As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out
As far as military dependence is concerned, the “indispendable nation” has already been dispensed with. The US no longer has either the willingness or the capacity to defend Europe against Russia, its only significant enemy. Conversely, Europe (including Ukraine) has developed the necessary willingness and capacity. In some areas, such as artillery and drone technology, Europe has surpassed the US. In others, including intelligence, the US remains helpful but not essential. In still others, such as missiles and anti-missile defence, the US is neither willing to help nor, thanks to the Iran war, capable of doing so.
Claims that Europe cannot dispense with the US in defence typically rely on two claims, first that Europe lacks the capacity to project power globally and second that it is too disunited to act effectively. Both come down to the same misconception: that Europe needs to become another version of the US. But the object of European defence policy should be defense (contrast Trump’s designation of Hegseth as Secretary for War). And, as the Ukraine war has shown, successful defence does not require a unified command capable of instant action (again, the contrast with Trump’s wars is instructive).
Turning to finance and economics, most of the pieces are in place to permit a disengagement from US financial institutions and from the global financial architecture constructed by the US and with the US playing the central role. The combination of a central bank digital currency and the emergence of payment systems like Wero will provide a capacity to break with reliance on the payment systems of Visa and Mastercard. As with military dependence, Trump’s eagerness to weaponise Visa and Mastercard against enemies like the International Criminal Court will accelerate this process.
Other parts of the US-centric architecture, such as ratings agencies and the Big Four auditing/consulting firms have done a great job in discrediting themselves. Again, the object should not be to produce European replicas, but to accelerate the process of returning the financial system to its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy.
Similarly, Trump’s chaotic tariffs, along with China’s economic nationalism, have necessitated the restructuring of the world trading system, with Europe taking the place of the US at the centre. Neither the failed globalist dream of the WTO nor Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying offers has any real future. This is a particularly bitter pill for Brexiteers who imagined they could escape the pull of Europe and join a bigger world, instead finding themselves utterly isolated.
The last parts of US hegemony in this respect are the dominant US role in the IMF and World Bank and, most importantly, the role of the $US as a reserve currency. I’ll leave those for later.
The most intractable area of dependence is that of information technology. Efforts to build a “European stack” have started, but as the term suggests, dependence is multilayered. At the software level, for example, it’s necessary both to promote Linux as an alternative to US-owned operating systems and to break with reliance on Microsoft for office software. And that’s one of the easy parts of the story.
The biggest questions relate to AI. If the US hyperscalers are right, their huge spending with produce a monopoly or oligopoly with entry barriers too high for any rival, including any European rival. My optimistic view is that this is a race that will be won by low-energy tortoises rather than hyper-active hares. Second movers like Deepseek and, more recently the French Mistral, running maybe a year behind the US leaders, can replicate their capabilities at.a fraction of the cost, and without reliance on massive data centres.If that continues to be true, the benefits of massive US investment will not be reaped by the current leaders but by followers.
The really big unknown here is the fate of the Trump regime. If Trump can cement his own power, and pass it on to someone more competent (Xi to Trump’s Mao), and other would be dictators like Modi establish themselves, Europe and its democratic allies will become an island (or maybe an archipelago including places like Canada and Taiwan) in a world of rival autocracies. Maintaining that will be costly in all sorts of way.
On the other hand, if Trump is defeated, the US cannot return to the status quo ante. It will take decades to rebuild a new and sustainable political order on the wreckage left by Trump. The two-party system, the Supreme Court, billionaire controlled media and much more will require either replacement or radical restructuring. That will leave its former allies no alternative to disengagement while the US sorts out its own problems.
Europeans and their allies are in an unenviable position. But still better than that of Americans for whom precarious and unequally distributed material prosperity has come at the price of freedom.
Meanwhile Australia, or at least the Australian political class, remains in denial. We are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on submarines to be used (if at all) in America’s wars. The assumed trade-off is that the US will defend us if necessary. No one really believes this any more, but speaking the truth puts you outside the class of serious people.
