Europe Is Destroying Itself Faster Than Any Rival Could | Prof. Jiang Xueqin

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]I want to step away from Iran for a moment. Not because Iran is unimportant.

[00:00:04]We will return to it. But because while everyone is watching the missiles and the oil fields and the naval positioning in the Persian Gulf, something equally consequential is happening in a place that is barely receiving any serious analytical attention. And the reason it is not receiving attention is that the story it tells is deeply uncomfortable for the people who would normally be telling it. The story is about Europe.

[00:00:26]And the argument I want to make today is one that will upset people from multiple directions. I am going to argue that Europe is not being weakened by Russia.

[00:00:34]It is not being destabilized by American pressure or Trump's erratic diplomacy.

[00:00:39]Europe is being dismantled by its own leadership through choices its own governments are making at a speed and completeness that no external adversary could realistically achieve through force. Let me show you what I mean.

[00:00:51]using the framework of structural analysis and game theory that we have been building all semester. Before you can evaluate any strategy, you must establish what the strategy is supposed to achieve. This sounds obvious, but it is the step that most political commentary skips entirely, jumping straight to whether a policy is good or bad without first establishing what good or bad means relative to the actual objective. So, what is Europe trying to achieve? If you ask European leaders this question in formal settings, the answer is consistent and reasonable.

[00:01:21]They want security, protection from military threats to their territory and sovereignty. They want prosperity, the material conditions that allow their populations to live stable, dignified lives. They want political stability, the maintenance of democratic institutions and social cohesion. and they want strategic autonomy, the ability to make decisions in their own interest rather than being a passive object of other powers strategies. These are legitimate, internally consistent goals. Any reasonable person would endorse them. Now, the second question, the one that changes everything, is the current strategy actually producing these outcomes? Here is where the analysis becomes uncomfortable. Because when you examine what European governments have actually done across the last several years and measure the results against these stated objectives, the gap between intention and outcome is not marginal. It is catastrophic. For several decades, the competitive advantage of European industry, particularly German industry, which formed the productive core of the entire European economic project, rested on a specific structural foundation. Russian natural gas delivered through pipeline infrastructure at prices that reflected geographic proximity and long-term contract stability provided European manufacturers with energy costs that their competitors in other regions could not match. This was not a political choice or an ideological preference. It was geography and economics producing a natural advantage. German chemical manufacturing, German precision engineering, German automotive production, industries that formed the foundation of European export competitiveness were built around and priced around that energy cost structure. Then European governments sanctioned Russian energy, ceased pipeline imports, destroyed the infrastructure that delivered it, and replaced Russian gas with American liqufied natural gas arriving by tanker at prices three to four times higher than the pipeline alternative. The consequences are not theoretical. They are measurable and they are compounding.

[00:03:21]BASF, the German chemical company whose products touch virtually every industrial sector, has been shutting facilities in Germany and relocating production to locations where energy costs make manufacturing economically viable. Volkswagen, which had never closed a German factory in nearly nine decades of operation, announced factory closures. Tyson, the steel company, has been cutting its workforce by tens of thousands. These are not cyclical adjustments. They are structural relocations of productive capacity away from a region where energy costs have made manufacturing uneconomical. This is what economists call de-industrialization.

[00:03:58]And the critical analytical point, the one that the political narrative consistently obscures is that Russia did not cause this. Russia did not cut the pipelines or refuse to sell gas.

[00:04:09]European governments made the decision to sever the energy relationship and European industry is absorbing the consequences of that decision. Apply the game theory framework. The goal is European prosperity. The policy severed the energy relationship that underpinned European industrial competitiveness. The outcome is accelerating de-industrialization. The strategy is not achieving the objective. By any standard of evaluation, this is a policy failure of historic proportions. The second dimension of European self-destruction is what I would call strategic theater masquerading as security policy. Across Europe, defense spending is increasing at a rate not seen since the Cold War's most intense periods. Germany, a country that made constitutional restraint on military spending a post-war identity commitment, has amended its constitution to permit unlimited defense borrowing. The EU has constructed a massive rearmament program. Political leaders compete to demonstrate hawkishness in their commitment to military expansion. The stated rationale is Russian threat.

