Watching from the Sidelines: Europe’s Age of Humiliation

We all know how that turned out.

The materialistic United States, which Rifkin expected to be eclipsed by Europe, was better able to weather the financial crisis. Brexit, the crises in Greece and Catalonia, and the implosion of liberal democracy in Central and Eastern Europe have highlighted the shortcomings of unity in diversity.

And European societies' hostile reaction to the wave of migrants fleeing wars and hunger demonstrated that empathy has failed to overcome materialism.

The error was not Europe's, but Rifkin's. Europe was not, and is not, bound to succeed.

In fact, as 2019 comes to a close, the European Union is seemingly helpless and resigned in the face of its most important challenges: completing the economic and political integration of the bloc, creating a common defense policy, and even safeguarding basic standards of the rule of law.

Poland's government, for example, is responding to a European Court of Justice decision regarding violations of judicial independence by introducing legislation that would allow the country's judges to be removed for criticizing violations of the Polish constitution.

When leaders of Poland's ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party proclaim that "this caste must be disciplined," what can the EU do?

Rifkin's analysis does not focus much on China, whose emergence as a global leader is displacing not the United States, but Europe. China is now the world's largest exporter, and, as the biggest producer of electric cars, it may soon overtake Germany to become the global leader in the automobile industry

 America's position as the world's leading military, financial, and innovation power is not threatened for now. The US withstood previous challenges from Germany and Japan in each of...