The unique German word Weltschmerz translates to world-weary melancholia and emotional pain. This was the state of teary-eyed Christoph Heusgen, the Munich Security Conference Chairman and a former Merkel aide, when he said, โOur common values are not so common anymore.โ
US Vice President JD Vanceโs speech at the premier security gathering is arguably the most consequential since Vladimir Putinโs 2007 speech criticised NATO expansion and US unilateralism.
โThe threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, itโs not China, itโs not any other external actorโ, said Vance at the 2025 summit.
Transvaluation of Values
โWhat I worry about is the threat from within and the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of Americaโ, he added.
Thereโs a gulf between Vance and his European interlocutors on what these โvaluesโ are.
The fundamental, rather indefeasible, values, as the US Founding Fathers most succinctly put it, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And free speech, free enterprise, and unfettered public franchise. These are all ideology-agnostic, or better, can be best realised through the confluence and convergence of Ideas, and not shaming, traducing, and gagging
The Trans-Atlantic partnership was premised on hard realities rather than on value-based idealism. It cannot be understood without the history of US involvement in the two world wars and the post-war west.
The alliance was cultivated by deft foreign policy practitioners such as Secretary of State George Marshall and his deputy Dean Acheson. It wasnโt predicated on the Woke cannon, speak-no-evil squeamishness, muzzling free expression, or kowtowing at the altar of Political Correctness, what the Nobel-winning author Dorris Lessing termed โthe most powerful mental tyranny in the free worldโ.
Thereโs an internet joke that the US innovates, China catches and scales up, while Europe regulates. As the competition with China heats up, Washington can neither rest on its laurels nor take the status quo for granted or be complacent in regulatory and interventionist zeal, the two favourite hobbies of the mandarins and the credentialed class.
The future of a renewed trans-Atlantic partnership as well as security architecture cannot be decided without the consent of the major partner, the USA.
Cracks in the system of Washington Consensus as well as European Security Architecture are out in the open and canโt be pushed under the rug. The European economy is facing a slowdown as German automakers face competition from Chinese EV makers.
The political and social landscape is witnessing upheavals since the war in Ukraine, which the European bien pensants want to continue forever in the name of wuzzy, nebulous ideals and pathologies that need to be exorcised.
Nothing Lasts Forever
Naive idealism, myopia, and hoping to find succour in the zealotry of โEnd of Historyโ, is a weak nostrum passed as a panacea.
Vanceโs speech is a reminder that the extended honeymoon or โholiday from historyโ of Clintonian Belle Epoque has ended.
European leaders should know better about the epochs and paradigms in history that abruptly change course when one least expects it. Nothing lasts forever, and zeitgeists certainly never do, as Hegel would have stated.
The origins of the grand concert called European Union lie not in any great liberating ideas or sweeping social solidarity programs, but in the historic Franco-German tangles over coal and steel, the hard reality of decolonization, the necessities of trade, tariff, mutual suspicion, and above all the Marshall Plan aid and Cold War imperatives. These were all constructs forged in the crucible of self-interest and realpolitik.
โThe European entity that began to emerge in the 1950s was in certain vital respects, an accident. It was neither predicted nor predictableโin either its form or its membershipโ, writes historian Tony Judt in his masterful essay, โEurope: The Grand Illusionโ?
โWhatever made possible the Western Europe we now have was almost certainly uniqueโand unrepeatable. To suppose that it can be projected indefinitely into the future is an illusion, however worthy and well-intentionedโ, Judt adds.
Kiev Quagmire
The former โbloodlandsโ and killing fields of Europe became safe, secure, and prosperous only on the back of American post-war reconstruction aid and security guarantees to contain the Soviet sphere of influence.
The Soviet Union is long dead, and the Neo-Cons who wanted a continuation of the Cold War mentality and viewed the Kremlin as the biggest foe, have now been consigned to the backseat. The rosy-eyed Neo-Liberals have conceded that trickle-down has been way slower and unequal than they expected.
Statistical parables, expert doublespeak, and ideological hair-splitting mean absolutely nothing to the guy on the main street.
Democracy export is a costly and futile business, as Washington has learnt from a series of misadventures in the Middle East.
Milovan Djilas, the former Yugoslavian politician, intellectual, and dissident, said in an interview that Communism was just one temporary phase in our long, arduous history. The same holds true for the ideological and political cartography of Project Europe.
Ukraine is as complex and contested as the Balkan tinderbox, and only stranger to history arsonists or naively deluded interventionists would want to be pulled into that vortex in the name of dubious value EU exports โdemocracy & human rightsโ. JD Vance knows it. And this is what he had in his mind in the prescient New York Times op-ed โThe Math on Ukraine Doesnโt Add Upโ.
One canโt be a zealous interventionist on borrowed bullion, subsidized military expenditure, and diminishing geopolitical heft. The Brussels bureaucracy needs to realize this.
