understood that the interplay between civilisations is the key to understanding what happens within them. The three blocs of Nineteen Eighty-Four are internally dystopic precisely because they are locked in a state of perpetual war and rivalry. By the same token, the second Trump Administration’s frustrations with Europe can only be understood fully through the grand-strategic lens. Europe is now a dull shadow of its former self — economically, militarily, even culturally and politically. And at the same time, across the Pacific, a great storm is brewing in the form of an aggressive rival civilisation. The liberal analysis claims that Trump is upending the “post-war status quo” . Yet, as we have seen, Trump is in fact merely acting upon to a pre-existing global dynamic — not magicking one from thin air.
The old world, and the international order that upheld it, vanished with the rise of China, propelled by Europe’s own startling and self-imposed decline. Consequently, the battle for world power is now in Asia — and it has been for decades. So Europe is faced now with a choice: either restore that which has been lost by reversing the policies and cultural decay that have so damaged its inner foundations, or accept a dystopic future of further decline and sad, shameful irrelevance.
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What if Orwell had a sequel to his great work, and in that sequel there was a supra-regional oligarchy that benefitted by perpetual war among the regions, one where the human costs of war were perhaps unfortunate but necessary for the success of the long game?