Europe’s Vain Hopes of Imperial Grandeur
As Washington scales down its US defense commitment to Europe, many of the continent’s leaders are talking of making the EU a military superpower. It’s an unrealistic prospect, but it risks becoming the key focus of EU spending.
French soldiers prepare to leave the General Thomas d’Aquin Ouattara military camp in Port-Bouet, Abidjan, on February 20, 2025. (Issouf Sanogo / AFP via Getty Images)
There are decades when weeks happen and weeks when decades happen, goes an aphorism misattributed to Vladimir Lenin.
The fortnight between J. D. Vance’s broadside against Europe at the Munich Security Conference, and Vance and Donald Trump’s vicious upbraiding of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office feels more like the latter.
Washington threatens to light a bonfire under the postwar Western alliance, and rarely has an empire begun torching the structures that sustain its power with such glee.
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