Europe after the postwar world order

What might be the role of Europe after the American postwar world order, and the fall of American Primacy?

Here is my prediction.

Europe will, after a decade of turmoil, abandon the identity of the West to become the plurality of Europe again. Europe will separate from the USA and its geopolitical crusades. It will repair the damage of the partition of Eurasia, enforced by the USA since 1945. It will turn its back on its domineering patron across the Atlantic Ocean, and make its home in Eurasia.

Former Prime Minister Paul Keating once said that Australia should reconceive its role in the world by changing its orientation to Asia. Australia had habituated itself to a strategic mindset, cultivated in service of the British and later American Empires. Australian leaders saw Asia as a threat. Keating proposed instead that Australia “seek its security in Asia rather than from Asia.”

Europe today faces a similar decision. It can lock itself in the American garrison of NATO. Or Europe can begin to seek its security in Eurasia, rather than from Eurasia.

Will Europe change this mental habit, ingrained by centuries of conflict and empire? Will Europeans reverse the intensification of this habit by postwar political traditions of grand strategy, which were articulated by Mearsheimer’s offensive hegemonic realism, Brzezinski’s grand chessboard, and Mackinder’s imperially racist contempt for the Eurasian horde?

I confess, in 2024, it seems unlikely. Most European elites profess apparently solid commitments to the Atlantic Alliance. My prediction is qualified and may only be wishful thinking. This scenario is only a possibility. The inertia of events, empires and institutions are more likely to snare Europe in the high-equilibrium traps of NATO and the European Union in their current forms.

But nothing lasts forever, especially in moments of polycrisis when the tides of change in the world are surging. In an earlier period of sudden transition, the world after World War II, Europe made a different choice. The broken Western European empires allied with an unscathed USA that controlled 45 per cent of the world’s industrial production. But the strategic grounds for that choice have disappeared. In 2024 Europe no longer has its empires to cling to, and the USA’s share of world industrial output has fallen to 15 per cent. And American society is torn by chronic failures of governance, most notably health and social security. Why would Europe not choose the BRICS this time, rather than late Soviet America?

My prediction is but one speculative scenario. However, it has good grounds. It is founded on Emmanuel Todd’s historical analysis, in La Défaite de l’’Occident, that the USA will suffer a strategic defeat in the Ukraine war. 

Les éphémères succès militaires du nationalisme ukrainnien ont lancé les État-Unis dans une surenchère d’où ils ne peuvent sortir sous peine de subir une défaite, non plus simplement locale, mais globale: militaire, économique et idéologique. La défaite maintenant, ce serait : le rapprochement germano-russe, la dédollarisation du monde, la fin des importations payées par la ‘planche à billets collective interne’, une grande pauvreté. p. 366

[Translation: The ephemeral military successes of Ukrainian nationalism have launched the United States into a bidding war from which it cannot escape without suffering a defeat, no longer simply local, but global: military, economic and ideological. The defeat now would be: German-Russian rapprochement, the de-dollarization of the world, the end of imports paid for by the ‘collective internal printing press’, great poverty.]

This judgement was made in September 2023. How much more certain is defeat in late 2024?

Powerful voices in Europe have begun to step away from Biden’s war in Ukraine. In October 2024, the current rotating President of the European Union, Viktor Orban, told the European Parliament that Ukraine cannot win on the battlefield, and that Europe should seek peace, not more American-led wars. In November 2024, Georgia Meloni criticised Biden’s decision to launch American missiles into Russian territory and so risk more catastrophic war in Europe. At least some leaders in Europe are looking for a way out from the postwar world order shaped by America into a nuclear circular firing squad.

The Defeat of the West will impact the USA and Europe differently, and strain the Western institutions established since 1945. Out of the fractures, ideas for a new Europe will emerge. From the ruins of the West, Europe might emerge reborn.

It may seem now that Europe is bearing the greatest costs for the USA’s Project Ukraine. Europe cut off the supply of energy from its neighbour and historic economic partner, Russia. This act - against Europe’s own interests by elites more loyal to an American ‘liberal oligarchy’ (in Todd’s terms) than their own nation - is the puzzle at the heart of Emmanuel Todd’s Defeat of the West. He describes it as the suicide of Europe. He judges it is driven by the nihilism of the Washington Gang.

