Europe is weak and delusional (but not doomed)
The gap between Europe's self-image and reality has grown into a chasm of delulu. One that's threatening to swallow the continent's future whole, as dangerous dependencies on others for energy, security, software, and manufacturing stack up to strangle Europe's sovereignty. But its current political class continues to double down on everything that hasn't worked for the past forty years. Let's start with free speech, and the €120 million fine just levied against X. The fig leaf for this was painted as "deceptive design" and "transparency for researchers", but the EU already bared its real intentions when they announced this authoritarian quest back in 2023 with charges of "dissemination of illegal content" and "information manipulation" (aka censorship). Besides, even the fig leaf itself is rotten. Meta offers the very same paid verification scheme as X but, according to Musk, has chosen to play ball with the EU censorship apparatus, so no investigation for them. And the citizens of Europe clearly don't seem bothered much by any "deceptive design", as X continues to be a top-ranked download across every country on the continent. But you can see why many politicians in Europe are eager to punish X for giving Europeans a social media that doesn't cooperate with its crackdown on wrongthink. The German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, is personally responsible for 5,000(!!) cases pursuing his subjects for insults online, which has led to house raids for utterances as banal as calling him a "filthy drunk". Germany is not an outlier either. The UK has been arresting over 10,000 people per year since 2020 for illicit tweets, Facebook posts, and silent prayers. France has thousands of yearly cases for speech-related offenses too. No wonder people on X aren't eager to volunteer their name and address when their elected officials crash out over their tweets. It's against this backdrop — thousands of yearly arrests for banal insults or crass opposition to government policies — that some Europeans still try to convince themselves they're the true champions of free speech and freedom of the press. Delulu indeed. But this isn't just about the lack of free speech in Europe. The X fine also highlights just how weak and puny the European tech sector has become. Get this: The EU's tech-fine operation produced more income for European coffers than all the income taxes paid by its public internet tech companies in 2024!! That's primarily because Europe basically stopped creating new, large companies more than half a century ago. So as the likes of Nokia died off, there was nobody new to replace them. In the last fifty years, the number and size of new European companies worth $10 billion or more is alarmingly small: But even the old industrial titans of Europe are now struggling. Germany hasn't grown its real GDP in five years. The net-zero nonsense has seriously hurt its competitiveness, and its energy costs are now 2-3x that of America and China. This is after Germany spent a staggering ~€700 billion on green energy projects — despite Europe as a whole being just 6% of world emissions. All the while, the EU as a whole sent over twenty billion euros to Russia to pay for energy in 2024. So cue the talk about security. European leaders are incensed by getting excluded from the discussion about ending the war in Ukraine, which is currently just happening between America and Russia directly. But they only have themselves to thank for a seat on the sidelines. Here's a breakdown of the NATO spending by country: This used to be a joke to Europeans. That America would spend so much on its military might. Since the invasion of Ukraine, there's been a lot less laughing, and now the new official NATO target for member states is to spend 5% of GDP on defense. But even this target fails to acknowledge the fact that even if European countries should meet their new obligations (and currently only Poland among the larger EU countries is even close), they'd still lag far behind America, simply because the EU is comparatively a much smaller and shrinking economic zone. In 2025, the combined GDP for the European Union was $20 trillion. America was fifty percent larger with a GDP of $30 trillion. And the gap continues to widen, as EU growth is pegged at around 1% in 2024 compared to almost 3% for the US. Now this is usually when the euro cope begins to screech the loudest. Trying every which way to explain that actually Europe is a better place to live than America, despite having a GDP per capita that's almost half. And on a subjective level, that might well be true! There are plenty of reasons to prefer living in Europe, but that doesn't offset the fact that America is simply a vastly richer country, and that matters when it comes to everything from commercial dominance to military power. But it's the trajectory that's most damning. In 2008, Europe was on near-parity in GDP with America! But if the 1% vs 3% growth-rate disparity continues for another decade, America will grow its economy by another third to $40 trillion, while Europe will grow just 10% to $22 trillion. Making the American economy nearly twice as large as the European one. Yikes. These should all be sobering numbers to any European. Whether it's the 10,000 yearly arrests in the UK for social media posts or the risk of an economy that's half the size of the American one in a decade. But Europe isn't doomed to fulfill this tragic destiny. It's full of some of the most creative, capable, and ambitious people in the world (like the fifth of US startup unicorns with European founders!). But they need much better reasons to stay than what the EU (and now a separate UK) is currently giving them. Like drastically lower energy costs to for a competitive industrial base and to power the AI revolution, so best we quickly revive European nuclear ambitions. Like an immigration policy designed to rival America's cherry-picking of the world's best, rather than mass immigration from low-average-IQ regions of net-negative contributors to the economy (and society). Like dropping the censorship ambitions and bureaucratic boondoggles like the DSA. Like actually offering a European internal market for remote labor and a unified stock exchange for listings. There are plenty of paths to take that do not end in a low-growth, censorious regime that continues to export many of its best brains to America and elsewhere. So: make haste, the shadows lengthen.
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