Europe faces global-health shift after 2025, says new study

Scott L Greer’s open-access article in the European Journal of Public Health takes Leonard Cohen’s line, “You aren't going to like what comes after America,” and turns it into a warning about Europe’s place in global health after 2025. PubMed lists the paper under PMID 42281495 and identifies Greer as the author from a School of Public Health.

Oxford Academic marks the article open access, and its preview says the paper opens with Cohen’s line from the satirical poem “What Is Coming” in Flowers for Hitler. The preview frames the piece as “Europe and global health after 2025,” putting the question of what follows U.S. dominance at the center of the argument.

The paper is already circulating beyond the journal page. Science cited Greer’s article in 2026 in a piece about leaving the WHO, and the International Health Policies newsletter included it in a June 19, 2026 roundup of mid-June global-health developments. That path matters because the WHO is one of the institutions most exposed to any shift in U.S. participation, financing, and agenda-setting, and Greer’s title suggests Europe will have to reckon with that change directly.

The title also lands in a long pop-culture shadow over Canada. “Blame Canada,” the South Park song tied to the 1999 film South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut, treated Canada as a punch line for American anxiety. In June 2023, Marc Shaiman rewrote the song in response to Canadian wildfire smoke, showing how the joke keeps resurfacing even as Greer’s paper points to a far less comic question: how Europe organizes global health if the United States is no longer the assumed center of gravity.