Czech President Pavel warns: “If Putin wins in Ukraine, we all lose.” He compared secret U.S.-Russia talks on territorial concessions to the 1938 Munich Agreement, calling them dangerously familiar. Letting Russia emerge victorious from this war, he stressed, would be a defeat for all of Europe.
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In March 1939, Adolf Hitler proclaimed the Nazi German-dominated “protectorate” of Bohemia and Moravia from a balcony in Prague Castle.
It was one of the dictator’s last land grabs before he invaded Poland and started the Second World War six months later.
Sitting in the same castle today, the Czech president Petr Pavel cannot help but recall that sequence of bloodless capitulations, how the free world’s leaders had either stood by or abetted them, and where that policy of appeasement ultimately led.
The revelation last month of secret negotiations between Russia and the US, which proposed taking land from Ukraine, reminds him all too vividly of the 1938 Munich agreement that ushered in the dismantling and subjugation of Czechoslovakia.
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Having lost so many battles at home, it is easier on the ego to look abroad for societies to redeem. The attack on Europe by the American right is a disguised self-reproach.
By Janan Ganesh Contributor Dec 7, 2025
If MAGA people care little for the defence of Ukraine and the wider continent, that is a legitimate choice, if a sad one. But there is much more to the animus: a feeling that Europe has somehow let down “Western civilisation” with – if I follow the argument – mass migration, curbs on free speech and a certain loss of vigour. JD Vance said as much in Munich last winter.
The woke thing wasn’t our idea, lads. “Entirely imported from the US,” was Emmanuel Macron’s view of certain academic dogmas, which did so much to poke ethical holes in Western history and intimidate those who dissented.
Europe copied the movement, of course. But it also put up some of the stoutest resistance, as might be expected in a place where traditional gender differences are hard-wired into major languages.The most that can be pinned on Europe is that Michel Foucault and his philosophical kin wrote some of the source code for the woke in the last century. But it took Americans to turn it into an organised force, which the US right was powerless to stop (more on their failures later) until the movement itself over-reached.
Ideological fads
Perhaps it should be eminent Europeans touring the US with a request to please stop its ideological fads at the water’s edge, thanks.
And so to migration. The foreign-born share of the US is about the same as that of Britain, higher than Italy’s and lower than Germany’s. Europe is not an exceptionally open place by Western standards. Unlike, say, Australia.
Why not leave us to be irrelevant, slow-growing and the best place on Earth to live?
Perhaps what MAGA is getting at is Muslim migration, which is higher in Europe, for reasons that are plain to anyone with an atlas. Are we to believe that if the US swapped location with Europe, its inward traffic would not have an African and Middle Eastern skew?
Why pretend it is a European establishment plot at work here, rather than geography? By the way, if Muslim migration is the issue, we should expect Europe to have a much larger populist uprising than America.
In fact, it is about the same. Only Italy of the big European countries has a Trump-ish leader.
Cultural defeats
So again, what eats these people about Europe? What has the continent done against the West that America hasn’t or wouldn’t? Why not leave it to be irrelevant, slow-growing and the best place on Earth to live?
Here is a guess. Because the US right has been so electorally successful for so long, its cultural defeats over the period are forgotten. Less than half of Americans now say that religion is an important part of their daily life, which puts this once exceptionally pious rich nation ever closer to the OECD average.
The US birth rate is no higher than that of Britain or France. (And all three slightly exceed that of Hungary and Russia, which some in MAGA-land regard as fortresses against liberal modernity.)
Support for same-sex marriage has gone from minority to overwhelming majority view with amazing speed.
Perhaps, having lost so many battles at home, it is easier on the ego to look abroad for societies to redeem. The attack on Europe is a disguised self-reproach. If I took psychobabble more seriously, I’d know if this is called “projection” or “transference”, or whatever.
Either way, I wish they would pick on New Zealand or somewhere.
Of course, it would be easier – in fact stimulating – to take sermons about civilisation from experts or even strong amateurs on the subject. But no.
There is a well-known pattern in LinkedIn or dating profiles. Someone who claims to “enjoy deep conversations” is vacuous. Someone who “loves exploring different cultures” is parochial. Someone who “cannot stand people who don’t read” reads Deepak Chopra. Something about explicitly claiming high cultural standards is suspect.
Sure enough, those who go on about “Western Civilisation” – the words are often capitalised in conservative settings – never seem all that steeped in the stuff. An entry-level interest in ancient Rome is often the extent of it.
Having to take lectures from the sort of person who has a Doric column as their Twitter photo: this, as much as anything, is our reduced fate as a continent.
A new White House policy document formalizes President Trump’s long-held contempt for Europe’s leaders. It made clear that the continent now stands at a strategic crossroads.
- Douglas Kelley: Let's talk about Hitler.
- Hermann Göring: It's curious that you have not asked me this question directly before.
- Douglas Kelley: I'm curious what the attraction was. There's a failed painter, not a very good soldier, yet he was worshipped and revered.
- Hermann Göring: He made us feel German again.
- Douglas Kelley: How?
- Hermann Göring: First of all, I had seen Germany crushed. And along comes a man who says "We can reclaim our former glory." Would you not follow a man like this?
- Douglas Kelley: Depends what else you were willing to do.