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There is a certain kind of man who interprets silence as weakness.
When wars end, he hears a lack of courage. When treaties hold, he sees a lack of nerve. When prosperity rises without bloodshed, he wonders why no one took anything. To such a man, civilization is merely the intermission between battles: a moment when nations inexplicably forget that only force conquers, and only conquest counts.
Europe, of course, knows otherwise.
Europe buried this idea—literally—alongside the millions of young men who marched into the first mechanized war convinced that “size will win.” Today, the idea wishes to rise again, carried by a voice that looks at the world and sees decay wherever there is restraint. It is the voice of a man who praises the past at the expense of the living.
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Strongman Who Mistook Civilization for Decay
(11 minutes, 3 seconds).
Recently, Donald Trump announced that “Europe is decaying,” and that “size will win” in Ukraine. He offered these statements not as analysis, but as prophecy. In his imagination, the future belongs to those who can assemble the biggest pile of territory, of army, of wealth, of whatever is piled high enough to appear impressive.
Trump’s worldview is not merely political.
It is a worldview from another century speaking through a 21st-century microphone.
On the Meaning of Decay
It is worth asking, politely, what Trump means when he calls Europe “decaying.” He is not talking about GDP, innovation, or culture; the continent remains a global engine of wealth and ideas. Nor is he referring to military preparedness alone, though he often treats defense budgets as if they were baseball statistics. His claim is more fundamental: To Trump, Europe is decaying because Europe no longer lives by the logic of conquest.
He measures vitality by expansion, not achievement.
He defines strength as the capacity to take, not the capacity to govern.
He believes the arbiter of history is mass, not law.
In his imagination, a society that prefers treaties to annexation must be dying. A union that protects small nations rather than absorbing them must be weak. And a civilization that regards consensus as victory, rather than domination, must be in decline.
This is precisely backwards.
Europe’s “decay,” as he calls it, is the result of something he cannot fathom: Europe deliberately abandoned the politics of size—and began the politics of rights.
It is the only continent in history that studied its own horrors and said, with conviction: never again, not as ritual, but as design.
To a man who believes size grants authority, the survival of Belgium, Estonia, Luxembourg, and Slovenia must seem like a cosmic mistake. Small nations are supposed to be crushed for sport, not welcomed as equals. Yet modern Europe was built on the idea that smallness has dignity, and that dignity outweighs tanks.
For Trump, this is decay.
For the rest of us, it is civilization.
‘Size Will Win’ — The Most Dangerous Bad Idea
Let us take his second claim at face value: “size will win” in Ukraine. There is a reason this statement chills anyone who has opened a history book beyond the table of contents. It is because the belief that size alone guarantees victory was last held earnestly by European generals in 1914, who believed that the ability to mobilize and move millions of soldiers quickly by train would ensure a swift victory. The rail schedule, they thought, was the secret weapon of the modern age. If you could organize mass faster, you would overwhelm any nation that stood in your way.
This idea led directly to the mass carnage of World War I, when enormous armies collided at unprecedented speed, only to become trapped in trenches, slaughtered by machine guns, and ground into mud. Size did not win.
Size produced graveyards.
This is not an obscure lesson. It is the first page of Europe’s modern memory.
The most destructive war in human history was launched by men whose worldview Trump now repeats: big wins, small yields, mass conquers, the rest is detail.
Putin believed size would win in Ukraine, too.
He was wrong.
Not because Ukrainians are larger, but because 21st-century warfare is not a test of raw mass. It is a system conflict—involving finance, technology, intelligence, networks, and alliances. Drones outrun divisions. Sanctions paralyze factories. Satellites outperform spies. International institutions constrain supply chains. A hundred small levers outweigh a single large hammer.
The world outgrew the cult of size, because size proved lethal—and inefficient. Yet here stands an American president reviving the same logic as if the last hundred years never happened.
Europe’s Cure, Trump’s Complaint
Trump sees Europe as decaying because it stopped behaving like Trump.
