The Economist Today for Jan. 28 whines “Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky don’t agree on much, but they all affirm that Europe is weak and annoying. The Telegram, our column on geopolitics, explains why it’s fashionable to pick on Europe, and why the insults say as much about the leaders lobbing them as about the real-life place.” We weren’t really expecting “I know you are but what am I?” even from the current diminished version of that publication (or a newsletter you can’t link to). But we do want to suggest that a civilization fixated on failed energy policies and deindustrialization whose chattering classes are turning it into a geopolitical comedy sideshow partly because they still think it’s 1878 out there, with Dickens and Balzac dominating culture, Britannia ruling the waves and France able to settle uppity foreigners by sending a gunboat, is an irresistible target for mockery.

Heatmap, for instance, chortles “European EV Sales Overtake Gas for the First Time”. And who’s making these marvels of modern green engineering? Volkswagen? Mercedes Benz? Jaguar perhaps? Renault? Uh, no. It’d be Tesla (USA) and BYD (China). And where’s the energy coming from to run them? Uh, that’d be nowhere, man. The Congress of Vienna it ain’t.

Still, fear not. According to Inside Climate News:

“European nations are jointly plotting a massive offshore wind buildout/ As the U.S. tries to crush its offshore wind industry, 10 countries agree to work together to install 100 gigawatts of offshore turbines in the North Sea.”

Right. While the United States sends a nuclear carrier task force in the direction of Iran, the EU sends a windmill task force in the direction of the Dogger Bank.

The president of France, finally grudgingly leaning toward listing Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as terrorist, recently called the European spat with Donald Trump over Greenland “a strategic wake-up call for all of Europe”. And the probable next prime minister of Denmark, Rob Jetten, called it a “wake-up call” so they have their lines down. But does it mean France will acquire working aircraft carriers? Rebuild its army? Clamp down on illegal immigration, directly into France or through France into Britain? Deregulate its economy so it can afford its various grandiose dreams and social programs? Or put on blue shades and prate? Alas:

“This show of European solidarity comes as France prepares to strengthen its diplomatic presence in the region.”

So France will send a legion of consuls or something. As for Denmark, well:

“Once in office, one of the first things Jetten will do is ‘talk to my colleagues in Europe to see what role the Dutch can play again in strengthening the European cooperation,’ he said.”

Gad. Send more meetings.

As for Britain, the Guardian offers as if it were reporting actual events not PR that in heading to Communist China the hapless Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer:

“promised ‘stability and clarity’ in his approach to Beijing after years of what he described as ‘inconsistency’ under the Tories, as western powers turn to China in their search for economic stability amid concerns the US may no longer be a reliable partner.”

Suggesting Starmer, and the Guardian, know as little of economics as of geopolitics. But of course Starmer is still full steam to the bottom of the sea on Net Zero as British energy bills skyrocket, crushing lives, hopes, pubs, communities, a whole way of life and national security.

As for Germany, once the economic powerhouse, the power is flickering. As Robert Bryce comments under a headline we will not repeat:

“Earlier this month, German Chancellor Frederich Merz admitted that his country’s decision to abandon nuclear power was a ‘serious strategic mistake.’ Merz further acknowledged that Germany now lacks sufficient electric generation capacity.”

OK. At least some actual vision there. But the question is, what do they do about it? If anything?

The mindset of sending more words, and more meetings, is deeply ingrained. A Jonathan Freedland column about Davos in the Guardian bore the headline “As the world finally punches back, was this the week Donald Trump went too far?” Now writers don’t do their own headlines and the term “punch” was not in the actual piece. But it did praise Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s all-too-typical Davos Man bloviation to set up a revealing delusion:

“What Carney called for, and what the moment demands, is a new arrangement, a new formation. The ‘middle powers’, the nations of the democratic west outside the US, do not have passively to accept that the old world of ‘institutions and rules’ has been replaced by a new world of ‘strongmen and deals’, as the former head of MI6 phrases it. Instead of competing with each other to be the most accommodating of the US hegemon, flattering the Oval Office emperor in the hope of being spared his wrath, they can, says Carney, ‘combine to create a third path’. What would that look like? The obvious shape is a new constellation of the European Union plus the UK plus Canada, both an economic bloc with heft and a security alliance with muscle.”

Muscle? Heft? Bosh. All three have been diligently undermining both their defence and their prosperity through a combination of neglecting the former and actively harming the latter, to the point that nobody is even remotely afraid of them, from Washington to Teheran to Beijing. They don’t even know it, as for instance when Carney told the World Economic Forum “We are an energy superpower” though we struggle to build pipelines and our vaunted electricity generation seems to be in decline.

They certainly have no plan to reverse the decline other than to dress it up with pretty words in the hope of making it sound like an achievement. In which regard the New York Times “Climate Forward” piece we also discuss elsewhere in this newsletter is pertinent.

According to the grey lady, or perhaps blue from cold in recent weeks, the solution to insufficient energy is not to get more, it’s to use less:

“It’s part of a strategy called demand response that’s being used by power grid operators in times of peak energy use, like cold snaps and heat waves. The idea is to reduce power demand when supply is tight by incentivizing big electricity customers to use less.”

You won’t save money, because “incentivize” means “pay”. And if you’re into fancy words to hide bleak reality, things like “demand response” or “virtual power plants” or “coordinated energy reductions” (never mind “snaps” for cold and “waves” for heat even if the former last longer), we suggest “managed decline” to describe having lost both the strength of character and the clarity of thought to take bold measures to fix problems, especially ones that are self-inflicted.

P.S. It is worth noting that European economies still loom very large in world rankings, with Italy surprisingly at #8 and ahead of Russia, partly because most of the planet is governed spectacularly worse even than the West. On the downside, all except Germany still trail California alone. Still, a bit of real reform would go a long way. But not until Europeans stop sneering at the vulgarians who cannot grasp and defer to their innate superiority.