For decades, the European Union has been the world leader in policies to fight climate change. The EU Green Deal package in European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s first term is the largest climate law in the history of the world (despite President Biden’s ridiculous claims that the IRA was). But it now appears that the EU’s climate warrior era is over.

Today President von der Leyen unveiled an overhaul of the EU’s Emissions Trading System, the bedrock of Europe’s efforts to fight climate change. It’s not a complete suspension of the system as Giorgia Meloni was asking for in March, but as a I predicted back then, the ETS is instead being sent to a death by a thousand cuts. Today’s proposal, which will need to be approved by both houses of the EU’s legislature, would render the system moot by extending free allowances to emissions-intensive industries and allowing generous offsets. Basically, the system will still exist in practice but companies will not have to meaningfully pay for emissions for another decade, which means they will not be driven to invest in low-carbon solutions.

“Free pollution permits were never meant to become a permanent subsidy,” notes Greg Van Elsen from the NGO CAN Europe. “Extending them until 2038 rewards delay instead of industrial decarbonisation. Public support must reward companies that cut emissions, not business as usual or shareholder payouts.”

The extension of free allowances for several more years may seem like just a technical adjustment. But it is sending a signal to the markets that the EU will not stand by its legislation and will simply adjust it whenever the bill comes due if lawmakers face pressure from businesses and foreign governments. This has implications for many other policy areas, and suggests that the Commission will also chicken out once the bill becomes due for new carbon border levies (CBAM). Why should any company bother making investments in low-carbon technology when they can assume they’ll never actually have to pay for their emissions?

The fact that the carbon price is going up is not a flaw in the ETS, it is the whole point. Companies have known for 15 years that the price would go up at this point and they would lose their free allowances. Some companies prepared and made investments in low-carbon innovation. Other companies sat on their hands and did nothing. The laggards are now being rewarded. What a way to stimulate European competitiveness.

MEPs in the EU Parliament, and national governments in the EU Council, are split on this issue – so we can expect a major fight on this. While Italy, Germany and Poland are leading the charge to kill the ETS, France, Spain and Sweden are leading the charge to save it. Von der Leyen’s centre-right European Peoples Party, which also includes German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, will lead the charge to push this through in the European Parliament, with the help of the far-right PfE of Marine Le Pen and ECR of Giorgia Meloni. Polish Secretary of State Krzysztof Bolesta told Politico that the ETS is a threat to “our European way of life” and the EU needs to “ditch dogmatism” in its climate approach. But Sweden’s Europe Minister Jessica Rosencrantz hit back, telling them “the ETS works. Europe should build on its success, not retreat from it.”

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Since its launch two decades ago, the ETS has lowered emissions by more than 50% in the sectors it covers. More importantly, all EU climate policy has been built around it. As the centre-left S&D group noted in a letter to the Commission in July, it is “the cornerstone of the EU climate architecture”. Without it, all other EU climate efforts that have been passed into law over the past two decades fall apart.

Interestingly enough, the climate campaigners who are now desperately trying to save the system were actually against it at first. They warned that “cap and trade” (as it was being called at the time) was a conservative market-oriented solution to climate change that depended on future governments maintaining the credibility of the system. It essentially put off the hard work of fighting climate change by trusting the market to deliver reforms, but only in the future once free allowances stopped being given out. Under the system, the emissions that industrial companies can produce are capped, but they can purchase allowances to emit more. This incentivises companies to develop low-carbon technologies not only so that they don’t need to pay for additional allowances, but also so companies that are well below the cap can make money by selling their allowances.

But companies have been given high levels of free allowances in the first 20 years of the system in order to not penalise them before they’ve had the chance to develop the new technologies. Those free allowances are supposed to be phased out now. But that’s what this proposal would end, delaying that process by about a decade.

And yet, unveiling the proposal yesterday, the commissioners had the nerve to try to say this adjustment to the ETS was responding to the urgency of climate change and energy security. “The part that gets me: The Commission's own text says the ETS should be "lowering the EU's dependence on fossil fuel imports – their words, in the proposal itself,” noted Hans Stegeman, Chief Economist at Triodos Bank. “Then it lets industry emit more, longer, and hedge with foreign offsets instead of cutting at home.” “It's not just bad climate policy. It's also bad regulatory practice. Firms plan investments on the credibility of a price signal. Move the goalposts once, under pressure, and every future target becomes a starting position for the next round of lobbying.”

Did Obama kill the EU ETS?

Climate campaigner sceptics eventually learned to live with the ETS in the 2000s because it appeared that was the way the world was going. Market-based solutions for fighting climate change were being championed by both Republicans and Democrats in the United States, so it was assumed that the US would eventually start its own system. Having one unified method of fighting climate change in the West was better than having a market approach in the US and a regulatory approach in the EU, it was reasoned, and so Europe somewhat reluctantly got behind emissions trading following an initial pilot in 2005. Then they had the rug pulled out from under them – a story I tell in Chapter 7 of my book The Owned Continent:

“When the EU ETS was set up in 2008, the assumption was that the US would be setting up a parallel cap and trade scheme that it could link to. Both Barack Obama and John McCain were promising one as part of their 2008 presidential campaign platforms. But because it was Obama who won and ended up proposing it, the Republican Congress killed it as part of their openly-stated strategy of rejecting everything Obama proposed.

The Obama administration didn’t want to spend political capital on trying to save the climate law, preferring to spend it instead on Obamacare. So the US climate bill was abandoned and the EU was left in the lurch, stuck with an ETS that had no other major system to link to. That meant that European companies would face the prospect of unfair competition with American companies (something solved with free ETS credits up to 2026, transitioning to carbon import levies in 2026).”

The US failure to enact carbon trading 15 years ago was the first nail in the coffin of the EU ETS. But it is the current US administration’s wholesale abandonment of any climate policies (and its aggressive pressure campaign against other countries’ climate efforts) that has been the death blow. EU climate policy could survive with a ‘go it alone’ approach on emissions trading. It was working. But it apparently cannot survive in a scenario where it is being actively attacked by America. Because European businesses are saying they cannot compete in a world where they alone face climate burdens and their American competitors do not. And competitiveness is the Brussels mantra of the moment – at the insistence of Merzoni.

Or did European voters kill the EU ETS?

There are other factors at play here besides the MAGA regime’s hostility toward EU climate policy. Whether they understood it or not, European voters chose this path when they voted in the 2024 European Parliament election in a way that created a right-wing majority in the EU’s legislature.

That the Green Deal legislation happened during President von der Leyen’s 2019-24 first term was largely the result of the 2019 European Parliament election results, which happened at the time of the Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future marches. Green parties saw a big surge across Europe, and voters listed climate change as one of their main motivating concerns. But in the 2024 election the Greens were decimated, losing a third of their seats in the European Parliament. The public has, quite evidently, moved on from its concern about climate change. That may be because the immediate global concerns in the West about imminent democratic collapse and World War III put a more long-term concern like climate change back of mind. Or it may be that the public thinks governments can’t or won’t do anything to fight climate change (surveys have shown that both in the US and Europe people are unaware of the major efforts that were passed over the past five years with the IRA and the Green Deal). But the Fridays for Future crowd didn’t show up in the 2024 election, and we’re now living with the consequences.

Elections have consequences. And the impression that Gen Z is now ‘over it’ when it comes to climate change and is now voting for the far right in ever-increasing numbers, is in particular making politicians think climate change is now a losing issue with little political benefit in pursuing.

Or was it Trump?

The reasons why Europe is right now tearing up its climate change efforts are myriad. The EPP says they have been given a mandate to do so by the citizens in the 2024 election. European businesses are facing legitimate competitiveness concerns as they’re getting their asses handed to them by Chinese and American companies (though the degree to which this is due to EU regulation or the ETS is highly debatable). But it is also impossible to ignore the context of repeated European surrender to the Trump administration which is aggressively lobbying against EU climate policy (along with EU tech policy). The EPP and von der Leyen will insist this pressure has nothing to do with why they’re tearing up EU climate laws. That is hard to believe.

As part of her surrender deal with President Trump signed a year ago, President von der Leyen committed to Europe buying $750 billion worth of US liquified natural gas (LNG). If that promise is kept, it will be impossible to meet the EU’s target of reducing emissions by 55% by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. Investments are being diverted from renewables into building new gas infrastructure for the incoming American fossil fuel, which needs regassification facilities at ports and new pipelines. Meanwhile, von der Leyen is preparing to shred the EU’s methane law at at the US federal government’s request, even as Democratic lawmakers and US state governments are begging her not to.

At minimum, it is clear that EU climate policy is not important enough to von der Leyen and her EPP to defend it from US attacks. But they are going even further, jumping at the chance to obey US orders to gut climate laws. Whether they are doing so out of honest convicting that climate laws are hurting European competitiveness or cynical pandering to big business, this now seems like an unstoppable train. And with the EPP’s war on NGOs in Brussels having hallowed out civil society in this town over the past year, there isn’t much momentum to push back.

Future generations will look back at this moment as a pivotal turning point, the point at which Europe gave up on the idea that climate change can be resisted. We will be living with the consequences of that for decades to come.

There’s a word Brussels loves right now: sovereignty. Digital sovereignty, energy sovereignty, defence sovereignty – pick a noun, staple “sovereignty” to it, and you have a European Commission work programme. And yet there’s one form of sovereignty few in Brussels seem willing to name, let alone pursue. It’s the ability of Europeans to think their own thoughts, rather than unconsciously borrowing the mental furniture of a country across the Atlantic.

The Slovenian author Gorazd Hladnik has defined this concept as “cognitive sovereignty” – the ability for a people to set their own narratives rather than accepting the narratives of others. “Europe's deepest vulnerability is not military or economic – it is cognitive,” he writes in his Libertas Europa paper on the subject. “Europe is progressively losing the capacity to define reality according to its own experience, traditions and interests. This is cognitive dependence: the gradual adoption of externally generated narratives and values without independent evaluation.”

“This condition is hard to recognise because democracy formally continues. Elections happen, media report, universities teach. Yet the cognitive environment within which democratic judgement forms is increasingly shaped outside Europe.”

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In his book Good Morning Europe: A Suicide Note – and a Survival Guide, Hladnik argues that Europe’s current cognitive dependency is dangerous because in the 21st century power has migrated from territory to cognition. “For centuries, sovereignty meant controlling land, population and resources,” he says. “Today, the decisive strategic resource is the capacity to shape how reality is perceived before political decisions are made. Autonomy means operating within an existing framework. Sovereignty means defining that framework. A political community may possess democratic institutions and military strength while gradually losing sovereignty if the assumptions behind its decisions are established elsewhere.”

It’s a situation that perfectly describes Europe’s relationship with America, which as I have argued in my own book The Owned Continent, so culturally dominates this continent that it has led Europeans to a psychology of subservience where the first instinct is to surrender to Donald Trump.

“Historically, post-WWII integration into the Atlantic system brought peace and prosperity but created structural dependencies,” says Hladnik. “Today, much of Europe's digital infrastructure, technological ecosystems, information environment, financial architecture, popular culture, strategic analysis and normative discourse originates beyond its borders. The problem is not foreign influence itself but Europe's diminishing capacity to distinguish independently between cooperation and dependence.”

And this is why European leaders, faced with an American administration that treats them with open contempt and is actively funding their political enemies, keep behaving as though this is a temporary misunderstanding between friends rather than a new reality of aggression that isn’t going away.

The water you swim in

As I argue in my book, a teenager in Lyon and a teenager in Leipzig have more in common with each other culturally than either has with their own grandparents – and what they have in common is largely American. The same streaming shows and movies. The same social media platforms, built in Silicon Valley, whose American engagement logic shapes what gets seen and what doesn’t. The same meme formats, born on English-language forums, translated a week later into French or German or Polish.

None of this is new. Europeans have been watching Hollywood films and listening to American music for over 80 years. But what’s changed over the past two decades is the totality of it, and the fact that the delivery mechanism is no longer a cinema or a record shop but a phone that never leaves your hand. American culture used to be something Europeans consumed. Now it’s closer to something Europeans live inside. And that is shaping their reality.

