Why the Future of Europe Is Wales: Glyn Morgan on the Rise and Fall of American Europe

00:00:51 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. We've done a couple of shows recently on America's strange — and perhaps strained — relationship with Europe. One with the Seattle-based political thinker Daniel Bessner, who has a new book out, Cold War Liberalism: A Power in a Time of Emergency, in which he says Cold War liberals weren't quite as good as they claimed. And then we did a show last week with the historian Stephen Ross, who has a new book out, The Secret War Against Hate, which covers the appearance of American Nazi parties after the Second World War. American relations with Europe are sometimes a little more complex than some people think, and that's certainly the case with my guest today. Glyn Morgan is an old friend. In fact, we went to grad school together many years ago at Berkeley. He has a new book out called The Rise and Fall of American Europe, which suggests that the old Europe, American Europe, is now being replaced by what he calls civilizational America. Glyn is joining us from Syracuse in New York. Glyn, congratulations on the new book. Could you lay out what you mean by American Europe versus civilizational Europe? What exactly is American Europe? Did it rise after the Second World War?

00:02:23 Glyn Morgan: Well, what happens is during the Second World War, the last part of it, the Americans start theorizing what Europe will look like in the aftermath of the war. And although Europeans like to tell the story that they themselves were the builders of post-war Europe — and typically they will date the story from 1950 with the Treaty of Paris and 1957 with the Treaty of Rome, which really initiates the building of the European Union — really, the construction of post-war Europe is theorized by the Americans, and it takes place via, initially, the Marshall Plan. The Americans push Europe towards a federated, democratic political entity. And Europeans resist, but begrudgingly, they go along. We find slowly emerging something I call American Europe. American Europe is a multilevel entity with an Atlantic component, which provides the security and is institutionalized in NATO; a trade relationship, which is based around the European Union, which is the second tier; a third tier, which is based around the nation state, a democratic nation state. And the fourth component of American Europe is a commitment to enlargement, which I think is very important and underemphasized — that both via NATO and the European Union, the entity that is constructed enlarges. In 2004, it takes in Central and Eastern Europe. Now that entity, American Europe, lasts from roughly 1945 until, I think, 2025, when Americans — not merely in the Trump administration, but Americans more broadly — lose their willingness to sustain this entity and start envisaging an alternative.

00:04:26 Andrew Keen: And, of course, this is sort of symbolized by JD Vance's famous 2025 speech at the Munich Security Conference. Let me — Glyn, some Europeans, I think, in particular, will be listening to this and watching this and thinking, this guy's wrong, he doesn't know what he's talking about. All the Americans did was allow us to reestablish our own national identities, our own principles of democracy. We were the people who invented democracy back in Athens, or seventeenth-century England or France. Are you suggesting that's wrong, that post-Second World War Europe isn't really Europe, it's American Europe?

00:05:11 Glyn Morgan: Absolutely. The Europeans, like all people, like to construct myths. And the myth they constructed was that, after replacing what I call Imperial Europe — which was the entity that existed prior to the Second World War — it's replaced by an American entity. The Americans really are the guarantors of European security. Post-war Europe is essentially an American protectorate, and Europeans don't like to admit that. Europeans think that they're in charge. They only came to realize just how dependent they were on the United States in 2025, when Trump basically leverages US security and forces Europe into a very disadvantageous trade deal in July 2025. And Europeans realize, well, if America is providing the security, we have no trade leverage against them. That was incredibly shocking to Europeans.

00:06:10 Andrew Keen: Glyn, your book, which is very provocative, covers a number of American diplomats. Bill Bullitt, who most people won't have heard of, you argue was very influential. There's, of course, George Kennan. As I said, Bessner talks about the Cold War liberals. What was in it for the Bullitts and the Kennans, as well as the Isaiah Berlins and Hannah Arendts of the world who were Cold War liberals? Were they believers? Did they see Europe as a bulwark against Soviet communism? Was it simply their excuse to establish their own principles in the museum of Europe? What is the reasoning behind American Europe? Because it was expensive. Or was there an element of altruism there? Were the Americans finally recognizing that they had to give back in order to maintain world peace?

