The U.S. Is the Most Troubled Nation, Except for All the Others

When Gen. John Burgoyne surrendered his British troops to American rebels at Saratoga, N.Y., in 1777, a distraught young Briton several thousand miles away brought the news to the economist Adam Smith.

“This will be the ruin of the nation,” the young man wailed.

“Young man,” Smith replied. “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.”

My summer travels reminded me of the great man’s sangfroid. Travel broadens the mind, not only by educating us about other countries, but by teaching us about our own—placing our self-absorption in a global context, helping us understand that for all our flaws and vices, other countries have troubles too.

And there’s a great deal of ruin in the world right now.

Last weekend I attended the annual conference of the European House Ambrosetti, an Italian think tank, in the sublime Villa d’Este on the shore of Lake Como. The event—along with the location—attracts a lively crowd of European business and political leaders along with a good showing of Americans, including lawmakers—among them this year Republicans Sens. John Thune and Lindsey Graham and Democrat Bob Menendez.

Despite the serenity of the surroundings, the mood was one of psychic gloom, the tone set by Valerio de Molli, Ambosetti’s president, who in his opening remarks, offered a bleak reminder of Italy’s “demographic winter.” Last year the country reported a record low number of births—400,000. It now registers seven new births and 12 new deaths annually per 1,000 inhabitants.

“If current birth and death rates continue, the last Italian would be born in 2225 and the last Italian on earth would disappear in 2307,” Mr. de Molli. As the crowd lunched on tagliatelle con verdure and mullet roe with black truffle and the lake gently lapped in the background, I silently prayed that the last Italian will bequeath us some recipes and well-preserved medieval palazzi.

But Italy’s existential woes aren’t even the most alarming in Europe. Germans are notoriously gloomy. It says something about national character when a people have a compound noun not only for the taking of pleasure in another person’s misery—Schadenfreude—but also for a deep world-weary melancholy—Weltschmerz. These days Weltschmerz is winning.

Germans I spoke to last weekend resignedly embraced the moniker “sick man of Europe.” Their economy is stagnating, having recorded a formal recession this year with still painfully high inflation. The cyclical problems pale beside the structural. Years of disastrously complacent and ideologically driven environmental policies that left the country dependent on Russian energy and exports to China; demographic challenges similar to Italy’s are creating anxieties about immigration; once-great industries—car making, capital equipment—are wasting away.

While the Germans and Italians can be famously morose, no one can hold a candle to the British when it comes to self-loathing. “It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God Save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box,” George Orwell wrote.

So the endless bleating of metropolitans in London about Britain’s collapse—disingenuously ascribed to Brexit, although the U.K. economy hasn’t performed significantly worse than the European Union’s since it left—might be discounted as consistent with the character of the elites.

But there is an undeniably bleak landscape today reminiscent of the pre-Thatcher 1970s: strikes, inflation, a punishing tax burden—all delivered, in an added twist, by 13 years of Conservative government.

The war in Ukraine hangs over all Europe like a vast cloud, and the general mood is solemn—compounded by the knowledge that Europe’s dependence on the U.S. to fight its wars is as heavy as ever.

But if you think this malaise is limited to Europe—a once-great civilization in the process of becoming a museum of great civilization—I have news for you from Asia, where I spent time earlier in the summer.

China’s economic contradictions are crushing its economy, and the Communist Party’s efforts to conceal the problem only confirms it. The failed transition from an investment-led to a consumption-led economy in a country whose demographics are worse even than Europe’s is producing calamitous social consequences.

What does all this teach us back here in America? It would be complacent to ignore our own problems because other countries have it worse. The main conclusions I draw are a promise and a warning.

The promise lies in the continuing success of America’s economic model—like its counterparts everywhere, China’s communist system is failing much faster than our capitalism ever will.

But as I look at Europe, I fear that so too is the energy of our great shared civilization—overwhelmed by demographic self-destruction, atrophied by ideological revisionism, crippled by cultural self-laceration. All of it perpetrated by the elites in most of those countries—whom too many ideologues in our own would like to emulate.