Stephens: Europe worth fighting for; it should understand that

By Bret Stephens / The New York Times

If Germany were invaded, just 38 percemt of its citizens would be willing to fight for their country, according to a recent poll. Fifty-nine percent would not. In Italy, another poll found that only 16 percemt of those of fighting age would take up arms. In France, Gen. Fabien Mandon, the army’s chief of staff, told a conference of mayors last month that the nation would be “at risk” if it “wavers because we are not ready to accept losing our children.” This statement of the obvious set off a political furor.

It’s in this context that the Trump administration’s latest national security strategy, released last week, landed in Europe with a thud.

It’s not hard to see why. America’s chief foreign policy priorities, according to the document, are now focused on the Western Hemisphere and Asia. The European Union stands accused of suppressing political freedom; subverting national sovereignty; obstructing economic dynamism; promoting migration policies that could lead to “civilizational erasure”; and obstructing a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine.

“It is far from obvious,” the document warns, “whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”

These are the talking points of the European far right. Russia is never treated in the document as an enemy of the United States, just as Ukraine is never treated as an ally. Instead, the real enemies, in the eyes of the national security strategy, are migrants and bureaucrats, out to destroy whatever remains of an authentic Europe.

It’s tempting to dismiss the national security strategy as unsettling but unserious: It has no legal weight, and its prose reads as if it might have been written by the Otto character from “A Fish Called Wanda” — the thin-skinned, thick-skulled American bully played to antic perfection by Kevin Kline. But as with so many other populist arguments from the right or left, the problem with the national security strategy lies less in its falsehoods than in its half-truths. It names many of the core problems while proposing the worst remedies.

Among the core problems: Europe represents an ever-shrinking share of the global economy, particularly when it comes to industries of the future: Where are the European equivalents to Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, SpaceX, Amazon or Apple? Migration alone needn’t be a problem; if anything, it’s a remedy for the rich world’s affliction of collapsing birthrates. But migration without assimilation is a curse, especially when migrants have values that are indifferent or hostile to those of the host country. Small militaries can be made larger by shifting budget priorities. But the crucial element for military success isn’t money; it’s the will to fight. Except for front-line states like Finland and Estonia, Europe doesn’t seem to have it.

Earl Butz, Richard Nixon’s and Gerald Ford’s secretary of agriculture, once said of a papal pronouncement on birth control (though in his typically more vulgar way): If you don’t play the game you don’t make the rules. That’s the position in which Europe risks finding itself in a world of unsentimental power politics.

All this should serve as a clanging wake-up call, particularly for the parts of Europe’s political classes who still think that they are in the business of making fantasies come true. They are not. Their job is to keep nightmares at bay.

European politics in this century have been largely fixated on growth-killing cliches (“sustainable development”); feckless foreign policy gestures (recognition of a nonexistent Palestinian state); self-destructive environmental policies (Germany’s decision to close its nuclear power stations); and a virtue-signaling attitude toward mass migration (Angela Merkel’s “We can manage this”) that is the central reason fascistic parties like Alternative for Germany are surging. All this needs to end.

What should take its place? It’s a cold view of what Europe must do to protect itself in a world where it no longer has protectors. Rearmament on a massive scale. An end to dependency-producing, cost-exacerbating green energy projects. Immigration policy on the Danish model — tougher about who gets to come, who has to leave and what immigrants must do to integrate. A return to the EU’s original and noble purpose of opening markets and fostering competition, not being a factory for rules.

Above all, a civic revolution to convince younger Europeans that their heritage, culture and way of life — a fundamentally Christian civilization leavened and improved but not erased by the values of the Enlightenment — are worth defending. That’s not my civilization, and even to write that line feels transgressive.

But it should also be self-evident. If Europe isn’t that, what, then, is it? If it isn’t that, why would anyone go to war for its sake? If it isn’t that, what’s to keep it from just becoming an extension of someone else’s civilization, whether that’s America’s, Russia’s or Islam’s?

Henry Kissinger once said of Donald Trump that he “may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” There are good reasons to regret this, not least in Europe. There are no good reasons to pretend it isn’t happening, or to fail to adapt.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.