Opinion | Europe’s Challenge Is Decline, Not Trump
"Decline, not the Donald, is the specter haunting Europe today. The numbers make this clear. Some readers objected to World Bank data in last week’s column showing that, in dollar terms, the eurozone economy had not recovered from the 2008-09 financial crisis. In euro terms, they point out, eurozone gross domestic product has been growing. But even using the euro-denominated figures issued by the European Central Bank, the growth rate from 2009 to 2017 was only 0.6% per year. That’s anything but robust." Mead used to be such an incisive analyst but his analysis today is flabby and flaccid. The problem in Europe involves economic decline, but that is not the root. The root is the fact that the Europeans have decided to die demographically by not having children, plumping up their welfare state, pensions, and government benefits while lounging in cafes sipping plonk waiting to die. I see this nihilistic attitude in some American Millennials. They want to eschew children so they can eat and make merry. This is fine while young but once old, what is there? Life has no meaning, making merry loses its charm, the opposite sex loses theirs as well. And soon, you are alone, on the glide path to a lonely, miserable death. The Europeans have made a cottage industry out of this nihilism. "Europe continues to drift toward irrelevance on the global stage. Josef Joffe, longtime editor and publisher of Die Zeit and one of Europe’s most seasoned and respected diplomatic observers, argues in the February issue of Commentary that the Soros warning may be too late. The grand project of building the EU into a superpower has already imploded: At the level of world politics, “ ‘Europe’ does not exist.” That lifelong proponents of European values like Messrs. Soros and Joffe increasingly share Mr. Trump’s harsh view of the EU as an irrelevant failure should make even the most headstrong Brussels partisans reflect. Europe is not on a sustainable path; nobody knows this better than those who love and value it most." Dude? Europe has been on this path since at least 1 November 1993. Only America continued to pretend that Europe politically, economically, or militarily mattered. So, if this is the true lay of the land, what on Earth are we doing fluffing the pillow of the Europeans? And what is May thinking trying to obtain a Brexit deal with the EU? Both the USA and the UK should run far and fast from the EU. Leave the continent to its nostalgic ruminations. We, on the other hand, need to come to the epiphany that the 21st century will be an American-Anglosphere century but only if we have the intelligence to band together in free trade pacts as Anglospheric nations. We also need to realize that the UN is just as dead as the EU. We should send the UN packing from Turtle Bay, implode the UN building, and build anew to house a more appropriate Anglospheric agency for peace. We need to toss off the international financial institutions as well, make it a clean sweep. The EU is dying because this is what the Europeans want. We should not waste any more time on these ner-do-well warmongers. We need forward-looking direction which is with the Anglosphere. We need policies which will dismantle the remaining totalitarian states and force them to move towards free markets, republican government, the rule of law, individual liberty, personal responsibility, and reformed religions. Or, like Mead, we can wallow in our fantasies of the Ancien Regime and its glories.
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