Europe is in steady decline, while the U.S. outpaces the EU across a broad range of metrics.Recent reports claim that Mississippi, the poorest U.S. state, now has a higher GDP per capita than the United Kingdom and all but one European country. But the problem extends far beyond Britain, as Europe as a whole is failing across numerous measures, not just GDP per capita.Europe once produced world-changing ideas and philosophies while building dominant empires, including Rome and Britain, that controlled much of the known world. The British pound sterling was once the world’s leading currency, while French was the language of international diplomacy.Today, Europe trails the United States in economic, military, and diplomatic power. It also lags in currency strength, competitiveness, birth rates, GDP growth, labor productivity, post-pandemic economic performance, market capitalization, leading global technology firms, artificial intelligence investment, industrial production, energy, and labor costs.And good luck trying to use French instead of English as a lingua franca in Asia, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Oceania, or virtually anywhere outside Francophone Africa. You’ll get about as far as you would trying to use euros instead of dollars, and you could starve to death in most of the world if all you had were British pounds.The data reveals a continent that has become a hollow shell of its former self.The EU’s population is 452.0 million, while the U.S. population is only 342.3 million, and yet the U.S. produces more. Since 2008, EU GDP has grown by just 13.5% in dollar terms, rising from $16.37 trillion to $18.59 trillion. By comparison, U.S. GDP grew by 87%, from $14.77 trillion to $27.72 trillion. As a result, EU GDP fell from 110% of U.S. GDP in 2008 to 67% in 2023. IMF projections for 2026 place U.S. nominal GDP at $32.38 trillion, compared with $23.04 trillion for the EU, a $9.35 trillion gap.According to World Bank current-dollar GDP-per-capita figures for 2024, the United States recorded $85,810, compared with $44,109 in Germany, $39,441 in France, $47,265 in the United Kingdom, and $40,226 in Italy. As of 2026, U.S. GDP per capita is about 85% higher than the EU average. Overall, EU GDP per capita fell from 76.5% of the U.S. level in 2008 to 50% in 2023.Between 2015 and 2024, U.S. real GDP growth averaged 2.5% annually against 1.7% in Europe, and U.S. labor productivity growth of 1.3% per year outpaced Europe’s 0.7%. By 2024, U.S. real GDP stood approximately 24% above its three-decade pre-pandemic trend, while eurozone output remained 20% below trend. The Draghi report on EU competitiveness attributes the gap to productivity, noting that only 4 of the world’s 50 largest technology firms are based in Europe.Germany’s manufacturing sector shows a similar pattern. Industrial production in Germany sits around 10% below its 2018 peak, with a fourth consecutive year of decline in 2025. Unit labor costs in German industry run 22% above the average of comparable countries, and electricity prices in Europe are roughly two and a half times those in the U.S. or China.Industrial electricity in Germany costs approximately $0.29 per kilowatt-hour, compared with $0.09 in the United States and $0.12 in China. Volkswagen is closing three plants, citing production costs for electric vehicles in Germany running 40% higher than in China, with 35,000 positions to be cut by 2030. ThyssenKrupp faces insolvency, and BASF has shifted investment toward China. Germany’s GDP fell 0.2% in 2024, following a 0.3% decline in 2023.Nvidia’s market capitalization surpassed $4 trillion in 2025, exceeding the combined value of every listed company on the UK stock market according to LSEG data. Deutsche Bank data places Nvidia’s market cap above the combined stock market capitalizations of Britain, France, and Germany.Population-weighted fertility rate data from the UN World Population Prospects 2024 Revision places Europe at 1.4 children per woman, against 1.7 for both Asia and the Americas, 2.1 for Oceania, and 4.0 for Africa. At the continent level, Europe has the lowest fertility rate of any continent.On competitiveness in AI, chips, rockets, drones, and robotics, Europe lags the U.S. and China in AI company formation, with the U.S. dominating private investment and China leading in open model deployment, according to the State of AI Report 2025. The EU’s own reporting on its 3% R&D target shows spending stagnant at 2.2% of GDP in 2024, against 3.6% in the U.S. ASML, based in the Netherlands, holds a global monopoly in extreme ultraviolet lithography equipment used to manufacture advanced chips.On rockets, the European Space Agency operates the Ariane 6 launch vehicle through Arianespace, though the rocket is fully expendable and Europe is not expected to have reusable launch capability comparable to SpaceX until the 2030s.Military power: The United States spent $954 billion on defense in 2025, more than double the $430.4 billion spent by all 27 EU member states combined, according to SIPRI and the European Defence Agency.Despite years of war on the continent, Europe has relied on U.S. weapons, munitions, and intelligence to sustain Ukraine’s defense against Russia, falling far short of its own pledge to produce one million 155mm artillery shells for Ukraine, delivering roughly half the promised total and reaching only about a third of its claimed annual production capacity. The reliance reflects a European defense-industrial base fragmented across 27 separate national procurement systems, compared to a unified U.S. military that operates 11 aircraft carriers, more than China, the UK, France, India, Spain, and Italy combined, and a nuclear triad, capabilities no European country or combination of countries fields independently.Currency strength: The U.S. dollar held 56.92% of global central bank reserves in the third quarter of 2025, more than double the euro’s 20.33% share, according to IMF COFER data. The British pound holds under 5% of reserves, and zero independent sovereign nations peg their currency to it today. The last members of the “Sterling Area” abandoned their pound pegs in 1972, and the only territories using sterling at par now are British Overseas Territories and Crown Dependencies such as Gibraltar and the Falklands, not independent countries.Six sovereign nations outside the U.S., Ecuador, El Salvador, Panama, Timor-Leste, Zimbabwe, and the Marshall Islands, use the dollar as legal tender, with the dollar serving as official or co-official currency in 17 countries and territories total. No European currency, including the euro, has been adopted as legal tender by any sovereign nation outside Europe.The U.S. dollar is the dominant exchange rate anchor for 19.2% of IMF member countries, while the euro anchors 12.9%. But the composition differs sharply: 14 of the roughly 25 euro-anchored countries are the CFA franc zone states of West and Central Africa, a currency system created by France in 1945 that requires member states to guarantee convertibility through the French Treasury and, until 2020, required them to hold half their foreign reserves in France. Critics, including the Ivory Coast’s own former finance minister, have called the arrangement a colonial relic that African nations have historically been unable to unilaterally exit without financial disruption.Dollar-anchored countries, by contrast, include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, Gulf states with no colonial or historical tie to the U.S. that adopted the dollar peg by independent economic choice.Dollar invoicing accounts for at least three-fourths of export invoicing in every world region except Europe, and over 96% in the Americas, according to Federal Reserve Governor Christopher Waller. Even within Europe, the euro’s own invoicing share is only about 50% once intra-euro-area trade is excluded.Language dominance: English holds official-language status in 67 sovereign countries, and Ethnologue counts English as spoken in 186 countries total as an established language or by a substantial population, more than any other language on earth. French is an official language in 29 sovereign countries, and 65% of French speakers live in Sub-Saharan Africa.English is a mandatory subject in national education policy in 142 countries worldwide, with a further 41 countries offering it as an elective, according to the University of Winnipeg’s Global English Education Policy project. No comparable global count exists for French as a compulsory subject.Nearly every metric of national power, economic, military, monetary, linguistic, and demographic, now favors the United States over Europe by a wide and often widening margin. A continent that once ruled empires and set the terms of global commerce and diplomacy has become, by the numbers, a secondary power trailing its former colony.The post Data-Driven Proof That Europe Is a Hollow Shell of Its Former Self appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.