"Europe has abdicated. It has no coherence, no leadership, no influence."

Conrad Black writes in American Greatness,

...the decline of Europe, not its rise, is now the threat that should worry foreign policy specialists.

The United Kingdom, renowned throughout the world and for more than 300 years for good government with continuous though gradually self-reforming institutions since the Magna Carta in 1215, is suffering its worst failure of government since the American Revolution. Britain, in addition to having voted to leave the European Union, and now having failed to negotiate a soft exit and Parliament having declared that it does not want what the people voted for, is stretched between a narrowly pro-exit population and an anti-exit Parliament. The performance of Theresa May’s government has been so incompetent that the normal solution to such an impasse—a general election—probably would elevate the Labour Party now led by a Marxist anti-Semite, Jeremy Corbyn. That would lead to the implosion of the country into a state of ignominy and political degradation not seen since Richard III strangled the princes in the tower, and Corbyn would do nothing to clarify Britain’s position with the European Union.

...Instead of putting the horrors of the Third Reich and the difficult Cold War years of a divided Germany into the past and stepping out as one of the world’s great powers, with allies all around it, Germany—with the world’s fourth-largest economy—has stalled. It’s two main political parties have slowly eroded, and a coalition between them can barely agree on anything, let alone command a Bundestag majority. There are four other parties, the far left—a detritus of the old Communist East Germany—the Greens (relatively extreme eco-warriors), the Alternative—half reasonable, half-far right, and somewhat xenophobic—and the worthy Free Democrats, who are sensible, small business-oriented, and bourgeois.

Angela Merkel is an agile leader but terribly cautious; she is about pass Konrad Adenauer as the third longest serving German chancellor, after Bismarck and Helmut Kohl. But she has frittered away the preeminence of her party and is leaving it to an unprepossessing successor facing the likelihood of more voter fragmentation and multi-party coalitions. Chancellor Merkel shut down the entire nuclear power system to appease the Greens, (although nuclear power is the safest of all economically viable energy sources), and has committed Germany to dependence on Russian natural gas.

...Europe has abdicated. It has no coherence, no leadership, no influence. The president of the United States has cut America loose from the nonsense of the Paris climate and Iran nuclear agreements, popular with the Europeans, and is making direct arrangements with the other major powers—China, Japan, India, and even possibly Russia.

...The Western alliance can be revived, but only when Europe recovers its political will and common sense. Except for a few purposeful countries formerly under Soviet occupation, the whole continent is, in de Gaulle’s phrase about the French Fourth Republic, “crossing the desert.” It will get to the other side; the administration, in its way, is trying to help, but only Europe can do it.

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