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To my friends in Europe, I want to extend an apology—and an urgent warning.
I am profoundly sorry that Americans are failing you in this dangerous and difficult time, after you have stood with us over so many years. I didn’t vote for this, I didn’t want it, I fought against it. But I am an American, and this is my country’s choice and its policy—and I am heartily ashamed of it.
Now the warning: Europe needs to become one of the great powers of the world, and do it fast—or you will get carved up by them.
The carving has already started. Like colonial rulers sitting down at a table to draw up the borders of some distant continent, leaders of the US and Russia are sitting at a table in Saudi Arabia disposing of your lives and futures without your involvement or permission.
Many of us had worried that this negotiation would look like the Munich conference of 1938. It is looking more like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. It’s not appeasement, it’s an alliance.
America is getting ready to sell you out, in the most literal sense. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio spoke about “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically on issues of common interest and, frankly, economically.” We have some specific ideas about what those economic opportunities are. Russian representative Kirill Dimitriev spoke of Western oil companies returning to Russia. The American government has also presented Ukraine with a contract granting the United States half of Ukraine’s revenues from mining and oil, as well as from ports and other infrastructure, with nothing promised in return. A Ukrainian official dismissed it as “a colonial agreement.”
That’s what gives this the aspect of Molotov and Ribbentrop. It looks like an agreement to divide up Ukraine, for domination and looting, the way the Soviets and Germans divided Poland in 1939. A British analyst described it as “not peace talks, not negotiations, but a business meeting—a business meeting between the representatives of two bosses who want to decide how best to share the spoils of war.”
This is also the meaning of Trump’s repeated, seemingly senile rantings about buying or seizing Greenland. While he plans to abandon much of Europe to Russia, he wants to carve off a large chunk of Danish territory. Like Vladimir Putin, he sees this as the natural right of a great power over the neighbors it dominates.
The more substantive way in which the US intends to carve up Europe was announced by J.D. Vance’s speech at Munich, in which he sought to break down Germany’s firewall against the return of fascism and put a stop to any European efforts to counter propaganda and subversion directed by Russia. The whole speech was a vast Orwellian contradiction in which authoritarian politics and propaganda campaigns by a hostile government are afforded the label of “free speech.” But the intent was clear. The current leaders of the US want Europe to submit to having authoritarian and racist regimes imposed on it to match the authoritarian model revived by Russia and now adopted in America. It is a plan for the political domination of Europe by the great powers that surround it.
This will be Europe’s fate, unless it chooses to become one of the great powers itself.
I was struck by this when I saw the recent cover of a German newsmagazine with a cartoon depicting the world’s great powers gathered to carve up the globe. There was Trump, representing America, Putin for Russia, and Xi Jinping representing China. But there was no one there to represent Europe.
Yet it is absurd to think of Europe as a nonentity with no standing in the world. The countries of Europe, excluding Russia, represent 700 million people. Europe is composed of advanced and developed societies, great centers of science and culture—and taken all together, it is the world’s third-largest economy, on a par with the US and China. Europe also makes up a large part of NATO, the world’s most powerful military force. Even without the US, you are more than a match for poor, backward, depleted Russia—and the UK and France have their own nuclear forces, which provide a deterrent against other nuclear powers.
Europe’s greatness is about more than money and guns and territory. Americans have long flattered ourselves—borrowing the words of a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville—that “America is great because she is good.” By good, we meant that we are, or were, a free society. Liberated from feudal and aristocratic constraints, every individual was free to pursue prosperity and chase new ideas, regardless of circumstances of birth, regardless of religion or national origin, and eventually regardless of race or gender. This allowed us to make full use of the talents and energies of our own people and to absorb millions of immigrants who brought us the talents and energies of the globe.
America has decided, for a while at least, to stop doing that. So it is time for someone else to take up this position at the forefront of the world. No region is more qualified than Europe, which after hard experience has widely and deeply embraced the tolerance and pluralism of a free society.
Liberal democracy is a superpower that can make a country, or a continent, great. The world needs to have at least one such liberal democratic power, to a serve as a refuge, a protector, and an example for the rest of the world. If it is not going to be America—for who knows how long—then it had better be Europe.
This will not be easy for Europe to do. The European Union is a loose alliance with a bureaucracy that can be oddly intrusive on the small issues, but it still has no really unified central executive. You will have to figure out how to work in concert and act decisively. But unity will come from sharing the struggle and its triumphs—just as it did for the thirteen separate colonies that formed the United States, and just as it did for the US and Europe in the decades after World War II and after the Cold War.
Europe has the capacity to assert itself as a great power, it just needs the will.
The will comes from necessity—if you choose to recognize it. You must accept the fact that your existence as free nations is at stake, that the alternative is enslavement to the will of foreign strongmen. This is the notice you just received, in definitive terms, from the meeting in Riyadh.
And you need to choose quickly. Europe’s leaders and the public are still operating as if the normal rules apply and they can respond to events with careful deliberation over months and years. This is a delusion.
You have to realize what many Americans have discovered in the sharp shock delivered by our domestic politics, where an unelected man with no official position has just dismantled our government, knocked down all guardrails, and given himself nearly unlimited power, which is now being wielded with deliberate cruelty against vilified minorities. This is all moving with the speed, not of normal politics, but of a revolution. As one revolutionary supposedly said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happened.” You are living through those weeks.
You have already entered a world different from what most of us have ever known, one in which America is not a guarantor of your security, or an ally, or even a well-wisher of your freedom. America is now a great power conspiring with other great powers to bring you under their dominion.
To stop it, and to keep the light of freedom alive in the world, you must become a great power yourselves.
