The U.S. Is Bullying Europe Like Never Before
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
- we want to but cannot because we could not project that the country which convinced us to embrace our current political and economic system would abandon it and punish us for following
- saying the world is dog eat dog is a self fulfilling prophecy; after the 20th century in Europe was characterised by war, the post-war federation and economic cooperation has made intra European bloc war impossible. This is rightly considered a success in Europe, and explains why we tend not to see world matters as zero-sum. American education teaches war in a transactional economic way that does not resonate with our collective imagination, due to our own scars from war
It is easy (and partly fair) to blame the European bloc for a lack of organisation and foresight but in fairness, it was hard to imagine the US govt would act in a form of economic self-sabotage as a means of political pressure. And deterrents and preparation for the possible are not free. Hindsight is not an answer.
The EU has lagged the US in economic dynamism (link below). This deficit drives the inability to project economic or military power, forcing the EU rely on the US to support its foreign policy objectives in Ukraine - a conflict considerably more relevant to the EU than to the US.
Couple that with unaffordable, state-funded entitlements, and massive immigration significantly burdening (some) exchequers, and you end up with active urban conflicts in major EU cities, forcing a diversion of resources, and even more dependence on US military support.
None of this comes for free.
And Applebaum, playing the role of a wide-eyed ingenue, claims that the EU is "being bullied", instead of presenting it as the inevitable result of decades-long unwise, failing stances taken by the bloc.
A more interesting question is whether the current political, economic, and social model of the EU is compatible with the desire to be a major global power.
https://nextbigteng.substack.com/p/american-vs-european-star...
We have serious issues like housing shortages but if we kicked out all the immigrants (which we shouldn't because they are helping our economy by doing jobs we don't like!) we still would have that problem, just a few percent less. This is the fallacy in that narrative.
And life isn't all about who has the most money, that's a US-Centric view. The poorer countries in Europe are better places to live at the moment and cost of life is lower there too. Besides, those 'entitlements' really add to our quality of life. We don't have to worry about going bankrupt over a medical issue. That's much more important in my life than being able to buy a new iPhone every year and pollute the world.
It's very telling of the US to always consider everything some kind of race or competition. Whereas we're not trying to win but to live together. Really if I make enough money to live comfortably without having to waste all my life at the office I'm doing well. Life is a balance of work and personal life. The US has never had this kind of balance. Everyone's in a race to make it 'to the top' but most people never do. I hear of people in the American big cities having to take side jobs because cost of living is so high. Our American-centric HR is always pushing me to 'challenge my career path' and move up into management but I would utterly fail there due to just not having those skills and talents (Peter principle). I'm just happy being a top technical expert for the rest of my life. I would detest being a manager and I would suck at it.
If anything Europe is getting too American. Too few people are holding too much of the wealth, this is why people are protesting.
Restricting immigration to those with skills the country requires at the time is sensible policy. Allowing millions into the country in an orgy of performative empathy with no plan for integration or converting them into productive members of society isn't.
My point is that there is a cost associated with this, and the EU is paying it in spades. The money spent addressing these issues comes at the expense of investment in things that make the country more innovative (education, trades, streamlined regulatory structures...), or have a stronger defensive posture.
Self-evidently, life isn't exclusively about WHO has the money. Having options, however, IS exclusively the result of who has the money. When the EU have restricted their options through these voluntary and unwise choices, they have to depend on someone else's help. That someone is going to want their pound of flesh.
"Fascist" seems a little over the top to describe these views.
You’re committing a fallacy of association and then attributing that fallacy to the parent comment. Not great.
“Fascists blame everything on immigrants...” is the logical equivalent of what they said.
> We don't have a huge immigration problem. The immigrants are blamed for everything by the fascists, just like in America.
What do you think the word blame means
There has been one incident during the Syrian war where Angela Merkel said "wir schaffen das" but there was no coordinated grant of immigration rights in any way. And these were mostly legitimate refugees from the Syrian war.
Europe hasn't forgotten that many of us once were refugees not too long ago.
It's a problem because the right-wing keep blowing it out of proportion, but it's only based on racist underbelly feelings.
My Bangladeshi parents were in London in 2023 and they were shocked by the number of immigrants. My mom was very upset because it blew up the idea that the immigrants would act and talk exactly like British people who just happened to be less sensitive to the sun. They’re retaining their differences, they’re participating in politics in ethnic blocs, they’re raising their kids with their own culture and values. It’s the opposite of what her generation had hoped for—London becoming more like Dhaka instead of Dhaka becoming more like London. This is because you’re letting them in too fast, in groups that are too large.
