Long reads shortened
Rutte and Trump in the Oval Office last October. Salwan Georges/The Washington Post/Getty
The night Europe’s leaders gave up on America
For the first year of Donald Trump’s second term, says The Wall Street Journal, European leaders tried to placate the tempestuous US president with “flattery diplomacy”. Finland’s president and Norway’s prime minister “workshopped” their text messages to him, discussing which words to capitalise to mimic his style. Officials adopted Trump-like language: their Ukraine peace plan would “stop the killing”; sanctions on Russia were rebranded “tariffs”. Leading the way was NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who told Europe’s leaders they had to raise their defence spending to “give Trump a win”. To those who flirted with the idea of a “new West”, without the US as its linchpin, his response was simple: “Keep on dreaming.”
But when Trump threatened to seize Greenland in January, everything changed. At an emergency meeting in Brussels, Europe’s leaders vented so emotionally that some described it as “therapy night”. Belgium’s prime minister complained that Europe risked becoming a “miserable slave” to the US. Denmark’s premier, Mette Frederiksen, looked so shaken that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took a moment to ask her how she was holding up: “You OK?” And since that meeting, Europe has begun “an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanisation”. Governments are quietly removing US tech from their systems and urging civil servants not to use Microsoft Teams or Office. They are spending hundreds of billions on boosting Europe’s space firms, AI companies and data centres, to reduce their dependence on Silicon Valley. They have even begun assessing how well their US-made weaponry would function without America’s authorisation. Trump’s more recent actions, not least the Iran war, have only stiffened their resolve. “We are drawing a line here,” Emmanuel Macron said at that January meeting. “There is no going back.”
🎁🤣 During a meeting with Friedrich Merz in the White House, Trump told his guest he had something to show him. He took him into a small study off the Oval Office – “the Lewinsky room”, Trump called it – that was filled with MAGA memorabilia and boxes of Florsheim dress shoes. “Just grab whatever you want,” a congenial Trump told Merz and his officials, adding that their wives could sell the swag for “thousands of dollars”.
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Comment
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To hell with “self-optimisation” – let’s have a drink
In the past few years, says Derek Thompson on Substack, millions of people have embraced a position that, only a decade ago, “would have seemed absurd”: that any amount of alcohol, even a single drink a week, is bad for you. Yet the science isn’t as settled as people think. One influential recent study concluded that two drinks a day appears to be roughly as risky as logging, the most dangerous job in America, which is pretty close to “yikes territory”. But it found that a single daily drink is the equivalent of a decade’s worth of driving, which doesn’t seem so worrying. Plus, the results are so wildly inconclusive that the authors cannot rule out the possibility that a daily drink actually extends the average person’s life.
What really worries me, though, is that the shift away from booze is all part of the “cult of the enhanced self”. Weight-loss drugs, supplements, peptides, testosterone therapy, fitness wearables – they’re all helping us become among the healthiest people ever to have lived. “But self-optimisation can often become selfish optimisation.” The more we go to the gym and stay off the wine, the less time we spend socialising. So it’s not just drinking that’s declining; we are also having less sex, spending less time with friends, and so on. And while we shouldn’t minimise the health risks of alcohol, we also shouldn’t minimise the health risks of not socialising. One study has found that living with a partner and frequently visiting family has “nearly the same longevity benefits as exercise”. Maybe we should be more neurotic about that.
Global update
Friedrich Merz: out of options? Daniel Bockwoldt/Getty
Europe’s “engine room” is falling apart
A few weeks ago, says Henry Donovan in The Spectator, Germany’s famous Deutsche Bahn ground to a halt. A problem with the rail network’s radio system meant that, for several hours, “nothing moved on the tracks of Europe’s largest economy”. Then a bridge carrying a critical stretch of motorway running through one of the country’s busiest regions shut without warning because of structural issues. In the industrial heartland of North Rhine-Westphalia, a third of motorway bridges need repairing. Meanwhile Volkswagen, the company “synonymous with German industrial identity”, is planning to cut 100,000 of its 600,000-strong workforce. The country that has long been “Europe’s engine room” is rapidly falling apart.
This is Germany’s deepest crisis since World War Two, says Daniel Johnson in The Telegraph. For the past few years, its economy has stagnated, lagging on the two measures on which it used to stride ahead: growth and inflation. Donald Trump’s tariffs and Chinese competition have devastated one key German industry after another – cars, chemicals, engineering – and the cheap Russian energy it has long depended on has gone for good. Perhaps worst of all is that German industry shows no sign of embracing any “entrepreneurial flair”. Family firms still dominate, and they avoid high-risk investments in cutting-edge fields such as AI or space. In defence technology, the older, less innovative corporations continue to “hog the largesse” over the small, dynamic firms that have helped Israel and Ukraine become leading military powers. Friedrich Merz, who was elected with the sole mission of turning things round, is pulling levers with little result. If Europe’s economic powerhouse – and the continent’s last key defender of free trade – continues on this trajectory, the European Union could well “collapse under the weight of its own contradictions”.
The Knowledge Crossword
TV
Stevenson (R) with Francis Fulford
“It’s Noddyland – it won’t work”
For those of us who are basically sympathetic to the idea of taxing the very richest in society a little more, says Lucy Mangan in The Guardian, Gary Stevenson’s documentary on the subject should have been a slam dunk. Unfortunately, How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson is an absolute embarrassment. For one thing, the needlessly pugnacious city-boy-turned-inequality-influencer is deeply unappealing, with an “adolescent bullishness” that would be annoying in a teenager, let alone a 39-year-old millionaire. It’s also bizarre to watch a supposedly expert presenter be repeatedly outfoxed by his interviewees.
Stevenson speaks to globally minded telecoms tycoon Bassim Haidar, who flummoxes him with the simple, polite question: what do you do when all the rich people leave? Twenty-eighth generation landowner Francis Fulford is robust and jocular, and again, fatal: “The values you are basing your figures on will collapse. It’s Noddyland – it won’t work.” Andrew Henderson of Nomad Capitalist, which advises clients on how to minimise their tax liabilities by moving countries, easily matches Stevenson for sheer belligerence: “I don’t think life is fair and I think that fundamentally upsets people who talk about inequality because you feel entitled to rich people’s money.” Towards the end, the tax lawyer and expert Dan Neidle deals a final blow, telling Stevenson coolly but firmly that he appears to be unable to separate his “emotional reaction to inequality” from a “rational assessment of the best tools for it”. The whole thing beggars belief. It’s his documentary. Had he not done even the minimum homework? Or has he just spent so much time preaching to the choir that he’s forgotten what it feels like to be challenged? As Neidle put it: “There’s no evidence you’ve ever thought about it!”
Watch How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson here.
Quoted
“If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don’t actually live longer; it just seems longer.”
Clement Freud, broadcaster and MP
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