Backtalk DANIEL MCCARTHY / GUEST COLUMNIST Europe Chose Its Own Decline D


onald tusk, the prime minister of poland, might not shock Europe’s leaders the way Donald Trump does, but he, too, has a tough message for them.


“Hear for yourself how it sounds,” he said recently.


“Five hundred million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. “If you can count, count on yourself. Not in isola-


tion, but with full awareness of your potential. Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power.” Decline is a choice — and for 30 years now, decline is


what Europe’s political class has chosen. Poland, like Ukraine, has always been alert to the dan-


ger Russia poses. But Western European leaders can’t claim Vladimir


Putin surprised them with his full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022. He’d already grabbed Crimea eight years earlier and


set up pro-Russian secessionist militias in Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions. Russian assassins even targeted dissidents in Eng-


land, poisoning and killing Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and attempting to do the same to Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018. Yet all the while, Western Europe slept. Islamist terrorism did little to awaken the continent’s slumbering leaders, who continued to treat citizens call- ing for immigration restriction as the real enemy. What changed after the fall of the Berlin Wall wasn’t


the people of Europe but the quality of its leaders. From London to Brussels to Berlin, from Madrid


to Paris to Stockholm, the continent’s elites adopted a philosophy that the American political theorist James Burnham described as “the ideology of Western suicide.” They embraced a progressive liberalism that demon-


ized all the traditional sources of a nation’s strength — its historic religion, patriotic pride, and industrial base. Green parties and environmentalists emphasized


fi ghting climate change over readiness to fi ght wars. Patriotism was treated as synonymous with xenopho-


bia and the worst kinds of nationalism — with which Europe certainly had plenty of experience. But patriotism, and nationalism at its best, was the


motive of those nations and resistance movements that fought the Nazis in World War II and defi ed communist “internationalism” — really communist imperialism — during the Cold War.


98 NEWSMAX | APRIL 2025 Secularism, meanwhile, taught Europe’s leaders to


think like materialists: They might talk about “values,” but the value of a pipeline deal with Russia was the kind of thing German leaders, in particular, really cared about.


Indeed, energy policy is telling: Germany and others,


with the notable exception of France, have abandoned clean and effi cient nuclear power, which environmental- ists detest. Less nuclear power means more energy must come


from other sources — such as Russian natural gas. All this results in a weaker Europe with less energy


available for industry — including defense industries — and dependent on fuel from a hostile neighbor. European elites up to now have not only been cheap-


skates when it comes to military spending, but they found the very existence of their countries’ armed forces distasteful.


W


hen Ursula von der Leyen was Germany’s defense minister 10 years ago, German soldiers were


reduced to using broomsticks as substitutes for heavy machine guns in NATO exercises — they just didn’t have enough real equipment. Germany is not a poor country; its armed forces were


forced to play pretend with broomsticks because leaders didn’t care enough to keep them armed and ready for real action.


Today, von der Leyen is president of the European Commission and calls for Europe to rearm. Europe took a 30-year vacation from history; now it is scrambling to make up for lost time, yet its nations are led by many of the same characters responsible for the continent’s weakness in the fi rst place. And when voters demand change, as Germans did


by giving the hard-right Alternative fur Deutschland a record 20% in February’s election, establishment parties on the left and center-right form coalition governments that exclude these unwelcome agents of change. Donald Tusk is correct: Europe’s weakness is wholly


self-infl icted. Now the question is whether the leaders responsible


for three decades of decline can reverse course complete- ly — or whether Europe needs its own Donald Trump-like fi gures to replace them.


Daniel McCarthy is the editor in chief of Modern Age: A Conservative Review.


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