The Thing About Europe

Very few people I know have been optimistic about Europe lately.

And I get it. I’ve written plenty about the mess that is the European battery supply chain. I’ve lived the frustration firsthand, working with startups and manufacturers trying to build things here. It’s slow. It’s bureaucratic. It’s expensive.

But I never lost faith in Europe.

Because when you’ve seen what’s happening in Russia. When you’ve worked in Turkey. When you’ve travelled across the Middle East. And when you read about the creeping madness in the US...

You start to get this feeling.

An eerie, quiet realization:

Europe — with all its red tape, high energy prices, and manufacturing struggles — might just be the last free place on Earth.

Last week, The Economist had put it to words perfectly, in its article “The thing about Europe: it’s the actual land of the free now. Europe’s very real problems don’t look so bad by comparison.”

Is that enough? No. Europe needs to fix its industrial policy. It needs to build stuff again. Batteries. EVs. Other stuff.

As the old joke goes, Americans, when asked about where they would like to spend their retirement, tend to mention the French countryside. Europeans, when asked the same question, haven’t been caught naming the plains of Texas as their preferred retirement place.

Have a read. And don’t discard Europe just yet.