Europe rejected:
Annexation as statecraft,
Ethnic destiny as diplomacy,
Force as identity,
And the idea that small nations should kneel before large ones.
This was not accidental.
It was intentional self-reconstruction:
NATO says size must not decide sovereignty.
The EU says power must share the table.
The Court of Human Rights says the individual is not an afterthought.
The Schengen agreement says borders are bridges, not trophies.
These are artifacts of a civilization that corrected itself and survived.
Trump reads this as decay precisely because it is maturity. His worldview continues to treat the world as a contest of bodies: the larger army, the louder nation, the bigger map.
Europe buried that idea under marble and grass.
The King Without a Kingdom
Trump is a king without a kingdom—a man who worships the symbols of monarchy without possessing any of its responsibilities. He wants war to be a sport, peace to be an intermission, and treaties to be theater. The small people and small nations in his path are not obstacles; they are inconveniences.
In his rhetoric:
Ukraine is small,
The Baltic states are tiny,
Moldova is microscopic…
So, they are not actors in history.
They are objects to be settled by the large.
Trump's obliviousness to the longer themes of history explains the seamlessness of his admiration for Vladimir Putin: both men believe history is an arena in which size legitimizes violence.
They differ only in style.
One sits shirtless on a horse, the other sits looking pained in a courtroom sketch.
But their worldview is the same: they see smallness as permission.
Europe’s modernity is the rejection of that doctrine.
The Penny and the Nation
In a different context, Trump argues the smallest units do not matter: the penny is meaningless; eliminate it. The point is neither the minting cost nor the rounding algorithm. The point is that smallness does not count unless it serves the large. It is an impulse that extends outward:
One penny,
One vote,
One journalist,
One dissenter,
)ne refugee,
One nation.
To him, value scales upward, not inward.
But the entire architecture of modern Europe rests on the opposite conviction: the small must be defended against the large—precisely because they are small.
This inclusiveness is not a sentimental project. It is a hard lesson, purchased in blood.
Two Visions of the World
There are now, in plain view, two visions for the 21st century:
The Trump–Putin worldview:
Size wins,
Small yields,
Conquest is destiny,
Rights are ornamental,
Peace is weakness.
The European worldview:
Legitimacy, not mass,
Sovereignty, not acreage,
Treaties, not trophies,
Law, not appetite.
When Trump says Europe is decaying, he means Europe has abandoned the worldview he admires.
When he says, “size will win,” he means: the future belongs to the large, so the small should accept their fate.
But Europe’s entire post-war argument is that the small are entitled to survive.
That is the core civilizational disagreement.
A Living Civilization vs. a Dead Idea
Trump’s rhetoric does not describe Europe; it describes a Europe that no longer exists.
The Europe he praises:
Died at Verdun,
Drowned in the Somme,
Froze at Stalingrad,
And bled itself into the soil from Ypres to Kursk.
Mass was not victory. Mass was a coffin.
Europe’s “decay” is simply its refusal to repeat its own funeral.
So, when a modern president invokes the logic that produced Europe’s darkest century, Europeans do not hear strength; they hear a ghost offering advice from its grave.
Closing
Perhaps Europe is decaying. But that statement begs the question:
Decaying into what?
A continent where sovereignty is not awarded by artillery,
where small nations do not exist at the mercy of large ones,
where peace is built by negotiation rather than expansion,
where law restrains ambition,
and where the future is not weighed in body counts.
If that is decay, then let civilization decay.
Let it rot into the kind of world where size is not destiny, and every nation, no matter how small on the map, is large enough to deserve survival.
Because it was Europe’s maturation, not its decline, that ended the age when a general could point to the world and declare: “Big wins.”
The world learned the cost of that idea.
Donald Trump has not.
~Dunneagin
PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.
Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).
There is a certain kind of man who interprets silence as weakness.
When wars end, he hears a lack of courage. When treaties hold, he sees a lack of nerve. When prosperity rises without bloodshed, he wonders why no one took anything. To such a man, civilization is merely the intermission between battles: a moment when nations inexplicably forget that only force conquers, and only conquest counts.
