A geopolitical reading of managed decline and the demand for renewed sovereignty in Munich 2026
Three Hundred Years of European Decline
From Jonathan Swift to Marco Rubio
If Jonathan Swift, the satirist behind Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal, were to inhabit the office and voice of U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio in 2026, his critique of European governance would not read like a diplomatic memo. It would resemble a surgical satire aimed at what he might describe as voluntary blindness.
The Illusion of the End of History
Swift would likely compare European leaders to the scholars of the Academy of Lagado, extracting sunbeams from cucumbers. In his lens, Europe embraced the dangerous illusion that commerce and supranational rules could permanently replace human nature and national interest.
To assume that borders would dissolve into a frictionless cosmopolitan order would mean ignoring millennia of historical experience in favor of ideological comfort.
Sovereignty Traded for Comfort
European deindustrialization would not appear as an inevitable economic transition. It would resemble deliberate fragility. Sovereignty outsourced in exchange for inexpensive imports left entire societies strategically exposed.
In Swiftian imagery, it is the master who sells his boots to buy a mirror, only to discover he can no longer walk through the mud.
Energy Dogma and Strategic Weakness
Energy policy would become central to the satire. Voluntarily constraining domestic energy capacity while geopolitical rivals expand fossil production appears, from this viewpoint, less like virtue and more like asymmetry.
Strategic competition does not pause for moral self-congratulation.
Abstraction Over Survival
European reliance on global institutions would be portrayed as preference for abstraction over agency. When sovereignty is subordinated to procedural multilateralism, decisive action becomes structurally delayed.
The Courtesy of Decline
The sharpest critique would target complacency. Managed decline implies administration without ambition. Cultural hesitation becomes strategic inertia.
Rubio’s Munich intervention outlined what he framed as a structural correction.
He called for the restoration of national primacy within alliances.
He urged reindustrialization and supply chain sovereignty.
He demanded firm border control as an act of state continuity.
He insisted on cultural confidence as prerequisite for political will.
From this side of the Atlantic, those who still look at Europe with Renaissance nostalgia should at least consider the warning.
Gulliver discovered that scale alone does not determine dignity.
Civilizations decline not only by defeat, but by hesitation.