German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggests to a classroom full of
youngsters that Donald Trump has been rCLhumiliatedrCY by his war in Iran rCo
and the President cancels deployment of the long-range missile systems around which Germany had planned its defense strategy for the coming decades. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S|inchez observes a strict
neutrality on Iran, declaring his countryrCOs bases out of bounds rCo and Trump urges Spain be kicked out of NATO. British Prime Minister Keir
Starmer hesitates to sacrifice his countryrCOs navy in a war on which he wasnrCOt consulted rCo and Trump mocks him in public for a week. No casual observer of the Atlantic alliance in the 18 months since Donald Trump returned to power would believe his White House thinks of Europe as the bedrock of American military and economic security.
But, strangely, it does.
Two factors have combined to make a disaster of the transatlantic relationship. The first is psychiatric. Donald Trump lacks the mental discipline to do what he thinks he is best at: cut deals. The second is world-historic. The Europeans have long been restless. Declaring their independence from an overbearing and arbitrary ally is a project of decadesrCO standing. This is particularly true of those politicians keen
to suck the vitality out of EuroperCOs historic nations in order to build
up a European Union with its capital in Brussels. Right now, the
temporary, tactical danger that Trump poses is driving Europeans toward
the more permanent, strategic danger that Brussels poses.
There is a delusion at the heart of the EU. Its leaders believe that
they played a huge part in saving Western civilization during the Cold
War (which is quite true) and that they did so by constructing the EU
(which is demonstrably false, since the Maastricht Treaty which
established the Union was not even passed until years after the Cold War
had ended). As the Trump administration sees it, NATOrCOs victory was a
real achievement of nation states; the EU is an academic utopia that
serves no one except the politicians who run it. Even when Trump is
baying at the moon, he gets the better of this particular argument.
The rupture can be described in another way. J.D. Vance laid out the
basic Trumpian project at the Munich security conference in 2025:
protecting the West against invasion, political correctness and
electoral corruption. VancerCOs speech horrified NATOrCOs leaders. In a recent essay, two policy analysts at the German Marshall Fund, Jackson
Janes and Markus Ziener, explained why: it sounded like Washington was offering alliance members rCLa civilizational club based on shared ancestry,rCY whereas the Europeans wanted to base their collective defense on rCLshared democratic values.rCY
These are notes that Brussels has been sounding for a long time. TheyrCOre not sufficient to explain the present impasse, or any sustained disagreement. rCLValuesrCY is just a name for ideology. Asked to choose between an ideology and a civilization, most free people would choose
the civilization. ThatrCOs how the West won the Cold War: our civilization beat their ideology. Civilizations are bigger than values. WhatrCOs more, itrCOs okay if theyrCOre based on shared ancestry. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization is not a World Treaty Organization rCo though it has, at its most irresponsible, behaved like one. The rCLNorth AtlanticrCY in its name reflected that the United States understood itself as a displaced
European civilization.
That began to change with President Lyndon JohnsonrCOs immigration reforms in the mid-1960s, which repudiated European identity. Johnson called the ethnic criteria in US immigration policy rCLa cruel and enduring wrong in the conduct of the American Nation.rCY As LBJ saw it, rCLThe land flourished because it was fed from so many sources.rCY ThatrCOs a misunderstanding, although you can see what herCOs getting at. The land flourished because
it was originally fed by the one particular current of European
civilization rCo 18th-century English Whiggery rCo that was genuinely open to the commercially minded and hard-working people of all nations.
The neutral national identity LBJ proposed was not popular. Indirectly,
it brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. Europeans donrCOt like rCLvaluesrCY-
based migration policies either. TrumprCOs electoral insurrection was similar to the one Britain underwent earlier this month in its local elections. From the two council seats it had won in 2022, the anti- immigration Reform party saw its representation increase to 1,454,
bringing a collapse in the two establishment parties. Old-school parties
on the continent are not faring much better, with Merz in Germany
polling at historic lows. The Alternative for Germany may well
capitalize on TrumprCOs Iran blunder to take power in Sachsen-Anhalt next September.