The result is that a huge number of Europe’s political and cultural reference points are American ones, without anyone ever having decided this should be so. Ask a European under 40 to name a free speech controversy and they’ll likely reach for a US campus story, not a French issue, even though France has had plenty of its own. Ask them about policing, and American culture-war vocabulary like “defund the police”, “woke” and “check your privilege” lifted straight from US cable news will surface before anything homegrown does. European debates about immigration, gender, race, and institutional trust increasingly run on rails laid in America, even when the underlying societies, laws and histories are entirely different.

This is cognitive dependence. It’s not that all Europeans love America. Most don’t these days. It’s that the terms of the argument – what counts as the obvious question, the thing to be outraged about this week – increasingly arrive pre-loaded from Washington or Silicon Valley. Europeans then have their local argument using someone else’s furniture. In my book I cite the example of the George Floyd protests spreading to Europe in 2020.

It’s not just opinions that get imported. It’s the assumption of what’s default – a subject I’ve written about on this Substack before when it comes to European news media. American commentators, understandably, write and speak as though the American experience is simply the human experience – the norm from which other countries deviate. This isn’t malice, it’s just what happens when you’re the largest media-producing culture on Earth and your language is the most spoken one in the world. But Europeans absorb this framing too, and start treating American preoccupations as the neutral starting point rather than as one country’s particular, often quite parochial, set of hang-ups.

Take the American obsession with free speech as an absolute, near-sacred value, detached from any competing social good. That’s a specific product of American constitutional history – a particular reading of the First Amendment and a media culture built around it. It’s not a universal truth about how democracies should organise themselves, and plenty of successful and free European democracies such as Germany have made different choices about the boundaries of expression. Yet increasingly you’ll hear Europeans debate their own countries’ speech laws using purely American assumptions, as though the American position were simply correct by default and their own country’s approach needs justifying against it, rather than the reverse.

Or take guns, individualism versus solidarity, the role of the state, even something as basic as how much personal failure is understood to be one’s own fault. These are all areas where mainstream American assumptions and mainstream European assumptions genuinely diverge. But because the volume of American content is so overwhelming, Europeans can find themselves reaching for American frameworks to explain European problems, and feeling faintly embarrassed, even provincial, when they instead reach for their own.

That’s cognitive sovereignty lost. Not colonisation by force, but colonisation by algorithm and habit. It’s a slow erosion of the confidence to think in your own categories because the loudest, most abundant, most algorithmically favoured content is telling you constantly that someone else’s categories are the normal ones.

Brussels on its knees

Now scale this up from teenagers on Instagram to prime ministers in the European Council, and you start to see why Europe’s political response to an increasingly hostile Washington has been so strangely and persistently deferential.

For eighty years, the Atlantic relationship has not just been a security arrangement. It has been the psychological scaffolding of the European political class. An entire generation of Atlanticist European leaders, officials, and commentators have grown up in this ethos - many of them directly receiving their education in the United States. They have spent their whole lives believing, as a foundational fact about the world, that America is the guarantor without whom European security and prosperity are unthinkable.

So when an American administration imposes tariffs on European countries, threatens to invade Greenland and quit NATO, or treats a European leader with the kind of public condescension it wouldn’t dream of directing at China’s Xi Jinping, the instinctive European response is not ‘our closest ally is turning hostile.’ It’s some version of: surely this is a phase; surely this is one man, one administration, one bad electoral cycle; surely, underneath it, the relationship remains what it always was. Because they cannot conceive of any different reality. This is cognitive dependence.

How to achieve cognitive sovereignty

What we’re watching in European capitals right now isn’t really strategy at all. It’s something closer to grief, stuck at the denial stage. You can see it in the way European officials talk about the transatlantic relationship in the conditional and the past tense in the same sentence – as something that surely still exists in essence, even as the evidence in front of them says otherwise. You can see it in the sheer reluctance, even among leaders who privately admit the game has changed, to say so plainly and in public.

That is the deeper cost of cognitive dependency. It’s not just that Europeans absorb American pop culture and American political arguments without noticing. It’s that decades of living inside an American-shaped information environment have made it genuinely difficult for European elites to picture themselves as a truly independent actor at all – one with its own interests, capable of treating Washington the way Washington treats everyone else: as a power to be dealt with rationally, coldly, and on the basis of what it actually does – not what it once was.

Cognitive sovereignty, in the end, isn’t about rejecting American culture, or refusing to learn from American debates, or pretending the two continents aren’t hopelessly entangled after eighty years of alliance. It’s about the much more basic ability to notice when you are borrowing someone else’s categories, someone else’s sense of what’s normal, and to ask whether they still fit.

In his paper, Hladnik argues that Europe should adopt a “cognitive security” strategy to protect the union “from systematic manipulation while safeguarding freedom of thought and expression”. He outlines six pillars for such a strategy. The first is to establish a legal definition of systematic cognitive engineering and to recognise it as a strategic threat to democracy. The second is to require full disclosure of non-European foreign funding for political, media, academic and NGO entities shaping public policy. He also argues that that the infrastructure of foreign cognitive dominance must be dismantled, and European-owned digital platforms, media, research centres and data systems must replace them. “Sovereignty cannot exist while primary information channels are controlled beyond European jurisdiction,” he says. Libertas Europa has a self-test where you can check your own cognitive sovereignty.

Europe already has instruments – the Digital Services Act, media pluralism rules, public broadcasting traditions that are the envy of much of the world – that could be used far more aggressively to ensure European audiences encounter European journalism, European commentary, and European framings of European problems before they encounter the American version. That means funding local and pan-European media properly, rather than watching newsrooms hollow out while everyone gets their politics from an algorithm tuned in California. It means treating the dominance of a handful of American platforms over European public discourse as a sovereignty question, not just a competition one. None of this requires banning American culture. It requires making sure it isn’t the only culture in the room.

But platform policy alone would just rearrange the furniture without changing the habits of mind that make Europeans reach for American categories in the first place. The harder, slower work is educational and institutional: teaching media literacy that specifically equips people to notice when a “default” assumption is actually a culturally specific American one; investing in pan-European journalism that isn’t from an American company but instead rooted in European values and traditions; building the confidence, in schools and universities and newsrooms, to treat European history, law, and social democratic tradition as valid starting points for argument, rather than exceptions that need to apologise for not being American.

That doesn’t mean rupture for its own sake, or pretending eighty years of alliance can be wished away. It means dealing with Washington as it is now, not as it was in 1989, and building the independent capabilities – in defence, in technology, in energy, in finance – that make that clear-eyed dealing possible rather than merely rhetorical.

And ultimately, it means something almost civilisational in scale: Europe rediscovering enough confidence in its own political and cultural traditions to stop treating them as a regional variant of a universal American norm. Cognitive sovereignty isn’t achieved by decree, and it certainly isn’t achieved by resentment. It’s achieved the way any kind of independence is achieved: slowly, through the accumulation of institutions, habits, and leaders willing to think a European thought all the way through, without checking first whether Washington would approve of it.

Last week I gave the keynote speech at the European Economic and Social Committee conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The EESC is the consultative body that, since 1958, has been representing employers and workers in advising EU lawmakers on legislation (it sits alongside the Committee of the Regions, which represents states and municipalities).

In my speech I laid out the reasons why Europe is not currently free and sovereign and the things that need to be done to get us there. I listed the three foreign powers on which Europe’s dependence poses a problem: Russia, China and America. For this continent’s Atlanticist establishment, just putting those three together is controversial enough. But I went further, arguing that though it is the one that our leaders never want to talk about, Europe’s dependence on America is by far most entrenched and the most dangerous. It was this aspect that the Portuguese newspaper Correio da Manhã led with in their coverage of the speech last week.

I thought my readers might want to watch the full speech here on my Substack. It’s also an opportunity to write about an interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed while doing these speeches and readings to promote my book The Owned Continent (and more recently the French edition Le Continent Captif) over the past seven months.

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Yesterday I wrote about the three big developments that took place on the same day for the French, British and German far right – all three of whom are currently polling first in their respective countries. I wrote that for all three, it was hard to tell if these were setbacks or rocket fuel for them. For Le Pen and the AfD, the jury’s still out. But for Nigel Farage, 48 hours after his dramatic press conference on Tuesday it is already clear that his gambit is failing.

As a recap, the father of Brexit is currently being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over whether he broke House of Commons rules by failing to declare a £5 million donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. After taking the money he reportedly lobbied the governor of the Bank of England to relax rules on cryptocurrency.

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Farage has given several contradictory accounts of why he didn’t declare the money, sometimes saying it’s because it was a gift to use any way he likes (including buying ferraris), sometimes saying it was given to him before he was an MP to pay for his personal security, sometimes saying that the whole thing is fake news. The Guardian has revealed that they contacted Farage on Tuesday about a story they were about to run – that the £5m gift had been reported to the National Crime Agency “by bankers who were concerned it may have been laundered money”. They gave him till 1pm to respond, at which time they would run the story. And wouldn’t you know it, when 1pm came, Farage, who just a few months ago was being predicted as the next prime minister, was holding a press conference announcing he’s resigning as an MP. But he’s doing so in order to trigger a by-election in which he will run to replace himself.

What he is essentially asking for here is for the public to be the judge about whether it’s wrong to take such gifts, rather than judges or parliamentary authorities. “Why should I be judged?” he asked. “No, I’ve decided that the people of Clacton [his constituency] should be the judges of my actions. This will be a people versus the establishment by-election,” he told the press after a very long-winded intro complaining about how the deep state is persecuting him. “It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.” That by-election, of course, will come in the next few weeks – before the standards committee has rendered its verdict.

Farage has commanded his Reform Party (the renamed UKIP/Brexit party) surrogates to convey this message. And, looking much like JD Vance when he has to defend the undefendable from Trump, they have dutifully done so.

“People look at this and say, well this is just Nigel Farage trying to dodge an inquiry which he felt was going the wrong way,” the Channel 4 reporter Garry Gibbon asked Reform Shadow Treasury Secretary Robert Jenrick yesterday.

Jenrick: “Nigel was very clear that he has broken no rules.”

Gibbon: “He’s not the arbiter of that, that’s not how it works as an MP. He doesn’t sit in judgement.”

Jenrick: “It’s the people who sit in judgement.”

Gibbon: “Actually, there are rules about how an MP behaves.”

Jenrick: “No, actually, we’re a democracy. Or at least we in Reform believe it. You might not think that if you look at the other parties.”

Gibbon: “It sounds very Trumpian, because Donald Trump would say, the fact that voters vote for me, that trumps everything else.”

Farage vs Count Binface

But Farage’s Trumpian strategy is quickly unravelling, because all the other parties have already declared that they will not field a candidate. That will leave him alone facing only Count Binface, the perennial gag candidate fielded in high-profile elections. In the UK, anyone who can acquire a (very low) threshold of signatures as a candidate in an election gets to stand on stage when the results are announced, even if they only got two votes. Now there is a online campaign for people in Clacton to vote for Count Binface in order to show their contempt for Farage. That’s unlikely given that Clacton is a firmly Reform-leaning district (that’s the only reason Farage represents it, given he has no real connection to it and reportedly barely ever even visits).

You could tell from his speech on Tuesday Farage is legitimately furious that he can’t engage in the same kind of open corruption that MAGA politicians can in America. “He’s clearly genuinely aggrieved that people are questioning the fact that he should be allowed to be a de facto leader of the opposition, which is how he’s styled himself, but also be allowed to sell gold bullion and have side hustles and be a brand ambassador,” noted Lewis Goodall yesterday on the Newsagents podcast. “If you listened to his speech yesterday, he genuinely seemed pissed off and incredulous that these two things could not coexist.”

That Farage’s effort to emulate Trump’s tactic of normalising corruption by claiming a mandate from the public is failing says a lot not just about the state of democracy in Britain, but also in the rest of Europe. The Trump regime has become, without a doubt (it’s not even close), the most flagrantly corrupt government in American history. The extortion, bribery, insider trading and personal profiteering from government positions is all out there in the open, something the administration likes to call “transparency”. And the most disturbing thing is that it was all possible under America’s archaic and dysfunctional governance system where the justice department can be turned into the personal attorneys of the president. It took decades to create the “imperial presidency” – something so far away from what the original founding fathers intended. But because Americans have allowed their governing structures to atrophy (so convinced are they of the righteousness of their founding constitution, as if it was chiseled on tablets by Moses), this is where they’ve ended up. Not so in Europe.

