Donald Trump’s inauguration speech was remarkable for many reasons, but what stood out watching from afar was the dissonance as he described a United States that was in existential decline and in need of rescue. In fact, America is in rude health, and its 47th President’s description was more apt for Europe.
Across the pond, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen set out a vision on Tuesday that was equally hard to square with reality. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, at the start of her own second term, she described a continent of innovative strength, committed to immutable principles, ready for change and finding strength from unity in the face of adversity.
Europe’s actual circumstances are closer to Trump’s dystopia than Von der Leyen’s idyll. The continent’s business model has broken and it remains painfully slow to change. It’s increasingly riven as nationalist leaders challenge fundamental EU principles. One, Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico, speculated this week that the European Union and NATO may not long survive a changing world.
The US, by contrast, remains an extraordinarily powerful nation state, with its dynamic market a key driver not only for its own economic health, but for Europe’s. Look at virtually any data, whether on long term demographics, energy prices, currency, innovation, trend rates of growth or deployable military power and that case is clear. Even inflation, a core voter complaint against President Joe Biden’s tenure, has subsided.
This US power is now in the hands of an ardent nationalist, who just declared territorial expansion as an American goal for the first time in well over a century. It is the marriage of capabilities to raw nationalism that makes leaders abroad nervous, and they should be.
America’s allies are uniquely vulnerable in the face of this nationalist revival, because for decades they’ve organized themselves around the trust that the enormous power of the US would never be turned on them. Sure, Washington could be a bruising and domineering friend, but it was committed to maintaining the alliance, so there were guardrails.
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Publish date : 2025-01-21 21:00:00
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