The most important skill in European politics is the ability to pretend that all is well. In London, Paris, Berlin and a dozen other capitals, the order of the day is continuing the series of polite lies that exculpate a generation of politicians from bearing responsibility for their failures.
Things that intrude on this bubble – videos of protests circulating online, the views of the electorate, writers who draw attention to the catastrophic consequences of a toxic combination of welfarism and open borders – are censored, ignored or threatened with legal action.
Donald Trump’s occasional forays into European affairs have much the same effect on the political class as a stick of dynamite chucked into a lake does on fish. His comments are followed by floundering, gasping, and goggle-eyed outrage. They are not met with actual rebuttal.
With Europe engaged in a project of total self-delusion, it has fallen to the American president to tell us the truths we are unwilling to tell ourselves. For all Mr Trump’s failings, he is rarely accused of being insufficiently blunt. And on Europe, he has a regrettable tendency to be correct.
While our politicians wring their hands over vast numbers of economic migrants abusing an outdated asylum system, attempting to square the circle of an open borders approach to migration, generous welfare states, and hopelessly outdated laws and treaties, Mr Trump is free to state what he sees: “You better get your act together or you’re not going to have Europe anymore.”
It is a view that will resonate with voters across the continent. The great weakening of Europe’s borders has been unfolding for a decade now, since German chancellor Angela Merkel crumpled when confronted with a crying child and attempted to reshape her country around the slogan “wir schaffen das”: “we can do this”. Political will, however, was not sufficient to change reality on its own. The cultural costs have not been negligible. Nor have the economic consequences, particularly alongside other flawed policies.
The costs of net zero continue to mount, with politicians seemingly eager to dismantle Europe’s industrial base in a fit of moral fervour. When Mr Trump tells Sir Keir Starmer that Britain should go against this consensus and drill for the oil in the North Sea, or objects to the “detrimental” effect of windfarms on the “beauty of Scotland”, he is articulating the views of millions of British voters. That they are unpopular in Westminster means that these criticisms are frequently ignored or overruled. It does not mean that they are untrue.
Indeed, it is often the truth of Mr Trump’s statements that triggers the most furious backlash against them. When he says Europeans risk “losing their wonderful right to freedom of speech”, or his vice-president J D Vance criticises “digital censorship”, the criticisms sting because they are clearly correct, and all the more so contrasted against attempts to rebut them.
When the French mission to the UN asserted that “in Europe, one is free to speak, not free to spread illegal content” – a statement that would have been just as true of the Soviet Union – the official State Department account responded by pointing out the only true effect was to protect Europe’s “leaders from their own people”. It is hard to disagree with this sentiment.
It is difficult, too, to disagree with Trump’s blunt statement that recognising a Palestinian state “doesn’t matter”. French president Emmanuel Macron has declared that France will join Spain and Ireland in this policy. As Mr Trump says, however, it is a statement that “doesn’t carry weight”, and is “not going to change anything”.
In this, it is a perfect summary of Europe’s travails. Political leaders who have squandered the legacies they were handed still behave as if the world hangs upon their word, even as events overtake them. Gesture policies like state recognition are thrown out without any thought as to their actual effect or practicality. What does it mean to recognise a Palestinian state in an area controlled by Hamas?
How is this policy meant to assist in quelling the fanatical opposition amongst Palestinian elites to any Jewish state in the Middle East, or for that matter the presence of any other minority? In what sense is rewarding Hamas’s butchering and raping of Israeli civilians meant to have any effect other than prolonging this bloody conflict?
Mr Trump is not always right. His protectionist trade policy is a catastrophic misstep. He was similarly disastrously wrong on Ukraine, and it is by good fortune rather than design that his ham-fisted attempts to force Kyiv into a terrible deal failed. There, Europe’s leaders were for once in the right. The difference is that Mr Trump appears to have realised the error of his ways, and shifted his policies accordingly.
To date, this has only once occurred in the other direction. It is clearly for the good that Europe is coming round to Mr Trump’s views on defence, with Nato pledging to raise defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP after pressure from the White House, implicitly affirming the truth of his statement that the continent had been “freeloading”.
This was not cheap but it was necessary. We must now hope that similar reversals will follow in other fields, before irreparable damage is done.
