These notes will serve as part of a briefing document that I will send off…
The US attack on Europe misses the point entirely
The other day I was asked whether I was happy that the US President was finally saying things that I have been noting for years. The reference to Trump was, on interrogation, based on the US government analysis of Europe that appeared in the so-called – National Security Strategy of the United States of America – November 2025 (hereafter NSS) – which was released to the public on December 4, 2025. When I finally got around to reading the document, it was clear that the person who put that proposition to me didn’t understood Trump’s position and certainly didn’t understand my position. While the Trump Administration is critical of the European Union, as I am, the respective bases for those criticisms couldn’t be farther apart.
It is a hard document to read given all the excessive bombast, which is redolent of the way the US Administration deals with the rest of us on a daily basis.
The braggadocious manner in which Trump and his cronies behave is almost beyond belief and would be comical if their resultant actions were not so lethal.
I am not an expert on US international relations and the way in which this statement from Trump diverges from the previous two statements (Trump 1 and Biden) although there are some notable shifts – not the least being the soft-pedal on Russia and China in the current approach.
While not denying the power in international relations that the US obviously possesses, it has been clear for some time now that the world is shifting away from the US being at the centre.
My understanding of the Israeli behaviour in Gaza, for example, shocking in its extreme, is that it really defied what the US would have preferred and the latter looked like it kept playing catch-up to make it look as though they were in charge.
And the Ukraine debacle – ‘I will solve it in a day’ – has shown that Russia is far from tempered by US interventions and is just doing what it wants at great cost to the people of Ukraine.
But it is the rise of China as an economic power that has really demonstrated how weak the US is becoming.
In another strategy document release recently (December 1, 2025) – ASPI’s Critical Technology Tracker: 2025 updates and 10 new technologies – from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which is a Canberra-based institution that specialises in the challenges posed by geopolitical and economic developments in the “Indo-Pacific” region.
Their ‘Critical Technology Tracker compares “74 technologies, giving policymakers, industry and partners the clearest, most current picture of the tech race for strategic advantage.”
ASPI say that:
The tracker measures not a country’s overall strength in critical technologies but its research performance in them.
The latest version concludes that:
1. “The updated picture is stark. China’s exceptional gains in high-impact research are continuing, and the gap between it and the rest of the world is still widening. In eight of the 10 newly added technologies, China has a clear lead in its global share of high-impact research output.”
2. “The historical data for these new technologies tells a familiar story: an early and often overwhelming US lead in research output in the opening decade of this millennium, eroded and then outmatched by persistent long-term Chinese investment in fundamental research.”
3. “China now leads in 66 of the 74 technologies tracked, with the United States leading in the remaining eight ,,.”
In my recent discussions with Japanese colleagues, they have focused on the need for tariffs to offset China’s advantages, which they concluded was more due to currency manipulation (keeping the yuan cheap) than anything else.
I made the point that even if you clap tariffs on Chinese goods, they are so far ahead of the rest of us now that they can still under cut other nations in competitive export markets.
The solution is not to follow Trump like measures but rather to learn from what China is doing – investing heavily in its people, its research infrastructure, and industrial design.
The West has become so obsessed with fiscal austerity that it has starved the research community of funding and undermined its education systems.
China has done exactly the opposite.
The longer the West starves its educational systems of funds and privatises every functional state apparatus that it can, the further behind we will all become relative to China.
And that spells trouble in the future.
This article (published December 8, 2025) – China’s global technology and engineering ascendancy continues – written by the ABC Finance person (Alan Kohler) documents some aspects of that rise and the reasons for the relative decline of the West.
And it is the West’s almost total embrace of neoliberal ideology and praxis that is at the basis of my long-standing criticism of Europe.
It is a different argument altogether to the rather extraordinary attack on Europe by the US in its NSS, which after all outlines the current foreign policy of the US government.
The NSS tied in the usual Right-wing obsessions with immigration and purity of culture with the assertion that it was taking Europe into a state of “civilisational erasure” – whatever that exactly means.
Trump is obviously miffed that the Europeans, to their credit, will not let Putin redraw national boundaries to suit himself, while pretending to seek peace on the Continent.
The ‘white-being-supplanted-non-white’ narrative that is a driving force for the far-Right lunatics is now central US foreign policy.
The document contends:
Should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less … within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.
That is about demographic makeup.
French author Renaud Camus introduced the term – ‘grand remplacement’ – in 2011, which is about the so-called – Great Replacement conspiracy theory – the view that the French (and Europeans) were being overrun by non-whites (ostensibly Muslims) because of migration and differential birth-rates.
If there is one thing that provides a common thread for all the Right-wing political voices it is that issue.
And sure enough, the NSS rehearses exactly the same conspiracy theory.
As did the National Socialists in Germany and beyond in the 1930s except the ‘evil’ ethnic group responsible the ‘civilisational erasure’ has evolved over time or been added to.
That is how crazy the world has become under this current US Administration.
