Ron Nehring
There is an active effort underway, amplified daily by our foreign adversaries, to split the Western alliance by driving wedges between the United States and Europe. This is not new. Since NATO’s founding in 1949, Russia’s central geopolitical objective has been to weaken and fracture the transatlantic relationship. A divided West is a West Russia can dominate; a united one is not.
Because Western nations are democracies, this effort does not primarily take the form of tanks or missiles. It takes the form of narratives: carefully crafted stories designed to shift public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. The goal is simple: persuade Americans Europe is alien and irredeemable, and persuade Europeans America is reckless, unstable, and unrecognizable.
The technique is subtle but effective. Differences that naturally exist between sovereign democracies are cherry-picked, exaggerated, and presented as proof of incompatibility. Symbols and niche issues are elevated into supposed civilizational chasms. Normal policy differences are framed as irrefutable evidence shared values no longer exist.
Conservatives should recognize this technique for what it is. It is the same method used in domestic politics to fracture coalitions: isolate a grievance, strip it of context, amplify it emotionally, and insist it defines the whole.
In the United States, this narrative increasingly takes the form of a caricature of Europe as economically stagnant, culturally exhausted, and overwhelmed by a migrant population that has allegedly hollowed out European society beyond repair. The implication is that Europe is not merely facing challenges, but has ceased to be part of the West in any meaningful sense.
This is not analysis. It’s propaganda by aggregation.
Yes, Europe has serious problems. So does America. Californians see this up close every day. The dishonest move is to imply that selected European problems define an entire continent, while American problems are treated as isolated or temporary. One could just as easily reverse the lens and construct a bleak, and equally misleading, portrait of the United States.
Consider higher education. Europe is not bankrupting its young through a student-loan debt trap that pushes millions of students into six-figure liabilities before they have earned their first paycheck. In California, student debt now routinely rivals a mortgage, without the asset to show for it, delaying homeownership, family formation, and upward mobility. Total U.S. student loan debt exceeds $1.7 trillion, with Californians among those most affected.
European systems are imperfect and bureaucratic, but they are not luring young adults into decades of compounding debt as the price of entry into the middle class.
Consider health care. Europe is not burdening its citizens with a labyrinthine system of insurers, networks, surprise bills, and opaque pricing that drives costs relentlessly upward.
In California, even insured families face rising premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs that make health care feel like a stressful financial gamble rather than a service. The United States spends nearly twice as much per capita on health care as most European countries, yet produces worse population-level outcomes. Whatever one thinks of European models, they are not extracting the same economic toll from ordinary families.
Consider public order and civic space. Ride BART late at night, or walk through parts of downtown San Francisco or Los Angeles that were once vibrant commercial centers, and then compare that experience to public transit and city centers in Munich, Hamburg, or Berlin. Walk through Central Park after dark and compare it to central parks in London or Copenhagen. One does not have to romanticize Europe to observe that many American cities, including some of California’s largest, are struggling with disorder, crime, and visible decline in ways that many European cities are not.
And consider debt. Europe is often portrayed as fiscally reckless, yet the United States is now running annual deficits measured in trillions of dollars, with federal debt exceeding 120 percent of GDP and rising rapidly even in non-recession years.
Californians, who already live under one of the heaviest tax burdens in the country, will inevitably be asked to shoulder a disproportionate share of the consequences. This trajectory is not sustainable, and it is not something Americans, or Californians, should dismiss while lecturing others.
None of this is an argument that Europe is “better” than America. It is an argument against bad-faith comparisons designed to sever a vital alliance.
The transatlantic relationship was never built on the assumption that America and Europe would face identical challenges, adopt identical policies, or develop in lockstep. It was built on something far more durable: shared and enduring values: democracy, individual liberty, the rule of law, free enterprise, and the inherent dignity of the person.
Those values still bind us. They are precisely why Ukraine matters. They are why NATO endures. And they are why authoritarians work so hard to convince Californians and other Americans that our allies no longer share our values.
Conservatives played a decisive role in building the transatlantic alliance after World War II. We understood that American strength depended not on standing alone, but on leading a community of free nations. Today, that alliance needs defending, not from honest disagreement, but from those who seek to turn disagreement into division.
The West’s real fault line is not between America and Europe. It is between those who believe free societies are worth defending—and those who are eager to convince us that we no longer belong together.
Ron Nehring served as Chairman of the California Republican Party from 2007 to 2011.