In Europe, politicians who commit crimes (such as Marine Le Pen) are convicted. In America, even an attempt to lead a coup against the US government goes unpunished (unlike in Brazil). Crimes are openly committed with no fear of retribution. And the appeal to popular mandate is taken as a free pass for blatant corruption. It is impossible to see the United States as anything other than a fundamentally broken country, and anyone who refuses to see that is lying to themselves.

Young Europe offers better protections than archaic America

I think there’s a wider lesson to be learned here, and it’s a point I’ve been making repeatedly as I’ve been doing readings and appearances to promote my book over the past months. There’s a version of the last twenty years of American media coverage of Europe that goes something like this: Europe has a far-right problem. Marine Le Pen keeps making the runoff. Orbán captured Hungary. The AfD is polling first in Germany. Geert Wilders won a plurality in the Netherlands. Meloni runs Italy. Cue the ominous chyron, the think-piece about “the return of fascism to the continent that invented it,” the vague sense that Brussels is one bad election away from Weimar.

Meanwhile, in the country that actually had a mob storm its legislature to overturn an election five years ago, the framing has tended to be softer: a “populist moment,” a “test of democracy,” a story about polarisation rather than a story about authoritarianism. For Andrew Neil, who led the BBC’s coverage of the 2020 election, “it was not an attempted coup or insurrection – t was a mob on the rampage, which got further than it ever expected because of appalling policing,” and "there are still “reasons to be cheerful for America”. Meanwhile the same Andrew Neil has been positively doomladen when talking about the future of Europe. It’s a strange asymmetry, and this week gave us a tidy natural experiment in why it’s backwards.

This Tuesday, despite significant pressure (including from the US government), the Paris Court of Appeal upheld Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds. She and her party took money meant for parliamentary assistants and used it to bankroll National Rally operations in France. The court struck down the ban on her running for president next year (and she subsequently confirmed she will run), but it also handed her a suspended prison term, a €100,000 fine, and a year of house arrest with an ankle monitor. This is a woman who has been the most successful far-right politician in Europe for a decade, and the French judiciary has twice now told her that stealing public money has consequences – full stop – regardless of the fact that she is polling in first place in France. No one is above the law.

Now compare that to the other side of the Atlantic.

Donald Trump was found by a jury to have committed sexual abuse. He was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York. He was the subject of two separate federal indictments for trying to overturn an election and for mishandling classified documents, both of which evaporated the moment he won back the presidency. And on his first day back in office, he didn’t just pardon himself of anything that might still be coming, he issued blanket clemency to nearly 1,600 people who violently stormed the Capitol on his behalf, commuting the sentences of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy. His Justice Department then went further: firing the prosecutors who’d built those cases, scrubbing the public record of the prosecutions themselves, and moving this year to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions outright. Dozens of pardoned rioters have since been rearrested for everything from child sexual abuse to attempted murder of federal agents. None of that has slowed Trump’s grip on the Republican Party for even a week.

Put the two systems side by side and the “Europe has the fascism problem” framing starts to look like an accident of vocabulary rather than an accurate read of institutional resilience. Le Pen is punished and still, arguably, has a path back. The punishment came from an independent judiciary that answers to nobody, and voters get the final say with full information about what she did. Trump wasn’t just spared punishment; the punishment was retroactively erased, and the machinery that might have delivered accountability was dismantled from the inside by the person it was meant to hold accountable. Worse still - those who tried to hold him accountable are now being harassed by the FBI which Trump controls.

This is the new world

In coverage of America vs Europe, we always see the cliché “new world vs old world” descriptions. People on both sides of the Atlantic describe things this way. But as I’ve been saying for years, this gets things completely backwards. Most European countries are, constitutionally speaking, teenagers compared to the United States.

West Germany’s Basic Law is 77 years old and was written by the victorious Americans, who modelled it on their own federal constitution (but improved) which was already 161 years old at that time. Because Germany (which had only been created 80 years earlier) had just witnessed a constitutional democracy get voted into a dictatorship, the federal republic’s new constitution contains provisions like the ability to ban anti-democratic parties and to limit some forms of speech. The framers of the US Constitution in 1787 never had cause to imagine such a scenario, because the world they were living in was so different to that of the 20th century.

France’s Fifth Republic dates to 1958. Spain’s constitution is from 1978, written by people who had just emerged from the Franco dictatorship. Most of Central Europe’s constitutions are barely 30 years old, drafted specifically with authoritarian capture in mind because their authors had just lived through it. Most central European nation-states were only created after World War I. Even the three European countries who can constitutionally claim to be older than the United States (Britain, Denmark and Sweden who have been continually existing independent monarchies for more than 250 years) have seen major changes during that time which changed their system of government.

By contrast, the United States is still operating under an archaic governing structure that was built for the world of the 1700s. The US Constitution, for all its virtues, was not built by anyone who had ever seen what a modern demagogue with a television network and a captured party could do to it, and its mechanisms for disqualifying an insurrectionist – Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment among them – turned out to be more decorative than operative when tested.

As I write in the prologue of my book, one of the things that attracted me to move to Europe was that both the EU (“the European project”) and European countries were so much more adaptable than the archaically-governed country I came from. If something isn’t working, European governments can change it. Because they don’t treat their constitutions like semi-religious documents like Americans do. Sometimes, that adaptability can be abused. Viktor Orbán spent fifteen years hollowing out Hungary’s institutions from within. Meloni is trying (so far unsuccessfully) to make it easier for her party to stay in power by changing voting rules.

But resilience is the thing actually being tested here. Do the courts still function when a powerful person is guilty? Do the other parties still refuse to legitimise a stunt? Does a conviction still mean something? On these metrics, Europe’s younger, more scarred, more deliberately engineered constitutions are – this week at least – doing their job in a way the oldest democracy in the world currently is not. And for that we should be thankful.

Diplomacy Notebook

Why Europe Can't Quit America

Almost 20 years ago, an American journalist packed his bags, moved to Europe and decided he would never go back. Today, he argues that the old continent has a problem few Europeans recognize: it can’t overcome its unhealthy dependence on the United States…

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10 days ago · 4 likes · 1 comment · Nicholas Kralev

7 July 2026 may go down in the history books as a turning point for the far right in Europe, but which way things are turning is hard to tell at this stage. Yesterday saw major developments for the far right in Europe’s three biggest countries – France, Britain and Germany. And that’s significant, because the far right is polling in first place in all three.

Let’s start with France. First we got the unexpected news that from a French appeals court that they are upholding Le Pen’s conviction for embezzlement but they are striking down the ban on her running for president next year. This means that she will be under house arrest next year during the election, and it prompted an obvious question: will she run for president wearing an ankle bracelet? She told French news channel LCI a week ago that this would “not be possible” because a presidential candidate needs to move freely. She could not imagine having to ask a magistrate’s permission each time she wants to hold a rally or give an interview. So the assumption was, if her conviction were upheld, her young protégé Jordan Bardella would be the candidate.

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But then last night, in an interview on France’s main broadcaster TF1, she announced, “I am the candidate for the presidential election.” Bardella will be running alongside her but as candidate for prime minister, she said. “We offer the French a duo, president and prime minister, and this duo is solid and has very strong convictions. We are a winning ticket.”

This US-style concept of a presidential “ticket” does not exist in France. But Le Pen is going to make it a thing. She will try for a fourth time to become president of France.

Talking to people here in Brussels ahead of the verdict, it was hard to tell which outcome people wanted. On one hand, out of two bad options for the EU, some people I’ve talked to felt that Bardella would be the lesser of the two evils should the far right take the presidency. He has less historical animosity toward the EU, is from a younger generation, and is perceived as being more business-friendly than his mentor. Plenty of people I’ve talked to also saw him as more “beatable” than Le Pen, given his inexperience, youth and questions lingering over his personal life. On the other hand, he doesn’t come with the same baggage as Le Pen, who still carries the surname of her notorious father even if she distanced herself from him long before his death last year.

“I honestly don’t have a preference, both candidacies come with risks,” one centrist in the EU bubble told me last week. He likened the situation to Democrats who wanted Trump to be the Republicans’ candidate in 2016 because they thought he could never win with the baggage he came with. “We should be careful what we wish for.”

Both Le Pen and Bardella are polling in first place ahead of next year’s election, meaning it’s likely that either one will win the first round. But polls then show that either one would face the same difficulty winning in the run-off second round that Le Pen has faced in the last two elections against President Macron. But Bardella has been polling slightly higher than Le Pen.

How is it going to work having a candidate campaigning while wearing an ankle bracelet? We’re about to find out. Experts say that, at minimum, house arrest means she would need to stay every night in her own home. Since people are allowed to go to work, she can argue that campaigning is her work. But she would not to be able to stay overnight in other French cities before or after campaign appearances, for example. Will she wear her ankle bracelet as a badge of honour? Will she downplay it? There are many questions.

Nigel’s ‘vanity election’

Meanwhile in the UK, Nigel Farage made the dramatic announcement that he is resigning as a member of Parliament in order to trigger a by-election in which he will run as a candidate. Why is he doing such a nonsensical thing? He is trying to overcome a financial scandal by demonstrating that he has popular support. Much like prime ministers call snap elections while under siege in an appeal to the public to bail them out with a popular mandate, Farage hopes that like Andy Burnham, he can be propelled toward the office of prime minister with a landslide by-election victory. “This will be a people versus the establishment by-election,” he said in a press conference. “It’s a chance to stick two fingers up to the entire establishment, to frankly tell them where to go.”

There’s just one problem: the other parties have already said they’re not going to play along with his game. The Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Labour, Greens and rival far right party Restore Britain have all said they will not field candidates. Farage will be running against himself, all alone.

The father of Brexit is currently being investigated by the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards over whether he broke House of Commons rules by failing to declare a £5 million donation from crypto billionaire Christopher Harborne. He has given several contradictory accounts of why he didn’t declare it, sometimes saying it’s because it was a gift to use any way he likes, sometimes saying it was given to him before he was an MP to pay for his personal security, sometimes saying that the whole thing is fake news. At his press conference yesterday, he defended the right of politicians to receive support from wealthy patrons. “We absolutely need successful people from all walks of life – but particularly from business and industry,” he said.

“There is no easy way to describe what Nigel Farage has just done, because to even try requires that you surrender your commitment to elementary logic. It is impossible to even express it in a single sentence, because at the end the sentence will negate itself.

Let’s give it a go. The Reform leader is going to run a ‘people vs the establishment’ campaign over his right to receive undisclosed gifts from a man who calls him daddy and writes books called ‘How to Launder Money’,” wrote Ian Dunt on Substack yesterday. “No, that sounds mad. Let’s try again. The Reform leader has triggered a vote in his constituency on the principle of whether there should be scrutiny of his finances. No that’s fucking crazy, that can’t be right. The Reform leader is going to sidestep a highly damaging news story by elevating it to the most important narrative in politics for the next six weeks. No, that doesn’t work either. It can’t done. You cannot make it make sense.”

Farage’s rivals were also not kind in their descriptions of yesterday’s spectacle. Conservative Leader Kemi Badenoch told Politico: “What I saw was a man who is cracking under the pressure. He went on telly, having a hissy fit, because for the first time he is finally having to face some scrutiny after a very long honeymoon, and he cannot handle it.” Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said: “If this by-election does go ahead now, we are calling on all parties to stand aside and refuse to give oxygen to Farage’s vanity project.”

AfD’s group disbanded?

And finally, the third development – concerning Germany. Ever since the far-right Alternative for Germany party came second in 2024’s European Parliament election in Germany, there have been questions about their political home. The party’s lead candidate Maximilian Krah had a very public falling out with Le Pen and therefor was barred from entering the far-right Patriots for Europe group she formed with Viktor Orban and Geert Wilders. Relations between Le Pen and party leader Alice Weidel haven’t been much better. So the AfD had to form their own group, Europe of Sovereign Nations, with a ragtag selection of individual MEPs from small parties in other countries. To form a political group, you need at least 23 MEPs from seven different member states.