But as the fog of strategic defeat clears, a different landscape emerges. If Russia defeats NATO, it defeats the USA, and “the greatest military ever”. The prestige of American Primacy will be fatally wounded. Moreover, the collapse in authority is metastasizing. The American support for Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon have destroyed American diplomatic authority around the world. The lesser partners of the West, including European nations, may walk from the shadow of American failure.

Since 1945 the American postwar world order has claimed the history of Europe as its own through the idea of the West. US leaders even claimed the war in Ukraine, and more horrifically Israel’s assault on Gaza, were battles for Western civilization. They miscalculated. Now that order is breaking down. BRICS is strengthening. American influence in the world is collapsing. Shame-faced Europeans, embarrassed by the violent branch of the Western family, have begun to contemplate a divorce.

There are uncertain signs in the present that Europe might end its submission to American global leadership, and rediscover ‘sovereign autonomy’ in culture, economy, politics, and last of all security. Georgia Meloni has spoken of reclaiming a specifically European culture and civilization. Mario Draghi has set out a plan for European competitiveness that would strengthen Europe’s institutions and industry against predation by its Atlantic partner. Emmanuel Macron said at a recent European Council meeting that Europe should not restrict itself to being a herbivore in a world of carnivores. It should at least be an omnivore. The current threat might be presented as Russia, but the predator he was really concerned about was the USA.

American commentators tend to sneer at this talk of Europe standing independently in the world. There is a rich vein of contempt in American political culture, expressed in perceptions of Europe as stagnant, divided, and dependent on America paying for its defence. It is embellished by ideological historians like Niall Ferguson or Robert Kagan who mock the degeneration of Europe and insist the Old Continent grows a spine to join America’s New Cold War. It is enacted by Donald Trump, and many American political elites, who insist that Europe pay more for its own defence, made necessary by America’s aggressive expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders. They even insist Europe degrade its social welfare and health care systems to become more liked the seedy libertarian dream of American streets. Even conciliatory commentators, like Ambassador Chas Freeman, tend to assume that Europeans and Russia will squabble forever without the gracious intervention of the best and brightest leaders of the USA.

These contemptuous attitudes blind American leaders to the changing world, and increase the probability of Europe choosing a Eurasian future. They foster, beneath the surface of loyal Atlanticist media editorials, a growing determination from European leaders to find a way to escape the leash of their erratic and supremacist master. Donald Trump may prove the perfect excuse for Europeans to declare independence from the Atlantic Charter. Emmanuel Todd’s La Défaite de l’Occident - a work of historical sociology - has succeeded as a bestseller because it connects to this underlying emotional longing in Europe to emerge from the ruins of the fractured, nihilistic American empire, and make Europe European Again. Perhaps for that reason, Todd’s book has been translated into Italian and Spanish, but not yet American English.

The attitudes also find their way into the conventional accounts of how America shaped the postwar world order, as I discussed in last week’s post, USA dreams in the world, after American Primacy. If Europe reframes its history since 1945, Europe may free itself to become something different from what it has been. 

I will be exploring how to reframe the history of Europe as one of the five major powers in the world today in my series on the Burning Archive in 2025.

I will use John Darwin, After Tamerlane as a starting point, and explore other historical perspectives on Europe. In my Wednesday post (for paid subscribers), How the partition of Eurasia defined world disorder after 1945, as part of my series on the post-1945 world, I discussed the crucial importance of this partition of Eurasia by the USA for the disorders of the world today - in Taiwan, the Koreas, West Asia, South Asia, East Asia, and in Europe. The end of the Cold War gave temporary relief from some of those disorders. The strident reassertion of American Primacy, whether under Bush, Obama, Trump or Biden, has opened up those wounds again, and motivated Europeans to remake their history.

In 2025 I will share more of these most insightful histories that might reframe how Europe and major world powers adapt to this disordered, changing world. 

Please join me as a paid subscriber so you can read these thought-provoking histories with me. We will discuss the implications for our lives, far from the centres of power. We will find ways to learn from history to live in tune with the mode of a changing world.