Doug Sheridan Says
“Walter Russell Mead writes in the WSJ, the recently convened G20 summit in India didn't produce any consequential agreements per se, but it was telling for what was on full display….”
Doug Sheridan Says
Walter Russell Mead writes in the WSJ, the recently convened G20 summit in India didn't produce any consequential agreements per se, but it was telling for what was on full display—the accelerating decline in Europe’s influence and reach.
Observers have long warned that Europe’s slow economic growth, demographic decline, military weakness and unrealistic approach to world politics would constrain the Continent’s role in world affairs. One conclusion from New Delhi is that the long-deferred day of reckoning seems to have arrived.
This has been a year of disaster for Europe’s global standing. France has been largely expelled from a once-dominant position across much of Africa. Putin has revealed Europe’s impotence in Ukraine. Turkey has largely turned its back on Europe, and European influence throughout the Middle East is in precipitous decline. China appears poised to challenge Germany’s automobile industry. High European energy prices are hastening the continent’s deindustrialization.
For most of the world, the overrepresentation of Europeans in global institutions is now the greatest flaw in the international architecture. The redistribution of global power and influence away from Europe to rising powers in Asia and elsewhere is, for most G-20 countries, the most important action item on the “global governance” agenda that the world faces today.
This is a challenge for the US. Looking further ahead, to the extent that US policy makers genuinely care about a working global political and economic order, the survival of that system requires reforming it to reflect Europe’s declining clout.
Yet when it comes to outcomes rather than architecture, Europe is Team Biden’s closest global ally. It is the Europeans and for the most part only the Europeans who share the climate-change, human-rights, democracy and general wokeness goals at the heart of Biden’s global agenda.
Most of the world’s rising powers are profoundly skeptical when it comes to the liberal policy goals that unite US progressives and their European counterparts. As Europe’s voice in global institutions fades, the Biden admin’s chief goals will become much harder to achieve.
Our Take 1: No issue brings into focus Europe's decline more so than it's attempt to make climate change the big issue of the 21st century—with a theatrical Brussels leading the way. Thinking people long ago, however, concluded Europe's radical green ambitions and motives were nothing short of desperate, destined to hasten the continent's irrelevance on the global stage. It looks like that process might now be in full swing.
Our Take 2: No nation needs to be taking its cues related to much of anything from today's infirm Europe, especially what to do regarding a slowing moving—but never-ending—issue like climate change.
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