Europe, of course, knows otherwise.
Europe buried this idea—literally—alongside the millions of young men who marched into the first mechanized war convinced that “size will win.” Today, the idea wishes to rise again, carried by a voice that looks at the world and sees decay wherever there is restraint. It is the voice of a man who praises the past at the expense of the living.
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Strongman Who Mistook Civilization for Decay
(11 minutes, 3 seconds).
Recently, Donald Trump announced that “Europe is decaying,” and that “size will win” in Ukraine. He offered these statements not as analysis, but as prophecy. In his imagination, the future belongs to those who can assemble the biggest pile of territory, of army, of wealth, of whatever is piled high enough to appear impressive.
Trump’s worldview is not merely political.
It is a worldview from another century speaking through a 21st-century microphone.
On the Meaning of Decay
It is worth asking, politely, what Trump means when he calls Europe “decaying.” He is not talking about GDP, innovation, or culture; the continent remains a global engine of wealth and ideas. Nor is he referring to military preparedness alone, though he often treats defense budgets as if they were baseball statistics. His claim is more fundamental: To Trump, Europe is decaying because Europe no longer lives by the logic of conquest.
He measures vitality by expansion, not achievement.
He defines strength as the capacity to take, not the capacity to govern.
He believes the arbiter of history is mass, not law.
In his imagination, a society that prefers treaties to annexation must be dying. A union that protects small nations rather than absorbing them must be weak. And a civilization that regards consensus as victory, rather than domination, must be in decline.
This is precisely backwards.
Europe’s “decay,” as he calls it, is the result of something he cannot fathom: Europe deliberately abandoned the politics of size—and began the politics of rights.
It is the only continent in history that studied its own horrors and said, with conviction: never again, not as ritual, but as design.
To a man who believes size grants authority, the survival of Belgium, Estonia, Luxembourg, and Slovenia must seem like a cosmic mistake. Small nations are supposed to be crushed for sport, not welcomed as equals. Yet modern Europe was built on the idea that smallness has dignity, and that dignity outweighs tanks.
For Trump, this is decay.
For the rest of us, it is civilization.
‘Size Will Win’ — The Most Dangerous Bad Idea
Let us take his second claim at face value: “size will win” in Ukraine. There is a reason this statement chills anyone who has opened a history book beyond the table of contents. It is because the belief that size alone guarantees victory was last held earnestly by European generals in 1914, who believed that the ability to mobilize and move millions of soldiers quickly by train would ensure a swift victory. The rail schedule, they thought, was the secret weapon of the modern age. If you could organize mass faster, you would overwhelm any nation that stood in your way.
This idea led directly to the mass carnage of World War I, when enormous armies collided at unprecedented speed, only to become trapped in trenches, slaughtered by machine guns, and ground into mud. Size did not win.
Size produced graveyards.
This is not an obscure lesson. It is the first page of Europe’s modern memory.
The most destructive war in human history was launched by men whose worldview Trump now repeats: big wins, small yields, mass conquers, the rest is detail.
Putin believed size would win in Ukraine, too.
He was wrong.
Not because Ukrainians are larger, but because 21st-century warfare is not a test of raw mass. It is a system conflict—involving finance, technology, intelligence, networks, and alliances. Drones outrun divisions. Sanctions paralyze factories. Satellites outperform spies. International institutions constrain supply chains. A hundred small levers outweigh a single large hammer.
The world outgrew the cult of size, because size proved lethal—and inefficient. Yet here stands an American president reviving the same logic as if the last hundred years never happened.
Europe’s Cure, Trump’s Complaint
Trump sees Europe as decaying because it stopped behaving like Trump.
Europe rejected:
Annexation as statecraft,
Ethnic destiny as diplomacy,
Force as identity,
And the idea that small nations should kneel before large ones.
This was not accidental.
It was intentional self-reconstruction:
NATO says size must not decide sovereignty.
