All I can say as an American is that the Europeans did it to themselves. They have not been strategically serious countries for almost a century and have not had to compete with the rest of the world as a de facto US protectorate. Now they are discovering the consequences of spending 40% of their GDP on social programs.
This criticism may be correct on its own, but I would say it still unbalanced because it leaves out some relevant things. America has a lot of debt and a lot of spending on social programs as well. There is debt everywhere - the federal government, states, cities, companies, and people. This will become a problem soon. It is propped up by the reserve currency status of the Dollar but that may go away before the end of this century or a lot sooner.
Calling Europe a de facto US protectorate is also ignoring the fact that the US has a geographical advantage of being relatively separated from hostile world powers, which let it avoid most of the effects of the world wars - and that’s really pretty recent in historical terms. Is that really something America gets credit for, or is it just luck?
Finally, the US had benefited a lot from immigration but the most vocal American voices that attack Europe seem to ignore this reality, and are also clamoring for a shutdown of programs like F1, H1B, etc. - despite half the biggest American companies being founded by immigrants or their children. If you glimpse into the future, is America any more “strategically serious” than Europe? Or is it just another has been that turns to racism and isolationism to deal with its problems?
America has guns and is willing to use them which is really the only thing that matters. The issue with Europe is that they were idealistic enough to actually buy the whole 'rules' based foreign order nonsense while savvy people realized that rules and firepower mean the same thing to the guy holding the gun.
