After his divorce and being fired from his job, my brother lived with us for a year until I kicked him out because he needed to get his ass back out there. Even today, decades later, he cannot admit this... wiped it from his memory banks.
This is the analogy of old western Europe. They divorced themselves and tried to kill each other. The US funded global order stopped it from happening again. It was US generosity and the US has suffered many ills from it. The Global Order empowered the US military industrial complex, and the globalist expansion made American financial institutions too big to fail. US infrastructure fell behind along with the gutting of industry and manufacturing and the decline of working-class economic opportunity. National debt and state debt skyrocketed. Homelessness increased. Inflation increased. Wages did not keep up. Life expectancy declined. The upper 10% did very well financially, but everyone else in the US suffered comparable downward trends.
But the Europeans were living fat and happy for years. The Marshall plan bailed them out and repaired their cities. They were given almost unfettered access to US consumer markets. They did not need to pay for their own security and national defense. They could afford fat social benefits for their people.
They have been like my brother being taken care of.
Now we are kicking them off the couch and telling them they need to make their own way.
Like my brother they are denying that they ever got any help, and the US is only bullying them.
Clever stories like this are amusing and thought provoking but just stories, little fictions supposed to make us feel justified or right or good. But they are just stories, or rhetoric, if you will. Based on my reading, I doubt that any country has ever done anything out of "generosity" as opposed to self interest...and certainly not my beloved America. And every country lives, for better or worse, with the consequences of its self interest. Many if not most of the stories we tell ourselves in the US, e.g. our "exceptionalism", how we "won the war(s)", how powerful and compassionate we are, & etc. is our homegrown propaganda, our manufactured tales of strength and glory. Anyone who denies these myths are un-American and an enemy (see, e.g. Steven Miller diatribes). And we all of us blame all others, be they individuals or countries for our failures. In the end, we reap what we sow.
I do agree that nations rarely do things that are not in their own self-interest, but not really in this case. In this case it was only the self-interest of American elites to fill their egos and banks accounts exporting American exceptionalism. The majority was screaming for an end to the export of industry, manufacturing and jobs for decades... and it led to the election of Trump.
Globalism has benefitted the top 10% very well, but the bottom 80% have been crapped on. The US-funded post Bretton Woods global order has gone on for 40 year too long. It has made Europeans into entitled brats that have stopped caring for their own long-term national survival. Just look at their response to the Russia invasion of Ukraine. The only supplied rhetoric while buying Russian gas because they killed all their other electrical generating plants including nuclear. They expected the US, again, to pay for and fight the wars that they cause.
I’m not sure globalism has been as detrimental as you suggest. Most people enjoy a higher standard of living today than their counterparts in 1960 (or whenever our supposed golden age was). I’ll grant you many people are nostalgic for a utopia that never was. As for Europe, yes, they need to get their act together. Most of them realized that Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump’s belligerence isn’t justified.
Where do you live? Do you get out to any rust belt communities? Have you been paying attention to the graph of real income for the working class since the globalism project got started?
American working-class real income has experienced long-term stagnation since the 1970s, failing to keep pace with productivity growth, despite a recent, temporary boost for low-wage workers during the 2019-2023 pandemic period (which was mostly the result of Democrat-approved pandemic relief spending that resulted in high inflation). While top-tier earners saw rapid growth, median, and lower-middle-wage workers saw meager gains, leaving real weekly earnings, in many estimates, below their early 1970s peak.
Cheap Chinese crap at Walmart is not the American dream.
Who to blame and what to blame them for??? The first lesson I learned in business school in 1969 was that a corporation's bedrock duty was to "maximize shareholder value". Thus a right thinking business will work to reduce the cost of production by seeking the lowest cost effective workers, be they from nonunion states or, after WWII, overseas. Values, morality, and worker or societal welfare came in a distant consideration, if at all. I still recall how shocked I was at this as a naive 18 year old Catholic boy. This is as true today--see today's layoff announcements in any news source. Meanwhile, beginning around the mid 1960s the same blue collar and middle class workers migrated to the Republican Party for a variety of what they were convinced were good social and moral reasons. The irony was that it was, and still is, the same Republican party funded by the very businesses who'd offshored their production and cut American jobs in the first place. I always thought this was akin to sleeping with the enemy. But then look at all those brave Southern citizen soldiers who died so a handful of cotton plantation owners could keep their cheaper, more efficient slave labor. Maybe this is in fact the real American way: the poorer are here to serve the needs of the rich, just like feudalism, isn't it?
