“A beleaguered continent is rallying to meet the menace of Russia and threats from Washington” - a good piece on Europe today.  T

The Wall Street Journal

Don’t Write Off Europe Just Yet

The beleaguered continent is rallying to meet the menace of Russia and threats from Washington.

By Brendan Simms

March 14, 2025 1:06 pm ET

It is hard to exaggerate the shock that has been administered to Europe over the past month. First, there was Vice President JD Vance’s provocative speech at the Munich Security Conference. What offended the delegates wasn’t Vance’s remarks about the continent’s failure to make proper provision for its own defense. They had expected that and agreed with the rebuke.

What shocked Europeans was the open contempt that the American vice president expressed for Europe and its democracy and the implication that it didn’t deserve to be defended. They were baffled by his suggestion that Europe’s (undoubted) internal problems with respect to migration, free speech and judicial interference in the democratic process were a greater threat to its security than Russian expansionism.

Then there was the public browbeating of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office, where Donald Trump and the vice president tried to humiliate the leader of a brave country under attack from a much stronger aggressor. This was followed soon after by the suspension of U.S. military aid and intelligence cooperation with Ukraine. For good measure, Trump asserted that the European Union had been established to “screw” America.

All of this comes against the backdrop of Europe being assaulted from without by a resurgent Russia—and not just in Ukraine. To the north, Russia is menacing Finland and trolling the Baltic states by trying to subvert their substantial Russian minorities and probing their cyber defenses. Moscow is also engaged in sustained “hybrid warfare” against societies and governments across the continent by using social media manipulation to widen fissures over migration and the culture wars.

As the former Belgian prime minister and European Council president Herman Van Rompuy put it this week, the continent has its “back to the wall, an abyss on both sides and a knife to its throat.”

Some of the American impatience with Europe is perfectly justified. It is unsustainable, as the former German chancellor Angela Merkel pointed out more than a decade ago, for a continent that has 7% of the world’s population and 25% of its GDP to account for half of global welfare spending, and the figures have become even more lopsided since then. Moreover, as the Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk stated last week, it is unreasonable to expect 300 million Americans to defend 500 million Europeans against 140 million Russians.

For all the trauma of recent weeks, however, the crisis has had a notably positive effect. Europe has begun to rally. The continent was distressed and revolted by the treatment meted out to Zelensky in Washington. It is now mobilizing, both psychologically and materially. After a decade in which the European flag was prominent in Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia but less so in the EU itself, at least in civil society, it will be displayed in large numbers at a planned “Rally for Europe” in Rome this weekend.

More important, recent events have precipitated not only an unprecedented degree of European strategic cooperation but also exceptional levels of additional funds for defense running into hundreds of billions of dollars. Europe is also finally addressing its deficit in nuclear weaponry, the only category in which it is currently completely overmatched by Russia. The United Kingdom, Germany and France combined have not only a far greater GDP than Moscow but also spend much more on defense. If you add in the rest of Europe, especially the highly prepared Finns and Poles, democratic Europe is potentially more than a match for Russia.

Europe will soon be able to stand up for itself, and such assertiveness is long overdue. The continent is the birthplace of the West, not only of the Enlightenment but also of parliamentary democracy. It is also, for better or for worse, the cradle of the prevailing North American civilization. The Federalist Papers, the most profound explanation of the American experiment in self-government, are in many ways a respectful dialogue of the Founding Fathers with European history.

Today’s Europe also possesses an astonishing capacity for innovation and foresight. Just before Christmas I visited Estonia and learned about how an entire society is preparing for the possibility of a Russian attack. Not only is the tech sector there supplying the Ukrainians with sophisticated equipment, Estonia’s best minds are thinking about how to maintain the nation if it is once again overrun as it was in 1940. A virtual registry, for example, will ensure that properties cannot be illegally transferred to new owners.

Europe is still one of the best places in the world to bring up children in livable cities. There is nowhere else in the world with such historical, linguistic and cultural diversity in such a relatively small space. Yet for all the variety, Europeans also enjoy an essential unity, which once came from their shared roots in Christendom and now rests on a set of common values. Despite the remarks of JD Vance and others on the MAGA right, who seem to see only fragmentation and cultural despair, most Europeans believe in hard work, tolerance and fair play, at home and abroad. Migrants from far and near (including the U.S.) want to come to this Europe.

This is the Europe that Ukraine has made such sacrifices to join. When I went to Kyiv for the third anniversary of the full-scale invasion two weeks ago, I found my interlocutors grim but determined to escape the Russian orbit and embrace Europe. They were immensely buoyed by the arrival of almost the entire European Commission in their capital city to show solidarity.

The Ukrainians are not naive. They know of Europe’s dark sides, which are today personified by the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. As Roman Schwarzman, a Holocaust survivor told us in Kyiv after Russian missiles had destroyed his apartment in Odessa: “Hitler tried to kill me because I was Jewish. Now Putin wants to kill me because I am Ukrainian.”

Don’t write off the old continent, just yet. It has the capacity not merely to rally to its own defense, albeit slowly, but also to serve as an example to others. As the U.S. appears to be heading away from its longstanding commitment to the defense of security and democracy on the other side of the Atlantic, Europe could be poised to take up its mantle as a force for good in the world.

Brendan Simms is a professor of international relations and director of the Centre for Geopolitics at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of “Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, from 1453 to the Present.”

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Appeared in the March 15, 2025, print edition as 'Don’t Write Off Europe Just Yet'.

https://www.wsj.com/world/europe/dont-write-off-europe-just-yet-9951eaf0