Rearm and Resent? The Contradiction in the USA's Europe Policy

Friday Flashpoint July 17, AD2026

Jul 18, 2026

Welcome to Friday Flashpoint where I analyze and expose important historical and social developments impacting America’s place in the world.

In the 1850s and 1860s during the age of nationalism, the French Emperor Napoleon III—nephew of the famous one—pushed the Italian nationalists too far toward the goal of a united Italy. He was sympathetic to them and also frightened by radicalism in some corners of their movement, especially after a cell tried to assassinate him. He hoped his aggressive intervention against Austria on the Italians’ behalf would give France the cards to reorganize Italy into a confederation, one that would be unified but decentralized. He realized too late what should have been obvious: an energized and provoked Italian nationalist movement would have the agency, ambition and will to create a strong centralized state, one that could challenge France on its Southern border and in the Mediterranean Sea. America should learn from his example and consider the consequences of pushing the Europeans to increase military spending while showing contempt for NATO, and threatening Greenland and the ICC.

a bunch of bullet like objects on a blue background — Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

The Economist Misjudges the American AI Advantage

The Economist has taken the line that despite evidence to the contrary, the United States is not in decline because it is dominant in the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning based on Large Language Models (LLM).1 Because of this lead, The Economist claims the US president can, with executive orders, reshape the world’s access to the newest, shiniest tech. As a result, America can control the future. However, American leverage is not a one-way street.

US AI labs cannot train or run frontier models without Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that come from Europe; specifically, they are built by the Dutch company ASML. These are the machines that print nanoscopic transistors onto silicon wafers. That’s real European leverage. However, ASML’s most advanced EUV systems also depend on American components and software. Cooperation would be better than a unilateral assertion of American command over AI model access. Such a move would risk EU retaliation. Additionally, the American techies are not supreme or uniquely smart compared to their counterparts abroad; rather, humility is needed.

Recall that the Chinese model DeepSeek, developed by a Chinese AI lab most had never heard of, blew up the assumptions that building elite AI requires massive compute spending, and that the US had an insurmountable lead in the field. DeepSeek narrowed the gap at a fraction of the presumed cost of American models, showing China can play at the highest levels if it chooses to.

Furthermore, America cannot cast executive orders like a spell to magically revoke the open weight models that have already been downloaded by experimenters around the world. An AI model works by storing its knowledge as “weights” that were tuned to recognize relationships between words, concepts, and patterns in the data it was trained on. The AI uses the weights so that it can predict a sensible, and hopefully accurate response to your prompts based on those learned relationships between the data it has or pulls from the web. Foreign competitors can build new systems based on the open source models already available. They would start a step or two behind the top 2026 models, but they would not be starting from zero.

Using US AI products as geopolitical leverage will only hasten the development of their foreign competitors.

China’s move not getting the attention it deserves

China is actively using America’s tech lead and desire to control and throttle access to AI to subvert America by offering an alternative: sharing Chinese research. China is going to the developing world, especially resource-rich Africa, and offering to freely share tech and research in order to prevent the development of a neocolonialist tech relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.2

European self-respect

All this brings me to the core concern of this week’s Flashpoint the sign of frustration in one reporter’s question during the 36th NATO Summit that took place in Ankara, Türkiye, on July 7–8, 2026.

On the last day of the summit, Rasmus Svaneborg, a Danish journalist, challenged the alliance’s Secretary General, the former Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, on his silence regarding American threats against Denmark.3

Mark, you sit next to Donald Trump in moments where he talks about conquering Greenland, talks about lashing out at allies like Spain, starting trade wars, things that it doesn’t seem like the old Mark Rutte would approve of. Does this have any effect on your self-respect when you sit next to him like that and say nothing?

Mark Rutte’s answer was to thank the US president for making NATO “stronger.” The problem is that a more self-conscious and rearmed Europe will loathe leaders who fail to publicly challenge the US when it seeks to publicly humiliate Europeans. Mr. Svaneborg may represent the reawakening of European self-respect. And given the reaction online, it is the sort of move that other journalists may try to emulate to generate social media buzz. One possible outcome is that a stronger Europe, with electorates willing to bear the expense of potent militaries, will not tolerate politicians like Mark Rutte for long.

It seems the US challenge to Europe for it to become militarily stronger is strange and unwise if the US also wants to bully and intimidate Europe. America may discover, as 19th-century France did with Italy, that nothing forces Europe to keep such renewed strength within American constraints.

Europeans have agency, and perhaps even a sense of dignity.

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