Joe Wiesenthal

One is a particular conception of free speech.

which the administration does not perceive Europe as upholding.

And then, of course, immigration, which they would associate with civilizational decline and so forth.

Interestingly, in your writing, you acknowledge that both of those, they're strange or they're kernels to both critiques that the European government has to take seriously, border control issues.

Maintaining those liberal values around speech.

How much harder does it or like, you know, how does Europe chart a path while also taking into account those factors, which may have some grain of reality to them?

I feel like it's become a cliche at this point to no matter what happens in the world, people always seem to say Europe is like the loser.

Yeah, it's bad for Europe, right?

Is there a sliver of hope down the line?

If we think that one of the things that Europe has struggled with is strategic autonomy and managing all these different national interests, and if we think that

Maybe the US emerges as a force for Europe to unite against or maybe encourage it, motivate it to develop some form of centralized strategy or autonomy.

Couldn't we see a more united Europe out of the situation?

Not the colonies, surely.

Not the colonies.

That was a fantastic sort of overview of the history and the core challenge.

I'm curious, look, predicting the future is impossible.

So maybe we'll just stick to the present and the past.

The UK left Europe.

So the UK left this sort of structure that was put in place to sort of denationalize the continent and so forth.

Not accidentally.