[00:05:09]Russia, it is argued, is an existential danger to European security, and the war in Ukraine demonstrated that Russia must be countered through massive European military buildup and continued financial and military support for Ukrainian resistance. Let me evaluate this argument structurally, not emotionally.

[00:05:27]Russia has just emerged from three years of grinding attrition warfare in Ukraine. The human and material costs have been enormous. Russian military equipment reserves have been depleted, replaced, adapted. Russian casualties have been substantial. Russia's economy, while more resilient than Western analysts predicted, has been extensively redirected toward military production at the cost of civilian consumption and long-term investment. A country in this condition, having just fought a punishing three-year war that consumed a significant portion of its military capacity, does not represent the same threat profile as a country with a rested, fully equipped military force in peaceime condition. The historical pattern is clear. States that have absorbed the costs of major wars require extended periods of recovery before they can project significant force. Roman history, European early modern history, the 20th century, the pattern repeats.

[00:06:20]Exhausted states do not immediately pivot to new offensive campaigns against opponents many times their economic size. NATO's combined GDP exceeds Russia's by a factor of approximately 30. NATO's combined population is roughly 7 times larger. Russia cannot win a war of attrition against a fully committed NATO alliance. This is not a close calculation. So the threat assessment that justifies the current European rearmament trajectory is at minimum significantly exaggerated relative to the actual strategic reality. Now add the second observation, the Ukrainian military situation. I have said this before and the factual situation has not changed. Russia controls the territory it has occupied.

[00:07:01]Ukrainian counteroffensive operations have not achieved strategic reversals.

[00:07:05]The front lines have been stable for extended periods. European military and financial assistance has been substantial and sustained and the battlefield reality is that it has not produced the strategic outcome Ukrainian recovery of occupied territory that justified the assistance. Continuing to send resources into a military situation whose trajectory is not changing does not reflect strategic analysis. It reflects political commitment to a narrative that evidence is contradicting. Europe is spending money it does not have on weapons it cannot fully man for a war it cannot change against a threat that is being described in terms that do not match the structural reality. And while it does this, the industrial base that makes European economic power real continues to atrophy. I want to introduce a concept that I think explains what is happening better than any specific policy analysis can. It is what I call strategic capture. The condition in which a subordinate actor within a hierarchical relationship becomes so dependent on the dominant power that it loses the cognitive capacity to even conceive of alternatives, let alone pursue them. The historical relationship between the United States and Western Europe has been one of genuine mutual benefit, particularly in the post-war decades. America provided security guarantees that allowed Western Europe to rebuild without allocating the full cost of its own defense. In exchange, Europe integrated into Americanled economic and political institutions, accepting a degree of strategic subordination that was tolerable because the security and prosperity it enabled were real. What has changed is the terms of the exchange. The American relationship with Europe is now structured differently. Europe is being asked to fund its own military buildup, purchasing primarily American weapons systems. It is being asked to pay for American LNG rather than cheaper Russian alternatives. It is being asked to maintain political and diplomatic alignment with American positions even when those positions conflict with European economic interests. And it is being asked to support military commitments whose costs fall primarily on European populations. In other words, Europe is being asked to pay all the costs of the subordinate relationship while receiving increasingly few of its historic benefits. The security guarantee that justified earlier subordination is being redefined as a service that Europe must now fund itself at American prices using American equipment. Think about what a rational negotiating actor would do in this situation. A genuinely independent strategic actor would assess the change terms, evaluate the costs and benefits, and either renegotiate the relationship or begin developing alternatives. It would say, "Our energy costs are three times higher than they need to be. Our industry is leaving, our populations are becoming poorer, and our security situation is not actually improved by these policies. Let us reconsider the arrangement. European governments are not doing this. European governments are increasing compliance with the demands while describing the compliance as strategic choice. They are calling energy dependence on America a values-based decision. They are calling industrial decline an acceptable cost of principle. They are calling inability to imagine alternative strategic autonomy.