00:07:10 Glyn Morgan: I think you can't underestimate the extent to which the Roosevelt Democrats, including Roosevelt himself, were extremely European in origins and values. They loved Europe. Bullitt loved France, and Kennan spoke German better than anyone had ever heard before, as well as speaking excellent Russian. They were steeped in the idea that America and Europe were one, and they wanted to rescue Europe, both from the Europeans themselves and increasingly from the Soviet Union. Bullitt and Kennan were fairly early to see the threat that the Soviet Union posed. In a sense, they broke with Roosevelt over that issue, because Roosevelt was much more willing to think that a deal could be struck with the Soviets and they together could rule the world. Bullitt and Kennan simply said no — that won't happen. The Soviets are a major threat, and we need a strong democratic Europe as a bulwark against them.

00:08:12 Andrew Keen: What about that tradition? We talked about this in our conversation with Stephen Ross. I mean, obviously, you had American Nazis after the Second World War, certainly beyond the pale. But what about guys like Joe Kennedy, with their sense of American isolationism? They weren't keen on Europe. I know Joe Kennedy took his family there many times. He was the American ambassador to Britain before the Second World War — a job that remains very controversial. But is there a credible American isolationism, a mainstream isolationism, before the Second World War? And what happens to the Joe Kennedys of the world after the creation of American Europe?

00:08:52 Glyn Morgan: That's an interesting question, because American isolationism was extremely powerful in the 1930s. Roosevelt couldn't come to the aid of the Europeans because of the popular support against any form of European involvement. There were also some provisions in US laws preventing Americans coming to the aid. So there was a robust isolationist tradition, and Roosevelt had to overcome that. He was helped enormously by Pearl Harbor. That isolationism really disappears slowly. There are some remnants of it with Taft in the fifties, but it disappears over the course of the Cold War era. But I think it's come back. It's come back now in people like JD Vance.

00:09:45 Andrew Keen: It's come back, yeah. I want to come to Vance and Miller. You give Miller quite a lot of space in your book, and Trump, of course. But thinking out loud, Glyn, it's interesting that conservative radicals — Reagan comes to mind — never challenged the idea of American Europe. Why was it so sacrosanct for so many years after the Second World War?

00:10:10 Glyn Morgan: I think because it had an important role to play in anti-Soviet alliances. You had a large communist party in places like Italy, and so Americans were very worried that Italy and possibly even France might elect a pro-Soviet government. So they were very, very keen to keep Europe in the American fold. At the time, the Americans thought that they were benefiting from the trade deals they had constructed. It was slowly in the seventies and eighties that Americans started worrying about the success of the German and Japanese car industries. But America was benefiting for many, many years. It's only really, I think, with the rise of China that things change, and China becomes the big threat.

00:11:10 Andrew Keen: Who was most critical of this idea of American Europe in the period up until Trump? Did it come from the left or the right in American politics? Or was it so sacrosanct that everyone was fearful of touching it? It was the crown jewel, the ideological crown jewel in American foreign policy and their sense of the world.

00:11:33 Glyn Morgan: Yes. That was definitely the case — that the State Department officials were very pro-European. You get these figures like Patrick Buchanan who start raising questions about the extent to which we should be supporting European security. And remember that there were also people as early as 1959, with Eisenhower, saying that the Europeans are taking us for a ride on security. So there's this strain of thought that the Europeans are wealthy enough to protect themselves. That reaches quite a crescendo under Robert Gates and Libya in 2010, where the Americans are furious with Europeans for just how pathetic their military contribution was. So that strain is always present, and it's grown. To be honest, I'm sympathetic with Americans here. Why should American taxpayers be funding the security of Europe when Europe is a wealthy place, and a number of European countries spend very, very —

00:12:36 Andrew Keen: That narrative is one that's often used on the right. Is it true?

