When Robert McNamara moved from running Ford to running the Pentagon at the height of the Cold War, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, it was such a “tragic failure” that his name is still a byword for the “misapplication of cold reason to the messiness of public life”. Will Elon Musk, in his quest to “rationalise the state”, fare much better? Well, it’s Europe that must hope so, not America. A continent “spent of ideas and confidence” is badly in need of a model of reform to emulate. Whatever problems there are with the US government haven’t kept it from stunning economic success. Meanwhile Europe’s economies are stuck in a “circular trap” of high taxes and low growth. If there is a way out, it is a “redesign of the state from first principles”.

Recent history suggests America’s example is everything. The turn to industrial strategy under Trump and Biden was imitated in Europe at both national and EU level, and so was the “Clintonian mix of open markets and mild redistribution” that preceded it. This “cringing obsession with America” – most acute among the British elite – is normally a bad thing. On the left it led to the importing of critical race theory and other silly fads (“if only there were tariffs on ideas”); on the right, it created the delusion that America would do the post-Brexit UK a favour on trade out of some “ancestral attachment”. But if Musk can work his improbable magic on Washington, that ought to “shock and embarrass” the British political class, and the rest of the European elite, into badly needed change. As he sets out to boost an “already rampant” economy, Europeans should curse him as “the right man in entirely the wrong place”.

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