There’s a reason Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have chosen to relegate Europe to the children’s table over Ukrainian peace talks.
And it’s got little if anything to do with their shared contempt for European “wokery”, or even what JD Vance, the US vice-president, has called “the threat from within”, by which I assume he means out-of-touch European elites.
Rather, it is that Europe has made itself into a geopolitical irrelevance that cannot even command a place in the room let alone shape events in its own backyard.
No one more perfectly personifies this impotence than Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission – an at best entirely mediocre politician for whom the expression “risen without trace” could almost have been invented.
As Angela Merkel’s longstanding deputy, she was once considered a shoo-in for the German chancellorship. But no amount of public relations spin on her supposed superwoman qualities in combining the affairs of state with being the mother of seven children could cover up for her failings while at Germany’s ministry of defence.
This was characterised by a series of major and increasingly comical procurement scandals that were to hole any further ambitions she might have harboured in her native Germany below the water line. So bad was her record, that Merkel felt unable to endorse her protegee when it came to choosing a successor.
There’s a reason Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin have chosen to relegate Europe to the children’s table over Ukrainian peace talks.
And it’s got little if anything to do with their shared contempt for European “wokery”, or even what JD Vance, the US vice-president, has called “the threat from within”, by which I assume he means out-of-touch European elites.
Rather, it is that Europe has made itself into a geopolitical irrelevance that cannot even command a place in the room let alone shape events in its own backyard.
No one more perfectly personifies this impotence than Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission – an at best entirely mediocre politician for whom the expression “risen without trace” could almost have been invented.
As Angela Merkel’s longstanding deputy, she was once considered a shoo-in for the German chancellorship. But no amount of public relations spin on her supposed superwoman qualities in combining the affairs of state with being the mother of seven children could cover up for her failings while at Germany’s ministry of defence.
This was characterised by a series of major and increasingly comical procurement scandals that were to hole any further ambitions she might have harboured in her native Germany below the water line. So bad was her record, that Merkel felt unable to endorse her protegee when it came to choosing a successor.