Victor Davis Hanson does a good job of describing how we should respond to the EU in the future: dial down the rhetoric, wish them well, all the while severing our ties to them. On every major issue in recent years—going back decades, really—we’ve differed with them. We’ve also been subsidizing their defense and providing them a perch from which to snipe at us.

Rather than wishing them ill, we should disentangle ourselves from them and allow them to stand on their own two feet, and live with the consequences of their decisions:

The United States should ignore all this ankle-biting, praise the EU to the skies, but not take very seriously their views on the world until we learn exactly what is going on inside Europe during these years of its uncertainty. America is watching enormous historical forces being unleashed on the continent from its own depopulation, new anti-Semitism, and rising Islamicism to Turkish demands for EU membership and further expansion of the EU into the backwaters of Eastern Europe that will bring it to the doorstep of Russia. Whether its politics and economy will evolve to embrace more personal freedom, its popular culture will integrate its minorities, and its military will step up to protect Western values and visions is unclear. But what is certain is that the U.S. cannot remain a true ally of a militarily weak but shrill Europe should its politics grow even more resentful and neutralist, always nursing old wounds and new conspiracies, amoral in its inability to act, quite ready to preach to those who do.

We keep assuming that Europeans are like Britain and Japan when in fact long ago they devolved more into a Switzerland and Sweden—friendly neutrals but no longer real allies. In the meantime, let us Americans keep much more quiet, wait, and watch—even as we carry a far bigger stick.