Europe, moreover, is mercurial. One of the great mysteries of modern diplomacy is how European leaders, reluctant warriors back when Joe
Biden was trying to rally them to the defense of Ukraine against Russia
in early 2022, have become a band of Rambos. At their summits, they vent their rage that Trump will not do more for Kyiv. They have a formal, propagandistic name for what Russia did to Ukraine, which they almost
never deviate from. They call it the rCLfull-scale invasionrCY rCo as if invading Ukraine were something Russians do to some extent every day.
Ukraine is mostly a pretext. The seismic lurch away from consensus and toward coercion did not come out of the blue in February of 2022. After
the Cold War, tremendous opportunities fell to the entire West. The
United States began budgeting for a global-empire-sized role, not a regional-hegemon-sized one. It was Bill Clinton, not Vladimir Putin, who reintroduced the European continent to interstate warfare for the first
time since 1945, with a 1999 bombardment of Belgrade that aimed to wrest Kosovo from the hands of Christian Orthodox Serbia and deliver it to
Muslim Albania. Western European peoples werenrCOt clamoring for that. Americans couldnrCOt find the Balkans on the map. Congress, pressed by Clinton to approve the operation, refused. But there was a class of establishment politicians and intellectuals who were well served by such empire-building.
Today it is the Baltic countries that are the most gung-ho for the
ruthless prosecution of the Ukraine war. Not out of national interest:
It does not make sense for Estonia, which has fewer people than Maine,
to provoke and insult Russia across their common border. But it may make sense for EstoniarCOs politicians, like the EUrCOs top diplomat Kaja Kallas. Whenever defense matters come up, Estonia is not a pipsqueak country but
a co-equal member of NATO and the EU, and EstoniarCOs leaders are the
peers of Merz and Starmer and Macron. The Ukraine war has brought about
this rCLBalticizationrCY on a larger scale rCo a way for Merz and Starmer and
Macron to pass themselves off as Trump and Xi.
It might have worked had Trump been an ordinary negotiator. But, in
Janes and ZienerrCOs memorable phrase, the President has turned the United States into a rCLsubscription-based security provider.rCY And even that oversells what Trump is offering. Who would be fool enough to make any
deal with him at all? He threatens the people he negotiates with. He
forgets his promises before he leaves the negotiating table. When he remembers them, he reneges on them.
The world is thus in a period of acute danger. But to say that the
danger is acute is to say that it will pass. There is no sizable constituency for TrumprCOs non-stop adventurism. No American expected it from him, and nobody likes it now that herCOs doing it. The raid to abduct Nicol|is Maduro and his wife from Caracas, for all TrumprCOs prideful boasting, did not move his popularity ratings in the slightest. Iran has cost Trump not just his popularity but his presidency. And should he
decide to further rough up a Cuba that he is trying to starve into
reform, no one outside of South Florida will thank him for it.
In the future, Americans will likely repress their memory of Trump rCo
even those who think of him as a necessary corrective to a period of decadence and drift. It was one of TrumprCOs most steadfast defenders, the classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who in his book The Case for Trump
(2019) laid out the most likely account of what the presidentrCOs long-
term position in the hearts of his country will be. Americans will be embarrassed by the crudity and corruption they had to ignore in the
course of putting things back on the right track, and will not want it called up as a precedent. So they will purge him from memory, the way
the townspeople forget their reliance on their deadly protector in the
old Western movie Shane. ItrCOs not unlike what Spain did with Franco or Chile with Pinochet. The Euro-American divergence in rCLvaluesrCY may heal on its own, making evident that rCLcivilizationrCY was what mattered all along.
Eventually the European Union will have to face up to a paradox that has been central to its construction. Europe has historically been great as
a collection of fractious sovereign states. It is not great as a confederation dedicated to upholding bureaucratic mush. If it is to have
a single purpose, yes, someone must lead it. But there is too much
sibling rivalry among its nations to permit any of them to lead from
within. It can only be led from without, the way Christianity did for centuries of strife and glory, or the way the United States did in the
Cold War, with results that, one must admit, look ever more equivocal.