Political groups receive EU taxpayer money for their administration, and that is the origin of Le Pen’s legal troubles. Money that was meant to go toward European activity instead went to domestic French politics.

ESN has 15 AfD MEPs from Germany, together with one or two MEPs each from eight other countries, from very obscure parties. This is, in short, not so much a European group as it is AfD’s vehicle in Brussels. That has made the group very vulnerable to collapse, which has happened in the past to previous far-right groups that were dominated by just one party (such as Farage’s EFDD group in 2014, which I wrote about here for European Voice at the time). It only takes one or two MEPs leaving to trigger such a group’s collapse. The speculation has been that when ESN inevitably disbanded, Weidel and Le Pen would put their differences aside and AfD would be welcomed into the PfE, making it the second-largest group in the Parliament.

But MEPs have decided, inexplicably, to accelerate that process by voting yesterday to trigger a process to disband ESN due to the behaviour of their MEPs. The vote, with 414 in favour vs 224 against in a secret ballot, tasks the Authority for European Political Parties and European Political Foundations (APPF) to investigate ESN’s compliance with EU values. Specifically, MEPs cite as evidence AfD members expressing Nazi sympathies, the MEP from the Dutch party Forum for Democracy calling for “remigration” in order to preserve a “white” Europe, racist banners installed by Czechia’s SPD party, and an action by Bulgaria’s Revival to stop the broadcast of a film featuring scenes of homosexuality. Most heavily, the motion is relying on a German court’s ruling last year that found AfD’s policy programme to be “contrary to human dignity and freedom of religion”.

But what motivated the vote to happen at this exact moment was the far-right chants of “send them back” following the vote last month passing an EPP-designed law toughening asylum rules and giving the green light to third-country return hubs - scenes that have shocked Brussels.

“There is strong evidence that the AfD’s European party, the ESN, is in breach of the EU’s core values,” said German Green MEP Daniel Freund, who initiated the motion, yesterday. “Racism, homophobia and antisemitism have no place in Europe and anyone who peddles hate speech must not be allowed to receive a single cent of EU money.”

Here’s the problem though: it wasn’t just ESN MEPs who were chanting and celebrating in the European Parliament following the asylum vote. It was also PfE MEPs, and I’m told some from Meloni’s ECR also joined in (though less fervently). All of the accusations being levied at ESN could also be levied against PfE and ECR. So why is ESN being targeted and not them? Is it because PfE has sitting prime ministers in the European Council, and perhaps the next president of France? Is the Parliament ready to move against a group that includes the prime ministers of Italy and Belgium? Is the reason that ESN is being targeted simply because there is no governing party in their membership?

The EPP’s support for this motion reeks of hypocrisy. Let’s get real here: all of the transgressions listed against the ESN have been expressed by Donald Trump’s Republican Party in the United States - for example the “remigration” rhetoric. How can the EPP vote to disband a European party expressing these sentiments that are supposedly “not in line with EU values” while at the same time saying the Trump regime is a “great ally” of Europe? It’s completely inconsistent.

I know people are understandably upset about the distressing scenes we saw in the parliament last month. But I’m not sure that going after a political group that was probably about to collapse anyway is the smartest response. All it’s going to do is give the ESN, PfE and ECR further fodder to say the EU is persecuting them for their beliefs. These groups are receiving EU taxpayer money because 23% of European voters voted for parties in these three far-right groups in the 2024 election. If you include the EPP, voters in that election gave the European Parliament a right-wing majority (these four right-of-center groups together have 52% of EP seats).

The problem is not with the funding. The problem is with the voters. And that isn’t going to be solved by depriving funding from the elected representatives people voted for because we don’t like what they’re saying.

Taken together, it’s really hard to know right now whether these three developments yesterday were good news or bad news for the European far right. We may look back and say this was the moment that all three were able to ride the momentum of a persecution narrative all the way to their nations’ highest offices. Or it could be the beginning of their unravelling – losing control of events just when they were at the peak of their popularity.

Given that early elections remain a distinct possibility in Germany and Britain, we are looking at the very real possibility of Europe’s three largest countries all being under the control of the far right by the end of next year. Given how unpredictable things are at the moment, it’s also a very real possibility that all these movements will have lost steam by then. But in order for that to happen, we need to give Europeans an alternative to believe in. And right now, our centrist leaders are completely failing to do that.

I’ve been in Ireland the past days on the press trip for the start of Ireland’s presidency of the EU Council - the upper chamber of the union’s legislature representing national governments with a rotating chairmanship. It’s always a delight to be in Ireland. I make no secret of the fact that this is my favourite EU country, and not just because of my ancestry. Nevertheless, the article is going to dish out some harsh truths about the emerald isle that some will not like to hear.

We’ve had briefings with Irish ministers and business leaders, as well as a joint press conference with Irish Taoiseach (prime minister) Micheál Martin and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen held after she convened a college meeting in Cork.

During all these briefings, it became clear that there are two awkward subjects that Ireland’s politicians are having to grapple with as their presidency starts. One is their military neutrality in the face of Russia’s war on Ukraine (I’ll write more about that below). The other is the degree to which American big tech companies (and pharma as well) have disproportionate power in this country. Sweetheart tax deals attracted them to base their European headquarters here and that’s given them quite a lot of power in Dublin, since they account for such a large portion of the country’s economy.

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He was escaping wretched poverty and starvation as a result of the potato famine, which had hit his town of Skibbereen outside Cork particularly hard. He sailed to America in search of a better life - and more than anything, in search of hope. He might have been bemused to know that 146 years later, his great great great grandson would make the same journey in reverse. Not for economic necessity as was the case for him, but also in search of hope.

In this video shot in Cobh port, I talk about how when I emigrated from the United States to Europe at the end of 2006, people in both the US and EU couldn’t quite grasp the concept. The US doesn’t have a tradition of emigration, only immigration. We’re taught from a young age, in both Europe and America, that the US is the place where dreams come true. Why would anyone leave? Having grown up in American society, I wasn’t all that surprised that people in the US didn’t quite get the idea that I was leaving and did not have the intention of coming back. But what really took me aback was that Europeans also didn’t get it. Time after time, I encountered confusion at the idea that I would leave the US and not want to go back.

So on this 4th of July, I reminisced about this time period, back before the Trump era when Europeans found it strange that an American would want to leave America. It’s a topic that’s been coming up a lot during the readings and interviews for the French edition of my book, Le Continent Captif. I’ve stressed this idea of being an emigrant rather than an “expat”. But I’ve also stressed how different this experience is for an American vs any other immigrant, because we can never really escape our home country. It follows us wherever we go.

I hope you enjoy the video, and happy 4th of July for those who celebrate.

I’m in Ireland this week for the launch of the country’s time at the helm of the EU Council presidency, which was marked yesterday by an opening ceremony at Dublin Castle with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. I’ll write more about the content of this press trip tomorrow, but what I wanted to write about today is what I encountered on the journey here.

For logistical reasons, I had to fly to Dublin from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport (90 minutes from Brussels by train). CDG is a nightmare at the best of times, but on this visit it was particularly bad. I had been hearing stories about nightmare queues at the EU’s Schengen entry and exit checks piling up already this summer, and I saw it for myself as I was leaving. Unlike in the US or UK, when you leave the EU’s Schengen area (which I had to do because Ireland isn’t in Schengen) you have to go through an exit passport check. When I got to it, I was told that the line was stretching to 90 minutes wait for non-EU citizens. Luckily, when I waved my Belgian passport someone ushered me to the other line, and I was through in three minutes.

Why the difference? The EU’s ETIAS and accompanying Entry/Exit System (EES), the equivalent of the US ESTA system, is right now coming

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Several of my Substack readers have reached out over the past weeks to tell me about a new book that explores many of the same themes as mine - Glyn Morgan’s The Rise and Fall of American Europe. One person told me that it’s much more negative about Europe’s future than mine - and I thought ‘wow it must be absolutely despondent!’ I’ve spent the past few days reading it and indeed, it is a grim read. Morgan, who is the director of the Moynihan Center of European Studies at Syracuse University, does an excellent job outlining how post-war Western Europe was designed by and for the United States. He also spells out how the collapse of that system, which we are witnessing right now, does not mean a new era of American isolationism - but rather quite the opposite.

Following World War II, Morgan writes, the US undertook a remaking of the European order that institutionalised control. “The United States sought an economically sufficient but politically compliant Americanized Europe, and this is what eventually emerged,” he writes. This system of “American Europe” has been made up of three parts: an institutional configuration (NATO and the EU), a set of values, and a style of governance. He traces how this emerging system was unsuccessfully resisted by both Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill (people forget that last part), and eventually proved so successful that it spread East. “American Europe as a state-form has proven no less expansionist than was Stalin’s Russia or Napoleon’s France.”

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While the title of the book might suggest that we’re now transitioning to an era of ‘Post-American Europe’, Morgan says this misunderstands the intentions and worldview of the MAGA movement. “The notion of ‘a post-American’ world – a popular notion among international relations scholars – is, I think, mistaken. There is nothing ‘post-American’ in Trump’s plans for Europe.”

“Europeans sometimes dismiss the Trump administration as composed of isolationists who will abandon Europe. But the more likely foreign policy – and potentially more troubling outcome – is that US political leaders will do what they did in the late 1940s and try again to remake Europe in their own image.” Morgan calls this new emerging system “Civilizational America” – an ideologically-driven goal of regime change in Europe in order to have even more compliant governments. He points to the US National Security Strategy and the US State Department’s quest for “civilizational allies” in Europe as evidence. While the ‘American Europe’ era saw the US government use a “Goldilocks approach” of subtle domination (allowing just enough independence but not too much), MAGA is done with these niceties. They make their extortion and control clear.

“American Europe is over. But this doesn’t mean the US will pursue an isolationist strategy. For economic as much as strategic reasons, the US still needs a compliant Europe. It needs to block Europe from pursuing an economic strategy that jeapordizes core US economic interests.”

Why does MAGA hate Europe so much? This is a question Morgan spends considerable time on. He says that MAGA has identified Europe as the personification of everything they hate – something that must be discredited. He says this has been developing on the American right for many years before Trump came along, noting that in 2013 former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan was decrying Western Europe as a leftist nightmare and extolling Vladimir Putin as “one of us”. In his 2006 book Buchanan said “all of Europe marches to its death” because they are allowing in non-white immigrants. “Since few Americans know much about Europe, an image of dystopian Europe serves their political ends…MAGA hostility to Europe is little more than deflected hostility toward an American elite that they seek to topple.”

“Europe serves as a symbol of an order that MAGA detests – whether cradle-to-grave social welfare programs, multicultural diversity, immigration, secularism, green alternative energy, or supranational institutions. To the extent that Europe is popular and successful, it delays the arrival of MAGA’s new Jerusalem.”

Morgan says that the most effective tool for controlling American Europe has been NATO – which, as US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has said, “is not an alliance, it’s a defence arrangement for Europe.” Morgan blames dependence on NATO for why EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen “acquiesced to a humiliating trade deal that saw the EU make unilateral concessions.” Resistance was deemed impossible, he says, because European leaders feared that Trump would pull US troops out of Europe or quit NATO.

NATO has now been weaponised as a tool of extortion, and Europeans should have transitioned to a sovereign system of European defence after the Cold War, he says. “Once the Soviet Union disappeared, there was no obvious reason why NATO didn’t disappear with it. NATO survived partly because of the entrenched interests of the Washington DC military, industrial and diplomatic establishment, who feared that a post-NATO world would shrink their financial and employment prospects.”

There are, Morgan concludes, ways that Europe can fight back. “Rather than the craven submission symbolised by Secretary General Rutte’s references to Trump as ‘daddy’, European political leaders should be willing to take advantage of America’s current strategic weakness. Notwithstanding Trump’s fervent desire to embrace the world’s most powerful leaders, his most striking strategic achievement is to produce an anti-American alliance that includes China, Russia, India, Brazil, Iran, South Africa and much of the Global South. A more Machiavellian European leadership would exploit this fact by, for example, signing some joint development deals with Chinese arms manufacturers.”

