You do not have to be the biggest fan of how the Trump Administration negotiates. You can, like myself, see the blustering towards Canada and Mexico in particular as extremely counter-productive, to say nothing of the clownish (and possibly dangerous) Gaza proposal. But the Europe stuff…come on, that’s fucking hilarious.

Vance scolding them in both just and right ways as well as ways reminiscent of the liberal internationalists he rightly despises served as a wakeup call that the End of History was over. It had never really begun, of course, but certain parts of the planet (Canada, Northern Europe, American media liberals) had bought into this self-flattering fiction because it centered the deindustrializing parts of the world as still, somehow, the primary drivers- perhaps even protagonists- of history. But when someone finally said this was not true out loud, the self-vassalized classes of Europe publicly wept. The American elite may be a cynical, fractious, and even ignorant bunch, but they have a theory of governance and diplomacy. Europe, so used to being a satrapy, has seen its once more accomplished elite become complete colonial recruit subalterns. Their best and brightest, the people allowed into power, genuinely believe this post-power politics shit. They weep when the mirage crumbles.

Frankly, its pathetic.

Were I European I would find this both funny and disturbing. I would immediately demand people who actually know about how the world works represent me, and appoint people to the foreign policy apparatus accordingly. I would castigate all the trendy postmodernists (closet liberal ideologues) and hard-constructivists (also closet liberal ideologues) for what dogs to America they really are and their role is gutting training for actual honest and forthright policy makers. The failure to prioritize a regional Europe over global ideological crusades has harmed EU countries at least as much as it has the US. Arguably more considering the backwash of the refugee crisis from Libya, Iraq, and Syria.

But since I am not European I merely need to sit back and watch, appraising how fast a society high on 30 years of pure ideology goes through the stages of withdrawal and grief.

I previously mentioned how (northern) Europeans in particular have a strange smug entitlement and unearned sense of self-importance when their only real impact on the 21rst Century seems to be outliers of enshittification to domestic political realignments. This might be worse than that, though. The pathetic Chamberlain-at-Munich analogies and blind faith in a bill of goods the US is (thankfully) no longer selling reflects an inability to even think of a future, only a romanticized and ahistorical past. Statecraft isn’t about bringing into being the hideous undulating many-tentacled beast of German Idealist philosophy, where human thought creates reality through a mystical immaterial process yet to be explained, it is about medium term solutions to immediate problems while understanding permanency is fleeting. It cannot be a playground for navel gazing. People have clashing interests. Always have, always will.

The Age of Discovery and the subsequent Age of Victorian imperialism is long since over. Coasting along as ducklings in America’s wake somehow enabled many in Europe to believe that they had transcended history and were still vital global actors. But the unlearning of statecraft actually meant they were stumbling in to being its victims.

The world today resembles not the dreams of the 90s, but the pre-Discovery balance of power. The great civilization-states of the east are back and growing their influence. Europe, meanwhile, has reverted to its older position of being the western peninsula of Asia. The faster the Europeans can grow up, the faster they can adapt to this new reality.