00:12:42 Glyn Morgan: It is true. Yes. Europeans, in many ways, get easier lives than Americans. They have decent health care. They have relatively cheap higher education, and they have a well-funded welfare state, which they couldn't afford if they had to spend as much money on defense as the United States does.

00:12:58 Andrew Keen: So basically, in your view at least — and I know you're not a MAGA person, but you agree with them on this — America is subsidizing or enabling the Scandinavian way of life in Europe.

00:13:12 Glyn Morgan: I absolutely think that's the case — that the Europeans need to stand on their own two feet. I also think that's doubly important now, because I think the United States and Europe are moving in very different directions. I think civilizational America and Enlightenment Europe are not the same place.

00:13:29 Andrew Keen: And you do use that word "Enlightenment" in inverted commas. Is it real? Or is it just the European self-satisfied notion of itself?

00:13:37 Glyn Morgan: Oh, I think there is a different liberal tradition in Europe than in the United States, and you could call it a variety of different terms. I use the term civilizational America to pick out what I think is the agenda of the Vance MAGA people, and I think there's an alternative liberal tradition represented by Europe, which I call Enlightenment Europe, which has different values about freedom of speech, different values about equality, different values about a whole range of issues. That divide is driving some of the split between Europe and America.

00:14:13 Andrew Keen: But if your argument is right about America for fifty years subsidizing the Danish lifestyle, social democracy — then if indeed Europe had to stand on its own feet and fund its own defense, the European Enlightenment would hit a wall, wouldn't it? It would have to face the same fiscal, economic, military challenges that every other place in the world has to face.

00:14:41 Glyn Morgan: Yeah. Europe is not in a good place at the moment, and there are no easy solutions to the problems that are coming down the pike for Europe.

00:14:52 Andrew Keen: Glyn, you focus a lot in this new book, which is very provocative. Not everyone's going to agree with the conclusions, but you argue it very well. That this was still — and I use this word carefully — the conceit of an East Coast liberal establishment, not just Kennan and Bullitt, but everyone who taught at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. You've taught at many of these universities. You're part of that elite too. Was it shared in the rest of America? What happened to Middle America in these fifty or sixty years? Did they take their eye off the ball? Were they watching too much television?

00:15:38 Glyn Morgan: Well, you know as well as I do that the old bastions of the East Coast liberal establishment have slowly begun to come apart. Media, for example, has now been democratized in all sorts of ways. There has been a movement of the economy from the Northeast towards the West and the Southern states. We're living in a different America from the America that was around in the '50s. But —

00:16:08 Andrew Keen: You're not answering my question. I know this is a rather generic, probably patronizing term, Middle America. What was happening in Middle America that enabled them to subsidize this notion of an American Europe where they didn't get anything in return? What was the benefit to a farmer in Kansas of American Europe? How did they profit from this?

00:16:32 Glyn Morgan: Well, they profited from having a safe world. The Cold War era was —

00:16:38 Andrew Keen: It wasn't a safe world, because America was in wars in Korea and Vietnam and many other wars, most of which it was humiliated in. So it wasn't as if there was global peace in this period, and many of their sons were killed in Vietnam and Korea.

00:16:54 Glyn Morgan: Right. There were definitely those wars, but there wasn't a major war between the Soviet Union and the United States, and there wasn't a war in Europe. I think Americans are to be lauded for keeping the world safe in that period. I agree there was Vietnam, there was Korea, there were a bunch of other wars, but the world didn't blow up. But you're right — what did the Middle American get out of this? I think Middle America probably didn't get enough out of it.

00:17:23 Andrew Keen: And Europe massively benefited — liberal Europe. You write about Churchill, who's always very quotable. He certainly was an architect of this. But what about prominent European politicians? De Gaulle comes to mind, for example —

00:17:42 Andrew Keen: — who ideologically were opposed to American Europe, but also, I assume, economically and even militarily benefited. Were Europeans — and the French are very good at this — successful in speaking two messages simultaneously, often messages which are fundamentally incompatible?

