Newspaper Reader.
Dec 10, 2025
Editor: The paragraphs below set the scene for the patient reader, who can just about see through Stephen’s particular expression of Doom and Gloom! About a West that will experience the end of the Ukraine War, in mere Historical Moments, while willfully forgeting 2014, and the myard crimes of E.U. and America that attented to ressurect a version of The Cold War with more current toxic political actors! Mr. Stephens has carefully tinctured his New Cold War chatter that reminds this reader of lowbrough Oswald Spengler!
If Germany were invaded, just 38 percent of its citizens would be willing to fight for their country, according to a recent poll. Fifty-nine percent would not. In Italy, another poll found that only 16 percent of those of fighting age would take up arms. In France, Gen. Fabien Mandon, the army’s chief of staff, told a conference of mayors last month that the nation would be “at risk” if it “wavers because we are not ready to accept losing our children.” This statement of the obvious set off a political furor.
It’s in this context that the Trump administration’s latest National Security Strategy, released last week, landed in Europe with a thud.
It’s not hard to see why. America’s chief foreign-policy priorities, according to the document, are now focused on the Western Hemisphere and Asia. The European Union stands accused of suppressing political freedom, subverting national sovereignty, obstructing economic dynamism, promoting migration policies that could lead to “civilizational erasure,” and obstructing a peaceful resolution to the war in Ukraine.
“It is far from obvious,” the document warns, “whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.”
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Editor: Reader the final paragraphs of Stephens attempt at diatribe, that is a dizzing collection of -should I call them ‘actors’, ‘characters’, or just the intelectual detritus of a writer relying on ‘clippings’ , that act the part of ideas, actors, or just irredeemable chatter? Note that the final reference is to the perpetually Murderious Henry Kissinger!
European politics in this century have been largely fixated on growth-killing clichés (“sustainable development”); feckless foreign-policy gestures (recognition of a nonexistent Palestinian state); self-destructive environmental policies (Germany’s decision to close its nuclear-power stations); and a virtue-signaling attitude toward mass migration (Angela Merkel’s “We can manage this”) that is the central reason fascistic parties like Alternative for Germany are surging. All this needs to end.
What should take its place? It’s a cold view of what Europe must do to protect itself in a world where it no longer has protectors. Rearmament on a massive scale. An end to dependency-producing, cost-exacerbating green energy projects. Immigration policy on the Danish model — tougher about who gets to come, who has to leave, and what immigrants must do to integrate. A return to the European Union’s original and noble purpose of opening markets and fostering competition, not being a factory for rules.
Above all, a civic revolution to persuade younger Europeans that their heritage, culture and way of life — a fundamentally Christian civilization leavened and improved but not erased by the values of the Enlightenment — are worth defending. That’s not my civilization, and even to write that line feels transgressive.
But it should also be self-evident. If Europe isn’t that, what, then, is it? If it isn’t that, why would anyone go to war for its sake? If it isn’t that, what’s to keep it from just becoming an extension of someone else’s civilization, whether that’s America’s, Russia’s or Islam’s?
Henry Kissinger once said of Donald Trump that he “may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” There are good reasons to regret this, not least in Europe. There are no good reasons to pretend it isn’t happening, or to fail to adapt.
Newspaper Reader.