Conrad Black - The US goal of strength and success: Europe should stop fussing and get in step

 December 17, 2025

There was a widespread European reaction of offended sensibilities last week to the customary statement of a relatively new US administration of its strategic objectives. Unlike the Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Biden regimes, the Trump administration did not proclaim an ambition remotely resembling “the permanent American domination of the entire world,” which is effectively what Trump accused those presidents of citing as their national aspirations. The Trump conception of American strategy further commended itself for avoiding what it called “laundry lists of wishes or desired end-states and vague platitudes about what we should want”.

The formulation of the Trump administration’s national goals does not make them chronic underachievers in what they do seek: “To be the strongest, richest, most powerful, and successful” country in the world. This might be considered indicative of a  superior attitude but it does more or less accurately describe the status the United States has enjoyed for more than 80 years. At least in being rich, powerful and successful, there is nothing in such an ambition that is implicitly disrespectful of any other country.

What seemed particularly to upset Europeans is the Trump strategic statement of the authentic concerns expressed by the US administration that Europe is falling by the wayside both in terms of its competitive economic and geopolitical strength and in its status as a bastion of human liberty and the democratic process. The authors express genuine concern and not snide self-importance in the fact that Europe has descended since 1990 from 25 per cent of the world’s gross economic product, and near-equality to the US, to only 14 per cent now, unlike the United States itself which has moved up slightly to approximately 26.2 percent in the same time.

The manner in which this stark fact is presented makes it clear that the United States is expressing concern about the uncompetitive performance of its great and esteemed ally. It declares Europe to be “strategically and culturally vital to the United States” and declares that the United States is ”sentimentally as well as practically attached to Europe”. This is a statement of comradely solidarity that has few precedents in any sober collective reflections that the agglomeration of European states ever makes about the USA. Europe almost invariably expresses concern about whether the US will continue to pick up the slack for Europe as well as frequently completely gratuitous flustered questions about whether the United States possesses the temperamental stability and geopolitical astuteness to discharge its responsibilities in the world. These are often implicitly defined as assuring the survival of Western democracy and preventing the Russians and Chinese from doing anything too beastly to Europe.

The Europeans have also frequently expressed concern about American imputations to the Russians and Chinese of nakedly imperialist ambitions. This year, instead of engaging in any such comments, the United States dismisses Russia as an inferior power to Europe of which the Europeans should not be afraid, and China as a formidable challenge but one the United States does not anticipate difficulty managing and which is a country economically, administratively, and militarily significantly inferior to the USA. The United States does express the concern in this document not only that Europe is failing to hold its position as an economic power but that it is failing to defend its own borders from illicit immigration that is merely a human wave of the desperate rather than of people committed to take up and strengthen a new nationality. This helps reinforce the American concern that Europe is unable to distinguish between authentic and desirable immigration and outright invasion by comparatively unarmed and desperate masses of people.

Also legitimate is the expressed American concern about declining democracy in Europe, the curtailment of freedom of speech and expression. The huge incidence in the UK of people being frog-marched out of their homes by police because of emails  critical of minority groups, and the apprehension of conscientious demonstrators for the alleged and imputed offense of a praying silently in a public place, neither inspire the United States with an ambition to defend such authoritarianism or a comfort level that their European ally of three whole successful generations is upholding the goals of freedom recognisable in the United States.

Particularly in the week when President Donald Trump has sued the vastly over-respected British Broadcasting Corporation for $10 billion in an already confessed act of defamation for which the director general and chief of news were fired, Europe should stop fussing about America and try to get in step with it. It was not so long ago that Margaret Thatcher, Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Brian Mulroney were in lockstep with Ronald Reagan and John Paul II; they won the Cold War together.

https://www.newenglishreview.org/the-us-goal-of-strength-and-success-europe-should-stop-fussing-and-get-in-step/