NeverTrump European Scolds President Trump But Uncle Sam is no longer a patsy. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/nevertrump-european-scolds-president-trump/
Last week the Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the erstwhile Prime Minister of Denmark, Nato Secretary General, and fervent supporter of the “rules based international order,” to which Rasmussen has “dedicated much of [his] life,” and that functions as a globalist, antinationalist foreign policy talisman that for decades U.S. taxpayers have financed.
Having returned to the White House, Trump is once again challenging that order with his America first policies and impatience with our allies’ refusal to share the cost of being the “world’s policeman.” Rasmussen fears Trump has “gone rogue” and “no longer exercises his authority over geopolitical gangsters, or becomes abusive toward the world’s most steadfast rule followers” ––by which he means Europeans, especially the Nato nations.
In other words, stale NeverTrump clichés we’ve been hearing since 2016––and much longer when targets were conservative Republicans who challenged “we are the world” globalism. But what it’s really all about is a simple principle of that order: “Let you Yanks and the bad guy fight––and you pick up the bill.” Now Europeans are miffed because we again have a president who first looks to his own countrymen and their interests ahead of those of international oligarchs, plutocrats, and cognitive elites who malign the U.S. and its citizens who don’t get in line with the globalist program, as the Democrats have.
Another bad NeverTrump habit Rasmussen indulges was identified by commentator Salena Zito in 2016: When Trump uses his trademark hyperbolic bluster, the press and the Dems “take him literally but not seriously,” whereas his supporters “take him seriously but not literally.” They understand that such exaggerations, insults, and bravado are tools for getting international attention, gaining leverage, and creating uncertainty in our adversaries, which often include our nominal allies.
Rasmussen should know this, since his verb “abuse” no doubt refers to Trump’s confronting the Nato nations in both his terms, calling out some of the richest nations in the world for not meeting the 2014 requirement to spend a measly 2% of GDP on defense. More shameful, those nations that do honor that rule, such as Greece, Poland and the Baltic states, have much lower GDPs than the skinflints like Germany––which is the third largest economy in the world, whereas Greece’s is ranked 52nd. I wonder if Rasmussen finds that fact more shameful than Trump’s tactical straight-talk and lack of vacuous diplo-speak.
Nor is chastising Nato for its serial failure to spend money on defense just a shibboleth of “isolationist” MAGA Europhobes. In 2023 the Washington Post highlighted the gap between the feel-good rhetoric from Nato nations about confronting Putin in Ukraine, and the sober facts of their misplaced spending priorities.
According to the Post, those facts show “that for all its wealth, industrial might and sophistication, the [NATO] bloc remains benumbed, oblivious to its sclerotic arms production incapacity and content to continue outsourcing its mounting security needs to the United States. Together they reflect Europe’s cognitive dissonance on security and should amplify the alarm bells set ringing” by Russia’s invasion. “Yet Europe has left unaddressed the corrosive, longer-term problem of defense industries in most E.U. countries that were left to atrophy after the Soviet Union’s collapse more than three decades ago, and today remain supine.”
So, does Rasmussen think the Nato deadbeats would have even started taking the baby steps that several have to shore up their defenses without Trump’s blunt and caustic prodding, and patently empty threats to quit Nato and refuse to defend Nato nations from attack?
Consider Europe’s reaction to Barack Obama’s efforts in 2009 to convince them to get serious about defense spending. His Defense, Secretary Robert Gates, politely told Nato that it faced “very serious, long-term, systemic problems” that could raise in Europe’s enemies a “temptation to miscalculation and aggression.”
The Daily Telegraph’s Gavin Mortimer continues, “And how did Europe respond to Gates’ warning? In most cases it decreased spending in the decade that followed. Germany’s spending went from 1.35 per cent of GDP in 2010 to 1.20 per cent in 2016, the year Donald Trump was elected president for the first time.
In the same period, France’s spending fell from 1.96 per cent to 1.79 per cent; Britain’s from 2.48 per cent to 2.18 per cent and Italy’s from 1.35 per cent to 1.12 per cent. Overall, Europe’s spending from 2010 to 2016 dropped from 1.63 per cent to 1.45 per cent of GDP.” Seems like Trump’s blunt plain-speak was more effective than diplomatic politesse.
