America’s Loss Will Not Be Europe’s Gain

Europeans are torn between fearing the vulnerabilities of American decline and seeing in it a chance to assert their own autonomy, yet Europe’s own challenges suggest this is more peril than opportunity.

Europeans are deeply conflicted about the prospect of American decline. On the one hand, they remain dependent on the United States, especially in security terms, and American decline could make them more vulnerable. On the other hand, many Europeans have long resented American power and sought to create a Europe that would be able to assert itself against the United States—and even offer an alternative to it. Thus while Atlanticists fear American decline and worry that it will bring Europe down with it, some post-Atlanticists, who want a Europe that is independent of the United States—and could even act as a kind of counterweight to it—see an opportunity in a post-American world. 

However, there are good reasons to be skeptical that Europeans might somehow move into whatever space is created by American decline. First, Europe is also itself in decline—by some measures, perhaps at an even faster rate than is the United States. Second, the few big foreign policy successes that the European Union can claim have themselves depended on American power. Third, as current events in the Middle East illustrate, American decline may turn out to be quite messy—and it is far from clear whether Europeans, who remain divided, would be capable of collectively filling the gap left by any US retrenchment. 

In order to think about the possible consequences of American decline for Europe, we need to start by thinking carefully and precisely about what decline even is and how to measure it. In particular, this means distinguishing between relative and absolute decline. Most discussions of American decline among foreign policy analysts have tended to focus on relative decline—that is, whether the gap in, say, economic or military terms between the United States and other powers, especially China, is closing. But there are some reasons to think that the United States may actually be in absolute decline too. One example: Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, life expectancy for Americans was actually decreasing.

Typical of the way that foreign policy analysts have thought about American decline is the short book published by Joseph Nye in 2015, Is the American Century Over? Nye defines relative decline as “a decrease in relative external power” and absolute decline as “domestic deterioration or decay” and says that “while the two are often related, they need not be.”

The United Kingdom, with which the United States is often compared, declined relatively but not absolutely: Even as it lost its empire, quality of life improved. The Roman Empire, on the other hand, declined in absolute terms—it “rotted from within.”

To Nye it seemed clear that America was not like Rome. In other words, if America was in decline at all—and even that was debatable—it was in relative terms. He accepted that American might was likely to decline relative to that of rising powers like China, particularly in economic terms. But he was convinced that the United States would remain the world’s predominant power. He worried about economic inequality in the United States and the increasing gridlock in American politics. But he did not think that social problems were “getting worse in any linear manner”: After all, crime, divorce and teenage pregnancy rates were dropping. 

However, shortly after Nye’s book was published, things suddenly started to look somewhat different. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there was a small decline in life expectancy at birth in the United States between 2014 and 2017. This drop was mainly attributed to drug overdoses and suicide—what the economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called “deaths of despair.” Driven by the opioid epidemic, drug overdose deaths reached 72,000 in 2017; there were 88,000 deaths from alcohol. While the global suicide rate had been sharply falling, it was increasing in the United States—in 2017, over 47,000 Americans took their own life. 

Such a fall in life expectancy is extremely rare, especially for an advanced economy. The last time life expectancy had fallen in the United States for three years in a row was exactly one hundred earlier. Between 1915 and 1918, there was an extraordinary decrease in life expectancy, from fifty-two years to thirty-seven for men and fifty-seven to forty-two for women. But that was a one-off caused by World War I and the influenza epidemic that followed. The question is whether the decline in life expectancy between 2014 and 2017 is a blip or the beginning of a long-term trend—and it is too soon to know the answer, not least because the pandemic has further complicated the picture by causing a big fall in life expectancy, at least momentarily. 

The situation in Europe is both better and worse than that in the United States. There is no reason to think that Europe is in absolute decline: Average life expectancy in Europe  is higher than in the United States and is not falling. At the same time, a number of indicators suggest that Europe is in an even steeper relative decline than is the United States. Europe’s aging populations make the American population look young, and Europe’s economic stagnation (especially its lack of technological innovation) makes the American economy seem dynamic by comparison. In other words, even as the United States declines relative to China, Europe is declining relative to the United States. 

Since World War II, Europeans have had an ambivalent relationship with American power. On the one hand, they have benefited enormously from it. They are often called free riders on security issues: Writing in the 1980s, the Atlanticist German journalist Josef Joffe even spoke of Western Europe’s “security parasitism.” Europeans have also to some extent been free riders in economic terms. For example, after the beginning of the eurozone crisis in 2010, when Germany imposed austerity on its partners, it became increasingly dependent on the United States as an external source of demand for its export-dependent economy.