[00:10:20]This is strategic capture. The captive does not experience the condition as captivity. It experiences it as loyalty to principles, as solidarity with allies, as the responsible choice. The actual costs are absorbed by populations who have no equivalent framework for understanding why their standard of living is declining while their governments describe the policies producing the decline as victories. If European governments are making choices that consistently conflict with the material interests of their populations, the political consequences should be visible. And they are, even if the mainstream coverage frames them in ways that obscure their structural significance. Approval ratings for mainstream European political leaders are at historic lows. German chancellors have been polling in ranges that in previous political eras would have been politically unservivable. French presidential approval has been in the low 20s. Across the continent, the parties that have managed European institutions for decades are hemorrhaging support to movements that the establishment describes as populist or radical. The descriptor matters.

[00:11:24]Calling a political movement populist or faright is a way of categorizing it without engaging with its actual arguments. And what these movements are arguing that energy policy has made ordinary people poorer. That military commitments have produced costs without corresponding benefits. that the mainstream political class is serving interests other than those of the people it claims to represent are not arguments that can be dismissed as irrational or extremist. They are arguments that follow directly from observable evidence. The political establishment's response to the rise of these movements has been increasingly restrictive, characterizing descent from the mainstream strategic narrative as foreign influence, limiting the participation of alternative parties and EU institutional processes, using control of media and institutional frameworks to delegitimize rather than engage with the arguments of the opposition. This is not the behavior of a political class that believes it can win the argument on substance. It is the behavior of a political class that knows it cannot win the argument on substance and is therefore attempting to win by removing the opponent from the legitimate political arena. This is how democratic systems begin to function less democratically, not through dramatic coups or constitutional crises, but through the gradual narrowing of what counts as acceptable political argument. And the narrowing itself accelerates the underlying crisis.

[00:12:46]Because when legitimate political channels for expressing grievances are systematically closed, the pressure does not dissipate. It accumulates until it finds other outlets. Let me situate the current European situation within a historical pattern because the specific mechanisms change across different contexts, but the structural logic repeats with remarkable consistency.

[00:13:08]Imperial systems that extract resources and loyalty from subordinate partners while providing diminishing returns in security and economic benefit do not maintain that arrangement indefinitely.

[00:13:19]They maintain it until one of two things happens. Either the subordinate develops enough independent capacity to renegotiate the relationship from a position of strength or the internal contradictions of the arrangement produce a crisis that forces rapid change. The British Empire provides one instructive case. The relationship between Britain and its colonial territories was maintained through a combination of military force, institutional integration, and economic dependency. What ended it was not primarily military resistance, though that was a factor in some cases. It was the accumulating unsustainability of maintaining extraction while providing less and less in return for populations that were developing both the economic capacity and the political consciousness to articulate alternatives. When India departed in 1947, the structural logic of decolonization was established. The rest followed because the underlying arrangement had already ceased to be sustainable in the place where it was most visible. The Roman example is structurally similar. Provincial allies who had accepted Roman authority in exchange for Roman protection and economic integration began to recalculate when Roman military protection became less reliable and Roman economic demands continued to grow. The fragmentation was not simultaneous or planned. It was the accumulation of individual recalculations by actors responding to changed costbenefit realities. The European situation follows the same structural logic. American demands on Europe have increased. American benefits provided to Europe have decreased.

[00:14:52]European populations are absorbing the costs. The political pressure this produces is building visibly. The question is not whether the arrangement changes. A structural history is clear that it will. The question is whether the change is managed through intelligent political leadership that adjusts policy before crisis forces adjustment or through the disorderly breaking of arrangements that have become too contradictory to sustain. At this point, Europe is on the second path. I do not want to spend all of this analysis on diagnosis without addressing the alternative because game theory analysis is supposed to produce prescriptions as well as descriptions.

[00:15:27]What would a European strategic approach that actually served European objectives look like? The principle is what I call strategic diversification and it is a principle applicable to any actor in any hierarchical relationship. The fundamental rule is that full dependence on any single partner is a structural vulnerability. The more alternative relationships you have, the more leverage you have in any specific relationship and the better the terms you can negotiate. applied to Europe.