{ 19 comments }
D. S. Battistoli 07.17.26 at 12:46 am
Maintaining Taiwan’s political independence against any proximate rival claims should that question come to blows would be very taxing indeed, especially to a power from the other side of the planet.
And I do so miss the subjunctive in English sentences where the verb is modified by conditional clauses. I fear it is going the way of “thou,” ?, ð, and þ. Sometimes in conversation with my own children I express conditionals in the indicative mood and then think, “if they were not to learn the subjunctive from me, where would they learn it?”
Cheez Whiz 07.17.26 at 2:29 am
The ROW coming to terms with what the US has become is comperable to the Democratic party coming to terms with what the Republican party has become, or perhaps Great Britian coming to terms with what itself has become as a result of Brexit. Fundamental assumptions, long-standing norms, reliance on existing systems, personal relationships nd agreements. Sweep all that away and you’re left standing in a bleak landscape, where you suddenly have to start inventing and building systems and relationships long taken for granted.
I’ve occasionally read that one issue with cutting NATO ties is reliance on logistics, along with intelligence and physical resources. Replacing all that is certainly possible but like Brexit the grinding, expensive, and politically unpopular work of doing that is not going to happen without massive committment and fights, because like Brexit simply being in denial is a viable option, until it isn’t. Then its Somebody Else’s Problem.
Alex SL 07.17.26 at 7:07 am
Agreed, sadly also with the last paragraph. But the vision of the EU as an island of democracy assumes that it won’t have its own autocrats taking over, and on that I am not as optimistic, especially as global crises accelerate.
I would not worry about the AI aspect. So far, the outcomes of the large language model revolution are: faster generation of text (which is not and was never the bottleneck anywhere outside of professional spamming, not even in coding), amusing or creepy image and video generation e.g. to illustrate substack posts or talks by lazy authors, spam, a speculative and investment bubble that may lead to several years of global depression when it pops, journals and hiring panels drowning in slop submissions, some more spam, exciting new KPIs in corporations such as how much are you using AI and how many AI code commits did you produce, spam, research papers to the effect of we did something with AI!!!!1! (that we were already able to do better and cheaper and faster twenty years ago), and maybe some productivity tools for people who don’t measure whether it did in fact increase their productivity (to paraphrase from a lunch-and-learn presentation I have seen, “it is amazing, it writes my meeting minutes so I can focus entirely on leading the discussion*” [literally next sentence] “unfortunately, I have to spend 30 min correcting its mistakes afterwards, because it gets everybody’s names wrong, etc.”).
There is AlphaFold, of course, but I don’t think that is really an LLM. And I am using computer vision in my own work, but again, not LLM but a much more reliable and compute efficient form of AI.
In my eyes, I think it is okay for the USA or China to take the lead on LLMs. They can have all the gigawatt data centers too, thanks. The more interesting issue is that China appears to be taking the lead on electrotech, batteries, renewables, EVs. That is the actual technology of the future if complex civilisation does have a future.
*) One day, somebody should introduce this manager to the innovative new technology of saying, “Mike, it is your turn to take notes today, thanks”.
somebody who remembers how GREAT America used to be - 07.17.26 at 12:06 pm
in other words:
It’s truly beautiful how the German Robber Baron FF VON CLOWNSTICK makes Europe (and Germany) GREAT AGAIN!
(and let’s thank the dear Prof. for this excellent review)
Michael Cain 07.17.26 at 5:47 pm
The one short-term question I would ask about force projection absent the US is, “Who’s going to protect TSMC, Samsung, and SK Hynix?” Is that reasonable? Can Europe get by without ICs past the 2nm node? Are they willing to depend on Intel?
marcel proust 07.17.26 at 7:44 pm
Along with a preview function, what this site could use is a set of like/dislike or thumbs up/thumbs down buttons. IF it had one (admittedly a very big if), I would enthusiastically give a like/thumbs up to the last point in the comment of D. S. Battistoli above. But this is a blog for real men and women, who have no need of such doo-hickeys!