At the same time, and perhaps precisely because of this dependence, there has always been a strong current of resentment of the United States, above all in France but also in Germany. European integration began as an American-led project in the context of the Marshall Plan. But from at least the Suez crisis in 1956, part of the aim of European integration was to develop a strong, united Europe that would be an alternative and counterweight to both American and Soviet power—a third force in international politics. During the Suez crisis, West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer urged French Prime Minister Guy Mollet to press ahead with integration in response to the United States’ opposition to the Anglo–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt, which they both saw as a betrayal. “You must build Europe,” Adenauer is supposed to have said. “It will be your revenge.” 

There was a resurgence of this idea of Europe as revenge against the United States around the time of the Iraq War. The US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 divided Europe: Many EU member states and candidate countries supported the United States even as France and Germany pursued against it a strategy of what international-relations experts call “soft balancing.”

But among so-called pro-Europeans, the war generated new momentum behind the idea of a European foreign policy or even a new sense of European identity, and those were largely defined against the United States. In opposing the invasion, Europeans believed that they stood for peace and international law, and they imagined themselves, as the historian Jan-Werner Müller wrote at the time, to be playing “the role of a ‘civilizing’ counterpart to the United States.” 

A good illustration of this European ambivalence about American power is the European approach toward Iran, which the EU has long claimed as one of its few big foreign policy successes. In the mid-2000s, in the aftermath of the Iraq War, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom got together as the E3 to seek to stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons through economic pressure rather than military force; the approach ultimately produced the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2015. The European strategy, which in this case included even the United Kingdom, was an attempt to offer an alternative to the US approach while also leveraging American power, in particular by coordinating economic sanctions on Iran. 

Ambivalence toward the United States means that American decline is both a danger and an opportunity for Europe. On the one hand, it clearly makes Europeans more vulnerable, especially in security terms. This is obviously an acute issue because of the war in Ukraine and the fear of many NATO countries, correct or incorrect, that were Putin to prevail in Ukraine, he would attack them next. On the other hand, some Europeans—especially those who dream of an autonomous Europe—hope that American decline might also create an opening. Even as Europeans continue to depend on the United States, they share with others outside the West the hope that a more multipolar world might be good for them. 

From a European point of view, the Middle East—above all the question of Israel/Palestine—is an especially important issue. In part, this is because of the region’s proximity, which means that Europe is directly affected by what happens there. In particular, since the refugee crisis of 2015, Europeans have become terrified of migration flows resulting from conflict in the Middle East. But the region is also important because the whole idea of a common European foreign policy goes back to attempts in the 1970s to develop a joint European Community approach to the Arab–Israeli conflict. These efforts culminated in the Venice Declaration of 1980, which acknowledged Palestinians’ right to self-government and went further than the United States was willing to go in recognizing the Palestine Liberation Organization. 

Of the three regions in which it has focused since World War II—Asia, Europe, and the Middle East—American military power has had perhaps the most detrimental effect in the Middle East. It is therefore tempting to think that a gradual withdrawal of the United States from the region might be a good thing—and could allow the EU to play the more active role that it has aspired to since the 1970s. But the disaster unfolding in the Middle East today gives us reasons to be skeptical about the possibility that American decline might create an opportunity for Europeans. Rather, current developments suggest that as the United States becomes weaker—that is, as it declines in relative terms—there may be more chaos, not less. 

American presidents used to set red lines with Israel. For example, Ronald Reagan told Menachem Begin that the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was a “holocaust” and warned him that he would cut American support unless Begin stopped the invasion—which Begin then did. But the Biden administration has been unable or unwilling to exert pressure on Israel even as Israel has exterminated and expelled the population of Gaza and now threatens to do the same in Lebanon. This is no doubt in part because of the pro-Israel socialization of Biden’s generation, as the historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, and because of the incentive structure around Israel in American politics. 

Also striking during the last year is how weak the United States has appeared to be. Israel may depend on US military support to carry out its operations in Gaza and Lebanon, and even to defend itself, yet it seems again and again to have simply ignored public calls for restraint from American officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken. Some analysts argue that this apparent weakness is an illusion; for Adam Tooze, buying into it “underestimates the intentionality on Washington’s part.”

But to the extent that this US policy is a function of relative American decline, it seems—so far at least—to have emboldened Israel rather than constrained it. A United States in transition from power to weakness might have consequences for the rest of the world that are even more disastrous than the hubristic, hegemonic United States of the unipolar moment that followed the Cold War. Europeans, still divided among themselves—with Germany on the pro-Israel end of the spectrum, and Ireland and Spain on the pro-Palestinians end—remain largely irrelevant even as Israel’s response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, has escalated into a regional war. If current events in the Middle East are anything to go by, America’s loss is unlikely to be Europe’s gain—or, to use Adenauer’s terms: Europe is unlikely to get its revenge.

This essay was originally published in “in The Ideas Letter, a project of the Open Society Foundations.