South Korea, for instance, has three times as many active military personnel as Britain, the strongest of the European military powers. Malaysia’s army, meanwhile, is twice the size of Britain’s.

A usefully argued piece from the new media out of Europe, The end of Europe’s ‘soft power’ delusion, Part 1 by A Gibson.  

Importantly, this paradigmatic shift eastwards, away from Europe, is not a new development. The writing has been on the wall for decades, becoming ever more vivid through successive administrations; but only now is it being read aloud by the United States, catalysed by the emboldened mandate of this second Trump administration. Through decades of wrongheaded policymaking, European nations have rendered themselves strategically useless to the United States – indeed, the region is now proving to be actively burdensome, as Vance and Hegseth made clear. By contrast, Asian countries at the interface with China, such as India, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan and Indonesia, are now key regional allies with burgeoning economies, pragmatic governments and surprisingly powerful conventional militaries. South Korea, for instance, has three times as many active military personnel as Britain, the strongest of the European military powers. Malaysia’s army, meanwhile, is twice the size of Britain’s.

By contrast, European militaries are chronically short of service personnel, armoured vehicles, ships and aircraft. Indeed, the United States’ military budget utterly dwarfs that of all European nations combined. Thus, in reality, the Nato alliance consists of the might of the United States’ military, with a few European divisions, and possibly Turkish forces, bolted on. Moreover, Europe’s defence industries are fragmented, depleted and dependent on far more advanced American technologies. So deep-rooted are the problems that the touted grand European rearmament launched in response to Vance’s Munich speech is unravelling already.

Critically, the root cause of this military weakness is the now-entrenched industrial decline of the major European economies. Germany’s long-stable manufacturing industries are in crisis, with soaring unemployment; France is mired by astronomical debt and an unemployment rate of 7.3 per cent; welfare spending has swollen to unsustainable rates in all major European nations, depleting public funds and sapping productivity; and the euro has trended sharply downwards against the dollar for years.

Furthermore, as an excellent piece of research by Bloomberg has shown, not only are European economies collectively far smaller than those of the United States and China, but they have fallen well behind qualitatively as well. Europe is severely lacking in dispersed start-up entrepreneurship and frontier technological innovation. There is nothing in Europe that resembles Silicon Valley or the equivalent Chinese big-tech industry. Part of the problem has been the stifling effect of long-term over-regulation, much of it generated by decree from the European Union.

The whole piece is worth reading.