There are also ways, he says, that Europe can lessen its tech dependency so that the US doesn’t have “chokepoints” to use to punish individuals or countries by shutting off their access to basic economic services. “If the US government can force China’s ByteDance to sell TikTok [US operations], when why shouldn’t European authorities force the sale of Twitter or Faceook [EU operations]?” he asks.

But Morgan’s depressing conclusion is that it is very unlikely that Europeans are going to do any of this, because the scale of the challenge is so enormous. He notes that freeing Europe from its American tech dependence and developing technological autonomy would cost five trillion euros, according to a 2025 Chamber of Progress report. That’s more than 25 times the EU’s annual budget – roughly a quarter of the entire EU GDP.

Freeing Europe from American control would be a multi-generational project, he says, because it took multiple generations to cement that control in the first place. He grimly concludes, therefor, that we are simply going to transition from the benign rule of American Europe to the brutal rule of Civilizational America – “a much less ambitious undertaking, not least because it involves hallowing out established institutions rather than building new ones.”

“After failing to strengthen itself over the last twenty years, Europe is now fated to live under a different, less agreeable form of US hegemony.”

As much as I share Morgan’s diagnosis of the seriousness of the problem, I don’t agree that Europe is inevitably fated to go along with whatever America decides to do to us. Morgan believes that Europe’s technological dependence is actually the most dangerous dependency, not its military dependence, because as long as it’s there Washington will be able to threaten a '“kill switch” to shut down Europe’s economy.

But with different, bolder European leaders, we could undertake this together at speed. The biggest problem right now is that most Europeans remain ignorant of the problem – and even if they understand the problem the challenge seems too enormous to even start tackling it. Hopefully, books like this one will open some more eyes on this owned continent.

This weekend, the US embassy will close down the large Cinquantenaire Parc next to Brussels’ EU quarter to host a massive party celebrating America’s 250th anniversary. While Politico has called the invite-only event “the hottest ticket in Brussels”, other reports have noted that the embassy seems to be having trouble attracting guests (sending repeated reminders to those who haven’t confirmed). The Politico article reports that of the 8,000 “hottest ticket” invitations that were sent out, 5,000 have confirmed on the official guest list. The event is being hosted by

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I talked about what the Meloni-Trump spat means for Europe, and whether other leaders will follow her in growing a spine, with Luke Johnson from the Public Sphere Substack. We also talked about the backstory behind the treaties governing the use of US bases in Europe, the context behind all this that was largely missing from a lot of the media coverage.

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On this day in 2016, 17.4 million people voted to leave the European Union - 51.9% of those who turned out for the advisory referendum. The question they answered was vague. It did not specify what type of relationship the UK would have with the EU once it left. Theresa May decided that for them: a hard Brexit giving the UK the most distant relationship with the EU of any country on this continent (other than Russia and Belarus).

The 2016 vote set in motion the most consequential act of democratic self-harm in British history. It was an experiment, a risk that gambled with people’s livelihoods. How did it go? We now have a decade of evidence. The verdict is in, and it’s not pretty. That’s why, according to the latest polling, only 29% of British voters today say it was the right decision to leave the EU. One in three leave voters has changed their mind.

And yet, even after winning a historic landslide victory in 2024 giving him a supermajority, Starmer refused to adjust the red lines set by his four Conservative predecessors. Just like Theresa May, he said no to the single market, no to customs union, no to regulatory alignment. And that’s why his so-called “reset” with the EU went nowhere. Starmer would not criticise Brexit for fear of alienating the red wall Labour voters who had voted for it. It became the elephant in the room that nobody in the government or the media would talk about. And it forced the Labour government to exist in the same fog of irreality that had plagued the Conservative governments from 2016 to 2024. Will Andy Burnham, the most likely next prime minister (the seventh since the referendum), be able to succeed where the others failed? Based on his reticence to talk about Brexit, it seems unlikely.

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Over the past two years whenever Donald Trump insulted or made up stories about European leaders, they have excused it, ignored it, or agreed with him with a ‘please sir may I have another?’ response. When Trump claimed he had conversations with Emmanuel Macron agreeing to raise prescription drug prices or begging for the US to defend Europe even if they didn’t pay (“the president of a big country”), the French president issued no direct response. He left it to his office to issue quiet denials on background, fearful of attracting Trump’s wrath if he contradicted the US president’s fantasies. When Trump attacked and insulted Keir Starmer (yet again this past weekend calling on him to resign), the British prime minister simply took it and claimed “I get on really well with Trump.” When Trump attacked Friedrich Merz two months ago, all the German chancellor could muster in response was to praise the Atlantic alliance.

That’s why it’s such a big deal that this weekend Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni called out Trump for lying about an interaction they had at last week’s G7 summit in France. The row started when Trump told Italian television: "She begged me to take a picture with her. She wanted a picture with me so ​badly. I wouldn't have taken it, but I felt sorry for her."

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Unlike other European leaders who have simply let such false anecdotes slide, Meloni immediately took to social media to rebut the accusation, posting on Instagram: "Donald Trump's statements are completely made up. I am frankly astonished. I don't ‌know why ⁠the president of the United States behaves like this towards his allies." And in a characteristic display of her political acumen, she added: “Neither I nor Italy ever beg".

Trump then doubled down, posting on Truth Social: “Italian Prime Minister Gigiorgia [sic] Meloni asked, over and over, for a picture with me during the G-7 meeting in France. She is doing poorly in Italy with her level of popularity, possibly because she turned down the United States of America, a country that truly loves and protects Italy.”

If he expected to successfully intimidate Meloni as he has other European leaders, he both underestimated her political shrewdness and overestimated his current leverage. She responded directly to his post, saying: “These constant, unprovoked attacks are senseless. As for my popularity, being your friend certainly has not helped it, nor does it depend on my relationship with you. My popularity depends on my ability to defend Italy’s national interest, and that is exactly what I have always done…in any case, my popularity is none of your concern, I suggest you focus on yours.”

There have been a lot of takes about this over the past days. Readers of this Substack know I am no fan of the Italian prime minister, who leads a far-right movement that is literally the successor party to Mussolini’s fascists. But this is yet another sign, as I have written before, of how the far right has displayed better political instincts by distancing themselves from Trump and his imperialist wars faster than Europe’s centrists. The ECFR’s Jeremy Cliffe has made the same observation in his piece for the Financial Times last month.

There are two things that this episode shows. One, as has been widely observed, is that Trump is severely weakened and vulnerable following his Iran War misadventure. Giorgia Meloni is the most politically astute (and, as I’ve argued before, in some ways the most powerful) leader in Europe at the moment. She senses where the political winds are blowing, and other European leaders follow her. They followed her over the past two years when she was Trump’s cheerleader, with the Commission even sending a representative to the inaugural Trump Board of Peace meeting at her recommendation. And now, they will follow her in pushing back against Trump using nationalist rhetoric. Either way, Europe’s direction of travel is being determined by Italy’s far-right prime minister – which should worry centrists.

But I want to focus on the less obvious lesson from all this – the context behind what this fight is about. Trump’s response to Meloni included the line:

“She wouldn’t even let us use Italy’s landing strips or runways, a great logistical inconvenience, and this despite the fact the US contributes hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year to protect Italy, and other “so-called” NATO Allies. Now, after the United States defeated Iran militarily, she wants to be friends again in order to get her “numbers up.” No thanks!!!”

Meloni responded by invoking her defence of "Italy’s national interest”:

“This is also what I did regarding the American military bases in Italy. Their use is governed by agreements that we have always respected, and that cannot be violated as long as I am Prime Minister. Italy remains a sovereign nation.”

That last line is important. What they’re referring to there is the Italian government’s belated decision (well after the war began) not to allow the US to use its base in Sicily to launch direct attacks on Iran, citing the legal agreement governing that base which requires the US to ask permission (and receive an affirmative vote from the Italian Parliament under the Italian constitution) to do so. This has infuriated not just President Trump but also most of the US foreign policy establishment. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has even threatened to pull the US out of NATO if European countries deny the US the ability to do whatever they want in their European bases. “If now we have reached a point where the NATO alliance means that we can’t use those bases, that, in fact, that we can no longer use those bases to defend America’s interests, then NATO is a one-way street. Then NATO is simply about us having troops in Europe to defend Europe,” he said in April.

What Rubio is reflecting there is the long-standing US practice of operating outside the scope of its agreements with European countries at its bases, a subject I write about in Chapter 13 of my book The Owned Continent. Both Republican and Democrat administrations have believed they do not need to actually consult “allied” national governments about what happens on the US bases on their territory, regardless of what is written in the status of forces agreements. The reason is simple: the “allied” European governments have never asked them to. The Iran War would not have been possible without the use of US bases in Germany and the UK. It is likely that what has happened on those bases over the past months is not in line with the legal agreements the US has with those countries either. But of course, Berlin and London have never objected to such outside-the-law operations before, why would they start now? The US has continued using their British and German bases to attack Iran, with no objection from those governments.

But before you give Meloni too much credit here, keep in mind that her denial of the use of the base in Sicily was more about optics than actually blocking US operations. The US is still able to use its base in Northern Italy to conduct the war, and the definition of “logistical” operations that are still allowed has been very flexible. The US State Department isn’t angry because Meloni and Sanchez’s block on the use of US bases has actually disrupted the war effort. They’re mad because for the first time, European countries are insisting that Washington actually abide by the treaties governing these bases. And they’re worried about the precedent that will set after decades of America operating with impunity in Europe.

Meloni says “Italy remains a sovereign nation” – but is it though? The American government clearly doesn’t think so. For years they have treated Italy like a protectorate vassal state, doing whatever they like there without feeling the need to consult with the government. And it’s not just Italy, it’s also Germany, Britain, Belgium, Denmark, Poland, etc. So look beyond the tabloid titillation of this back-and-forth. This is much bigger than Donald Trump’s fragile ego. The most politically powerful woman in Europe just challenged decades of European foreign policy. And she was the most unlikely person to do it. We are living in incredible times.

Sanchez support

Meloni isn’t the only politically shrewd leader in Europe, even if she is the shrewdest. Even as she and Pedro Sanchez sparred at last week’s European Council summit on the subjects of China and migration, the Spanish Prime Minister took time out to show solidarity with her over Trump’s attacks (while Merz unsurprisingly remained silent, just as he did when Trump attacked Sanchez – so much for the Merzoni alliance).

“This attack is neither political nor personal. I don’t even know how to describe it,” Sanchez said at his summit closing press conference in Brussels. He said he had expressed this to her “in private as well, during the summit.” Asked about the exchange, President Macron was not willing to go as far as Sanchez, saying only that he was “surprised” by the comments and adding he would discuss the issue with her at their next meeting this Thursday at the Franco-Italian summit in Antibes.

Meloni’s pushback against Trump is getting more attention than Sanchez’s for obvious reasons. It is more of a direct confrontation, done in social media format (a to-camera video even!), coming from someone who is from the same far-right political ideology who had strongly supported him until now. I think it’s important to give credit where credit’s due. Meloni didn’t have to do this, it took courage that her counterparts in France and Germany have not been willing to show. But let’s also not forget that this woman also said just five months ago that Trump should be the Nobel Peace Prize. She was the only European leader to attend his inauguration last year.

This is about political opportunism on Meloni’s part, something that has defined her entire career. But it still look courage and it still took intelligence, and other European leaders should learn the lesson as she receives huge backing form the Italian public, from both the left and right, for what she’s done here. The Italian centre left has lost their opportunity to tie Meloni to Trump and make an appeal to the public based on resistance to American hegemony. And now it’s too late. She’s turned the tables on them and they’re now left with nothing. Because the slavish devotion that our European leaders showed to Trump in 2025 is not popular. Just ask Keir Starmer, who just resigned today.

In this case, Meloni should indeed be followed.

But not everyone is in agreement. While France (backed by Italy) is pushing for a tougher line, Germany has been more reticent while Spain has questioned the wisdom of starting a trade war with China just as Europe is being abandoned (and threatened) by its longtime ally the United States.

