Europe’s "Great Power" Dream is in Tatters
Don't fear the "rising European superpower". It never was, and never will be.
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NOTE: It has long been fashionable to deem the European Union a superpower, or at least a rising one. But as I’ve been telling you for 35 years now, it is not and never has been. As things stand, it is hard to imagine how it could ever change that, just as it is hard to fathom how China could overcome its catastrophic choices of years past. Net result? An even more American Century in the 21st than in the 20th.
Sometimes you win by being the best, and indeed America is that. But sometimes you win because your opponents lose. And America has that too. — RDM
by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
August 7, 2025
All four pillars of the EU’s economic strategy and great power project now lie in ruins. Every domino has fallen.
Europe sub-contracted its energy supply to Russia, its defense to America and its manufacturing supply-chains to China. The hurricane of events over the last five years have exposed the blind complacency behind those bad bets.
It is less understood that Europe also sub-contracted its aggregate demand to the rest of the world over long stretches of the last quarter century. It relied on an open global trading system, kept that way by American power and willingness to absorb limitless exports as the world’s market of last resort.
Europe surfed on the consumption of deficit states — chiefly the U.S. — rather than generating its own demand. It was always tempting fate. This neo-mercantilist bet has, at last, gone horribly wrong as well.
Lest we forget, the eurozone also surfed off pre-Brexit Britain — pushing the British current account deficit to 7% of GDP on the eve of the 2016 referendum, the worst in peacetime since records began in 1772. Whether you voted yea or nay on Brexit, the UK was not a sustainable course within an EU pursuing such policies.
There was a Europe before Turnberry. There will be a profoundly different Europe after Turnberry. “This EU is finished,” wrote Die Welt’s Christoph Schiltz in an excoriating attack on the bureaucratic oligarchy that has run the European economy and institutional system into the ground.
Writing for Jacobin on the German Left, Ingar Solty compared the EU’s capitulation to the final defeat of the Teutonic Knights at the Peace of Thorn in 1466, the loss of German sovereignty at the Potsdam conference in 1945 and the “unequal treaties” imposed on China by the colonial powers in the mid-19th Century. Clearly something has snapped in Germany.
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