Next comes another failure to understand Trump’s modus operandi. Rasmussen is shocked by Trump’s statement to “expand our territory,” targeting Canada, Greenland, Denmark, and Panama. Nor has Trump not ruled out force to acquire these territories. But given his political bases’ animus against “foreign entanglements” and “endless wars,” I’m betting Trump is highly unlikely to send our troops anywhere. The master of the “art of the deal” believes he doesn’t need force to get what he wants, just negotiations and tough talk.
So far, all these NeverTrump bromides bespeak typical European ressentiment and permanent pique about the great power that Europe own peoples and their descendants––most of them castoffs and low-born peasants–– have created, while the European powers have declined into tourist museums and geopolitical courtiers to uncivilized, nouveau riche upstarts.
Next, to emphasize that it’s Donald Trump, rather than anti-Americanism per se, that disturbs him, Rasmussen praises former presidents, usually for supporting the “rules based international order” that has for decades rationalized Europe’s pitiful levels of defense spending, and free-riding on the U.S. by praising “diplomatic engagement,” multinational institutions, international law, foreign aid, and other nonlethal means of settling conflicts.
George W. Bush, for example, whom most Europeans and Democrats denigrated as a draft-dodging, trigger-happy foreign policy naif, and unsophisticated daddy’s boy who it was falsely claimed had never traveled to Europe. That was all forgotten when W. changed the punitive, mind-concentrating war in Afghanistan into Wilsonian “new world order” democracy promotion, a desideratum of Western “citizens of the world” globalist Davoisie.
Even more dubious is Rasmussen’s praise for Ronald Reagan. Again, like Democrats, to Europeans Reagan was just a bad B actor and corporate shill, a fantasist promoting “Star Wars” missile defense, and a foreign policy “amiable dunce” who dangerously denounced détente with the Soviet Union, used neanderthal phrases like “evil empire,” and announced to the world that the Cold War would end when “we win, and they lose.” I’d be delighted to discover that Rasmussen back then disagreed with his fellow Eurocrats’ scorn and contempt for Reagan.
Rasmussen finishes his reading from the NeverTrump breviary by actually making some sense, at the same time he unwittingly acknowledges the efficacy of Trump’s hyperbolic rhetoric of which he disapproves so much. Given “Trump’s threats against some of America’s closest allies,” Rasmussen writes, and “that Mr. Trump has raised doubts about America’s willingness to fulfill its NATO obligations . . . I see no option other than to ensure we can stand on our own in any situation.”
Exactly. That’s what American voters and foreign policy realists have been saying since Dwight Eisenhower, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander, said in1951 that the main function of the newborn Nato Treaty was “to get Europe back on its military feet,” and warned, “If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in Europe for national defense purposes have not been returned to the United States, then this whole project will have failed.”
American troops, though not in Cold War numbers, are still in Europe, but what’s worse, the richest Nato nations are still not back on their “military feet,” but staying on their military knees. So, Rasmussen’s advice, incited by Trump’s hyperbole, is spot on.
But the elephant in the room that Rasmussen studiously ignores is the Nato nations appear incapable of finding the political will or the funds to get off their military knees and “stand alone.” Moreover, their shortsighted touting of the “rules based international order” after the collapse of the Soviet Union has been Europeans’ specious rationalization for cutting defense spending and weakening military preparedness.
Instead, Europeans have squandered the “peace dividend” that briefly followed the end of the Cold War. This dubious idea, along with feckless American leaders willing to keep subsidizing Europe’s defense, allowed European leaders to expand their bloated welfare states and pursue suicidal “net zero carbon” energy policies, all while demonizing Americans as global outlaws, greedy capitalists, neo-imperialists, and gluttonous squanderers of the earth’s resources.
As a consequence, today’s Nato nations do not have the industrial capability, political will, nor enough citizens willing to serve in the military––all necessary to achieve Rasmussen’s goal. It’s much easier to follow the proverbial tactic that “when all else fails, blame the Americans,” though in this case blaming Trump suits Europe’s and American’s cognitive elites much better.
But they’d better catch on that Trump’s victory in November means that Uncle Sam is no longer a dotty patsy.
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