The dispensable nation – updated — Crooked Timber

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The dispensable nation – updated

by John Q on July 16, 2026

As I observed last year, the statement that “The cemeteries are full of indispensable people.” is just as true of nations, and in particular the US. That was a little controversial at the time, but now it’s become sufficiently conventional wisdom to be restated in the New York Times. I’ve been working on an update. and that seems like a signal to get it out

As far as military dependence is concerned, the “indispendable nation” has already been dispensed with. The US no longer has either the willingness or the capacity to defend Europe against Russia, its only significant enemy. Conversely, Europe (including Ukraine) has developed the necessary willingness and capacity. In some areas, such as artillery and drone technology, Europe has surpassed the US. In others, including intelligence, the US remains helpful but not essential. In still others, such as missiles and anti-missile defence, the US is neither willing to help nor, thanks to the Iran war, capable of doing so.

Claims that Europe cannot dispense with the US in defence typically rely on two claims, first that Europe lacks the capacity to project power globally and second that it is too disunited to act effectively. Both come down to the same misconception: that Europe needs to become another version of the US. But the object of European defence policy should be defense (contrast Trump’s designation of Hegseth as Secretary for War). And, as the Ukraine war has shown, successful defence does not require a unified command capable of instant action (again, the contrast with Trump’s wars is instructive).

Turning to finance and economics, most of the pieces are in place to permit a disengagement from US financial institutions and from the global financial architecture constructed by the US and with the US playing the central role. The combination of a central bank digital currency and the emergence of payment systems like Wero will provide a capacity to break with reliance on the payment systems of Visa and Mastercard. As with military dependence, Trump’s eagerness to weaponise Visa and Mastercard against enemies like the International Criminal Court will accelerate this process.

Other parts of the US-centric architecture, such as ratings agencies and the Big Four auditing/consulting firms have done a great job in discrediting themselves. Again, the object should not be to produce European replicas, but to accelerate the process of returning the financial system to its pre-1970s role as a provider of a relatively limited set of services to the real economy.

Similarly, Trump’s chaotic tariffs, along with China’s economic nationalism, have necessitated the restructuring of the world trading system, with Europe taking the place of the US at the centre. Neither the failed globalist dream of the WTO nor Trump’s attempts to extort surplus through bilateral bullying offers has any real future. This is a particularly bitter pill for Brexiteers who imagined they could escape the pull of Europe and join a bigger world, instead finding themselves utterly isolated.

The last parts of US hegemony in this respect are the dominant US role in the IMF and World Bank and, most importantly, the role of the $US as a reserve currency. I’ll leave those for later.

The most intractable area of dependence is that of information technology. Efforts to build a “European stack” have started, but as the term suggests, dependence is multilayered. At the software level, for example, it’s necessary both to promote Linux as an alternative to US-owned operating systems and to break with reliance on Microsoft for office software. And that’s one of the easy parts of the story.

The biggest questions relate to AI. If the US hyperscalers are right, their huge spending with produce a monopoly or oligopoly with entry barriers too high for any rival, including any European rival. My optimistic view is that this is a race that will be won by low-energy tortoises rather than hyper-active hares. Second movers like Deepseek and, more recently the French Mistral, running maybe a year behind the US leaders, can replicate their capabilities at.a fraction of the cost, and without reliance on massive data centres.If that continues to be true, the benefits of massive US investment will not be reaped by the current leaders but by followers.

The really big unknown here is the fate of the Trump regime. If Trump can cement his own power, and pass it on to someone more competent (Xi to Trump’s Mao), and other would be dictators like Modi establish themselves, Europe and its democratic allies will become an island (or maybe an archipelago including places like Canada and Taiwan) in a world of rival autocracies. Maintaining that will be costly in all sorts of way.

On the other hand, if Trump is defeated, the US cannot return to the status quo ante. It will...