The EU says power must share the table.
The Court of Human Rights says the individual is not an afterthought.
The Schengen agreement says borders are bridges, not trophies.
These are artifacts of a civilization that corrected itself and survived.
Trump reads this as decay precisely because it is maturity. His worldview continues to treat the world as a contest of bodies: the larger army, the louder nation, the bigger map.
Europe buried that idea under marble and grass.
The King Without a Kingdom
Trump is a king without a kingdom—a man who worships the symbols of monarchy without possessing any of its responsibilities. He wants war to be a sport, peace to be an intermission, and treaties to be theater. The small people and small nations in his path are not obstacles; they are inconveniences.
In his rhetoric:
Ukraine is small,
The Baltic states are tiny,
Moldova is microscopic…
So, they are not actors in history.
They are objects to be settled by the large.
Trump's obliviousness to the longer themes of history explains the seamlessness of his admiration for Vladimir Putin: both men believe history is an arena in which size legitimizes violence.
They differ only in style.
One sits shirtless on a horse, the other sits looking pained in a courtroom sketch.
But their worldview is the same: they see smallness as permission.
Europe’s modernity is the rejection of that doctrine.
The Penny and the Nation
In a different context, Trump argues the smallest units do not matter: the penny is meaningless; eliminate it. The point is neither the minting cost nor the rounding algorithm. The point is that smallness does not count unless it serves the large. It is an impulse that extends outward:
One penny,
One vote,
One journalist,
One dissenter,
)ne refugee,
One nation.
To him, value scales upward, not inward.
But the entire architecture of modern Europe rests on the opposite conviction: the small must be defended against the large—precisely because they are small.
This inclusiveness is not a sentimental project. It is a hard lesson, purchased in blood.
Two Visions of the World
There are now, in plain view, two visions for the 21st century:
The Trump–Putin worldview:
Size wins,
Small yields,
Conquest is destiny,
Rights are ornamental,
Peace is weakness.
The European worldview:
Legitimacy, not mass,
Sovereignty, not acreage,
Treaties, not trophies,
Law, not appetite.
When Trump says Europe is decaying, he means Europe has abandoned the worldview he admires.
When he says, “size will win,” he means: the future belongs to the large, so the small should accept their fate.
But Europe’s entire post-war argument is that the small are entitled to survive.
That is the core civilizational disagreement.
A Living Civilization vs. a Dead Idea
Trump’s rhetoric does not describe Europe; it describes a Europe that no longer exists.
The Europe he praises:
Died at Verdun,
Drowned in the Somme,
Froze at Stalingrad,
And bled itself into the soil from Ypres to Kursk.
Mass was not victory. Mass was a coffin.
Europe’s “decay” is simply its refusal to repeat its own funeral.
So, when a modern president invokes the logic that produced Europe’s darkest century, Europeans do not hear strength; they hear a ghost offering advice from its grave.
Closing
Perhaps Europe is decaying. But that statement begs the question:
Decaying into what?
A continent where sovereignty is not awarded by artillery,
where small nations do not exist at the mercy of large ones,
where peace is built by negotiation rather than expansion,
where law restrains ambition,
and where the future is not weighed in body counts.
If that is decay, then let civilization decay.
Let it rot into the kind of world where size is not destiny, and every nation, no matter how small on the map, is large enough to deserve survival.
Because it was Europe’s maturation, not its decline, that ended the age when a general could point to the world and declare: “Big wins.”
The world learned the cost of that idea.
Donald Trump has not.
~Dunneagin
PS If you enjoyed this chapter of our national chaos chronicles, you’ll love the eBooks — a curated archive of America’s ongoing attempt to govern itself while on fire.
Collected volumes are available on Kindle (Trump’s Big Top: How Politics Became a 3-Ring Circus) and Gumroad (The Liar’s Guide to Autocracy & Mr. Dunneagin Speaks, Vol. 2).
F.P. Dunneagin
F.P. Dunneagin
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