There is a certain tension in the way that American conservatism looks at Europe. On the one hand, Donald Trump and his allies insist that European countries need to step up, behave like serious world powers, and take on much more military responsibility.
On the other hand, many American right-wingers display contempt for a continent they regard as impotent, decadent and basically doomed. And they have a special contempt for the current structure through which Europeans act in concert, the bureaucratized pseudo-confederacy (see, I’m expressing contempt myself) of the European Union.
As a consequence, American conservatives tend to sympathize with European parties of the further right, because they’re ranged against the Eurocrat consensus. But these parties are often more inclined to retreat into nationalist self-preservation than to embrace concerted European action. So Europeans who recall that America has often been complicit in Europe’s strategic emasculation (starting with Franklin Roosevelt’s “friendly” push to take over from the British Empire) might reasonably suspect that when figures like Elon Musk boost parties like the Alternative for Germany, they are tacitly encouraging Europe to turn ever-more-inward and leave the global field to the U.S.A.
That means that for American conservatives who sincerely want a capable Europe, just supporting European populism is not enough. Instead, the American right should consciously support a stronger France. It should encourage a special relationship between the two republics, support French primacy on the continent, treat Paris rather than Brussels as the European capital and the French military as the keystone of Europe’s security.
In effect, we should revisit Charles de Gaulle’s bid to maintain more French independence within the Western alliance, which made him a thorn in the American side during the Cold War, and recognize that he was right. It was not actually in America’s long-term interests to make Europe our full dependent, because vassaldom encourages weakness, and weakness reduces the value of the alliance in a world that America can no longer simply bestride alone.
Of course it may be too late for a European escape from decadence: The goal of transitioning from a “welfare state” to a “warfare state,” as the Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh put it, may be doomed by the expectations of an aging electorate.