00:18:02 Glyn Morgan: Yeah. De Gaulle is the really interesting figure, which I probably don't do enough on in the book, because de Gaulle really represents the alternative that wasn't taken — which is to have a European Europe, to break from America on security issues and run an alternative form of civilization, which basically dies with de Gaulle and only survives at the rhetorical level.

00:18:35 Andrew Keen: Macron sort of is de Gaulle lite, isn't he, in some ways?

00:18:38 Glyn Morgan: Yes. But it doesn't really go anywhere. Because back to the question you raised earlier, it requires Europeans to spend a lot more money on defense, and it's very difficult to do that if you're spending 50% of your GDP on state expenditures. So tough — they have to do something.

00:18:58 Andrew Keen: And what about — you and I are both from the UK originally. Churchill, as I said, was an architect. What about British politicians? They seem historically the most comfortable. And Mrs. Thatcher, for all her pride in Englishness, was a very influential architect and beneficiary of American Europe, wasn't she?

00:19:23 Glyn Morgan: Well, Britain's complicated, right? Because the British have always thought that they were in a particularly advantageous position. So going back to Churchill — Churchill thought that the secret to post-war Britain would be that Britain was going to be at the center of what he called these three majestic circles. It was going to be at the center of the Commonwealth. It was going to be at the center of Europe, and it was going to be at the center of the US Atlantic relationship. And what happens in the course of the fifties into the sixties is that all three circles come apart. Britain loses the empire with Suez, etcetera. It's outside the European Union until the seventies, and the United States is not as enamored of the special relationship as Britain thinks. Britain is left high and dry and therefore has to get into the European Union. And now it's back to being high and dry, because Britain has no alliances it can rely upon at the moment. They're not that close to America under Trump. They're not close to Europe. And the Cold War is long gone.

00:20:31 Andrew Keen: The heart of American Europe — and I use that word carefully — is, of course, Germany, which was the cause of the creation of American Europe after the Second World War. Fukuyama, of course, famously wrote about the end of history with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which resulted in the reunification of Germany. Now the headlines are all about German rearmament, for better or worse. Is the beginning of the fall of American Europe with the fall of the Wall, which everyone assumed at the time was the end of history, but actually marked the beginning, inevitably? We can blame it all, of course, on Trump or Stephen Miller or JD Vance, but that's a bit too simplistic.

00:21:16 Glyn Morgan: Well, yeah, I think Germany is going to be at the center of this new Europe, but Germany's got lots of problems, right? It's a very old society.

00:21:27 Andrew Keen: Yeah, but isn't that — what was the whole point of American Europe? If there was a center of American Europe, it was Germany, which was demilitarized and much more Americanized than anywhere else, because they were starting again.

00:21:45 Glyn Morgan: Yeah, absolutely. But that comes to an end with the Ukraine war. Because the Germans and the Americans have very different attitudes to how important it is to save Ukraine. If the United States is pulling out of Europe, then Europe needs to worry about what happens if the Russians take over Ukraine. Poland and Germany are on the front line, and I think Poland and Germany are going to be at the forefront of a much more militaristic Europe.

00:22:16 Andrew Keen: A militaristic Europe — there's a piece recently on Germany's rearmament that is stunning. But you talk about a militaristic Europe as if it's some sort of aberration. The argument of your book is it's perfectly normal. All countries need to defend themselves. That's the history of the world.

00:22:33 Glyn Morgan: Yeah, I wasn't using "militaristic" in a pejorative sense. I think Europe needs to have a military. It needs to rethink its security alliances. It needs to realize that one of the things Putin, Xi Jinping, and Trump all agree upon is they'd rather deal with Europe on a transactional basis, and that is easier to do if Europe is a Europe of nation states. They'd much rather see a Europe where they can pursue a divide et impera strategy. So that's a huge worry for Europe, and they need to unify, and they need to have a stronger military.

