{"id":90150,"date":"2026-02-16T07:58:29","date_gmt":"2026-02-16T07:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/?p=90150"},"modified":"2026-02-16T08:32:49","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T08:32:49","slug":"europe-needs-to-wake-up-and-be-woke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/2026\/02\/16\/europe-needs-to-wake-up-and-be-woke\/","title":{"rendered":"Europe needs to wake up and be woke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Heath Cox Richardson's 'Letter from an American<\/a>' is worth reading this morning, as it invariably is.<\/p>\n

As she noted:<\/p>\n

The Trump administration\u2019s white nationalist project was on full display this weekend at the 62nd Munich Security Conference that took place from February 13 to 15, 2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As she added:<\/p>\n

At the Munich Security Conference last year, just after Trump had taken office for the second time, Vice President J.D. Vance announced the U.S. was switching sides in global affairs. Henceforth, it would work to destroy the values of representative democracy and the global systems of trade and security that the U.S. and partners constructed after World War II.<\/p>\n

In their place, officials in the Trump administration and their media allies have embraced the Great Replacement theory that says Brown and Black migration to Europe and the U.S. is destroying \u201cwestern civilization.\u201d Such migration must be stopped, they argue, and Brown and Black people purged from the U.S. and Europe. The end of equal rights for migrants will enable white Christian men to dominate society and pass laws that reinforce traditional religious and patriarchal hierarchies.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So massive was the shift that she noted:<\/p>\n

A report the organizers of the Munich Security Conference released before this year\u2019s event named the elephant in the room: \u201cthe changing role of the United States in the international system.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report looked back to the statement of U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson, who oversaw the development of the post\u2013World War II global order, that he was \u201cpresent at the creation.\u201d Now, the report said, we may be present at its destruction. \u201cThe world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction\u2014rather than careful reforms and policy corrections\u2014is the order of the day. The most prominent of those who promise to free their countries from the existing order\u2019s constraints and rebuild stronger, more prosperous nations is the current US administration. As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Some in Europe have noticed, as she pointed out:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours,\u201d German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said when opening the conference. \u201cFreedom of speech ends here with us when that speech is turned against human dignity and the constitution. And we don\u2019t believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade. We stand by climate agreements and the World Health Organization.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And then Heath Cox Richardson noted (and I am being very selective here,\u00a0 abusing her narrative flow considerably):<\/p>\n

In his speech to the conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was less confrontational than Vance was last year, but the message was the same.<\/p>\n

He attacked all three of the pillars on which the U.S. has previously stood in foreign affairs. Global trade has ruined the U.S. economy, he said, while international institutions have undermined sovereignty, and \u201ca climate cult\u201d has imposed energy policies that are \u201cimpoverishing our people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He focused, though, on \u201cmass migration,\u201d which he claimed \u201cthreatens the cohesion of our societies, the continuity of our culture, and the future of our people.\u201d<\/p>\n

He called for Europe to join with the U.S. in rejecting the tenets of the post\u2013World War II vision, claiming that \u201c[w]e are part of one civilization\u2014Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.\u201d<\/p>\n

His description of that shared heritage reflected the Trump administration\u2019s fantasy past. It was all white and Christian, quite weirdly erasing the Indigenous Americans who were central to the development of a peculiarly \u201cAmerican\u201d identity in the eastern colonies of North America and the reality that the vast majority of the American West was Indigenous, Spanish, and Mexican for hundreds of years before it became part of the United States in 1848.<\/p>\n

Rubio\u2019s version of the U.S. did not include Black Americans at all, even though they were among the first inhabitants of the colonies that became the U.S. Rubio even ignored his own family\u2019s arrival in the U.S. from Cuba in 1956, rooting his own heritage not in the modern migration from Latin America to the U.S. that the administration is criminalizing, but in eighteenth-century Spain.<\/p>\n

Entirely ignoring the threat of autocratic Russia against Europe, Rubio pushed Europe to abandon the values of democracy in favor of imperialism. He said the U.S. had \u201cno interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West\u2019s managed decline\u201d and urged Europe to work with the U.S. for a return to western \u201cdominance.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just read the rest to understand what we are up against.<\/p>\n

And then note this: Starmer is saying we need to rearm to support this agenda. The rest of Europe is saying we need to do so to oppose this agenda. Starmer, meanwhile, is calling out those like the Greens who describe US policy as what it is: fascism that makes NATO impossible in its current form.<\/p>\n

We really do need to wake up, and recognise something that was expressed at the conference in this final quote from Heather Cox Richardson:<\/p>\n

European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas rejected the ideology behind Rubio\u2019s speech. \u201cContrary to what some may say, woke, decadent Europe is not facing civilizational erasure,\u201d she said. She noted that other nations want to join the E.U. and those that are already members want the E.U. \u201cto take a stronger role in the world: To defend our values. To take care of our people. To push humanity forwards.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, we are woke. Now, deal with it.<\/p>\n

\n

I am adding a definition of woke to the glossary.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heath Cox Richardson’s ‘Letter from an American’ is worth reading this morning, as it invariably is. As she noted: The Trump administration\u2019s white nationalist project
 Read the full article…<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,204,35,16,44,203,106,75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-economic-justice","category-economics","category-ethics","category-europe","category-fascism","category-politics","category-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90150"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":90163,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90150\/revisions\/90163"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.taxresearch.org.uk\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}