Victor Davis Hanson: Europe Is Failing, and America Should Pay Attention

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Welcome to The Daily Signal Podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now without further ado, here's today's take.

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**Victor Davis Hanson** (2:00)
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Europe is upset. They're very angry. They're always angry, but the last two weeks, they seem to be particularly angry. There are reports that their winter EU summit, they voiced extreme anger at the US in general and Donald Trump in particular. We know the causes. They were angry that tariffs were applied to them. They didn't mention that they were running a huge trade surplus with the United States. They were angry of Trump's chauvinistic and bombastic talk about annexing Greenland.
Bombastic though it was, we had a point, didn't we, that this is a critical piece of real estate in North America that is a colony of distant Denmark and which was lost to Denmark in World War II, which was restored by the United States and handed back over to Denmark because it could not protect the strategic real estate in World War II. During the Cold War, we protected it, had bases there, and now we are the only power strong enough to prevent Chinese and Russian infiltration in there. So there was a both sides argument to that controversy. They're very angry because Donald Trump is going to pull troops out of NATO. Not a lot, just a few, and maybe some air wings and redeploy them not to the United States, but to the Pacific and Asia where he feels the existential threat is not Russia, but China.
So why are they so angry?
The obvious reasons are that the United States has shouldered about 16 to 20 percent of the actual NATO budget, but when you look at overhead, logistics, intelligence, the nuclear deterrent, it's more like 50 percent. We're going to be spending a trillion and a half per year, and Europe all together won't get close to that number. Their argument is that we are now facing Russia, and you don't understand that Russia may go into the Baltic States, it may go into Poland. We understand that. We have over 70,000 troops there, and they remain under the American nuclear shield, and Trump has already explained to Putin that going into Europe in any place, sector, any time, would be a red line. But there's deeper causes why they're angry. These are just approximate causes. We saw during the World Cup both good and bad parts of Europe vis-à-vis us. The people who actually went to the various games in the middle of the country met people in Kansas and Missouri and the South, and rural America, suburban America, agrarian America, and they liked them. They were very shocked that they liked them. They were hospitable, they were generous, they were kind, they were modest, and they had basically bought into the bicoastal elites characterization of these people as deplorables, clingers, irredeemables, quote Biden, garbage, trash, chumps. But once they saw them, they liked them a great deal. And at the same time, they were glorifying their win over us, Brussels was, and making fun of Trump, of course, the way he dances and his intervention, supposedly, to get a player reinstated. So the old anti-Americanism resurfaced. But these deeper causes are, we have to give them some credit. I mean, for 500 years, from roughly 1500 to, I don't know, take an arbitrary date, 1940, they almost ran the world. London was the financial capital of the world. Paris was the cultural capital of the world. The US was an upstart. It wasn't supposed to work. The people who came from Europe that founded the United States were not their aristocracy, not their plutocracy. They were the poor and the downcast. And so, theoretically, Europe believed that, in an American society, they were getting rid of their worst people.