00:23:14 Andrew Keen: Is your argument in The Rise and Fall of American Europe that the fall was pretty inevitable? We can blame it all on Trump, as I said, or Vance or Stephen Miller — the evil trinity in the MAGA movement. But are you suggesting really that this had to come to an end, that it wasn't in the long term viable?

00:23:38 Glyn Morgan: Yes. That is exactly the argument. There are structural reasons which bring American Europe to an end. It's a mistake to focus on the evil trinity, as you put them, because you can see this state form running into difficulties as early as under Obama, with Obama saying we're going to reorient our attentions to China. It was coming into difficulties with Biden and his IRA strategies, which were very disadvantageous to European businesses. I don't really think it's got any legs, to be honest. American Europe is over, and Europe needs to rethink where it's going. Unfortunately, there are a lot of think tanks, like the Atlantic Council and all these groups, who are wedded to the idea that the Atlantic Alliance can be revived and we can go back to an American Europe.

00:24:38 Andrew Keen: That's the kind of New Deal nostalgia you find in the Democratic Party — who, we were talking before we went live about this, will probably cost the Democrats the next election too. So if on the one hand you're arguing American Europe is dead, you're not a big fan of civilizational America, which you argue in the book Trump and Miller are trying to replace it with. Is there a third alternative for more modernizing, more innovative progressives — where you can't go back to an American Europe, you reject the idea of civilizational America and Europe becoming some sort of colony of America? Is there a third way, or is that not viable?

00:25:28 Glyn Morgan: There is a third way. Whether it's viable — I think it is, but it's a long-run strategy. I think the answer is that Europe replaces NATO with a EUTO, that it incorporates the security dimension of Europe into the trade dimension. This is going to require a slightly more centralized Europe when it comes to foreign and defense policy than we have now, and it's probably going to require the European Union having genuine tax-raising abilities. At the moment, the European Union doesn't have tax-raising abilities, and it gets its money from block grants, essentially, from the nation states. So a much more unified Europe — call it United States of Europe if you want, but that's, I think, the answer. Viable — it's certainly not viable in the short run.

00:26:16 Andrew Keen: NATO is such a bizarre organization. There was a headline a couple of days ago on the BBC about how Europe's NATO, quote unquote, allies push back at a reported US threat to Spain. NATO is such a weird organization, because it's essentially America. If there's a four-word summary of American Europe, it's NATO. So how can NATO even — I know Trump keeps asking this too, and people on the left, but what's the point of NATO?

00:26:52 Glyn Morgan: A very good question. It is essentially an American protectorate. It's an American protectorate that costs the US taxpayer a lot of money, and it's humiliating for the Europeans to depend upon it. The sooner it disappears and is replaced by a more Europe-centric organization, the better.

00:27:12 Andrew Keen: When we stand back — I know you're not a big fan of Trump, but should we, as historians, as observers of all this, at least commend Trump for bringing all this stuff to the boil?

00:27:27 Glyn Morgan: Yes, absolutely. He has brought things to a boil — although "boil" might be the word —

00:27:37 Andrew Keen: — to worry about.

00:27:39 Glyn Morgan: So, the Iran war now is really the time when Europeans need to rethink completely, because the United States and Europe have very, very different interests in Iran. For example, the United States can see a failed state in Iran and live with it. A failed state in Iran for Europe is a disaster, because the refugee flows are likely to be huge, and that's not something Europeans can easily sustain.

00:28:10 Andrew Keen: You've got the twin danger. You've got, obviously, the Russian threat, and then you have the refugee threat. They're kind of connected, but they're also in parallel.

00:28:20 Andrew Keen: And you note in the book that it's hard to generalize about Europe. Some European politicians are particularly, in my mind at least, interesting. I know you're a keen observer of Italian politics. How does Meloni fit into this? Is she one of the few Italian or European politicians who's able to understand a post-American Europe? She's not particularly palatable on the left, although she's more palatable now than she was before she came to power.

00:28:50 Glyn Morgan: Well, to be honest, I think the one guy who saw things most clearly was Macron. Macron really does get the debate going in 2017 with his Sorbonne speech.

