The best Europe in history is facing some of its greatest challenges ever. They will test the sustainability, effectiveness and relevance of the European Union and its related institutions that helped end centuries of conflict.

Despite all the focus on this week's European parliamentary elections – the most closely watched and most widely reported in their four-decade run – this vote shouldn't distract anyone from the more existential questions facing Europe.

The dangers are deep and fall under three, broad categories: consistently slow economic growth, declining global relevance and unimaginative political leadership.

The good news is that European leaders and citizens can address all three, and European parliamentary elections might even help more than they hurt by creating a more democratically dynamic and truly European body that is closer to its constituents.

The bad news is that most European leaders and citizens continue to live in denial, insufficiently aware of the fragility of their historic accomplishments and inadequately motivated to make the decisions that could build on the past 74 years of European peace and progress.

Even worse, few in the Trump administration – least of all President Donald Trump himself – are willing to say loudly and publicly that today's Europe is one of the greatest foreign policy accomplishments in American history, achieved at a considerable cost of blood and treasure through two world wars and a Cold War that followed.

Fast-forward to today. The stakes have rarely been greater for U.S.-European relations as we enter a new and intensifying period of major power competition, pitting democracies and open societies against autocratic rivals.

We confront a historic inflection point as significant as 1919, 1945 and 1989, and just as then Europe is at the center of a global contest and the United States remains a crucial actor in how that unfolds. Whatever challenges the West faces in the 21st century – ideological, economic, technological and geopolitical – all are playing out again in full force on the European continent.

As the financier George Soros has argued, "Europe is sleepwalking into oblivion, and the people of Europe need to wake up before it is too late. If they don't, the European Union will go the way of the Soviet Union in 1991. Neither our leaders nor ordinary citizens seem to understand we are experiencing a revolutionary moment, that the range of possibilities is very broad, and that the eventual outcome is thus highly uncertain."

Share that warning with most Eurocrats in Brussels or officials in European capitals, and they'll roll their eyes. They'll remind you that critics – and particularly Americans – have been underestimating the European Union since its beginning and should drop outdated, apocalyptic thinking about their future.

I share the view that this European project, at age 74, is more robust and resilient than doomsayers recognize. Indeed, even as many worry that Eurosceptic and nationalist parties will surge in this weekend's elections, far-right populist parties, except in the UK, have shifted away from seeking a way out of the European Union to wanting to change it from within.

This vote is perhaps the most truly European in the European Union's history, with ideological battle lines being drawn across national borders. The result is likely to be a more factionalized European parliament with more pronounced disputes. However, it at the same time will be a more democratically dynamic, political and pan-European parliament, one that more closely reflects the preferences of national electorates and thus might increase confidence in the EU.

That, however, will only happen if they and national political leaders address the three broad issues listed above.