You’re also letting in the wrong kind of immigrants. You want immigrants who dislike their home countries and want to leave and westernize. You don’t want to take refugees, who are generally people who are forced by external circumstances rather than internal motivation to leave their homelands.
Maybe they're posting about it on the Costa de Sol though?
Surreal comment. Tourist: "There are so many tourists here"
> it blew up the idea that the immigrants would act and talk exactly like British people who just happened to be less sensitive to the sun.
Was that ever a requirement for immigration?
Of course they're not going to 'act and talk exactly like British people'.
> You’re also letting in the wrong kind of immigrants.
Yes, South African racists are a much better demographic.
> You don’t want to take refugees, who are generally people who are forced by external circumstances rather than internal motivation to leave their homelands.
As a grandson of people who were at some point refugees: this is utterly despicable.
Yes, that’s how immigration was sold and it’s the pillar of the moral case for it. The pitch was that differences were purely superficial—like actors wearing different costumes at Disney World—such that it would be irrational to have any feelings or judgment of them. Maybe they’ll like to eat curry instead of beans on toast. But it would be irrational to judge someone just because they eat curry—many British people eat curry too!
This concept that the differences are superficial such that judgment would be irrational was central to the moral case. If immigrants are more than superficially different in terms of social, cultural, and civic thoughts and behavior, then it’s rational to oppose immigration purely on those terms. Judging superficial differences is irrational, but judging substantive differences is rational. You can judge whether, say, different attitudes towards extended family are better or worse for civic life in a democracy, and whether you want to participate in the same democracy with more people who have different attitudes than your own.
It did not appear from your comment that this was a person in the west socialized to think like that but another immigrant who thought like that. Which makes it a completely irrational response. The fact that they weren't tolerant themselves of others like themselves is what makes it utterly surreal.
If there is one thing I'm proud of for NL (and I can't speak for the UK, I haven't spent enough time there but I have spent enough time in Canada to have some idea of how things work there) then it is that for the most part people here get along. My kids have friends across all cultural groups here and they visit there and those kids visit here. Never a single issue.
The only issues that we do still have is a lot of latent racism in small towns and concentrations of crime (across all cultures, including those lily white Dutch) related to drugs and such. The people that want to blow this out of proportion are the ones on the far right, typically their main reason for their stance is that they are afraid that new entrants are going to compete with them for social security. And to some extent they have a point.
But refugees should always be permitted to flee from wars, famine, natural disasters and whatever else can happen to people outside of their control.
The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration, which is just false. For example, children of two foreign born residents are 5 times more likely to be criminals than children of two native Dutch people. The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.
> The way you phrase it suggests that the crime problem is independent of immigration
Not really. It’s still possible to “blow this out of proportion” even if the distribution does not factor along immigration status.
> The people have every rational reason to oppose immigration if such a rise in criminality is the outcome.
It’s not rational to respond to a 5x prevalence (simply using your figure for the sake of argument, and assuming that future immigrants are similar to past ones) as if it were 10x or 100x, and that seems closer to jacquesm’s point.
But I think the Netherlands is taking too much credit for being tolerant. It's not anymore. It was in the late 90s but I'm the 2000s things changed and lately it's particularly racist and intolerant. Not just against immigrants but also LGBT minorities especially trans people. I find the so called 'funny' memes from the people I still know there despicable. And I've already discommunicated the worst ones in this regard. Lately even people who were formerly nice have become rabid racists.
And in a recent election the extreme right won more than a third of the votes.
Where I live in Spain it's honestly a lot more tolerant. Although even here the extreme right are on the rise, unfortunately.
Another problem is that the rise of social media has given bigots the world over a large enough echo chamber that they feel supported, even though their direct environment does not support them.
> Lately even people who were formerly nice have become rabid racists.
This is not something I have seen yet but that could be luck of the draw.
> And in a recent election the extreme right won more than a third of the votes.
Indeed they did. But: that percentage wasn't all that different in previous years overall, if you add up the various splinter groups. They were just less vocal and they did not have international ties the way they do today. This is an extremely dangerous development.
> Where I live in Spain it's honestly a lot more tolerant.
I believe you.
> Although even here the extreme right are on the rise, unfortunately.
Yes, it is like a cyclic thing that is driven by the loss of lessons learned from the past. NL is in a particularly difficult spot here with our history in Surinam, former dutch Indonesia and the slave trade. We've done some very ugly things and a lot of that required de-humanization of other people to a degree that it still stains our culture in a very significant way.
Lots and lots of crimes were committed, lots of mistakes were made. It will take many generations to come to some kind of new equilibrium. It certainly won't happen in my lifetime, and probably not in my kids' lifetimes either.
