Russians advancing, Chinese buying, Americans criticizing, Islamists conquering and Europeans standing in line for ice cream in winter.
And now the Titanic of Europe has struck the iceberg of Trump.
The White House just alerted the world that Europe is facing “civilization erasure”.
“The main question is not where the demarcation line between Ukraine and Russia will be drawn, but whether Europe will emerge from its state of torpor and weakness,” as Walter Russell Mead told Le Figaro.
Europeans continue to wear the mask of the chatterbox defenders of the “world order,” which is rapidly collapsing, but history will remember us as those who, when the moment came, traded Hegel and the dialectic of history for the empyrean of good intentions and children’s entertainment.
Welcome to the most beautiful theme park in the world: “Europe Land - Where History Goes to Die But With Style”.
Today’s Europe resembles 18th-century Venice: extremely wealthy, refined, cultured - and strategically irrelevant. It produced beautiful glass and international-law treatises while losing its colonies and fleet one by one.
And in the end Napoleon erased it with a stroke of a pen.
Europe still fantasizes about being a “third force,” a force of reason, moderation, culture and stability; but it sounds like a kind of life-insurance policy trapped in the rhetoric of the “common good,” repentance, and self-flagellation - armed with two pawns and a knight - with which Europe hopes to pacify the global stage.
It is only at low tide that we see who is wearing a swimsuit. The ocean is empty and Europe is naked. The old continent inspires neither fear nor dreams. And it can finally withdraw from history.
What we see now is a political dwarf, a military orphan, a diplomatic eunuch, an economic cuckold. Russians, Chinese, Americans, Indians, the Islamist fifth column - all licking their lips.
Europeans are proof that decline is not a sudden collapse: it is a slow, elegant strip-tease before the world.
Edward Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall in 1776, and Europeans are now shooting the director’s cut in episodes.
All their political chatter, stale rhetoric, insipid and arrogant bravado churned out by armchair strategists is undermining the continent.
Dozens of European think tanks, billions in “cohesion” funds and taxes presumably intended to finance hydrogen scooters and decarbonize everything - for what? A list of vague and inclusive acronyms, pathways that lead nowhere.
We are witnessing the triumph of Europeans sons dressed as fathers speaking of defense as if organizing sustainability audits, believing that history was a podcast on Spotify, not a slaughterhouse.
And thus Europe finds itself to be merely that magnificent place where everyone goes on vacation.
While China and the United States have built muscle - nuclear plants, production lines, aircraft carriers - Europe has cultivated the illusion of living off moral rent, soft power, and ever-more intricate regulations about everything except its own survival, serving only to employ legions of lawyers and Brussels consultants.
The real question is how to recover from two European generations ruined by educational shipwreck, digital cretinization, cultural collapse, migratory chaos, Islamist communitarianism, rentier pacifism, and stale slogans pressed into the waffle-iron of sociological and geopolitical clichés.
Europe is a ship adrift, without engine, rudder or compass, with a crew on the verge of mutiny, unaware that the captain holds a flute of champagne as the Titanic sinks.
It manufactures luxury handbags, while all serious components - chips, rare earths, batteries - are made elsewhere, not to mention energy.
When Trump told us in 2018: “Pay 2% of GDP for NATO or fend for yourselves,” we Europeans reacted like a betrayed wife catching her husband with a lover: tantrums, tears, “you brute!” - but in the end we stayed and endured because we had no other roof.
Today’s Europe is a caricature of itself: a place that bans plastic straws but imports 98% of its rare earths from China.
This is the Europe of organic cauliflower vendors and vegan rose queens calling summits on solar missiles, electric tanks, and the “European Koran” with an inclusive veil and benevolent jihad. In search of the organic burqa with a human face, two three four five fanaticisms meanwhile join forces to overthrow their common enemy - the West.
We are thus overwhelmed by history. By gender queer “oppressed by the IDF”. The situation is too desperate to be taken seriously.
Everyone pretends to have heard the last warning before the countdown to the future begins.
The truth is that Europe is the garden gnome of the world on the lawn of history: cute, useless, with a ceramic smile; the world walks past and kicks it occasionally to see if it’s still alive.