Has Europe Become America's 51st State instead of Canada?
Europe's Historic Surrender and The Installment of 21st Century Feudalism
F.L.T.R.: His Majesty King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, Secretary-General of NATO, and President Donald Trump of the United States. I don't know who made this picture but I love it because it so eloquently displays how elites, corporations and politicians are literally all in bed together...
Last week's NATO summit in The Hague will be remembered as the moment Europe formally surrendered its sovereignty to become America's vassal state. The agreement to increase defense spending to 5% of GDP represents the largest wealth transfer from Europe to the United States in the continent's history.
According to The Hague Summit Declaration, we need to ramp up expenditures to challenge the long-term threat posed by Russia to Euro-Atlantic Security and the persistent threat of terrorism. Allies will allocate at least 3.5% of GDP annually to resource core defense requirements, which essentially means flooding American defense contractors with billions of dollars. The remaining 1.5% is designated for protecting critical infrastructure, defending networks, and ensuring civil preparedness and resilience. However, buried in the details, this money is clearly intended to fund the Ukraine war for another decade.
To truly understand what happens here, we first need to understand what NATO is about. NATO was established on April 4, 1949, as a defensive alliance specifically designed to counter Soviet expansion in post-war Europe. The original twelve founding members—United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg—committed to collective defense under Article 5: an attack on one would be considered an attack on all. Over the following decades, only four additional countries joined: Greece and Turkey (1952), West Germany (1955), and Spain (1982). For forty-two years, NATO maintained this relatively modest membership of sixteen nations, serving its stated purpose as a defensive bulwark against the Warsaw Pact. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, NATO had achieved its fundamental objective—the threat it was created to counter had ceased to exist.
However, rather than disbanding or scaling back, NATO embarked on the most aggressive expansion in its history. Since 1999, NATO has doubled in size, expanding ever eastward to Russia's borders. Furthermore, NATO has evolved into what military analysts call "America's European Foreign Legion"—a coalition that legitimizes American military interventions through multilateral branding while distributing costs among subordinate allies. In other words: Europeans now pay for American weapons to fight wars that serve American interests. Meanwhile, they're left to manage the massive refugee crises these interventions create. This combination alone had already brought Europe to the brink of social collapse, even before the war in Ukraine started.
What Does NATO Protection Bring Us?
Since 1991, NATO has been involved in three major missions. In 1999 a coalition of NATO allies bombed Kosovo (former Yugoslavia) for 78 days straight in an effort to stop the ethnic cleansing during a brutal civil war. Despite significant loss of life on all sides, this mission can be regarded as a relative success because it stopped the massacres and the region has remained relatively stable for the past 25 years. Unfortunately, this was the only mission that achieved its stated objectives. The mission in Afghanistan from 2001-2021 was a complete failure. Apart from the massive spending of $2.3 trillion and thousands of deaths, absolutely nothing was gained. Twenty years later, the Taliban still rule Afghanistan. The mission in Libya in 2011 was even worse. The regime change not only destabilized the country, but the entire region, and today Libya serves as a base for ISIS expansion across Africa.
But NATO's military failures pale in comparison to the chaos created by unilateral American interventions. Since 1991, the United States has conducted military operations in Iraq (2003-2011), Syria (2012-present), and ongoing bombing campaigns in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan. Only last week, the US bombed Iran based on the same shaky nuclear threat narrative that led to the fall of Iraq twenty years earlier. These interventions, based on fabricated intelligence or regime-change objectives, displaced over 38 million people according to the Costs of War Project.
The 2015 European migration crisis saw 1.3 million asylum seekers, primarily fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Note that these were not Russian wars instigated against Europe, but solo US campaigns that Europe is left to clean up to this day.
Because when we look at the facts, the math is again quite simple. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991:
There have not been any Russian invasions of Europe;
There have not been any Russian attacks on European soil;
There have not been any Chinese attacks on European soil either.
That does not mean Russia has not conducted military interventions. However, almost all these interventions have been limited to former Soviet countries. One can point to Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), and the ongoing war in Ukraine. But consider the context: NATO was founded to counter the Soviet threat, has been expanding eastward for thirty years despite promises not to do so, and NATO regulations clearly state that countries in active conflict cannot join the alliance. Are we witnessing unprovoked Russian aggression, or predictable geopolitical responses to strategic encirclement?
Apply the same logic elsewhere: what would happen if Mexico or Canada joined a Russian defense alliance? It doesn’t matter who’s right or whose side you’re on. Great powers, including Russia, will always act to defend what they perceive as core security interests.
The tragedy is that Europe has been besieged in the last decade, only not by Russia. Middle East destabilization has resulted in a massive refugee influx to Western European countries. Many European countries are now struggling with high costs of living, unaffordable housing and deteriorating social services. Next to that, the countries fall apart because the mass influx of a radically different culture means you will lose yours. Ineffective governments try to suppress the dissatisfaction with censorship and misinformation, but they cannot hide the fact that in the last decades, the only real violence on European soil has been carried out by terrorists using $3 kitchen knives, rental trucks, and improvised explosives.
The NATO expenditures to prevent these real threats to European civilians is precisely $0. But now we have to spend $250 billion annually to mitigate threats that are not actually there using US military weapons? It's an absolute shame that our incompetent European leaders took the bait so easily, without even considering the consequences for us and the rest of the world.