I don’t see a way around this and Europe is suffering because they don’t seem to want to accept this reality.
We just have a problem with an aging demographic but this is a temporary problem.
Unless we nuke the pension systems in Europe it's not a temporary problem, but rather one for the next 15-20 years.
Everyone saw this coming decades ago. Immigration has been the only serious solution that has been proposed so far. Unfortunately many European countries are not very attractive to those immigrants who can afford to choose.
Japan has historically restricted immigration into what was a dynamic economy, which stagnated over time.
Have you been to Appalachia? Any part of the rural south? Qualitatively poverty in the US is shameful even compared to rural China. You are living in a spreadsheet world, not the real world. Is there any value to that GDP number without raising the standards of living of Americans?
The financial crisis in France and Italy, and the general societal unrest everywhere has not just come out of nowhere. Europe is just simply not competitive in the industries of the next 50 years and that is very unsettling to people.
America has always used the dollar monopoly + international treaties + sanctions, etc, as wrench to beat other countries into submission to expand their power.
The only reason the US and Europe collaborated and traded so much post WW2 was that the New Dealers in power wanted to avoid a Greate Depression at all costs in America. They had factories with a tremendous productive capacity but not enough domestic demand. So they needed countries to offload their extra goods to (Europe).
Bretton Woods however, ended. In the 1970s Europe was told by the US "the dollar is our currency but it is now your problem". Europe had relied on fixed exchange rates for its industry and trade, but America decided they wanted to kneecap the Japanese and German competition due to America's changing economic conditions.
Europe also played itself into economic irrelevance by not firewalling itself from American Big Tech. For every digital purchase they pay a 30% rent to America. They are now vassals whose governments can be shut down at the press of an American button.
Compound that with their disastrous program of austery post 2008 crash. The Euro crisis was solved by bailing out the banks while using the average person's money to back it up. The problem being that the banks took the money, gave it to big industry, big industry looked out the window and saw struggling people, and decided to not invest. Who would invest when the people have no money to buy your goods? So Europe is now behind economically as well and no longer as competitive on international markets as they used to be.
The solution for Europe is to recognize that they have always been bullied by America. This was never a marriage of equals. They need to take the reigns, invest massively in new technology, maybe with some protectionism to allow homegrown software industries, and stride forward on their own path.
Part of the problem is that the US has always opposed us having our own nuclear deterrent. They've always opposed France and have hamstrung the UK's options. In return the US promised to take care of this for us but we can't count on that anymore so I totally support building this out.
France has nukes.
France only has one sub guaranteed to be at sea at any one time. That's not a credible deterrent, one torpedo and it's gone.
We need to build that out to be much more resilient against counterattack.
This is why several countries are partnering with France now too build this out.
And what we need too is stronger NGO organisations like the UN and ICC. To avoid military conflict in the first place.
In case of a nuclear attack there is no time to build stuff obviously. A deterrent needs to be ready 24/7.
And bombers only really work when aerial supremacy has already been achieved. The US still operates some but constant flights were dropped in the 60s like chrome dome.
For Europe to be completely independent from the US for its deterrent (and thus not being able to be blackmailed by Trump) we'll need our own ICBM platform and more subs.
https://youtu.be/821R0lGUL6A?si=TKfi83pBlcMEqQg4&t=366
Europeans are genocidal lunatics. There were incidents of ethnic cleansing as late as the early 2000s. Telling countries like germany to rearm is lunacy
On the one hand, there are only politicians available in two kinds: those who insist on blindly glazing the US regardless of the harm it does to Europe and those who insist on blindly glazing the Russia/China/Iran axis regardless of the harm it does to Europe. All of them occasionally implement one-off military spending programs while permitting long term trends of worse military, energy, machine tools, infrastructure, mining, smelting and reserve readiness spending.
In Italy, Spain, Austria, Romania, Sweden and Britain (the six cases I'm familiar with, three from business travel, one from holidaying and two from deep interest) the occasional politician (one person per country per 3-5 years) who does want Europe to have independent expeditionary military partnering with Africa and the Middle East, totally disconnected from either superpower bloc and their goods, services, politics and ideologies is ridiculed up until they say something negative about [emotional support ethnostate of either bloc, they both have them], at which point they are dealt with through lawfare, debanking, travel bans and intimidation of their families.
.
On the other hand, it is entirely predictable that thoughts of military self-determination are taboo given the historical political economy of Europe. Sovereignty in Europe was dismantled by the US and Russia over the 20th century, the 1944 conferences being the most irreversible moment, and it can only recover if they both implode, not just one. Every party system Europe has relies on sovereignty backstopped externally and neither of the superpower blocs reneging on their backstop offers are imploding at the present time.