00:29:03 Andrew Keen: You know, Macron was on my show a few years ago.

00:29:05 Glyn Morgan: Oh, he was?

00:29:06 Andrew Keen: I gave him all his ideas in the first place.

00:29:09 Glyn Morgan: Well, you gave him some good ones, because he was the guy who started talking about security autonomy. It's a great tragedy that he was so unsuccessful in France. So we now have to look to Meloni, who's probably Europe's strongest leader at the moment. She's proving to be much more satisfactory to people on the center-left than we feared. But I don't think she's really got a great geopolitical mind. We haven't really seen any proposals of comparable quality to those that emerged from Macron.

00:29:50 Andrew Keen: Glyn, you have, I guess, a realist, maybe even a Hobbesian view of the world, certainly in this book, The Rise and Fall of American Europe. Given the reality of power, won't the future of Europe eventually get determined in Germany, given it's the economic, political, geographical heart of Europe? For better or worse, some people might be very fearful, paranoid, about the rise of German militarism. Meloni is a curiosity, as someone who began on the far right of Italian politics and seems to have shifted towards the center. But doesn't the future of Europe — won't it be determined in Berlin?

00:30:37 Glyn Morgan: Berlin or Warsaw. I think we underestimate just how important Poland is becoming. Poland is at the forefront of the Ukraine issue. Poland has a relatively robust army, and Poland is economically growing and is very successful. The political leadership of Germany is pretty weak. Friedrich Merz is no Macron.

00:31:06 Andrew Keen: Which isn't — Macron is certainly not de Gaulle. So —

00:31:11 Glyn Morgan: Yes. We're dealing with relatively low-level European politicians, all of whom have humiliated themselves in one way or another in front of Trump. Trump having them all queue up outside the antechamber of his lounge at his golf club is incredibly humiliating to Europeans. Then having that Rutte guy go over there and flatter Trump — it's something the Americans under Kennan were very, very concerned about: the importance of encouraging Europeans to have a healthy self-confidence. They were concerned about the psychology of Europeans. That's all gone from American foreign policy. Humiliation is front and center.

00:31:57 Andrew Keen: Well, Vance's speech in Munich was designed to humiliate. And of course, every time Trump opens his mouth — I think he referred to Starmer as not being Winston Churchill — he gets great pride. His brand is humiliating. A couple of weeks ago, Orbán was defeated in Hungary. You mentioned that Poland is important. There was an interesting Politico headline about — with its scapegoat gone, Orbán being defeated in Hungary, Europe is forced to finally get honest with itself. Do you think the defeat of Orbán will, as the Politico piece suggests — and because this is what your book is all about — force Europe to be a little bit more honest about itself, about its security, about its relationship with the United States?

00:32:53 Glyn Morgan: The defeat of Orbán was definitely a plus, but you shouldn't underestimate the extent to which a lot of European countries have significant national populist parties — including Britain, including France, including Germany. National populism is still an important theme in European politics. And some of those national populist parties are pro-Russian. So I don't think we can rest on our laurels because Orbán's gone. We've still got a big battle in front of us between the national populists and — I don't know, call them the liberal democrats.

00:33:36 Andrew Keen: Should we credit — Glyn, I almost called you Lyn. Glyn — Putin. He's obviously vilified by everybody, especially in the United States, except perhaps Trump, particularly progressives. But is he an accidental beneficiary of the fall of American Europe, or did he somehow recognize these structural features before anyone else and has been architecting the breakup of American Europe for the last twenty years?

00:34:13 Andrew Keen: I mean, crediting him in the sense that, strategically, he may not be a particularly pleasant person — certainly I'm not going to morally credit him — but in terms of his geopolitical insights, he recognized this. He saw this, it seems, before anyone else. And maybe even in the long term, historians will write about his invasion of Ukraine as marking, really, the beginning of the end of American Europe.

