The Jungle Devours Europe |
The Jungle Devours Europe
Half a billion Europeans should be able to defend themselves.
J.B. Shurk | October 31, 2026
The European Union has over four-hundred-fifty million people. The non-E.U. nations of Europe — including the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Norway, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Moldova, and Albania but excluding Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Turkey — have another hundred million people. Combined, Europe has over two hundred million more people than the United States and over four hundred million more people than the Russian Federation. As an “associate member” of the E.U., Canada would give Europe another forty million bodies.
There is no reason why Europe should struggle to defend itself with this kind of population advantage. In fact, it is downright embarrassing that it depends on Americans from the other side of the ocean to secure its borders when the United States (with its significantly smaller population) has military obligations throughout the world. It has been eighty years since the Second World War, and somehow the European Establishment still hasn’t figured out how to survive without American money and muscle.
Professors and pundits toss out all kinds of reasons why this is the case: The Europeans were saddled with debt and destruction after two continental wars within thirty years and had to rebuild much of their infrastructure and manufacturing capacity. As the Soviet Union and the U.S.-led allies carved up post-war Europe, the Cold War froze the continent in a state of transition for the next half-century. U.S. political leaders embraced America’s transformation into a global empire with global responsibilities. Peace in post-WWII Europe seemed fragile, and parts of Europe appeared broken; two generations had been lost to war and depression, and a sense of nihilism extinguished much of the early-twentieth-century exuberance that pervaded the continent before the First World War.
All of this is true. Still, there is no excuse for the continent to be struggling with the responsibilities of political sovereignty four generations after the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Josep Borrell, the E.U.’s former high........