Yes, corporations are simple to understand. They are like dogs that live for food, scratches and play.
Corporations are motivated by profit and shareholder returns. They should never be allowed to pursue those things at the expense of the country or world they live in. That is a government role. The blame goes to past political regimes that made the massive mistake of chasing globalism. Or more exactly, those that failed to end it when it was clear it was gutting out the middle of America while only enriching the top.
We have antitrust laws, but they are both ignored and in need of updating.
The primary culprit at this point is the financial sector. Wall Street and the big banks. They are way too big... command way too much control of the US and even the global economy.
Yes, we should never push this "social capitalism" concept onto corporations. The motivation to pursue profit maximization and shareholder return maximization is an expected and welcome one. The duty to constrain corporate behavior for the good of domestic society is up to the government. Capitalism is not and never was just an excuse for corporations to pursue profit at any cost. Capitalism is an economic-social system that demands domestic labor shares in the returns of domestic capital. We allowed Apple to spend $50 billion per year to train the communist country of China to take over all of our tech manufacturing that we invented and first produced. We did this because Apple wanted maximum profit margins. Today Apple is sitting on a mountain of cash, and the American middle-class has been hammered by China taking over almost every industry and market. That was not only stupid of our past political elite, but it has also been borderline treasonous.
It somewhat does not matter as the great global order is gonzo. All countries know it, they are just delivering theatrical political narratives to calm their constituents.
The rebuilding of Europe represented the self interest of the US. This investment in Western Europe was designed to keep it as a bulwark against communism. So to go to your story, would you have kicked out your brother if , after being kicked out, he would have joined an organization designed to destroy your way of life? The real question is why did the US continue this policy after the fall of communism? The answer is found in the Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The US was now to dominate the world and keeping Europe solidly on the side of the US was part of the project of the American Empire.
BS. The US was isolationist. Did globalism after two world wars done by Eropeans to try and prevent a 3rd Including what the USSR would do. Now the US is going back to being more isolationist because globalism has ended up hurting more than helping. You need to put done the woke chick fake history books.
Compared to their economies is the 20s, 30s and 40s, and then sure, rebuilding while the USSR took off, this is not any point to help your argument. They cannot even hold the EU together.
You should watch this. European countries have known that the global order was ending for several years now. All that WEF Davos chatter and the other EU vs US chatter is political theatrics trying to pin the US with blame for the mistakes made by the leaders of those other countries as they rejected the tough decisions and looted off the US-funded global order.
All these countries are clear that the problem is the commies taking over unless they pull back with a national industrial policy with global trade agreements to replace the global order.
Trump with his international policy related to Iran and Venezuela and immigration is all seen by these leaders of other countries as being exactly what is needed to prevent the commie take over, but they are weak leaders and the commies have invested in a deep state psych ops machine that leverages the global media that influences the useful idiots in Western societies (females and young people generally) to foment social unrest to influence elections of those that are supportive of continuing the US-funded global order (aka Democrats and Republican RINOs).
Yascha, you said that Europe "must simply stand up for its own values on its own continent"—do those values include immiserating their own populations by importing Muslims from the MENA and giving them the vote to beat the "far-right" in the polls, as Spain has just announced? "Far-right" being a slur used against the normies in all western European countries that want immigration stopped and the migrants deported, just as the left in the US calls anyone to the right of Bernie "fascist" and "Nazi"? Ceding all their European values to EU courts on human rights that demand all "refugees" be let in, and international courts that redefine genocide and other war crimes to suit their ideology? Churches are routinely being burned down in Europe while Macron and Starmer allow mass demonstrations by jihadists who are driving their Jewish populations out.
Tell me, please, what are they gaining by this behavior? Whom does this serve? Certqainly not the US.
