Europe Is Delusional

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Wednesday, December 10, 2025

 

It is time for a rant about Europe. It has, in fact, been time for quite a while, but there is always a moment at which the straw meets the camel, and, for me, that moment came when the European Union announced that it intended to extort another hundred million dollars or so out of the wildly productive American tech sector, and then the bureaucrats and politicos who staff that dreadful institution took to the very service they were in the midst of extorting to offer up generalized attacks on the United States. As a former Brit who enjoys spending time in both France and Italy, I take no particular pleasure in unloading in this manner, but honesty compels it: In its current incarnation, Europe is a poor, corrupt, sclerotic, vampiric open-air museum, and its leadership class is full of priggish, dishonest, supercilious, rent-seeking parasites, whose boundless sense of superiority ought by rights to have vanished in 1901. Europe, in the year 2025, is what a continent would look like if it were run by NPR. It is a librarian in a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snobbishly shushing the workers outside. It is a faculty meeting, a Sierra Club protest, a forum for those who believe that words create reality. There is no reason that we in the United States should consent to be lectured by the apologists for such a silly place.

 

Worse yet is how unabashedly smug those who engage in this lecturing have become. Criticize a European from America and you will immediately be hit with a wall of undeservedly self-righteous disdain. This should not be mistaken for pride; rather, it is that peculiar, negative, defensive sort of hauteur that is focused less on the positive virtues of the speaker, and more on his deeply held conviction that, whatever his deficiencies, at least he’s not you. That, at root, is the contemporary European mantra — At Least We’re Not American — and, like many mantras, it is impervious to fact or repudiation. What about the massive gap in GDP that has opened up between the U.S. and Europe since 2008? At least we’re not American. What about the anemic performance of European companies relative to those in the United States? At least we’re not American. What about the gulf between GDP per capita in Europe and GDP per capita in the United States, or about the U.S.’s great advantages in biotech and energy and advanced semiconductors, or the fact that, if most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun, or that most European countries are unable to usefully project military power? At least we’re not American.

 

Why, pray, do Europeans tell themselves that? Because, if they didn’t, they might have to account for their failures, and because that would require a capacity for introspection that they simply do not possess. Read any Eurocrat’s assessment of the United States, and you will encounter a thoroughly preposterous image of life here, in which science is ignored in favor of superstition; in which nobody is able to read or write; in which only billionaires are admitted to hospitals; in which one is unable to go to the supermarket without being gunned down by gangs; in which the sole food option is McDonald’s; and which, absent the benevolent guidance of EU censors, the population is fatally misled by an endless supply of Koran-burning bigots — and yet which, despite all of that, has magically managed to become the richest, most powerful, most sought-after nation in the history of the world. Invariably, these hallucinations are coupled with a penchant for sophistry and excuse-making that would make Gorgias blush. Europe’s feeble economic growth is recast as “sustainability.” Its habitual censorship of dissenters is brushed away with the contention that any speech that is prosecuted is, by definition, not “free speech” at all. Poor people have adopted a salutary “life balance”; rule by apparatchiks is “sophisticated democracy”; the superintendence of every last thing is the “management of community tensions.” Most fun of all, perhaps, is the insistence that all critics of Europe and its governments must by definition be “far right,” and even working on behalf of Vladimir Putin — a bizarre charge to hear from the leaders of a continent that has spent 80 years being protected by the carapace of hard American power.

 

I am a writer, not a politician, and as a result I am free to be as rude as I wish about anything that takes my fancy. Given the geopolitical concerns at stake, I would not recommend that those in power here in America echo my sentiments about Europe in quite this fashion or this tone, but I would hope that they are aware of the problem, which is that Europe — a region that the West needs to remain a useful ally — has become utterly deluded about its fortunes, its importance, its nature, and its very place in the world, and that unless it is told “No” by its suzerains, forcefully, repeatedly, and without any interest in the looks it receives in return, that delusion is unlikely to be dissipated any time soon.