President Trump recently released his National Security Strategy, the influential document that guides American economic, military, and diplomatic relations with friends and foes alike. Almost immediately, European leaders bristled at its apparent criticism of the continent.
But while the National Security Strategy contains candid critiques of current European policy choices, it is by no means anti-European. Just the opposite. It affirms Europe's strategic and cultural importance to the United States, underscores trans-Atlantic trade as a pillar of American prosperity, and emphasizes the need for a strong Europe to compete with China and other adversaries. The Strategy also calls for helping Europe reverse its trajectory of managed decline.
In short, the National Security Strategy recognizes that strengthening America's prosperity requires making Europe great again. To do so, Congress and the Trump administration will need to press European leaders to embrace the free-market dynamism that has made America the world's richest, most powerful, and most technologically advanced nation -- while rejecting efforts to import Europe's failed policies into the United States.
Europe's approaches to critical sectors provide a cautionary tale for American policymakers flirting with similar approaches.
Take the energy sector, for instance. EU member states have embraced climate alarmists' policy wishlist -- with catastrophic consequences.
Germany, in particular, has closed its nuclear power plants and phased out most of its coal plants, opting instead to rely on intermittent renewable sources. EU industrial consumers now pay roughly €0.19 per kilowatt hour ($0.22/KWh) -- about double the €0.10 paid in 2010.
By contrast, U.S. policymakers have embraced a free-market, all-of-the-above energy strategy. As a result, American industrial consumers pay about $0.0832/KWh, up just 23% from the $0.0677 paid in 2010, and barely a third of what our European peers pay.
Congress can further accelerate energy development, and thus drive down electricity prices, by passing permitting reforms that make it faster and cheaper to break ground on new infrastructure projects. Government policies that enable and incentivize the private sector to produce cheap, abundant energy will set an example for Europeans to follow -- and spark a greater American manufacturing renaissance and economic boom than tariffs or top-down directives ever could.
Europe's approach to the tech industry, meanwhile, is virtually vampiric. In 2024, the EU reportedly earned more money from fining American tech companies than it earned from taxing its own technology firms.
As the Wall Street Journal has noted, Europe's crushing taxes and regulations make it extraordinarily difficult to scale tech startups. There were only 107 privately held European tech companies worth more than $1 billion as of early 2025. And those firms had a collective value of just $333 billion. By contrast, there were 690 such "unicorns" in the United States, with a combined value of $2.5 trillion.
Congress can support and empower the Trump administration's trade negotiators to pressure European partners to end their abuse of American tech firms. And it can reject efforts, at the state and federal level, to similarly hamstring America's leading innovators.
Europe's once-dominant drug industry has fared no better than its energy and tech sectors. As late as the 1970s, European nations developed the majority of new medicines, outpacing America by a two-to-one margin. But as Europe's socialized healthcare systems imposed increasingly stringent price controls, the continent hemorrhaged capital and research talent. In 2024, European companies initiated just 21% of clinical trials globally, down from 44% in 2009.
Yet European policymakers seem unfazed by these losses. They recently finalized their updated General Pharmaceutical Legislation, which weakens intellectual property protections for innovative drugs and thus further disincentivizes research and manufacturing investments.
By contrast, over the past half-century, American policymakers have generally incentivized biotech investments by maintaining a comparatively free-market approach to drug pricing and offering world-leading intellectual property protections.
Congress can spur the continued growth of America's biotech industry -- which supports roughly 8 million jobs, $3 trillion in economic activity, and delivers dozens of lifesaving breakthroughs each year -- by pushing the administration to exert pressure on Europe to improve its pricing and IP policies.
And lawmakers can resist any attempts to import European price controls into the United States under the guise of "Most-Favored-Nation" pricing legislation. Codifying such sweeping statist price controls would gut America's biotech industry, just as they have already gutted Europe's.Consumers, workers, and investors here in America, and across the Atlantic, are counting on Congress to help Europe chart a more prosperous course -- while maintaining the domestic free-market policies that have delivered so much prosperity here at home.
Mr. Burr, a Republican, served as a U.S. senator from North Carolina, 2005-23.