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There’s a scene that repeats itself so often at European Council summits that you could set your watch by it. A leader arrives, stops at the cameras for the obligatory doorstep, and delivers two contradictory sentences back to back without appearing to notice. Today it was Rob Jetten’s turn.

The Dutch prime minister spent the months ahead of his election last year talking like a European federalist. He made his first foreign trip as PM to Brussels rather than Berlin or Paris – a symbolic break from the Wilders-adjacent isolationism of his predecessor’s government. He told reporters that in an unstable world, “Europe is where we make our money.” He positioned the Netherlands as back at the table after years of semi-detachment, ready to work “closely together with everyone here in Brussels and our allies within the EU.” During the campaign he called for a more federal Europe and even for pan-European defence.

And then he walked into today’s June European Council summit and did what every single one of his predecessors in The Hague has done for decades: he told everyone the EU budget needs to be smaller. The Commission’s proposed multi-annual financial framework “needs to be significantly reduced,” he said. It would be “unacceptable” for Dutch contributions to “really explode.” He’s been leading what he calls “a broad front” of frugal states – the Netherlands, the Nordics, Germany and Austria – pushing to cut the next seven-year budget down from what the Commission has put on the table.

This is not a contradiction unique to Jetten. It is, at this point, the operating system of European Council summitry. Leaders arrive professing that Europe needs to do more – more on defence, more on competitiveness, more on reducing dependency on Washington and Beijing, more on fighting climate change, more on supporting Ukraine – and then they spend the actual negotiating session trying to make sure the EU has less money to do any of it with. Right now they are negotiating the next EU multi-annual budget for 2028 to 2035. I’ve been in this town so long that I’ve been through three of these MFF negotiations and I’m honestly quite bored with the groundhog day routine. The Northern (mostly) protestant countries demand cuts, the Southern and Eastern Catholic and Orthodox countries want more spending.

It’s a perennial dance where both sides act in short-term nationalist interest and nobody is looking at what the big picture needs of the union are. It was same as it ever was today. “The [budget] proposal which is on the table is from a German point of view unaffordable,” Chancellor Merz just said in his concluding press conference. “The next proposal we expect from the Irish presidency has to be below the present proposal.” Then he went on to say “the EU needs to have effective instruments at its disposal in order to effectively defend our interests around the globe.”

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This doesn’t just happen with the budget. As I write in my book The Owned Continent, the rot at the heart of the EU is the building I’ve spent all day in today covering the European Council. The Just Lips, which houses the upper chamber of the EU’s legislature representing national governments, is the home of empty slogans and short-term thinking. These national politicians know what should be done to unite Europe and give Europeans sovereignty on the world stage. But so much of what they do in this building undermines the very union that their slogans say we need. And that is certainly the case with Northern Europe’s ridiculous penny-pinching and rebate demands. “The same frugals that complied with Trump’s orders to increase defence spending for NATO to 5% GDP are screaming blue murder over an [EU budget] increase from 1.1% to 1.26%,” noted former Dutch MEP Sophie in 't Veld today. “Ultimately it’s not about money, but about power: national leaders are determined to curtail the EU.”

EU spending is a rounding error

Here is the number that should be driving every conversation in the Europa building this week, and almost never does: the EU budget amounts to roughly 1% of the EU’s combined gross domestic product. Under the current 2021-2027 framework, the legal ceiling on what Brussels can even raise is 1.4% of EU GDP, and actual spending has consistently come in well under that, around 1% to 1.1%. The 2026 annual budget lands at €192.8 billion in commitments — against an EU economy worth somewhere north of €17 trillion.

Now put that next to what most national governments do with their own economies.

The United States federal government spent the equivalent of about 22.8% of GDP in fiscal year 2025 – more than $7 trillion against an economy of roughly $30 trillion. That’s federal spending alone, not counting state and local government spending on top of it.

Germany’s federal government (excluding the Länder, the regional states that run their own substantial budgets) spent around €495.5 billion in 2025 on a German economy of roughly €4.3-4.4 trillion. That’s about 12% of GDP, from the federal layer alone, before you add a single euro of state or municipal spending. Berlin’s federal government, in other words, spends more than ten times what the EU’s confederal government does. And that’s the “frugal” German federal government we’re talking about, the one whose chancellor stood next to Jetten in Cyprus this spring and said it was time for the EU to “reduce spending.”

The comparisons for non-federal unitary governments are even more striking. The United Kingdom’s total government spending runs at around 44% of GDP. In the Netherlands it’s 45%. France’s is higher still, at roughly 57% of GDP. These aren’t even outliers, they’re roughly where most large, mature European economies sit.

The EU’s confederal government, which is now being asked to run a single market of 450 million people, manage strategic autonomy from the United States, finance the green and digital transitions, safeguard the union’s economy to coordinate continental defence, support Ukraine’s reconstruction and accession, and manage a swathe of policy areas from trade to energy to competition, is being asked to do it with a budget 1/23rd the size of what the US federal government has. The reason why is clear. While the US and Germany have federal taxation, the EU does not. It is reliant on budgetary contributions from its 27 member states, and national politicians always have the incentive to make Brussels claw it out of their tightly-clenched fists.

As the Dutch Volt MEP Reinier van Lanschot points out in his book We Are Europe, the total number of national civil servants in the EU is 28 million. The number in the Netherlands (population 18 million) alone is 138,000. The number for the EU (population 450 million) is 55,000. He illustrates this by showing a number of dots at every level, with each dot representing 50,000 people. The EU’s civil service is one dot. The EU’s total population fills an entire page. Of course, many of these civil servants are people that would never be working for the national government in a federal country, such as police officers or postal workers. That’s why the spending level for the federal governments of the US and Germany is so much lower than the UK and France. But as the direct comparison with the US shows, the idea that the EU has a bloated out-of-control bureaucracy is a fallacy. The EU has a very lean budget and workforce considering all that it does.

This is not a generously funded supranational government straining at the limits of subsidiarity. It is, by any honest comparison, one of the most fiscally starved layers of government in the democratic world relative to the economy it’s meant to serve.

The ambition-resources gap

That would be fine if all these centrist national leaders denying the EU money were saying they only want the EU to be a free trade zone and they want to undo the 1992 Maastricht Treaty turning the European Community into a confederal union. In this sense, far-right French presidential candidate Jordan Bardella is at least being more honest than the centrists in office when he says he wants to halve the EU budget, because he also wants to gut the EU of its powers and make it just a free trade zone (although he’s not being honest by refusing to acknowledge to voters what that means in terms of lost European wealth and power). But these leaders sitting in the European Council today are trying to have it both ways. They want a strong sovereign EU, but they don’t want to pay for it.

This matters more in 2026 than it has at almost any point in the EU’s history, because of what leaders are asking the Union to become. Read the agendas for the recent Council summits: the next MFF, yes, but also Ukraine’s accession process, strategic autonomy from an erratic United States, a defence-readiness push that assumes Europe can no longer assume the American security guarantee is permanent, a competitiveness agenda meant to stop European firms bleeding market share to Chinese and American rivals, and a parallel debate about new EU borrowing capacity because the old contribution model can’t stretch to cover any of it without national finance ministries screaming.

This is especially true for climate action, which can only be effective if it’s done at EU level rather than at national level. “To put it simply, the current proposal is already insufficient, and cutting it further would undermine Europe’s capacity to reduce its dependencies that make our economy vulnerable,” says Chiara Martinelli, director of Climate Action Network Europe. “The next EU budget must match the scale of the challenge, and move us away from fossil fuels.”

Every one of these goals is, in some sense, an admission that the old division of labour – defence outsourced to Washington, competitiveness left to national industrial policy, growth subsidised by cheap Russian energy and an open Chinese market – has collapsed. The entire premise of strategic autonomy is that Europe needs to be able to do, collectively, things it used to either not do or had done by someone else. That costs money. The question, as asked by Morning Post Europe this morning, is whether leaders have the political courage to finance it. Building a European defence-industrial base, financing the Ukraine reconstruction and accession bill, matching the subsidy firepower of the US Inflation Reduction Act or Chinese state capitalism, none of that happens inside a budget capped at roughly the cost of running Germany’s federal government for about five months. That’s the comparison that should actually be on the table in Brussels this week, not the synthetic outrage over an €800 million Council building renovation that Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni decided to make her budgetary hill to die on.

As usual, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez was one of the only clear pro-European voices in the room today. “The EU budget must be much more ambitious than it is today,” he told reporters after the summit. Europe needs more resources for policies that are central to the European project, he said, from the common agricultural policy to cohesion funds. He also blasted the German-led deregulation push, saying it is “profoundly wrong” to be weakening EU laws in response to pressure from the US government and American companies.

You cannot ask an institution to become more like a government – more strategic, more autonomous, more capable of underwriting collective security and industrial policy – while simultaneously starving it to a fraction of what any actual government spends. Those two positions are not in tension. They are mutually exclusive. Europe has to pick one.

The Brussels pantomime

What’s been striking about the run-up to this summit isn’t that the frugal coalition exists. It always has, going back to Margaret Thatcher’s rebate fights in the 1980s. What’s interesting is how openly the rhetorical mismatch has been laid bare this cycle. Jetten gets to be the pro-European face of Dutch politics, the post-Wilders normalisation story, the guy who flies to Brussels before he flies anywhere else. And in the same breath, he gets to tell Dutch voters back home that he’s the one holding the line against Brussels excess, that he’s keeping “a close eye on every euro,”. Friedrich Merz does something similar: rules out new EU debt, says Europe needs to “set new priorities,” which in Council-speak always seems to mean cutting something rather than raising the money to do the new priority and the old ones. The Council summits always get framed the same way in national media: not national leaders coming together to jointly solve Europe’s problems, but coming into an arena to fight the good fight for their nation state. It’s a zero sum game where if one country gains, the others must be losing.

It is a remarkably durable bit of political theatre. You get to bank the credit for sounding like a convinced European at the podium, and you get to bank the credit for sounding like a careful steward of taxpayer money back home. You never have to reconcile the two, because national media rarely runs the comparison that would force the question: a budget that’s 1% of GDP cannot do what a budget that’s 11%, 22%, 44% or 57% of GDP can do. Nobody in The Hague is asking why the Dutch government itself spends roughly 45% of Dutch GDP while insisting Brussels needs to spend less than a fortieth of that share continent-wide. These frugal country leaders like to make the argument, “how can I explain to my citizens that the EU budget is growing while our national budget is shrinking”? Well you could start by telling them how much drastically larger the member state budget is than the confederal government, and then you could tell them that this adjustment is necessary because the EU is being asked to do more in this newly dangerous world.

It would be one thing if this fiscal restraint reflected a genuine belief that the EU should do less. But that’s not the argument frugal leaders are making. They want the EU to do more on defence. They want it to reduce dependency on the US. They want it to be a credible geopolitical actor that can stand up to Trump’s tariffs and Chinese overcapacity. They just don’t want to pay for any of it, and they’d very much like their voters to keep believing that Brussels spending is, by default, wasteful spending that the home capital is bravely resisting.

We need an EU-level tax

The Commission’s solution to this impasse is simple: the EU must establish “own resources” – Brussels jargon for federal-level direct taxation. “If you want to meet these ambitions, and you don’t want to increase your budget contributions, then we need own resources,” a Commission official said at today’s summit.

This is the context that makes sense of the otherwise odd-looking package the Commission put on the table alongside its MFF proposal last July: five new “own resources”: revenue streams that would flow to Brussels directly, rather than arriving as a line item that finance ministries in Paris, Berlin and The Hague have to negotiate and defend at home every single year.

There’s a proposed levy on uncollected e-waste, a share of Emissions Trading System and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism revenue, a new tobacco excise duty expected to raise around €11.2 billion a year, and a corporate turnover levy (CORE) aimed at large companies with EU turnover above €100 million, expected to bring in close to €7 billion annually. Taken together, the Commission estimates the basket could generate somewhere around €58-60 billion a year in revenue that doesn’t have to be wrung, GDP percentage point by GDP percentage point, out of national treasuries.