And yes, I know in writing this that I would never be permitted to visit the US again – a desire that faded many years ago before this latest madness emerged.
The other obsession rehearsed in the NSS is the dislike of “liberal ideology”, which in context is about progressive views on equity, care and respect, etc.
Taken together – the evil migrants and the woke liberals – are conspiring to undermine Western democracy and US cultural dominance.
That is the message.
And the solution according to the US is to support the:
… growing influence of patriotic European parties …
Which they claim will promote “genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history.”
So, give succour to the far-Right parties that want to restore ethnic purity (at least how they define it) and purge society of people who care about gender issues, and the like.
The transactional nature of the current US Administration is also on display.
The NSS talks big about democratic freedom and the like but constructs the Taiwanese issue, for example, not as one of preserving Taiwan’s right to self-determination, but, rather, as a vehicle for US prosperity via its access to the semiconductor sector.
Democratic principles are only defined in terms of freedom of access for US domination.
Very tawdry indeed.
My position on Europe
My position is clear – the European Union has become the most advanced form of neoliberalism in the World.
It has embedded that ideology within its very legal structures (the Treaties), which are nigh on impossible to change unless the interests of France or Germany are advanced.
Migration is not the issue.
The far-Right point, for example, to the – Banlieues – or ‘Projects’ in France as being Muslim-infested centres of anti-French sentiment.
However, my focus is on these urban centres as poverty traps – created by governments who have become obsessed by neoliberal fiscal rules at the expense of providing work and pathways for the children of the migrants that came from Northern African and beyond.
And remember a significant push factor promoting that migration was the colonial behaviour of metropolitan France in the first place.
My view is that if the state reassumes its responsibility to provide work for all and jettisons its fiscal austerity obsessions then these housing estates would cease to be centres of unrest and illegal behaviour.
I don’t hold the view that certain ethnic groups are pre-disposed to lawlessness.
Crime rates are highly correlated with economic circumstance and we know that austerity impacts disproportionately badly on those considered marginal in the society – which includes the migrant populations typically.
And in Europe generally, that austerity mindset is overseen by the technocrats in Brussels, which has only been possible because most of the nations (20 out of 27) ceded their currency sovereignty and signed up to treaties that made it almost impossible for them to run their own macroeconomic policy that would allow them to determine their economic trajectory.
And in doing so, the elites also refused to create a federal fiscal capacity that could make permanent asymmetric fiscal transfers across the ‘European space’ when needed.
So these nations are caught between a ‘rock and a hard place’ and as a result social instability is rising because peoples’ needs are being manifestly neglected while the elites swan around wining and dining at expensive summits etc.
The far-Right is not the answer to that problem.
And that economic malaise has nothing much to do with migrants.
The European treaties are the work of the corporate elites within Europe and are designed to advance their interests rather than provide prosperity for all.
Trump’s transactional vision is about reinforcing those elites rather than dismantling the currency union.
His claim that it is progressive views – which he calls ‘woke’ – that are undermining democracies and freedoms, whereas the ‘democratic deficit’ in Europe is all to do with the hijacking of economic policy by Brussels and the power the treaties have given the technocrats in Brussels.
Trump sees ‘sovereignty’ in ethnic terms, I see it in economic policy terms.
Conclusion
Thus my criticism of Europe has very little overlap with the vision that Trump and his cronies project.
That is enough for today!
(c) Copyright 2025 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.
What galvanizes right-wing support against migrants is the following false economic statements – ‘that is your tax-payer money being spent on housing migrants’ or some other similar statement regarding migrants and your tax-payer money being spent on migrants. That is a major reason why the right-wing hate MMT, it tells people the facts about how money and the financial system really work. As we know when a national government that issues its own currency spends — it is new currency key-stroked into existence. There is only public money or call it national government money, obviously there are taxpayers however no such thing as taxpayer money. The ‘taxpayer money’ deceit falsely constructs a zero-sum game (the tax-payer citizen loses and the migrant wins) Then more lies from the right-wing Neoliberals – ‘that is another reason your taxes are going up to support migrants’.
This economic Neo-liberal deceit (your taxpayer money BS when referring to a CICG) is a large factor in creating the uncivilized insanity of the world today.
CICG = currency issuing central government
mk: The left-wingers are just as much to blame as the right-wingers. In my opinion, the rise of the political Right is in large part due to the ineptitude of the political Left. If the political Left had been competent over the past fifty years, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now and the extreme Right would be an irrelevant voice crying out in the wilderness.
Philip
There is no coherent left in the UK.
Less ineptitude than invisibility or – at best – infighting.
Chantal Mouffe’s displacement theory for that rightward shift has largely proved correct.
So have both Gramsci and Foucault in how the hegemony of the right has become embedded and institutionalised.
And what residual left groups there may be are fragmented and often sidetracked into the cul de sacs of culture politics.
Labour has been reclaimed by Blairite corporate liberals, dominated by those neoliberal Clintonesque 3rd way business interests, and is very much centre right with a decreasing social conscience.