Adapting, avoiding being squeezed, these are the loser options of a bully victim whining that they aren't being left alone. Keeping to the metaphor of a bully, you're only worth leaving alone the minute you die and not a moment before, and the world is run by bullies. Using a more unsanitised and true metaphor, dogs and wolves get a dopamine-reward signal in their ventral striatum when they hear the prey animal in their jaws squeal.
The problem with partisan politics is that no part of it is able to admit that both 90% of Al Jazeera and 90% of Radio Free Asia are the unvarnished truth at the same time.
Capitalists set the world on fire to get the biggest mansion on the moon.
The US is more powerful in relation to the rest of the globe than it has been at any other point since the late 1990s. In terms of foes China is the new USSR for the US, a gigantic adversary that is considered at every move. China is spurring the US into a more competitive mode, which is ideal for not becoming fully lethargic.
War with Russia does not mean nuclear war with Russia. As we can clearly see from what Ukraine is doing to Moscow et al.
Also, an aggressive stance in fighting Russia, would have caught them early on when their military was entirely a disaster. The beating would have been an epic humiliation. Instead Russia has spent years re-learning how to wage war, which is not what you actually want.
What mechanism gives the US the power to tell Russian planes where they can and cannot fly? The US cannot simply mark an area on a map. It would have to, at a minimum, deploy a series of surface-to-air missile sites to actually shoot down those planes that violated the map.
It's anything but straightforward.
Ukraine is about 800 miles east-west and 550 north-south; Rammstein's another 800 miles from Kyiv. At Mach 1.2, you're talking about an hour to get to Ukraine and another hour to get to the eastern extent of it, plus the time it takes to go to an in-flight refuelling aircraft multiple times along the way.
It'd be equivalent to trying to establish a no-fly over the whole of Texas, basing out of Chicago, while there are SAM sites in Mexico and California waiting to shoot you out of the sky and aircraft launching missiles from within Mexico with the chance of starting WW3 if you retaliate.
The number of aircraft you'd need would be massive - not just fighters, but AWACS, tankers, search and rescue, you name it. You'd have to have coverage all the way down whatever corridor you were using to get aircraft in and out of the area too.
Now sure, you could (instead of scrambling to intercept) fly combat air patrols over Ukraine and shoot down anything that comes in which might reduce the time-to-intercept to something more acceptable. You still have to cover a massive amount of airspace though!
To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk. It would almost certainly result in a couple fighter planes being shot down.
> To be clear, I'm not saying it would be politically easy or low risk.
Agreed, I think the biggest issue is the political and strategic risk. In the early days of the war, there was a lot of "it worked for Iraq, just set up a no-fly" chat though.
Declaring a no fly zone would have achieved nothing. Sending air forces to enforce it would have done something. But what happens if American fighter jets engage Russians over Ukraine, while Russian air defenses support their air forces from their side of the border? Would Americans let Russians launch SAMs with impunity, or would they invade Russia, showing the world that Putin's justification for the war was in fact correct?
Maybe Putin would have chickened out when American jets show up, but you can't know that for sure. Which means you should probably decide in advance you far you are willing to escalate before you chicken out yourself.
Blocking the sale of Russian oil forced the EU to purchase US oil at a premium. Not conducive to ending the war from the US perspective.
Continued combat in Ukraine requires the purchase of US armament. Not conducive to ending the war from the US perspective.
The EU being a supplicant strengthened the US hand in trade negotiations. Not conducive to ending the war from the US perspective.
Probably much more that we don't know about driving the current situation.
But I could if I wanted.
The wars have been very profitable for certain people who planned for it.
> Trump aims to increase US military spending to $1.5 trillion by 2027
> EU member states' defence expenditure sharply increased between 2021 and 2026. In 2025, member states' defence expenditure reached €418 billion, rising for the 11th consecutive year. In 2026, it is expected to reach an estimated €454 billion. This means that defence expenditure has increased by 75.3% compared with 2021.
EU defense spending is a tiny fraction of their total spending so I'm not sure what your point is there.
Most events have some people who benefit and others who are hurt but that doesnt suggest that the people who benefit have a hand in starting those events. There needs to be some actual evidence for that to even be considered.
"In effect, the administration is promoting European rearmament and European defense cooperation while simultaneously promoting politicians who oppose rearmament or defense cooperation."
And now Trump's cut all the aid so Europe + Ukraine is having to deal with putting it out.