Ken_L 07.18.26 at 5:24 am
The Australian government’s persistence in supporting AUKUS is astonishing. No sane person believes we are going to get the promised new model nuclear submarines anywhere near on time and on budget. Stories appear almost daily about America’s inability to build anywhere near enough ships for its own requirements. The 10 ‘Constellation’ class frigates proposed in 2019 are down to two, with debates now occurring about whether to cancel them completely. They join the littoral combat ships and the ‘Zumwalts’ as evidence of the US Navy’s failure to manage large procurement projects successfully.
If and when we ever do get nuclear subs, new or used, they will make our defence reliant on the whims of whoever happens to be in the White House. It defies belief that our government remains willing to entrust our national security for the next 30+ years to a nation that twice elected a maniac to the presidency. I can only assume Albanese believes that to lose one submarine contract might look like a misfortune, but to lose two would look like carelessness.
engels 07.18.26 at 11:46 am
The implication of this position I’m least comfortable with is building more and bigger bombs to own Trump: given its what he and his cronies and toadies have been demanding everyone do (in rather obnoxious terms) for several years, and because of the various Eurotrumps who will be delighted by this agenda. (I thought the point about European “disunity” was that military spending doesn’t lead to anything like the same capacity as it would in a single state because of duplication, lack of interoperability, etc).
Other than that, agree with the aspiration if not the optimism. (The sooner M$ Office and the Big Frauds can be put out their misery the better.)
Janus Daniels 07.18.26 at 4:13 pm
Please note, “It will take decades to rebuild a new and sustainable political order on the wreckage left by” the US Republican Party.
We can see a direct line of decline, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, Bush, Trump.
Kiloseven 07.20.26 at 3:19 am
re: Janus Daniels 07.18.26 at 4:13 pm
Eisenhower was an accident, hardly a mainline Republican. He was West Point through-and-through, not attached to either party, as federal employees of the day were want to be (excepting Dougout Doug). He was solicited to run for President first by the Democratic Party leadership, and had he accepted their offer, would have run against Bob Taft, a much more typical isolationist conservative, which would have sealed the GOP’s fate.
Jonathan 07.22.26 at 10:32 am
“The most intractable area of dependence is that of information technology” strokes me as doing a lot of fantasy lifting.
The UK gets a third of its oil from the US, the world’s #1 producer of oil, and the US is a prodigious supplier of LNG. I don’t know what the equivalent reliance on the US is for nations in the EU, but it’s probably not pretty, not least because Europe consumes about 5 times more oil than it produces.
As far as I am aware, oil markets are still delusionally holding their breath even while being asphyxiated to the tune of an 11% drop in global oil supply.
Who knows how this plays out. I hope it will put a massive dent in US hegemony, but for the foreseeable it seems perilously intractable to me. And it’s this mineral materiality that underpins everything else, including the manufacture of renewables and information technology.
engels 07.22.26 at 3:46 pm
I approve of amending Madeline Albright’s hubristic phrase.
Watching Ken Burma’s documentary it occurred to me another famous description of the USA had taken on a new resonance post-Trump: “an asylum for mankind”.
Tm 07.23.26 at 7:47 am
engels: “The implication of this position I’m least comfortable with is building more and bigger bombs to own Trump: given its what he and his cronies and toadies have been demanding everyone do (in rather obnoxious terms) for several years, and because of the various Eurotrumps who will be delighted by this agenda.”
I second this. The insane armament race now going on in Europe is not a rational response to Trump’s wrecking of the post-1990 international order. They are pumping hundreds of billions into military spending while cutting their own education, welfare, and international aid budgets. In other words they copy Trump’s policies almost 1:1. How independent! And much of the military contracts still go to US manufacturers. Even non-Nato member Switzerland is dead set on spending billions on F-35 fighters despite huge cost overruns, concerns about dependence on the whims of the US government, and btw the government cannot even explain what it needs these planes for. And the same is true for much of the European military buildup – it doesn’t respond to any actual threat analysis, it’s just fulfilling the most far-fetched wishlist of the military industrial complex. And there is still a huge appetite for deepening dependence on US technology. The people in charge do not tend to see that as prohibitive at all. And they are also very eager to deepen ties with the Israeli military.