And instead of accusing the US of "flirting with the Kremlin," the Germans are finally admitting that denuclearizing and becoming totally dependent on Russian oil and gas was really stupid.
Americans value and respect NATO; my sense is they hate the EU with its preaching and preening, overbearing antidemocratic and anticapitalist bureaucracy, and its crippling of the western European states like Italy that want to stop migration.
Would it really be so hard to take a clue from eastern Europe?
There was a recent poll in Germany which showed that eastern Germany is totally AfD while the west is green and CD/SD. Seems like those who remember living under totalitarianism have got it right, and don't like the growing totalitarianism in the west. And a commenter ended with saying how funny it would be if this time around Poland invaded Germany to save them from jihadi communism.
After years of plunder, imposed pro-Western dictatorships, and devastating wars, we have the nerve to claim that Muslims are invading us. First, we burn and impoverish their countries, and then we close our doors to them when they flee hunger, misery, and war.
As if that weren't enough, Ms. Beyer asserts, without any documentary evidence, that churches are routinely burned in Europe while Macron and Starmer allow massive demonstrations by jihadists who expel the Jewish population. It's all completely fabricated and manipulated, whether out of blatant ignorance or pure malice.
The unsettling part of this overdue reset instigated by Trump and his team is that, after shaking the snow globe no one can be sure where all the little pieces will land. Would that intelligent leadership in high places allow us to keep the better values of the post-WWII rules based order for settling our differences, but economic benefit without the concommitant cost that was possible for many under the benign hegemony of a U.S. is over.
"Rules based order"? Seriously? Whose rules? When did I get to vote on them?
The CIA has been running roughshod throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and now the USA itself. The golden rule of politics is, whoever is the most ruthless and unprincipled wins. And, no, it didn't start with Trump.
"Whose rules?" The rules that our leadership, in negotiation with other major powers around the world, agrees to do its best to abide by. And I hope that we find the new version that will come from Trump blowing up the old one robust enough to keep us from resorting to guns and bombs every time we disagree. You won't get to vote on them, but you do get to vote for the people representing you who, at a high enough level, get to vote on them. Pay attention and vote for the best people you can.
Europe needs to engage and settle with Russia. Putin offered the hand of co-operation in 2008 but USA convinced Europe to challenge Russia and so that opportunity was lost.
Europe should wake up for the same reason that long-term, healthy welfare recipients eventually need to wake up and start thinking about how to make a living once the welfare checks stop coming - whether because of budget constraints or other issues.
Europe might also want to stop taking the clownish behavior of the current U.S. president so literally, and stop responding with clownery of its own, such as talking about sending soldiers to Greenland to stop a perceived U.S. invasion.
Europe should further begin thinking seriously about dissolving NATO and replacing it with a different, less expansive and less aggressive security posture. NATO has long outlived not only its usefulness, but even its original purpose, which was to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. The Soviets are gone, the Americans are only reluctantly involved, and the Germans are unified and restrained for now and for the foreseeable future.
NATO was never meant to aggressively expand, encroach on the borders of former adversaries, or serve the parochial interests of its later extensions.
Once these remedies are adopted, Europe may finally start feeling better about itself .
OK, Europe can no longer rely on the USA. Here's question: Why aren't you considering the extent to which the USA has not been able to rely on Europe? Why is it always the USA's fault for not doing enough, as judged by people who aren't doing as much?
This is a fine analysis, but I don’t quite understand the following « the understandable rage that Europeans have towards the Trump administration over his flirtations with the Kremlin, for example, it is still American arms and intelligence reports that are making it possible for Ukraine to keep defending itself against the Russian invasion. » I guess that this is a conciliatory effort at balance.
Among the clearest examples of « flirting » with Putin is Nord Stream 2. Amazingly, Germany underwrote Putin while simultaneously shutting down nuclear power at home. How rational was it to depend on the dictator Putin while sponging off the American taxpayer for defense? WWII was ten years before I was born, and I’m pretty old. Yet, I have no rage against Germany or any EU country. I have wanted them to cough up more for their own defense pretty much my entire life though. It is time to grow up.
