“WITH PEACE prizes all the rage, somebody should nominate Europe for one. For in a discordant age, one belief unites squabbling world leaders: Europeans are weak and annoying.
President Donald Trump calls Europe ungrateful and bent on self-destruction, as migrants render its cities “not recognisable”.
In the glum analysis of Western diplomats in Beijing, China’s leader, Xi Jinping, sees the continent as easily divided and uncompetitive. Europe-bashing even creates common ground between Russia and Ukraine. European leaders are used to hearing President Vladimir Putin accuse them of blocking Mr Trump’s peacemaking in Ukraine. It was a shock when Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, used a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos to scold Euro-allies for being all talk and no action.
To be sure, the continent faces hard-to-solve problems. On the global stage, European governments can sound smug and lacking in self-awareness.
They make promises that they lack the means to deliver, especially since the most swaggering, Britain and France, are broke.
The workings of the 27-nation European Union are ponderous and too often hobbled by caution and footling national interests. When Scott Bessent, Mr Trump’s treasury secretary, mocked the bloc’s slow decision-making and its reliance on such geopolitical tools as “the dreaded European working group”, his taunt carried a sting of truth.
For all that, this Euro-derision is overdone. It says as much about the leaders lobbing insults as it does about the real-life place called Europe. Rather than coolly weighing the region’s strengths and flaws, Presidents Trump, Xi, Putin and Zelensky are often talking about their own countries’ political choices.
At Davos Mr Trump called Denmark “ungrateful” for America’s return of the island of Greenland to Danish rule in 1945, after wartime occupation by American troops: “How stupid were we to do that?” he growled. Mr Trump called the NATO alliance a one-way bargain, saying: “I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us.”
In the same (long) speech he turned to the high prices that Americans pay for prescription medicines, complaining that Europeans buy the same drugs for a fraction of the cost because America has been “subsidising” the world.
America’s secretary of state, Marco Rubio, loathes European freeriding. He singles out France and Germany as rich countries that skimped on defence to avoid cuts to “welfare programmes, to unemployment benefits, to being able to retire at 59, and all these other things”. It is true that the alliance with America made European leaders complacent about national security after the fall of the Soviet bloc. But Europeans did not hypnotise America into doing their bidding. America believed that dominating a strong NATO was in its self-interest.
If Mr Trump thinks that handing back Greenland was stupid, his beef is with President Harry Truman, whose decision it was. The island is more strategically important today than in 1945, Mr Trump told his audience in Davos. Actually, Truman worried greatly about returning Greenland, which controlled vital skies and sea lanes. But he also opposed imperialism, which is why he dropped a proposal to buy Greenland in favour of a treaty guaranteeing America bases on the island. Generosity, Truman believed, was America’s superpower. Years after the war he marvelled that his country had “totally defeated” Germany and Japan “and then brought them back to the community of nations. I would like to think that only America could have done this.”
Political choices are the main reason why Europeans pay less for medicines: their big public-health systems negotiate discounts from drug companies, with the trade-off that Europeans’ access to new and pricey cures is rationed. Until 2023 America’s large public-health scheme for pensioners, Medicare, was banned from negotiating discounts. As for the trade-offs between defence and welfare, America could afford French-style unemployment benefits and earlier retirements if it chose. Republicans such as Mr Rubio have long called such spending an act of self-harm, though. Given France’s parlous public finances, they may have a point.
As for China, as its leaders strive for national greatness and self-sufficiency, they have chosen to suppress wages for workers, tolerate gruelling labour conditions and to direct public spending towards aircraft-carriers and missiles, rather than high-quality hospitals and pensions. For Chinese leaders, playing down the benefits of Europe’s more benign social contract is a comfort.
Mr Putin’s contempt for Europe has many roots. But his favoured ideologues admit that a sense of being rejected by the European club is one of them. In the words of Sergei Karaganov, a pro-Kremlin scholar, Russia has had to shed “illusions” about Europe and accept that it is an eastward-facing Eurasian power.
The great European pile-on
Mr Zelensky is being unfair. European countries are now Ukraine’s most generous backers. He is unwise, too, to condemn the EU for lacking unity as a “fragmented kaleidoscope of small and middle powers”. Ukraine’s desire to join the bloc is already ambitious. It would be far harder if the EU were a federal superstate with monolithic rules.
The best hope of admission for Ukraine, as a country that has ducked hard choices on corruption and poor governance, may involve a flexible EU granting it special, provisional membership.
Ask Mr Bessent about the risks of dismissing Europe. Soon after he joked about American demands to own Greenland being met with a working group, credible threats of a trade war tanked markets and Mr Trump backed down. Europe can certainly be annoying. It is not doomed to be weak.” [1]
It is weak though.
1. Lots of world leaders are attacking Europe. Why? The Economist; London Vol. 458, Iss. 9484, (Jan 31, 2026): 56.
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