Installment of 21st Century Feudalism
Nothing illustrates Europe's new subordinate status better than the leaked text messages from NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte to Donald Trump, revealed just days before the summit. In a display of subservience that would make medieval vassals blush, Rutte wrote:
"Mr. President, dear Donald, Congratulations and thank you for your decisive action in Iran, that was truly extraordinary, and something no one else dared to do. It makes us all safer. You are flying into another big success in The Hague this evening. It was not easy but we've got them all signed onto 5 percent! Donald, you have driven us to a really, really important moment for America and Europe, and the world. You will achieve something NO American president in decades could get done. Europe is going to pay in a BIG way, as they should, and it will be your win. Safe travels and see you at His Majesty's dinner! Mark Rutte"
This is the language of subservience. Rutte, who spent fourteen years as Dutch Prime Minister systematically transferring Dutch sovereignty to international frameworks, now serves as America's bagman, collecting tribute from European subjects who no longer control their own defense policies.
The irony is bitter: the same man who as Prime Minister cut Dutch defense spending to dangerous lows now demands that European nations bankrupt themselves for American weapons. His tenure was marked by the systematic erosion of Dutch autonomy, making the Netherlands a model client state unable to solve its own crises.
The consequences extend far beyond military spending. Just as medieval serfs lost the ability to govern their own affairs, European nations are losing the capacity for independent decision-making through a modern feudal system that preserves the appearance of sovereignty while gutting its substance.
The mechanism is elegant in its deception: European "sovereign" states voluntarily sign treaties, agreements, and frameworks that systematically transfer real decision-making power to unelected officials. Europe is run by the European Commission, NATO and WEF - institutions that do not care about local needs and troubles, leaving its citizens to fight crisis after crisis.
On paper, member states retain autonomy. In practice, deviation from the feudal hierarchy brings swift punishment. Hungary maintains formal sovereignty while facing billions in withheld EU subsidies for policy independence. This is 21st-century feudalism: vassal states maintain the symbols of independence with their flags and political theater, while the real decision making power lies elsewhere. And so, we have created this situation where European taxpayers fund their own subjugation while being told they live in democratic, independent nations.
The result will be financial suicide. Europe has no money whatsoever to fund this ludicrous defense spending. It will have to dramatically cut its spending on infrastructure, education and social services and if it’s not willing to do that, print and borrow money until our state debts become as unsustainable as the US government debt.
Just a quick example: if all NATO states had spent 3.5% of GDP on defense in 2024, that would have amounted to $1.75 trillion annually. Germany alone, with its $4.5 trillion economy, will transfer over $200 billion per year to what is essentially a protection racket. Europe will be drained and impoverished funding the American war machine. One might think that the US struck a good deal, letting the Europeans take over the extreme defense spending. But then you forget that the US massively voted to end all wars in November 2024. With this deal, they will get the opposite.
Can We Stop The Road to Serfdom?
This NATO agreement could not have come at a worse moment for Europe, since we already face our own economic stagnation. Europe's labor productivity lags behind, as do innovation, investments in technology and R&D. The European economy has hardly grown in the last decade, outpaced by the rest of the world. However, rather than addressing these fundamental weaknesses that really threaten our future prosperity, European leaders have chosen to drain our remaining resources on military expenditures. Not even our own military, mind you, but our overseas protector's, ensuring our permanent dependence.
The real tragedy is that the threats of China and Russia aren’t military; they are economic. Just observe what our supposed adversaries are really doing: China builds infrastructure across three continents while Russia develops energy partnerships worldwide, both understanding that 21st-century power flows through trade relationships and economic integration, not through military conquest.
But we Europeans have been down this road before. The Roman Empire's final centuries were marked by the same pattern we see today: incapable leaders who chose endless military campaigns over addressing fundamental domestic problems. As productivity stagnated and infrastructure decayed, Roman emperors launched increasingly expensive wars, partly to distract from their failures at home. The empire's vast military-industrial complex consumed the very resources needed to maintain the foundations of Roman prosperity, creating a vicious cycle that ultimately led to collapse and the rise of feudalism—a system where local strongmen extracted tribute from powerless subjects in exchange for protection.
The advantage we have over the Romans is that we can recognize this pattern before it's too late. We understand how great powers collapse when they prioritize military adventures over economic foundations, when they choose external campaigns over internal prosperity, when they drain their resources fighting the wrong battles.
But while we can see the historical parallel, we seem blind to our current reality. Instead of focusing on the real threats to our sovereignty and prosperity, we exhaust ourselves fighting over pronouns, safe spaces, and endless debates about what constitutes racism or proper gender definitions. We argue about microaggressions while macroeconomic forces reshape our continent. We cancel each other over thought crimes while our actual freedom disappears.
This is not accidental. A population distracted by manufactured controversies is a population that won't notice when their sovereignty is being auctioned off to the highest bidder. While we debate whether someone's feelings were hurt, our leaders sign away our economic independence. While we fight over who can use which bathroom, they mortgage our children's future to foreign defense contractors.
We've become a society that believes rules will protect us from everything—from hurt feelings to bad decisions to economic collapse. But rules don't protect us; they are fences boxing us in and stripping our autonomy and independent thinking. The time has come to see these distractions for what they are: bread and circuses designed to keep us from noticing that we're becoming serfs. We face a simple choice: take responsibility for our own destiny as free peoples, or accept modern slavery disguised as international cooperation.
Let’s end this story with a bit of humor and remind ourselves to stay vigilant:
Interested in what you've read? By the end of this week my debut novel Coddled Children launches—a dystopian thriller exploring what happens when safety becomes more important than freedom, and rules replace personal responsibility.
This NATO analysis marks the beginning of my next book: The Knowledge Crisis and The Fall of The Western Empire. I'll be writing more about this civilizational decay in the coming months.
Some cages have no bars. Some freedoms cost everything. Stay tuned!
As erudite and thought provoking as ever