There is a smug sense of entitlement among European leaders built around a false narrative that goes something like this. « We are nothing like those warlike Americans. We value our people and prefer to spend our money on the European social model. » This moralizing allows some to justify the underwriting of defense by the same people being denigrated. Generations of Americans have now paid for the European social model. My grandchildren will pay for the piles of debt generated by our government, part of which underwrites the European social model.
The situation is even worse in Canada. Access to the US markets has allowed them to avoid solving their own domestic problems, which are conveniently blamed on the United States. Canada was a rich country on a par with the United States before Justin le petit. Now the people of Canada are poorer per capital than Mississippi. Historically deep antiaméricanismes among the anglophone population lets politicians there blame the US for everything. « Elbows up and by the way, keep paying for our defense. » Of course, the decline of Canada is entirely self-inflicted. Rage should be directed inward, but rage is neither rational nor just.
First, thanks for "museal continent", a new and lovely metaphor for me. I suppose nations are just people too--and who doesn't want to relax and feel protected and safe. Unfortunately, when the Huns or the Nazis, or the armed-and-hungry whomever decide to come over the hill, the impulse and practice to rely on others can be fatal. As the present US administration has amply shown, promises don't always keep, only self reliance and ability does. Plan accordingly.
One problem is that the EU as an entity has little mythology to look back on for guidance in handling problems from outside of the EU. All of its mythology - and I use the term mythology without implying whether it is true or false - seems to be about why and how the union was formed and not the relationship of the EU to today's major powers.
After his divorce and being fired from his job, my brother lived with us for a year until I kicked him out because he needed to get his ass back out there. Even today, decades later, he cannot admit this... wiped it from his memory banks.
This is the analogy of old western Europe. They divorced themselves and tried to kill each other. The US funded global order stopped it from happening again. It was US generosity and the US has suffered many ills from it. The Global Order empowered the US military industrial complex, and the globalist expansion made American financial institutions too big to fail. US infrastructure fell behind along with the gutting of industry and manufacturing and the decline of working-class economic opportunity. National debt and state debt skyrocketed. Homelessness increased. Inflation increased. Wages did not keep up. Life expectancy declined. The upper 10% did very well financially, but everyone else in the US suffered comparable downward trends.
But the Europeans were living fat and happy for years. The Marshall plan bailed them out and repaired their cities. They were given almost unfettered access to US consumer markets. They did not need to pay for their own security and national defense. They could afford fat social benefits for their people.
They have been like my brother being taken care of.
Now we are kicking them off the couch and telling them they need to make their own way.
Like my brother they are denying that they ever got any help, and the US is only bullying them.
Clever stories like this are amusing and thought provoking but just stories, little fictions supposed to make us feel justified or right or good. But they are just stories, or rhetoric, if you will. Based on my reading, I doubt that any country has ever done anything out of "generosity" as opposed to self interest...and certainly not my beloved America. And every country lives, for better or worse, with the consequences of its self interest. Many if not most of the stories we tell ourselves in the US, e.g. our "exceptionalism", how we "won the war(s)", how powerful and compassionate we are, & etc. is our homegrown propaganda, our manufactured tales of strength and glory. Anyone who denies these myths are un-American and an enemy (see, e.g. Steven Miller diatribes). And we all of us blame all others, be they individuals or countries for our failures. In the end, we reap what we sow.
I do agree that nations rarely do things that are not in their own self-interest, but not really in this case. In this case it was only the self-interest of American elites to fill their egos and banks accounts exporting American exceptionalism. The majority was screaming for an end to the export of industry, manufacturing and jobs for decades... and it led to the election of Trump.
Globalism has benefitted the top 10% very well, but the bottom 80% have been crapped on. The US-funded post Bretton Woods global order has gone on for 40 year too long. It has made Europeans into entitled brats that have stopped caring for their own long-term national survival. Just look at their response to the Russia invasion of Ukraine. The only supplied rhetoric while buying Russian gas because they killed all their other electrical generating plants including nuclear. They expected the US, again, to pay for and fight the wars that they cause.