00:34:41 Glyn Morgan: Yeah. That takes us back to German-Russian relations. Germany had pinned its hopes on being able to control Putin, was highly dependent upon Russian gas, thought that was the future. And with Ukraine, that blows up. But I think there's now been a cold-eyed realization that Putin seeks a Europe of nation states, where he can deal transactionally, play off different European states against each other. Europeans were very slow to realize that was what they were facing. But they face it too with Trump. Putin and Trump are playing out of the same playbook. And you could say Xi Jinping is doing the same.

00:35:28 Andrew Keen: And China — if anyone's the beneficiary of this very dramatic, sharp fall, this collapse of American Europe, it's China. Because the Russians may have military power, they don't really have that much economic power, whereas the Chinese are investing more and more in Eastern Europe, doing trade deals with the UK and France and Spain. So the Chinese are also benefiting. Could we imagine, Glyn, a Chinese — I can't imagine a Russian Europe, maybe a Russian Baltic, but not a Russian Europe. Can we imagine a Chinese Europe in the future, in fifty or a hundred years? Is it conceivable that the Chinese will replace the Americans?

00:36:08 Glyn Morgan: I don't think they'll replace the Americans, but the Europeans need to realize that if they want to be free of US and Russian domination, they need to play off the US, Russia, and China. They need to adopt a much more Machiavellian strategy, realize that the future of Europe requires playing clever cards with those three powers. To the extent that Russia and the US pressure Europe, Europe needs to strike — even possibly security deals with China.

00:36:45 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Machiavelli, of course, who was a master of politics, political theory. Maybe in practice his political career was less successful. Where can Europe learn from history? Can it learn from the breakup of Italian city states in the Renaissance, or from the crisis of antiquity? Where do they need to look to understand its future? Europeans tend to be obsessed, maybe a little too obsessed, with their own history. But are there moments in history that Europe can look back on and think, well, we had this dilemma then, and this is how we dealt with it?

00:37:21 Glyn Morgan: There's a great line from de Gaulle, where he says it's a fundamental error of statesmen to think that to every problem there's a solution. At some moments of history, there's no solution. I worry that at the moment, there is no solution to Europe's problems. We await a Bismarck or a Tecumseh, some figure who can unify Europe. At the moment, we don't have such a figure. We have relatively mediocre, mid-level politicians who are struggling. The most they can do is to stop things from getting worse, while we figure out how to address what are really alarming problems.

00:38:02 Andrew Keen: Although if we were having this conversation in 1848, we certainly wouldn't be having it on the Internet. We might also talk rather pessimistically about the future of European democracy. And of course, in the wings was Bismarck, who nobody knew about in 1848 — although I guess he didn't create European democracy. So is there a second-rate Europe future, Glyn? Does it just become — if people don't read your book and listen to what you're saying and many others — will Europe just become a museum, a place for Chinese and American tourists to go to view the remains?

00:38:42 Glyn Morgan: Yes. That will be the future. It will be increasingly dependent on the American tech industry. It will be a pleasant museum, but it will have no power. It will have a very bleak future.

00:38:59 Andrew Keen: On the other hand, it needs a military, because otherwise the Russians will invade. So they may even lose their welfare states, their national health services.

00:39:08 Glyn Morgan: Well, that's the dilemma, right? How do you sustain the good things of Europe and also acquire a certain strength? It's not clear what they can do to get there, because I'm rather pessimistic about Europe's ability to act.

00:39:26 Andrew Keen: Do you think, Glyn — you're originally from Wales. You have a particularly good understanding of this because of the fate of Wales within the British Empire.

00:39:37 Glyn Morgan: Yes. Wales lost out in the great struggle for world power from a very early date, so I'm used to it. I can see the future.

00:39:48 Andrew Keen: So there you have it. The diplomats in Berlin or Paris or London — look to Wales. That's what Glyn Morgan argues in The Rise and Fall of American Europe. Fascinating, very provocative book, Glyn. Best of luck with it. And I hope your vision isn't quite as bleak as you're suggesting, but you may well be right.

00:40:12 Glyn Morgan: Thank you.