Your Party has not achieved takeoff velocity, is mired in internecine disputes and lacks a clear vision. Destined to a marginal voices off role.
The Greens are the current party of refuge for the homeless left, many displaced from Labour. It is leftish but not clearly socialist, and more often an inchoate mix of environmentalism, culture politics and liberal economics.
Their commitment to climate change priorities has been compromised by a half hearted challenge to corporate capitalism – but sadly that is where the power lies, so that uphill struggle is on an even steeper slope as corporate interests have aligned with the populist right. The new leadership has already seen some pushback from liberal centrists as well as the right.
Can’t speak for mainland Europe as British media bias ensures we don’t get coverage of that political sphere, but it has been obvious for some time that even the Scandi social democracies are under pressure and still harbour their 20th C neofascist supporters.
I wish I could be sure that the pendulum will swing back, but I’m not optimistic.
TiPi: I don’t know enough about what’s going on politically in the UK. However, I’d be confident enough to say that the fragmentation, infighting, and sidetracking of the political Left would be the product of its own making – the consequence of its ineptitude and the errors of its thinking.
The traditional Left-Right divide is itself a hangover of a false worldview. The traditional Left isn’t radical at all. Never was. It simply operates at the outer edge of a mainstream and false view of the world. We need an appropriate pre-analytic vision of the world (social, economic, and ecological); an understanding of the functional requisites of a modern, complex, and technologically sophisticated socio-economy (of which modern markets is one of them); and an understanding of how to harness the desirable features of these requisites and suppress their undesirable features – the latter being the features that neoliberalism (institutionalised chrematistics) has allowed the ruling psychopaths to exploit for their own benefit.
But, then, neoliberalism 2.0 (what we have now) is just a modern form of institutionalised chrematistics. It used to be enslavement; later feudalism; and then neoliberalism 1.0. In between neoliberalism 1.0 and neoliberalism 2.0 was WW1, the Great Depression, WW2, and a thirty-year aberration following WW2 that was the closest we ever got to oikonomia. Instead of transitioning to a post-industrial society (a modern form of oikonomia), we got neoliberalism 2.0 because we – the Left and the Right – were stuck in a false pre-analytic vision of the world.
TiPi has it correct. This is exactly the state of play here in the UK.
Bill, I’ve got a question about China: It seems like there’s a belief or stereotype that Chinese academia has really loose to nonexistent ethical standards, to the point that the danger with fabricating data isn’t that it undermines science, but that you might get caught. Do you think there’s any truth to that, or is that yet another racist stereotype?
Because of course, if academic dishonesty is normal in Chinese academia, then the notion that they lead in a bunch of categories of advanced research is suspect. But if I’ve fallen victim to Western propaganda… it’d be nice to know.
Philip
Yes, I’d agree we are seeing neoliberalism v2.0 or even v2.1 and that where we are headed is towards another type of dominance by a very small elite- probably not too far from Varoufakis and Kotkin’s dystopian visions of 21stC neo-feudalism.
I have always thought that the continuing failure of the left really took root with the major falling out between Bakunin and Marx at the First International, but that was prefaced by lots of sniping and backbiting between various left thinkers, and that has never ceased since.
No need to divide and rule with that built in fragmentation.
The bickering all seemed to reach a peak in the 1960s and 70s and there has been little or no progress since.
It has always been what divides us rather than what unites us that has sapped the energy of left politics. Monty Python were spot on in the “The Life of Brian” on factionalism.
I’d also agree that a meaningful worldview needs to be articulated that is informed by a systems view, but needs to be rooted in a deep understanding that human problems have to be dealt within the context and limitations of a finite planet and the ecosphere.
I still lean towards Polanyi’s intepretation of history as a reasonable start point.
TBH I’m not even sure that the Green movement has built any of those foundations, but it’ll be interesting to see if any of the UK left defectors to the Green Party with Marxian backgrounds can merge their thinking with non – hierachical environmentalism in a new vision.
“If the political Left had been competent over the past fifty years, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are in now ”
It had to be a lot more than competent, alas. 50 years ago was the height of Gladio, after decades of financing “the alternative is worse” french school “socialism”, and just before the careful design of the common market and the Euro as well as the shaping of electable through the likes of the Atlantic Council. That nearly all the “Green” parties of euroland, at best, make excuses for the settler colony and the NATO expansion project, while having much less interest in worker rights and non-greenwashing environmentalism is not a coincidence.
given that MMT has clarified ‘where” the money comes from. We need Central Banks under control and held accountable. Rather than large banks controlling the market we need banking to be decentralised to the local level where local needs are understood. Utilise money to improve lives for instance insulate all homes utilise local funding etc reverse privatisations and take utilities transport under public control and improve healthcare, social care utilising local funded local banks set up not for asset purchases but to employ locals improving the life of all citizens.
Merry Christmas all. lets focus on solutions problems are irrelevant.