I’m not sure globalism has been as detrimental as you suggest. Most people enjoy a higher standard of living today than their counterparts in 1960 (or whenever our supposed golden age was). I’ll grant you many people are nostalgic for a utopia that never was. As for Europe, yes, they need to get their act together. Most of them realized that Russia invaded Ukraine, Trump’s belligerence isn’t justified.
Where do you live? Do you get out to any rust belt communities? Have you been paying attention to the graph of real income for the working class since the globalism project got started?
American working-class real income has experienced long-term stagnation since the 1970s, failing to keep pace with productivity growth, despite a recent, temporary boost for low-wage workers during the 2019-2023 pandemic period (which was mostly the result of Democrat-approved pandemic relief spending that resulted in high inflation). While top-tier earners saw rapid growth, median, and lower-middle-wage workers saw meager gains, leaving real weekly earnings, in many estimates, below their early 1970s peak.
Cheap Chinese crap at Walmart is not the American dream.
Who to blame and what to blame them for??? The first lesson I learned in business school in 1969 was that a corporation's bedrock duty was to "maximize shareholder value". Thus a right thinking business will work to reduce the cost of production by seeking the lowest cost effective workers, be they from nonunion states or, after WWII, overseas. Values, morality, and worker or societal welfare came in a distant consideration, if at all. I still recall how shocked I was at this as a naive 18 year old Catholic boy. This is as true today--see today's layoff announcements in any news source. Meanwhile, beginning around the mid 1960s the same blue collar and middle class workers migrated to the Republican Party for a variety of what they were convinced were good social and moral reasons. The irony was that it was, and still is, the same Republican party funded by the very businesses who'd offshored their production and cut American jobs in the first place. I always thought this was akin to sleeping with the enemy. But then look at all those brave Southern citizen soldiers who died so a handful of cotton plantation owners could keep their cheaper, more efficient slave labor. Maybe this is in fact the real American way: the poorer are here to serve the needs of the rich, just like feudalism, isn't it?
Yes, corporations are simple to understand. They are like dogs that live for food, scratches and play.
Corporations are motivated by profit and shareholder returns. They should never be allowed to pursue those things at the expense of the country or world they live in. That is a government role. The blame goes to past political regimes that made the massive mistake of chasing globalism. Or more exactly, those that failed to end it when it was clear it was gutting out the middle of America while only enriching the top.
We have antitrust laws, but they are both ignored and in need of updating.
The primary culprit at this point is the financial sector. Wall Street and the big banks. They are way too big... command way too much control of the US and even the global economy.
Yes, we should never push this "social capitalism" concept onto corporations. The motivation to pursue profit maximization and shareholder return maximization is an expected and welcome one. The duty to constrain corporate behavior for the good of domestic society is up to the government. Capitalism is not and never was just an excuse for corporations to pursue profit at any cost. Capitalism is an economic-social system that demands domestic labor shares in the returns of domestic capital. We allowed Apple to spend $50 billion per year to train the communist country of China to take over all of our tech manufacturing that we invented and first produced. We did this because Apple wanted maximum profit margins. Today Apple is sitting on a mountain of cash, and the American middle-class has been hammered by China taking over almost every industry and market. That was not only stupid of our past political elite, but it has also been borderline treasonous.
I’m basing it on https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
It somewhat does not matter as the great global order is gonzo. All countries know it, they are just delivering theatrical political narratives to calm their constituents.
Amen.
The rebuilding of Europe represented the self interest of the US. This investment in Western Europe was designed to keep it as a bulwark against communism. So to go to your story, would you have kicked out your brother if , after being kicked out, he would have joined an organization designed to destroy your way of life? The real question is why did the US continue this policy after the fall of communism? The answer is found in the Grand Chessboard by Zbigniew Brzezinski. The US was now to dominate the world and keeping Europe solidly on the side of the US was part of the project of the American Empire.
