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The map above is a depiction of The Deluge, a historical event in which the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth — which had been a major European power — was defeated and destroyed under the combined assaults of Russia and Sweden in the 1600s. After having its power broken, Poland was carved up in the 1700s and subjugated by Russia, Prussia, and Austria. It took more than two centuries, until the fall of communism in 1991, for Poland to reemerge as a strong, truly independent country.
The Deluge shows that power and independence are not permanent. If you are surrounded by hostile powers, and if you don’t have the ability to guard yourself against those powers, no amount of historical greatness can save you from being subjugated. This is an important lesson for Europeans to remember right now, as they find their region under siege from Russia, China, and the United States all at once.
The United States no longer cares about the European project
Why would America care about Europe at all? For most of our history, we didn’t. In the 19th century, the U.S. viewed European countries as dangerous rivals. In the early 20th century, Americans prided themselves on not getting involved in European affairs, and were incensed at their government for dragging them into World War 1. Only after World War 2 did Americans start caring about Europe, and we did so for three reasons:
West Europe was a bulwark against Soviet communism.
Europe was a key trading partner.
Many Americans came to value their ancestral ties to Europe.
The first of these reasons vanished in 1991. Europe is still a bulwark against Russia, but Americans no longer feel threatened by Russia. Russian power is far less than what it once was, and Russia’s rightist ideology does not threaten the rightists who now rule America.
As for communism, many (most?) Americans now believe that European countries are socialist. When American conservatives ask where in the world socialism has succeeded, American progressives will always reply “Europe” or “Scandinavia”. Whether Europe or Scandinavia is actually socialist is irrelevant; Americans have come to see it that way.
Europe is still an important trading partner. But Trump and the other people now in charge of the U.S. do not understand trade at all. They think about trade entirely in terms of the net trade balance, rather than in terms of total U.S. exports. Trump & co. don’t care that America sells $650 billion a year to Europe; the fact that Europe sells $800 billion a year to America means that Trump & co. think America is “losing” and would benefit from a cutoff of trade.
Remember that the U.S. is an unusually closed-off, self-sufficient economy, so Americans in general don’t think too hard about trade or try to understand why it’s valuable. Also, the people running now the country are especially ignorant about economic matters.
As for civilizational ties, this is the reason Trump and the MAGA movement have turned so strongly against Europe. The American right values Europe because they think of it as a White Christian homeland — the source and font of Western civilization. Here’s a post I wrote about that earlier this year:
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I wrote:
in the American mind, Europe stood across the sea as a place of timeless homogeneity, where the native white population had always been and would always remain…In the mind of many Americans, Europe thus stood as both a refuge and a reservoir. America itself was a rough, contested frontier, but Europe would always be white and Christian. If you ever felt the need to live around a bunch of white people of Christian heritage, you could always go “back”, but for most that wasn’t necessary — just knowing that the Old World was somewhere out there was enough.5
I think Europeans may underestimate how much this perception motivated America’s participation in the Transatlantic Alliance during the Cold War…[T]o conservative Americans in the 20th century — the type of people who joined the John Birch Society — the Cold War was about preserving Christendom from the threat of godless communism.
Anyway, in the 2010s, it dawned on those Americans that this hallowed image of Europe was no longer accurate. With their working population dwindling, European countries took in millions of Muslim refugees and other immigrants from the Middle East and Central and South Asia — many of whom didn’t assimilate nearly as well as their peers in the U.S. You’d hear people say things like “Paris isn’t Paris anymore.”6…At the same time, Europe had long since abandoned its traditional Christian values…
To Americans who valued the idea of America and Europe as part of a single Western civilization, this realization was catastrophic. Suddenly European countries — and the Anglosphere countries of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — felt like they had left the club…
America’s rightists…want to know that someone, somewhere, is out there preserving an indigenous homeland for their identity groups. And that “someone” has to be Europe and the Anglosphere.
This isn’t a new attitude, either. Remember that in order to persuade a reluctant America to join World War 1, the U.S. government had to depict Germany as an ape abducting a white woman!