The Echo Chamber
Europe mistakes America’s yesterday for the world’s tomorrow.
Europe has a habit of arriving late. Not stylishly late. Just late. By the time Brussels shows up, the lights are flickering and the band has already packed up. Now the bureaucrats are asking Washington to dance to their tune, calling it “reciprocity,” “shared standards,” “normative alignment.” They talk like priests of a paper faith, convinced that if they rearrange enough clauses, the world will start listening again.
But the truth is simpler. Europe is trying to sell America its own old ideas, polished and rebranded. Europe speaks like a grant application to a Washington foundation in 1998: endless directives, strategies, roadmaps, consultation processes. Washington has already moved on, cutting steel, pouring concrete, restarting real industries. The Americans build factories while Europe edits a PDF about welding standards and Malta still has objections in footnote seven.
In its heart, Europe still believes virtue equals power. It drafts frameworks like prayers, regulating the planet from conference rooms in Brussels, as if anyone outside still cared. But power doesn’t reside in the clean conscience. It sits where the energy flows, the data routes, the production lines hum and most of those have long left the continent.
Europe has become a museum of American ideas. Its officials are the curators, giving guided tours of policies the Americans stopped believing in ten years ago. Every new regulation is an exhibit: curated, translated, sterilized. While Washington improvises, Brussels performs rehearsed perfection.
The dream of autonomy has turned into dependency with better lighting. The continent runs on American defense, American tech, American markets. Yet it wants Washington to play by European rules: a strange reversal of gravity, like the tide asking the moon to follow its rhythm.
By the time Europe enacts what America once believed in, America has already believed in something else or nothing at all. The lag is the story: Brussels still thinks the world is governed by moral architecture, while Washington knows it’s governed by leverage.
The lights will stay on late in those glass buildings. Committees will draft another communiqué about shared values. Somewhere in D.C., a senator will skim the summary and delete the email. The next morning, nothing will have changed except the language of the press release.
Europe still thinks it’s negotiating.
But America isn’t listening. It’s already gone.