I have seen reasonable people defend this military buildup as a necessity but it isn’t based on any rational threat asessment. As long as Russia cannot defeat Ukraine, it doesn’t pose a credible military threat to the rest of Europe. So the correct response would be to give Ukraine everything they need. Meanwhile we need to counter the non-military security threats facing Europe and the world:
– The biggest security threat remains dependence on fossil fuels. European governments are rolling back climate action and throwing the fossil fuel oligarchs a lifeline instead of doubling down on decarbonization.
– We need to do much more for cyber security
– We need to counter Russian and US propaganda operations, online disinformation, and so on. This includes cracking down on the oligarch owned Social Media. The EU is acting far too timidly. Musk’s Nazinetwork should have been fined into oblivion for its permanent illegal activity, from Nazi propaganda to child porn.
– We need to invest more not less in International Aid. Do I really nee to spell out why this is a security issue?
– And of course we need to invest in our democracy, which means taxing the oligarchs, stregnthening the welfare state and investing in the future (education, research, climate mitigation). If we don’t, the fascists will win.
Almost nobody in government is serious about any of these security challenges. They are mostly doing the precise opposite of what needs to be done. Trump is winning.
somebody who remembers a peaceful Europe 07.23.26 at 10:31 am
YES!
‘Musk’s Nazinetwork should have been fined into oblivion for its permanent illegal activity, from Nazi propaganda to child porn’. But as he saved Europes biggest economy by having the Worlds HUGEST War criminal elected US President and that President demanded that Germany builds weapons instead of cars – again – and in order to built even more of them they have to be dropped on somebodies heads – lets just hope that these heads stay out of Europe –
WAIT!
That was an incredibly sick and sad statement and I take it ALL back!
MisterMr 07.23.26 at 10:54 am
“As long as Russia cannot defeat Ukraine, it doesn’t pose a credible military threat to the rest of Europe.”
I’m pretty sure Russia can effectively hit many european capitals via missiles.
Would this be a rational action from the pow of Russia? No. But some people in Russia did in fact ask/menace this.
Jan Wiklund 07.23.26 at 6:11 pm
I wish it was true.
Cory Doctorow has written a post, https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/22/table-flipper/#graveyard-of-indispensable-nations, among other things about how Canada gets out of its way to let the US bully it. And EU and a lot of other countries have just signed a treaty – “Pax Silica” – where they sign away the rights to develop new digital products against the “rights” to sell raw materials to the Americans.
So I fear the development you describe is very slow indeed!
John Q 07.24.26 at 12:08 am
Engels and others: I’m not happy about building more bombs etc, but the purpose isn’t to own Trump but to resist the attacks of his ally Putin. When/if it becomes clear that Russia is no longer a threat, I hope to see spending coming down.
Jonathan @11 I didn’t discuss energy, but Europe has shown its capability here. Pre-2022 Europe was far more dependent on Russia than it now is on the US. Oil and gas imports have been cut to a trickle, except LNG which is set to stop in 2027. As of 2022, switching to the US seemed like a sensible choice, but that is now being re-evaluated. The assumption underlying your comment, that energy suppliers have the whip hand, has already been refuted.
Jan @16. The Anglo countries have closer historical (and in Canada’s case geographical ties) and have been slower to move. But even Australia is starting to rethink our dependence on the US
Janus Daniels 07.25.26 at 3:48 pm
Surely “the Australian political class” knows better, and expects to line their pockets from the “spending hundreds of billions of dollars on” anything?
Tm 07.28.26 at 8:45 pm
MisterMr: “I’m pretty sure Russia can effectively hit many european capitals via missiles.”
Of course Russia could attack Western Europe. But that’s not the same as posing a serious military threat, which would mean being able to not just start but win a military conflict. Russia absolutely could not, and would quickly be defeated in a war against NATO.
Russia can and does in fact inflict a lot of damage by non-military means and Europeans are still, after all these years, unprepared to counter these threats – while pouring hundreds of billions into military hardware, much of it without any strategic sense.
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