Europe Must Face Reality
This growing gap between the United States and Europe has left Europe without the extra money to invest in defense and in space.
Recent articles about European leaders discussing how to replace the United States and NATO with a European defense system further demonstrate how the European political and governmental elites are simply out of touch with reality.
President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Marco Rubio have all made the point that the Europeans must profoundly rethink the strategies they have adopted.
There is not a single European trillion-dollar tech company. The European regulatory, tax, and cultural systems are naturally opposed to change and new technology. So, bold entrepreneurs find it far more profitable to move to the United States.
We are at the beginning of a great transformation. Between artificial intelligence, robotics, remote sensing, revolutionary space capabilities, and breakthroughs in biology, it is almost impossible to predict what the future will look like in just a few decades.
Yet, with this scale of change coming down the road, there is no serious European strategy to compete head to head with America in developing the future.
The result is going to be a series of steadily widening gaps. The difference in productivity over the last two decades is amazing. America is simply evolving and increasing its technological and productivity edge while Europe simply is not.
This growing gap between the United States and Europe has left Europe without the extra money to invest in defense and in space. The Europeans for the six decades since the end of World War II have consistently invested in welfare state systems and underinvested in military strength.
There simply isn’t enough military capability for the Europeans to cope with either Vladimir Putin or the Iranian religious dictatorship.
It was telling that the Europeans’ most aggressive position has been to offer to police the Strait of Hormuz after the war ends (a particularly unhelpful offer).
The United States needs help reopening the Strait of Hormuz now against the desires and efforts of the Iranian religious dictatorship. Its ability to cause a worldwide economic crisis by cutting off the 20 percent global oil is Iran’s last great bargaining chip.
With control of the Strait, virtually every country except the United States and Israel will get in line to appease the Iranian dictatorship and cut some kind of deal so they can get cheaper oil than their neighbors.
Further, there are things the Europeans could help us with (and through us the whole world). We need mine sweepers, munitions, and long loiter drones with kill capabilities. We need more manpower in small ships that can get in close and genuinely stop the smaller vessels and autonomous vehicles — including smart mines the Iranians use to try to control the Strait and the Persian Gulf.
The United States Navy is really designed as a deep-water Navy that can dominate the oceans. It is exactly the model Alfred Thayer Mahan made famous in his series of books on the influence of sea power on history. In the Mahan model, if your navy can defeat any other navy, then you acquire all the advantages of controlling seaborne commerce and denying your adversary the ability to sustain their merchant and fishing fleets.
The United States Navy is a classic big ship navy. It has enormous aircraft carriers which no other country in the world can match. It relies on brilliant but expensive nuclear submarines. Surface warships are designed to protect the carriers (which always operate within a battle group and never on their own).
By way of emphasizing European weakness, the Royal Navy of Great Britain, which had been the dominant seagoing force for 200 years, has two small aircraft carriers. At present both are getting overhauled and not capable of helping in the Persian Gulf.
Just as Europeans can’t really manage the Persian Gulf and the Iranian dictatorship on their own, they also could not possibly contain Putin and the Russian dictatorship without our help. If you exclude Turkey (which under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has become increasingly authoritarian and unreliable) there are no large European militaries capable of competing on the battlefield with the Russians. Furthermore, the total size of the European nuclear arsenal is irrelevant compared to the approximately 6,000 nuclear weapons Putin still has under his control.
An effort to create serious European military capability would require a fundamental shift from all Europe’s small national militaries, each with their own bureaucracy and duplication of capabilities. It is impossible to imagine this happening any time soon.
The simple fact is the United States remains the indispensable nation if you want to contain the dictatorships. No matter how many press conferences and meetings the Europeans have, this is not going to change for a generation.
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Excellent note , your diagnosis is solid — the US-Europe productivity gap, the tech-scale gap, and Europe's defense underinvestment are real and well documented. Good assesment on the US Navy is built for blue-water dominance and genuinely needs the small-ship, minesweeper, and loitering-drone capabilities Europe could supply.
Europe has "no serious strategy" ignores ReArm Europe, Germany's fiscal shift, and Poland's spending. Under the current leadership EU is quite in trouble. Treating "Europe" as a single weak actor hides the real divergence between frontline states and the softer south. Unless that Germany leads the agenda no changes. Most of Goverment agencies are run by reprresentatives of small states for the purpose of political consensus , not a driven one. And blaming the tech gap on culture dresses opinion up as diagnosis — capital market fragmentation and pension structure explain more than "Europeans don't like change." They prefer to promote social policies than doing what it is required. They are still unde Dei and woke agendas across the economy. Thanks