[00:15:54]This would mean maintaining relationships with multiple energy suppliers rather than committing to a single expensive source. It would mean maintaining diplomatic channels with all relevant powers rather than restricting engagement to American approved partners. It would mean developing European military and technological capacity in ways that create genuine independence rather than importing systems that maintain dependency on American supply chains and operational frameworks. None of this requires being pro-Russian or anti-American. It requires thinking about European interests rather than American preferences. A European that has genuine alternatives, is a better negotiating partner for America, a more credible actor in global politics, and a more stable political system domestically because its policies can be justified to its populations on the basis of results rather than ideology. The reason European governments are not pursuing this approach is not ignorance. European leaders are sophisticated people who understand these dynamics. The reason is incentive structure. The careers of European political leaders are built within systems where American approval is a significant resource. Where access to NATO structures, to EU institutional leadership, to the financial network centered in London and Frankfurt depends on maintaining alignment with American preferences. where deviation from the approved strategic narrative is punished through institutional exclusion and media characterization as Russian appeasement. Individual incentives for political leaders are pointing toward American compliance even as collective outcomes for European populations are pointing toward the costs of that compliance. This is a classic principal agent problem in political economy where the agents making decisions are responding to incentives that diverge from the interests of the principal population they ostensibly represent.

[00:17:47]Let me be clear that what follows is structural projection based on historical pattern analysis. It is not prophecy. The specific timing and triggering events cannot be predicted with precision. But the direction of travel is I believe identifiable. The current European trajectory involves several compounding dynamics. Industrial decline reduces tax revenues and increases social spending demand simultaneously, producing fiscal pressure that forces choices between military commitments and domestic priorities. Political movements representing populations who object to the results of current policies continue to grow, increasing the political cost of maintaining mainstream policies. At some point in some major European country, the political mathematics shift enough that a government is formed that is willing to pursue a different strategic approach, not because of ideology, but because the economic situation leaves no alternative. When that happens, and the structural logic suggests it will happen, though perhaps not immediately, the change will be faster than the current appearance of stability suggests. The current European policy consensus is not sustained by popular support. It is sustained by elite consensus within institutions that filter out alternative voices. Elite consensus when it breaks tends to break suddenly because it was never reflecting the underlying distribution of preferences. It was managing it. The narrative will shift accordingly. What is currently described as dangerous deviation from western solidarity will be redescribed as strategic realism.

[00:19:19]What is currently characterized as irresponsible populism will be redescribed as democratic responsiveness to legitimate popular preferences. The labels change to fit the new reality.

[00:19:30]They always do. Let me end with the structural observation that I think captures everything I have described today in its essential form. Europe's current situation is not the product of Russian aggression or American malevolence. It is the product of a specific and identifiable failure of political leadership. the prioritization of imperial approval over the interests of the populations that leaders are supposed to represent. No external actor forced Germany to shut down factories that had operated profitably for decades. No adversary compelled France to allocate scarce fiscal resources to military spending rather than the domestic investment that would support its population's economic security. No foreign power convinced EU institutions to suppress political alternatives rather than engage with the legitimate concerns those alternatives represent.

[00:20:20]These were choices made by sophisticated, educated people in positions of responsibility within institutional frameworks that rewarded certain choices and penalized others.

[00:20:30]and the populations paying the costs of these choices. The German workers whose factories are closing. The French families whose purchasing power is declining. The Italian small businesses squeezed between rising energy costs and declining consumer spending did not make them. The classic definition of an empire is a power structure that uses one population to serve the interests of another. What Europe is experiencing is the consequence of a subordinate relationship in which European populations are absorbing cost to sustain a strategic arrangement that serves interests other than their own.

[00:21:06]Russia cannot make this happen through force. America cannot impose it through direct coercion. It requires the active participation of European political institutions that have internalized the priorities of the dominant power to the point where they no longer distinguish those priorities from European interests. That is the meaning of strategic capture at civilizational scale. And it is why Europe is currently doing more damage to itself than any adversary could do from the outside. The structural dynamics that produce this situation are not permanent. They never are. The question is what comes after and whether the transition happens through the intelligent exercise of leadership that recovers European strategic agency or through the disorderly collapse of arrangements that have become too contradictory to sustain. History does not guarantee good outcomes but it does identify clearly which arrangements are sustainable and which are not. The current European strategic posture is not sustainable that much. The structural analysis makes clear. What happens next depends on whether European societies can produce the political leadership to manage the transition or whether they will continue on the current path until the contradictions force a resolution that nobody chose.