BS. The US was isolationist. Did globalism after two world wars done by Eropeans to try and prevent a 3rd Including what the USSR would do. Now the US is going back to being more isolationist because globalism has ended up hurting more than helping. You need to put done the woke chick fake history books.
the marshall plan broke britan, they were still paying it off up to a decade ago
About the inanest comment I have read today. "The Marshall Plan broke Britian". LOL,
You might try some history to understand what Britian looked like before the Marshall plan.
and what it was like afterwards, the 50s and the 60s were not great times in britan
Compared to their economies is the 20s, 30s and 40s, and then sure, rebuilding while the USSR took off, this is not any point to help your argument. They cannot even hold the EU together.
with help from russia and right wing america they left the eu, at a cost of 5% of its economy
You should watch this. European countries have known that the global order was ending for several years now. All that WEF Davos chatter and the other EU vs US chatter is political theatrics trying to pin the US with blame for the mistakes made by the leaders of those other countries as they rejected the tough decisions and looted off the US-funded global order.
All these countries are clear that the problem is the commies taking over unless they pull back with a national industrial policy with global trade agreements to replace the global order.
Trump with his international policy related to Iran and Venezuela and immigration is all seen by these leaders of other countries as being exactly what is needed to prevent the commie take over, but they are weak leaders and the commies have invested in a deep state psych ops machine that leverages the global media that influences the useful idiots in Western societies (females and young people generally) to foment social unrest to influence elections of those that are supportive of continuing the US-funded global order (aka Democrats and Republican RINOs).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbN-AhFoN6M
Yascha, you said that Europe "must simply stand up for its own values on its own continent"—do those values include immiserating their own populations by importing Muslims from the MENA and giving them the vote to beat the "far-right" in the polls, as Spain has just announced? "Far-right" being a slur used against the normies in all western European countries that want immigration stopped and the migrants deported, just as the left in the US calls anyone to the right of Bernie "fascist" and "Nazi"? Ceding all their European values to EU courts on human rights that demand all "refugees" be let in, and international courts that redefine genocide and other war crimes to suit their ideology? Churches are routinely being burned down in Europe while Macron and Starmer allow mass demonstrations by jihadists who are driving their Jewish populations out.
Tell me, please, what are they gaining by this behavior? Whom does this serve? Certqainly not the US.
And instead of accusing the US of "flirting with the Kremlin," the Germans are finally admitting that denuclearizing and becoming totally dependent on Russian oil and gas was really stupid.
Americans value and respect NATO; my sense is they hate the EU with its preaching and preening, overbearing antidemocratic and anticapitalist bureaucracy, and its crippling of the western European states like Italy that want to stop migration.
Would it really be so hard to take a clue from eastern Europe?
There was a recent poll in Germany which showed that eastern Germany is totally AfD while the west is green and CD/SD. Seems like those who remember living under totalitarianism have got it right, and don't like the growing totalitarianism in the west. And a commenter ended with saying how funny it would be if this time around Poland invaded Germany to save them from jihadi communism.
After years of plunder, imposed pro-Western dictatorships, and devastating wars, we have the nerve to claim that Muslims are invading us. First, we burn and impoverish their countries, and then we close our doors to them when they flee hunger, misery, and war.
As if that weren't enough, Ms. Beyer asserts, without any documentary evidence, that churches are routinely burned in Europe while Macron and Starmer allow massive demonstrations by jihadists who expel the Jewish population. It's all completely fabricated and manipulated, whether out of blatant ignorance or pure malice.
How can anyone discuss Europe taking control of its destiny without addressing the elephant in the room—Muslim immigration?
The unsettling part of this overdue reset instigated by Trump and his team is that, after shaking the snow globe no one can be sure where all the little pieces will land. Would that intelligent leadership in high places allow us to keep the better values of the post-WWII rules based order for settling our differences, but economic benefit without the concommitant cost that was possible for many under the benign hegemony of a U.S. is over.
"Rules based order"? Seriously? Whose rules? When did I get to vote on them?
The CIA has been running roughshod throughout Europe, Africa, the Middle East, South America, and now the USA itself. The golden rule of politics is, whoever is the most ruthless and unprincipled wins. And, no, it didn't start with Trump.
"Whose rules?" The rules that our leadership, in negotiation with other major powers around the world, agrees to do its best to abide by. And I hope that we find the new version that will come from Trump blowing up the old one robust enough to keep us from resorting to guns and bombs every time we disagree. You won't get to vote on them, but you do get to vote for the people representing you who, at a high enough level, get to vote on them. Pay attention and vote for the best people you can.