Christopher Caldwell
On 5/18/2026 8:28 AM, Julian wrote:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggests to a classroom full of
youngsters that Donald Trump has been ohumiliatedo by his war in Iran u
and the President cancels deployment of the long-range missile systems
around which Germany had planned its defense strategy for the coming
decades. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sbnchez observes a strict
neutrality on Iran, declaring his countryAs bases out of bounds u and
Trump urges Spain be kicked out of NATO. British Prime Minister Keir
Starmer hesitates to sacrifice his countryAs navy in a war on which he
wasnAt consulted u and Trump mocks him in public for a week. No casual
observer of the Atlantic alliance in the 18 months since Donald Trump
returned to power would believe his White House thinks of Europe as the
bedrock of American military and economic security.
But, strangely, it does.
Two factors have combined to make a disaster of the transatlantic
relationship. The first is psychiatric. Donald Trump lacks the mental
discipline to do what he thinks he is best at: cut deals. The second is
world-historic. The Europeans have long been restless. Declaring their
independence from an overbearing and arbitrary ally is a project of
decadesA standing. This is particularly true of those politicians keen
to suck the vitality out of EuropeAs historic nations in order to build
up a European Union with its capital in Brussels. Right now, the
temporary, tactical danger that Trump poses is driving Europeans toward
the more permanent, strategic danger that Brussels poses.
There is a delusion at the heart of the EU. Its leaders believe that
they played a huge part in saving Western civilization during the Cold
War (which is quite true) and that they did so by constructing the EU
(which is demonstrably false, since the Maastricht Treaty which
established the Union was not even passed until years after the Cold War
had ended). As the Trump administration sees it, NATOAs victory was a
real achievement of nation states; the EU is an academic utopia that
serves no one except the politicians who run it. Even when Trump is
baying at the moon, he gets the better of this particular argument.
The rupture can be described in another way. J.D. Vance laid out the
basic Trumpian project at the Munich security conference in 2025:
protecting the West against invasion, political correctness and
electoral corruption. VanceAs speech horrified NATOAs leaders. In a
recent essay, two policy analysts at the German Marshall Fund, Jackson
Janes and Markus Ziener, explained why: it sounded like Washington was
offering alliance members oa civilizational club based on shared
ancestry,o whereas the Europeans wanted to base their collective defense
on oshared democratic values.o
These are notes that Brussels has been sounding for a long time. TheyAre
not sufficient to explain the present impasse, or any sustained
disagreement. oValueso is just a name for ideology. Asked to choose
between an ideology and a civilization, most free people would choose
the civilization. ThatAs how the West won the Cold War: our civilization
beat their ideology. Civilizations are bigger than values. WhatAs more,
itAs okay if theyAre based on shared ancestry. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization is not a World Treaty Organization u though it has, at its
most irresponsible, behaved like one. The oNorth Atlantico in its name
reflected that the United States understood itself as a displaced
European civilization.
That began to change with President Lyndon JohnsonAs immigration reforms
in the mid-1960s, which repudiated European identity. Johnson called the
ethnic criteria in US immigration policy oa cruel and enduring wrong in
the conduct of the American Nation.o As LBJ saw it, oThe land flourished
because it was fed from so many sources.o ThatAs a misunderstanding,
although you can see what heAs getting at. The land flourished because
it was originally fed by the one particular current of European
civilization u 18th-century English Whiggery u that was genuinely open
to the commercially minded and hard-working people of all nations.
The neutral national identity LBJ proposed was not popular. Indirectly,
it brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. Europeans donAt like ovalueso-
based migration policies either. TrumpAs electoral insurrection was
similar to the one Britain underwent earlier this month in its local
elections. From the two council seats it had won in 2022, the anti-
immigration Reform party saw its representation increase to 1,454,
bringing a collapse in the two establishment parties. Old-school parties
on the continent are not faring much better, with Merz in Germany
polling at historic lows. The Alternative for Germany may well
capitalize on TrumpAs Iran blunder to take power in Sachsen-Anhalt next
September.