The logic here is not subtle, even if Brussels is too polite to say it in quite these terms: national governments have shown, summit after summit, that they will not vote themselves a bigger contribution no matter how loudly they talk about European ambition, because contributions show up as a clean, attackable line in each country’s own budget – exactly the kind of number a Jetten or a Merz can wave at domestic voters as proof of fiscal discipline. Own resources are designed to route around that veto point entirely. A tobacco tax or a corporate turnover levy doesn’t appear in The Hague’s budget as “money we chose to send to Brussels” — it’s revenue the EU raises and collects more or less on its own authority, the same way Washington doesn’t ask Sacramento’s permission to levy federal income tax.

And yet, these same Northern frugals are also opposed to some or all of these own resources income generators - just as they are to the other option for raising income, raising joint EU debt on the capital markets. So not only are they blocking an increase to the budget through national contributions, they’re also blocking all other ideas for how to raise the money for the ambitions they say they want.

That’s why the own resources package is in serious trouble. It needs unanimity in the Council and ratification by every national parliament, which means every government with a reason to dislike a new EU-level tax. And there’s a national lobby opposed to nearly all five of them, from tobacco-growing states to capitals nervous about creating any precedent for Brussels taxing companies directly. Each of those lobbied governments gets a veto. The frugal coalition that wants a smaller overall MFF envelope is, unsurprisingly, lukewarm at best on giving the EU an independent revenue base that would make the next push for a bigger budget easier to finance and harder to block. It is one thing to ask the EU to do more with money that capitals can switch off. It is quite another to give Brussels a tax base of its own.

It’s all very frustrating. And until this continent’s political and media elite decide to start having an honest conversation with their citizens for the first time about the real options for Europe’s future, this doesn’t get solved. The problem with Europe is Europeans themselves. And until we can change these old ways of behaving, Europe will be condemned to irrelevance.

When it comes to talking about Europe’s dependencies on foreign powers, there are only two that our European leaders like to talk about: Russia and China. The third is the dependency that dare not speak its name. And that will again be the case at today’s European Council summit in Brussels, where prime ministers and presidents will discuss sanctions on Russia and over-dependence on China. But they will not discuss the US government’s move last week to ban Europeans from using certain applications from American tech companies.

Over dinner tonight, the leaders will discuss with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen her idea for the EU to become more confrontational with China. The Commission’s trade chief Maroš Šefčovič discussed the idea with national foreign ministers on Monday, and told journalists as he was leaving that “the status quo is not sustainable – not economically or politically.” The status quo is the €360 billion trade deficit in goods that the EU has with China, an imbalance that is now even the case for the EU’s biggest exporting powerhouse Germany. The Commission has recently launched new trade investigations against Beijing and proposed new defensive tools, while also ratcheting up the public rhetoric pressuring China to stop what the EU says is market distortion.

But not every prime minister sitting around the dinner table tonight is behind this new bellicose language about China. Some, such as Spain’s Pedro Sanchez, are questioning why the EU should engage in a trade war against China when Europe’s dependence on the United States is such a more pressing and serious issue. But we know why. For two decades Brussels has shadowed Washington’s language on Beijing almost word for word. Now that Washington itself can’t decide what it wants, who is actually writing Europe’s China policy? And why should Europe antagonise China at this precise moment, when it should instead be diversifying its trading partners and hedging its bets against an erratic and aggressive America? The answer to these questions from Brussels and national capitals over the past year has been incoherent.

Whose China policy is this, anyway?

In February, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz looked simultaneously delighted and terrified as he watched a robot ninjas do backflips during a visit to Hangzhou as Chinese officials beamed at him. The German chancellor had just

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On Friday, the US Commerce Department ordered Anthropic to cut non-US citizens’ access to the company’s latest models Fable 5 and Mythos 5, even those living in the US. Anthropic was reportedly blindsided, and came out with a statement shortly after saying the order is so unenforceable that they will have to ban access to the two models for everyone. “The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance,” the company said. “We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm. The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern.”

This is exactly the “kill switch” nightmare scenario that so many in Europe have been warning despite American insistence that these fears are irrational. The worry is that the US government can turn off the internet for Europeans with the flip of a switch - not just for AI but for all kinds of tech applications including electronic payments. The idea is that dependence on the US government or US companies is equally risky, because the government can also force US companies to turn their services off for Europe – or threaten to do so in order to extort Europe through its dependencies.

“This shows how the US government views Europe: as an enemy, not as a friend and ally,” said German Green Member of the European Parliament Alexandra Geese yesterday. “Europe must finally take note of this. As long as our digital infrastructure depends on foreign companies, our freedom is at risk.”

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She noted that the US government has, per usual, not consulted with European governments about this at all. And, she noted, that the security concerns being cited by the US government have also been raised by European authorities. “But in Europe, Anthropic had refused for weeks to allow European authorities to assess the potential risks. The US government’s block of Anthropic’s latest AI model highlights just how severe the lack of sovereignty in Europe currently is. Whilst the US government is able to take action, European security authorities have had to politely ask for permission even to assess the potential risks.”

The warnings in Europe over this latest development haven’t just come from the left, they’ve also come from the right. "Europe cannot keep building its tech stack on access that can be switched off overnight by a foreign government," Finnish conservative MEP Aura Salla told Politico. "We must take action to reserve our data and our market preliminary for European tech to scale it and build our own frontier AI." Far-right French presidential candidate Jordan Bardella, increasingly distancing himself from Trump and MAGA, also hit out against the US ban. "This sudden decision comes to remind us that artificial intelligence is already a major issue of national sovereignty," he told Politico. "Nations that do not quickly develop their own [models] will always depend more and more on the choices of other powers.”

Liberals in Emmanuel Macron’s Renew Europe group have called an urgent technological sovereignty debate in the European Parliament today in response to the latest developments. “These restrictions are a clear example of the current American ‘nobody but us’ mentality,” said Dutch liberal MEP Bart Groothuis. “While software is vulnerable worldwide, the mitigation of potential hazard is left to Americans only. It’s irresponsible. With the ascent of frontier AI models, we have a huge task ahead of us to avoid a cyber bloodbath. Once again: this shows that Europe needs its own LLM’s and open weight models or face digital colonization.”

“The US is once again demonstrating what we Liberals and Democrats have warned about so many times since Trump entered into office; that the US holds a real ‘kill-switch’ over essential technologies and that they are more than willing to use it,” said French Liberal MEP Christophe Grudler.

The Anthropic ban comes just a week after European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen presented a “Tech Sovereignty” package designed to lessen European dependence. But here in Brussels, the proposal went down like a damp squib, with people saying its ambition is far too limited given the dangerous situation Europe now finds itself in. The anthropic development, von der Leyen’s critics say, shows that she is not taking the American threat seriously enough.

“The Commission’s proposal for the Tech Sovereignty Package is not fit for purpose when it comes to making Europe digitally sovereign,” said Geese. “The expansion of American data centres in Europe will only deepen our dependence. Giving priority to data centres over industry without taking sustainability or security into account will further weaken the competitiveness of European companies. Instead of imposing new red tape on SMEs, we must finally address the elephant in the room: US tech giants are no longer ‘trusted partners’, but are working alongside US President Trump to achieve global domination by the strongest and to dismantle a rules-based economy and world order.”

It isn’t just von der Leyen that doesn’t seem to be treating this with the urgency it deserves. There is no indication that European leaders are planning to bring this issue up with President Trump at the G7 over the coming days. Nor is it on the agenda for the EU leaders’ summit on Thursday and Friday. Anthropic may have banned the new models for everyone, but the intention of the US government was clear: block all foreigners, even from “allied” nations, from using American tech. This may just be an early preview of what the White House has in store. And given the level of Europe’s dependency, the American kill switch could ground this continent’s economy to a halt.

I’m now doing promotion rounds for the book in French (keep an eye on the events section of the website) and the first stop was a reading at Librebook multilingual bookshop in the expat-heavy Brussels neighbourhood of Ixelles. It follows a reading of the English book there in March.

Thanks to everyone who came out for the reading, we had a really good discussion there with some excellent questions.

The reviews are coming in from France. This one from l’Express has a headline focused on one very small part of the book saying European federalists should embrace the fact that English has become a lingua franca for the union understood by more than half of EU citizens. I knew this would strike a nerve in France, which has fiercely resisted this development for years. But it’s really not at all the point of the book, I’m not even advocating for any action on that front! I’m simply asking for people in France to stop denying the current linguistic reality in Europe.

Anyway the review itself is quite positive and focuses on the actual topic of the book (resisting American dominance), I think the headline editor just saw a click-bait opportunity to lead with this one small part of the review. Fair enough, I guess I shouldn’t complain if it gets more people to read it. But I really hope I don’t end up getting sidetracked by this one point in all my French interviews, it really isn’t important enough to merit such long debate in my opinion. But I know other people feel differently, and I’m willing to defend my position that resisting English is counter-productive for Europe.

You can purchase the French or the English edition at Librebook, Waterstones or The European Bookshop in Brussels. For more purchasing options, click here.

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Earlier this month I wrote about the tense negotiations over reform of the EU Passenger Rights Directive, which has been on the table for years but recently got caught up in the deregulation fever here in Brussels. Last night negotiators reached an agreement, but as I predicted before, the airlines have ended up with a law that is worse for them than what they had before. It should be a cautionary tale for all the business associations in Brussels right now asking for EU laws to be reopened.

The big headline of the deal, which will still need a final vote of approval in the Parliament and Council to become law, is that airlines will no longer be able to charge extra for passengers to bring small rolling carry-on suitcases on the plane. This is something that budget airlines started doing about two years ago and has recently been followed by flag carriers (the usual pattern of budget airlines finding a way to sell cheaper tickets and then flag carriers eventually doing the same).

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But before you jump for joy, this may not be as good for consumers as it first appears. The reason why budget airlines started charging for things that used to be free (meals, choosing a seat, rolling carry-ons, etc) was so they could offer budget fares that come up as the cheapest on search engines. They count on people clicking on their fare because it’s lower, then adding the extras in the booking process, possibly ending up with a more expensive fare than the other ones from competitors in the search engine that included those things in their basic fare. Flag carriers were eventually pressured to follow with the same no-frills basic fares to avoid this happening. The issue is that this became a race to the bottom, with Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary once suggesting (perhaps joking, perhaps not) that his airline was considering charging extra to use the toilets.

What this new law will immediately mean is that the airfares that you see on flight comparison sites are about to get more expensive, because there will no longer be basic backpack-only fares. I travel a lot, and as a Dutch Calvinist trapped in an American Irish-Catholic’s body, I’ve adjusted to only taking a backpack now when I fly. Other passengers who need a rolling carry-on are then subsidising my cheaper ticket. With this law, that ticket will no longer be available to me. And that’s exactly what the airlines warned about.

“By making the hand-baggage-inclusive fare the default offer, consumers may be presented with higher headline prices including the second bag, rather than the most affordable option,” said airline industry association A4E. “Around half of passengers flying, particularly those travelling for short periods or on business trips, prefer to travel with only a small personal item in exchange for a lower fare.”

Under the deal agreed last night, from next year when the rules come into force airlines will have to include in the basic airfare a small carry-on suitcase. To address the airlines’ argument about this disadvantaging customers who want the no-frills option, the law will allow airlines to let customers opt out of the carry-on suitcase allowance during the booking process to reduce their fare.

But here’s the problem: budget airlines started offering the cheaper backpack-only option in order to appear as the cheapest ticket on flight search engines. If they can no longer display that price (which can only show the lowest default option), then it is not in their interest to offer customers a lower price during the booking process. After all, if the customer has clicked on a price of €200 and is willing to pay it, why would the airline then offer them the choice of lowering that to €150? I don’t expect any airline will actually offer this possibility.

The only motivator would be in order to prevent customers from showing up with more carry-on bags than the plane can hold. That has actually been the big benefit of having the budget airlines charge for carry-on suitcases. On any plane, there is not enough space to accommodate a carry-on suitcase for every passenger. I fly regularly between Brussels and Barcelona and I have three options: Brussels Airlines or the budget airlines Vueling and Ryanair. The cheapest basic fare with Brussels Airlines includes a backpack and a carry-on suitcase. But I stopped taking Brussels Airlines because it was happening so often that the plane would fill up halfway through boarding and they would start making passengers check their carry-ons. With the budget airlines, if you pay for a carry-on suitcase you know you can bring it on, because they stop offering that ticket once the cabin storage is full. Vueling knows exactly how many customers are going to show up with carry-on suitcases. Brussels Airlines did not. (I also choose Vueling because their basic fare allows you to change the flight for a fee while Brussels Airlines does not - something to note in case anyone from Lufthansa Group is reading this!).

