Americans Can No Longer Tolerate European Entitlement

Authored by Michael Shellenberger via X

There’s something I need to say and I need to be blunt. 

So let me start by saying I love Europe. Truly love Europe. I love visiting Europe, I love Europeans,  I have European friends. I respect the relationship we’ve had for a really long time.

You Europeans do not respect Americans. (ER: True. But Europeans don’t understand Americans. Canadians, too, for that matter.) You can protest and say, no, no, we love America. No, you don’t. We know you look down on us. You think you’re better than us. And in some ways you are. You know, you work 35 hours a week. You have longer vacations. You’ve got this magnificent culture. We get it. But any relationship in which one side doesn’t respect the other can’t last.

It’s this thing where Ukraine comes to the White House and acts like it can tell us what we should do.

That’s not what the relationship is.

This thing where somehow we’re on the hook, including for countries that are not in NATO. That was never the deal. Ukraine is not part of NATO. We were never obligated to protect Ukraine.

Maybe that was something that Europe wants to do that. Great. Go. Europe should go protect Ukraine.

We have no NATO agreement with Ukraine. And this thing where Zelensky then goes and quotes all these other European leaders. They’re with me, not with the United States. Great. Go, go, go work together.

We have 100,000 Americans being killed by the Chinese and Mexican fentanyl and methamphetamine mafias every year. Our kids are not learning to read. We have thousands of veterans with PTSD and are hurting. We have been at war in the Middle East for a quarter century. It’s been 80 years since we bailed out Europe. You have your own militaries. You have your own nuclear weapons. I’ve been trying to be really indirect about this for years.

I’ve been trying to be soft peddling that you guys don’t get it. Europeans do not get it. You guys think that this relationship is going to last forever. You think that because something’s written down on a piece of paper, it’s going to last forever. Americans have voted against this multiple times. This is not about what you think of Trump or like Trump. People on the left, on the right, they do not want to be in a nuclear war with Russia.

How can we explain this to you?

We do not want to continue to be in the Ukraine war. We want peace.

Our natural inclination is to actually not get involved in conflicts in Europe and Asia. We didn’t want to have to continue to intervene after World War II. I get it, but times have changed. We’re ready to move on.

We bear a lot of responsibility for this. The United States bears a lot of responsibility for this.

Our people, our administrations, our think tanks told Zelensky and told the Europeans that we were loyal to that alliance, that we were going to stick with them. No, the American people are not on board with that. Again, the left has traditionally been against those kinds of military entanglements. Now the right is, but a lot of the left is too. A lot of Democrats, a lot of liberals. I would love an orderly transition here, but the behavior that we’re seeing coming out of European leaders and out of Zelensky just now in the Oval Office suggests that the relationship is over. We’ll reset the relationship afterwards.

We’re going to have a trade. We’re going to visit each other. It’s great. But this thing of this entitlement, I don’t think Europeans understand how angry it makes us. I don’t think Europeans really understand how much Americans want to deal with our problems. We go to Europe. You have universal healthcare. You work 35 hours a week. You retire at a young age. You don’t work nearly as hard as we do in the United States. You have many more benefits in large part because we pay for all of your security or a large part of it. And in return, we just get disrespect, entitlement, like your children. (ER: But Europeans have been trapped by their own governments into this dependency relationship.)

This is a dysfunctional relationship. It needs to end. It needs to change. Maybe there’s a transition period something, but this has gone too far. I think that the anger that you saw in the White House with Trump in advance with Zelensky holding his arms, rolling his eyes, acting (ER; yes, it was acting!) like he was telling us what the deal was. No, that’s not a Republican, Democrat, whatever thing. That is not how we’re going to be treated by people that we’re helping.

So it’s time to grow up. It’s time for the relationship to change.

ER: We couldn’t agree more. As Schellenberger describes it below, was this the point behind the highly scripted scene in the White House with Zelensky? 

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