You're right, I get to vote for the person who will make international agreements. I voted for Trump. He's doing what I voted for him to do.
Europe needs to engage and settle with Russia. Putin offered the hand of co-operation in 2008 but USA convinced Europe to challenge Russia and so that opportunity was lost.
Europe should wake up for the same reason that long-term, healthy welfare recipients eventually need to wake up and start thinking about how to make a living once the welfare checks stop coming - whether because of budget constraints or other issues.
Europe might also want to stop taking the clownish behavior of the current U.S. president so literally, and stop responding with clownery of its own, such as talking about sending soldiers to Greenland to stop a perceived U.S. invasion.
Europe should further begin thinking seriously about dissolving NATO and replacing it with a different, less expansive and less aggressive security posture. NATO has long outlived not only its usefulness, but even its original purpose, which was to keep the Soviets out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. The Soviets are gone, the Americans are only reluctantly involved, and the Germans are unified and restrained for now and for the foreseeable future.
NATO was never meant to aggressively expand, encroach on the borders of former adversaries, or serve the parochial interests of its later extensions.
Once these remedies are adopted, Europe may finally start feeling better about itself .
OK, Europe can no longer rely on the USA. Here's question: Why aren't you considering the extent to which the USA has not been able to rely on Europe? Why is it always the USA's fault for not doing enough, as judged by people who aren't doing as much?
https://captainfransentim.substack.com/p/europe-must-wake-up-internal-fracture?r=5jmmex&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/captainfransentim/p/the-war-is-no-longer-coming-it-is?r=5jmmex&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://open.substack.com/pub/cashflowcollective/p/marco-rubios-valentines-day-address
https://open.substack.com/pub/captainfransentim/p/orban-is-not-dissent-he-is-structural?r=5jmmex&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
This is a fine analysis, but I don’t quite understand the following « the understandable rage that Europeans have towards the Trump administration over his flirtations with the Kremlin, for example, it is still American arms and intelligence reports that are making it possible for Ukraine to keep defending itself against the Russian invasion. » I guess that this is a conciliatory effort at balance.
Among the clearest examples of « flirting » with Putin is Nord Stream 2. Amazingly, Germany underwrote Putin while simultaneously shutting down nuclear power at home. How rational was it to depend on the dictator Putin while sponging off the American taxpayer for defense? WWII was ten years before I was born, and I’m pretty old. Yet, I have no rage against Germany or any EU country. I have wanted them to cough up more for their own defense pretty much my entire life though. It is time to grow up.
There is a smug sense of entitlement among European leaders built around a false narrative that goes something like this. « We are nothing like those warlike Americans. We value our people and prefer to spend our money on the European social model. » This moralizing allows some to justify the underwriting of defense by the same people being denigrated. Generations of Americans have now paid for the European social model. My grandchildren will pay for the piles of debt generated by our government, part of which underwrites the European social model.
The situation is even worse in Canada. Access to the US markets has allowed them to avoid solving their own domestic problems, which are conveniently blamed on the United States. Canada was a rich country on a par with the United States before Justin le petit. Now the people of Canada are poorer per capital than Mississippi. Historically deep antiaméricanismes among the anglophone population lets politicians there blame the US for everything. « Elbows up and by the way, keep paying for our defense. » Of course, the decline of Canada is entirely self-inflicted. Rage should be directed inward, but rage is neither rational nor just.
First, thanks for "museal continent", a new and lovely metaphor for me. I suppose nations are just people too--and who doesn't want to relax and feel protected and safe. Unfortunately, when the Huns or the Nazis, or the armed-and-hungry whomever decide to come over the hill, the impulse and practice to rely on others can be fatal. As the present US administration has amply shown, promises don't always keep, only self reliance and ability does. Plan accordingly.
One problem is that the EU as an entity has little mythology to look back on for guidance in handling problems from outside of the EU. All of its mythology - and I use the term mythology without implying whether it is true or false - seems to be about why and how the union was formed and not the relationship of the EU to today's major powers.