Parliament wins the game of passenger rights chicken

Since 2005, passengers on a flight operated by an EU airline (plus non-EU airlines departing from an EU airport) that are delayed more than three hours are entitled to €250 for short-haul flights, €400 for flights between 1,500 and 3,500 kilometres, and €600 for long-haul flights. Airlines have for years complained that the time thresholds are too low. Based on those complaints, in 2013 the European Commission proposed a reform to increase the timeframe. But in the Parliament and Council, legislators got nervous about taking away a consumer right once it’s been established, and the proposal was abandoned - dormant for a decade. Flash forward to 2025, when the “simplification” (deregulation) agenda became the main focus in Brussels, pushed by Germany’s new chancellor Friedrich Merz and the new right-wing majority in the European Parliament. It was in that spirit that the proposal got taken up again.

National governments in the Council adopted a position last year that would have lowered the burden for airlines, limiting compensation to only delays of more than six hours for flights up to 3,500 kilometres (or four hours for shorter flights). The Parliament, infuriated by the Council position and accusing national governments of siding with airlines over citizens, not only opposed any changes to the time thresholds but also started adding new demands for extra passenger rights that weren’t originally in the scope of the legislation. And this is how we got the carry-on baggage changes.

In the end, the deal struck last night keeps the time thresholds the same. The Parliament won this battle by wielding a powerful weapon: they said they would only agree to the increase in the thresholds if airlines were required explicitly to inform their passengers when they are entitled to compensation and give them a form to fill out. Currently only 38% of passengers entitled to compensation actually claim it, because most don’t know about it. That made the airlines very nervous. If they ended up with a law that lowered the amount of times they need to pay compensation but increased the proportion of passengers claiming compensation to something like 80%, they would actually end up paying out more. So they started urging the national governments not to adopt any version of the law that included this proviso and to back off on the time threshold changes if need be. It became very difficult for the Council to justify a position that insisted on keeping consumers ignorant of their rights, and the airlines knew that.

The Parliament provision requiring airlines to include a link to a pre-filled compensation form has been deleted from the agreed text, as has the Council’s increase to the thresholds. There is now only a vague instruction for airlines to send passengers “clear instructions on how to submit a request” for compensation.

This was a hugely contentious file that took up months of the EU legislature’s time, and even had to go into reconciliation third reading which is almost unheard of these days (legislation is usually settled between the Council and the Parliament in second reading trilogues). But in the end we’ve ended up with the same flight compensation as before, with the addition of new requirements that will, in my opinion, be worse for passengers because it will deprive them of that cheapest fare option. Nobody is happy. Not the airlines, not the passengers and not the legislators. Maybe the only ones happy are the MEPs in the Parliament, who have scored a rare victory against the Council here.

With the Commission throwing out omnibus after omnibus these days to satisfy the deregulation demands of big companies (and the US government), the case of EU passenger rights reform should serve as a cautionary tale. The airlines demanded a reopening of existing legislation in order to ease a supposed burden on them (in reality there is little evidence that these requirements are causing them economic difficulty), but ended up with a revision that is worse for them and adds new complications. That’s what’s happening with the omnibus proposals in other areas as well, with all kinds of amendments being added in that could actually end up making things more complicated.

Given that the passenger rights law dates from 2005, it’s understandable that it may have needed updating. But what’s crazy is that the other “simplification” omnibus proposals relate to climate and digital laws that were only passed in the previous 2019-2024 term, many of which haven’t even taken effect yet. If this were a national government we would thing this was extremely bizarre. Imagine, you have a centre-right government in power with a conservative prime minister which passes a series of digital and climate laws. Then you have an election in which the governing centre-right party maintains power (albeit it with a parliament that is further to the right) and the exact same prime minister is in place. That prime minister and her party then set about undoing the legislation they just passed in the previous term before it’s even taken effect. But why? If the legislation is so bad, EPP, why did you propose and pass it in the first place? This would be no way to run a country, and it’s no way to run a union.

So after watching the passenger rights law debacle, to business associations in Brussels I would say this: be careful what you wish for.

Yesterday witnessed the very bizarre phenomenon of two news outlets reporting polar opposite headlines about the same document. In the morning, the Financial Times came out with a bombshell article entitled, “EU countries weigh ‘tearing apart’ bloc’s diplomatic service.” “France, Germany and other European nations are discussing proposals for a radical overhaul of the EU’s 15-year-old diplomatic service, including stripping powers from the bloc’s chief diplomat,” the paper previewed on social media.

Then, later in the day, Reuters came out with an article entitled, “France floats revamp of EU diplomacy with ‘reinforced’ role for Kallas.” “The paper reflects a view among EU officials and diplomats that the bloc was too slow and disjointed as it tried to react to the war in Gaza and other emergencies, amid divisions between its institutions, leaders and 27 member governments,” Reuters writes, saying that the French paper suggests “boosting the role for foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas in a bid to improve the bloc's response to crises.”

Believe it or not, both articles were about the same internal document. So, what could account for the difference? Four words: Ursula von der Leyen.

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The European Commission president, who has been engaged in a high-profile turf war with the EU high representative for foreign affairs for a year now, has a direct line to the FT. It is the go-to paper when the Commission wants to leak something. It seems to me that what happened here, and I’m only guessing, is VDL’s team leaked the paper to the FT giving it the most anti-Kallas spin they could. What the FT has highlighted is just one of the options floated in the paper for fixing the EU External Action Service which Kallas heads. But another option is actually strengthening the high representative role in order to improve Europe’s weak position on the global stage. Reuters focused on the latter, the FT focused on the former.

Social media commentators who loath Kallas for her seemingly singular obsession with Russia and weak statements on Gaza were quick to cheer the FT report. “Best news of the year,” proclaimed French commentator Arnaud Bertrand. “Kaja Kallas' only diplomatic achievement may end up uniting Europe on the need to get rid of her, and dismantle her own office.”

But here’s the thing: this isn’t about Kaja Kallas. This is about a failed institutional setup that is the fault of the EU’s national governments. Three things have combined to expose the weakness of that setup: perilous geopolitical circumstances in which EU countries are being humiliated, the first high representative with the ambition to use the position as it was originally envisaged, and a power-hungry European Commission president who resents her.

“EU countries are great in finding scapegoats for their own failures in European foreign policy,” observed the author Ricardo Borges de Castro yesterday in response to the FT article. “Kallas is certainly not the problem. The Commission/EEAS articulation was always a hybrid and difficult. With a presidential and centralising von der Leyen this has become a bigger issue.”

The current high representative role was created by the Lisbon Treaty in 2009. It was meant to give the EU a stronger voice on the world stage by establishing an ‘EU foreign minister’ that could speak for the union. But almost immediately after they agreed to establish the position, understanding in theory the need for it, the worst instincts of national governments kicked in and they started to undermine it. First by refusing to call it an EU foreign minister and instead giving it an unwieldy and confusing title. And then by appointing an unknown Brussels bureaucrat with little policy experience to be the first holder of the position, rather than a former foreign minister.

As Julien Hoez expertly outlined on Substack yesterday: “The institutional design is deliberately ambiguous. Lisbon’s architects wanted a stronger EU foreign policy voice but could not agree on who would control it. So they built a service that answers to everyone, and to no one in particular.” The treaty not only created the position but put it in charge of a new institution, the EEAS, which is in the strange situation of straddling both the Commission and the Council. This was the result of a compromise between the drafters of the EU constitution (turned Lisbon Treaty) who wanted executive-level foreign policy competence and skittish national governments who insisted that the high representative should be accountable to all 27 foreign ministers and only be able to take positions when she’s gotten the permission of all of them. The result has been a mess. The job has been a poisoned chalice that none of the four office-holders have succeeded with (Julien does a nice job outlining the problems with all of them).

The fault lies not so much with the office-holders but with the impossible task they were given. As I write in Chapter 12 of my book The Owned Continent: “The job comes with the expectation of power but no authority to use it.”

“Foreign policy is defined in the EU treaties as being a completely national competence. The creation of a High Representative for Foreign Affairs was always in conflict with this. The next round of treaty change should redefine the EU’s relationship with foreign policy, saying it is a shared competence between member states and Brussels. The most obvious thing to do is to get rid of the unanimity requirement for foreign policy decisions. If Kallas can be allowed to adopt policies with a qualified majority (weighted by a country’s population) vote, it would give her more room for manoeuvre.”

The internal French paper (it is unclear whether this was also backed by Germany as the FT claimed) essentially acknowledges that mistakes were made when creating the EEAS. An internal email sent by Kallas to the 5,000 employees of the EEAS yesterday also acknowledges this. “The relationship between the EEAS, the Commission and Member States has been discussed since the Service was established,” she wrote. “Given the unprecedented geopolitical challenges we face, it is only natural that these discussions attract renewed attention and take on greater intensity.”

The paper, which the government says was not approved by French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot (whom she will see later today in Paris for an awkwardly-timed meeting) and does not reflect an official French position, reportedly outlines three options for reforming the EEAS: bringing it entirely under the authority of the Commission, shifting its key functions to the Council, or keeping it as a separate institution but giving the high representative more authority. Funny how that last option, the one von der Leyen would hate the most, didn’t lead the FT article.

In his piece yesterday Julien noted that what has gotten Kallas into trouble is that she has dared to take strong positions, such as when she responded to the oval office attack on Zelensky by saying “the free world needs a new leader” (for which she was chastised by von der Leyen’s team, a story I tell in my book), or when she made harsh comments about China in May. It could also be about a new report claiming she compared Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s apartheid system during a private meeting in Mexico City in May - reflecting the sentiment of some but not all EU member states. “The current wave of criticism reflects something baked in from the start. Kallas speaking her own mind on EU-China relations is not a character flaw; it is what happens when the person in the role actually tries to use it,” Julien writes. “The overlap between the EEAS, the Commission’s external relations directorates, and national foreign ministries is not a management failure; it is structural.”

But the ideas to dismantle the EEAS outlined in this paper, essentially returning the functions back to the Council and Commission and throwing things back to how they were before 2009, does not fix the problem. It is not the fault of the EEAS or Kallas that the EU has had a humiliating response to Trump’s threats and a disjointed response to Russia. The fault for that lies with national capitals, and the European Commission president who is happy to rally behind their cowardly inaction. As Julien concludes:

“We Europeans have two options: We can continue patching up a system designed for a completely different era, reshuffling functions between institutions that were never built to run the geopolitical juggernaut that we should be and simply hope that the next crisis finds the right coalition willing to act. Or we can accept that genuine strategic autonomy requires genuine institutional courage: treaty change, democratic legitimacy, strong institutions, and a foreign policy entity with the mandate, resources, power and guts to match Europe’s actual weight in the world.

Blaming the High Representative for the current dysfunction is Brussels’ favourite sport, but it does nothing but embarrass us in front of our citizens and the wider world. Building the institution that would make that blame unnecessary is the harder work. It is also the only work that matters.”

The problem is that the EEAS was only set up halfway. Each time that EU national governments agree to make a leap forward in integration in order to make Europe stronger, they immediately handicap the institutions that they set up. The ideas laid out in this paper come from this same short-term, self-destructive impulse that we so often see from national capitals. It does not solve the problem of Europe’s geopolitical irrelevance, it only make it worse. If the EEAS isn’t working then it should be strengthened, not weakened or destroyed.

“Defunding the EEAS now is geopolitical self-sabotage,” warned European Parliament Vice President Javi Lopez, an ally of Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, yesterday. “At a time when Europe needs a stronger voice in the world, weakening the very service that projects our interests and values abroad is an act of strategic negligence. Less global presence. Fewer diplomatic tools. Less influence. Less Europe. How exactly are we supposed to defend diplomacy over force by dismantling our own diplomats?”