The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: Europe Is Failing, and America Should Pay Attention

Episode Date: July 8, 2026

Europe is always angry, but the last two weeks particularly so. First it was Trump’s tariffs, then it was Greenland, and now it’s the NATO budget—that the U.S. is carrying by 50% mind you.   What Europe should really be upset about is the socialist agenda ruining their country: DEI, redistribution, green energy, open borders, you know the rest.   America had better learn from Europe quickly, or we’ll be Europe 2.0 before long, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” Mount Titano Media - FINDING OUR WORDS: Words That Made America is available now in paperback, hardcover, Kindle, Audible, and in Spanish translation on Amazon.com, and on https://www.MountTitanoMedia.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Get your copies at Amazon and on the Mount Titano Media website. That's Mount Titano, Tintanon, Mountatatatano Media.com. Visit www.montatano Media.com. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. Europe is upset. They're very angry. They're always angry, but the last two weeks they seem to be particularly angry. There are reports at their winter EU summit. They voice extreme anger at the U.S. in general and Donald Trump in particular. And we know the causes. They were angry that tariffs were applied to them. They didn't mention that they were running a huge trade surplus with the United States.

They were angry of Trump's chauvinistic and bombastic talk about annexing Greenland. Bombastic, though it was, he had a point, didn't he, that this is a critical piece of real estate in North America that is a colony of distant Denmark and which was lost to Denmark in World War II, which was restored by the United States and handed back over to Denmark because it could not protect the street. strategic real estate in World War II. During the Cold War, we protected it had bases there, and now we are the only power strong enough to prevent Chinese and Russian infiltration in there. So there was a both sides of argument to that controversy. They're very angry because Donald Trump is going to pull troops out of NATO, not a lot, just a few, and maybe some air wings, and redeploy them not to the United States, but to the Pacific and Asia, where he feels the existential threat is not Russia, but China.

So why are they so angry? The obvious reasons are that the United States has shouldered about 16 to 20 percent of the actual NATO budget, but when you look at overhead, logistics, intelligence, the nuclear deterrent, It's more like 50%. We're going to be spending a trillion and a half per year, and Europe altogether won't get close to that number. Their argument is that we are now facing Russia, and you don't understand that Russia may go into the Baltic states.

It may go into Poland. We understand that. We have over 70,000 troops there, and they remain under the American nuclear shield, and Trump has already explained to Putin that going into Europe in any place sector, any time would be a red line. But there's deeper causes why they're angry. These are just the proximate causes. We saw during the World Cup both good and bad parts of Europe vis-a-vis us.

The people who actually went to the various games in the middle of the country met people in Kansas and Missouri in the south. and rural America, suburban America, agrarian America, and they liked them. They were very shocked that they liked them. They were hospitable, they were generous, they were kind, they were modest, and they had basically bought into the bi-coastal elites characterization of these people as deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, quote Biden, garbage, trash, chumps. But once they saw them, they liked them a great deal.

And then at the same time, they were glorifying their win over us, Brussels was, and making fun of Trump, of course, the way he dances and his intervention supposedly to get a player reinstated. So the old anti-Americanism resurfaced. But these deeper causes are, we have to give them some credit. I mean, for 500 years, from roughly 1,500 to, I don't know, we can take an arbitrary date, 1914. they almost ran the world. London was a financial capital of the world. Paris was a cultural capital of the world.

The U.S. was an upstart. It wasn't supposed to work. The people who came from Europe that founded the United States were not their aristocracy, not their plutocracy. They were the poor and the downcast. And so theoretically, Europe believed that in a bureaucratic society, they were getting rid of their worst people. But they weren't. They were getting rid of their most dynamic, their most. adventure as their most risk-taking. And so when the United States assume global prominence in World War I, but especially after World War II and fought the Cold War, they saw that the ingredients of this strange but unique and brilliant constitution and free market capitalism and the protections of private property and a repugnance for socialism, all of that made a dynamic economy and legal, diverse, and meritocratic immigration up until recently was also a plus.

And so what I'm getting out is part of it is lost glory. They have 450 million people in Europe in the EU alone. The NATO countries have even more when they overlap perhaps 500 million Europeans. They're highly educated. They're Western peoples. They're the inheritors or the creators of the Western legacy. And yet, on every barometer of economic and cultural influence, they're failing. And they're failing not because they're not talented.

They're brilliant people. They're failing because they have adopted an agenda, an agenda. And the agenda is simply they're going to replace fossil fuels with green energy that is unreliable and inefficient, and they've lost their global competitiveness. They've adopted a socialist paradigm of redistribution where they go after. people, especially in the upper middle classes and the entrepreneurial class, they still have an aristocracy that they leave alone, but it's really kind of a drone-like group of people that are not dynamic. They don't have people that founded Google, or they don't have a Jeff Bezal, so they don't have an Elon Musk. Those people would not be able to operate in Europe as they were in the United States.

They also have open borders. No one's more responsible for the decline of Europe than Angela and Angela. Merkel. She was the architect of open borders and rapid illegal immigration influxes, especially from the Middle East. Some of these countries like Germany have 16% of their population as foreign-born and is not assimilating, acculturating, or integrating. In addition to that, until Donald Trump came on the same, they would not, would not spend money on defense. They relied on lecturing the world that they were pacifistic, socialist, and they used green energy. why they bought natural gas and became dependent on Vladimir Putin's Russia.

What am I getting at? They know their agenda does not work. They look at the United States, and they see that we're pumping almost 14 million barrels of oil were the biggest natural gas exporter in the world, and we've got this booming free market economy. 340 million Americans produce $10 trillion more in GDP than 500 million Europeans.

And they say, wow, that works and what we are doing does not work. And that gets them very angry because the malady that is treatable. And we have a special responsibility because in some ways we exported to them, DEI and the green fanaticism and the idea of completely open borders under Obama and Biden, But unlike them, we changed and we have correctives. So now when we talk to Europe, we're not talking in critical fashion. We're saying, don't do what we did because it'll make you a second-class continent. And we were headed in that direction.

And we have people today who want to return to that direction, but don't do it. We want to be an equal partner, not a greater partner, an equal partner. If you combined the United States and Europe and they reached their full potentials, they would be unstoppable on the world stage. I don't mean in an aggrandizement or imperialist or colonial sense, but their borders would be secure, and no one, not China, not Russia, not terrorists from the Middle East, would dare to attack them. But unfortunately right now, the Europeans know that the medicine, to recapture their dynamism and importance and influence, seems to be worse than the disease. Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this.

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