Europe, moreover, is mercurial. One of the great mysteries of modern
diplomacy is how European leaders, reluctant warriors back when Joe
Biden was trying to rally them to the defense of Ukraine against Russia
in early 2022, have become a band of Rambos. At their summits, they vent
their rage that Trump will not do more for Kyiv. They have a formal,
propagandistic name for what Russia did to Ukraine, which they almost
never deviate from. They call it the ofull-scale invasiono u as if
invading Ukraine were something Russians do to some extent every day.
Ukraine is mostly a pretext. The seismic lurch away from consensus and
toward coercion did not come out of the blue in February of 2022. After
the Cold War, tremendous opportunities fell to the entire West. The
United States began budgeting for a global-empire-sized role, not a
regional-hegemon-sized one. It was Bill Clinton, not Vladimir Putin, who
reintroduced the European continent to interstate warfare for the first
time since 1945, with a 1999 bombardment of Belgrade that aimed to wrest
Kosovo from the hands of Christian Orthodox Serbia and deliver it to
Muslim Albania. Western European peoples werenAt clamoring for that.
Americans couldnAt find the Balkans on the map. Congress, pressed by
Clinton to approve the operation, refused. But there was a class of
establishment politicians and intellectuals who were well served by such
empire-building.
Today it is the Baltic countries that are the most gung-ho for the
ruthless prosecution of the Ukraine war. Not out of national interest:
It does not make sense for Estonia, which has fewer people than Maine,
to provoke and insult Russia across their common border. But it may make
sense for EstoniaAs politicians, like the EUAs top diplomat Kaja Kallas.
Whenever defense matters come up, Estonia is not a pipsqueak country but
a co-equal member of NATO and the EU, and EstoniaAs leaders are the
peers of Merz and Starmer and Macron. The Ukraine war has brought about
this oBalticizationo on a larger scale u a way for Merz and Starmer and
Macron to pass themselves off as Trump and Xi.
It might have worked had Trump been an ordinary negotiator. But, in
Janes and ZienerAs memorable phrase, the President has turned the United
States into a osubscription-based security provider.o And even that
oversells what Trump is offering. Who would be fool enough to make any
deal with him at all? He threatens the people he negotiates with. He
forgets his promises before he leaves the negotiating table. When he
remembers them, he reneges on them.
The world is thus in a period of acute danger. But to say that the
danger is acute is to say that it will pass. There is no sizable
constituency for TrumpAs non-stop adventurism. No American expected it
from him, and nobody likes it now that heAs doing it. The raid to abduct
Nicolbs Maduro and his wife from Caracas, for all TrumpAs prideful
boasting, did not move his popularity ratings in the slightest. Iran has
cost Trump not just his popularity but his presidency. And should he
decide to further rough up a Cuba that he is trying to starve into
reform, no one outside of South Florida will thank him for it.
In the future, Americans will likely repress their memory of Trump u
even those who think of him as a necessary corrective to a period of
decadence and drift. It was one of TrumpAs most steadfast defenders, the
classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who in his book The Case for Trump
(2019) laid out the most likely account of what the presidentAs long-
term position in the hearts of his country will be. Americans will be
embarrassed by the crudity and corruption they had to ignore in the
course of putting things back on the right track, and will not want it
called up as a precedent. So they will purge him from memory, the way
the townspeople forget their reliance on their deadly protector in the
old Western movie Shane. ItAs not unlike what Spain did with Franco or
Chile with Pinochet. The Euro-American divergence in ovalueso may heal
on its own, making evident that ocivilizationo was what mattered all along. >>
Eventually the European Union will have to face up to a paradox that has
been central to its construction. Europe has historically been great as
a collection of fractious sovereign states. It is not great as a
confederation dedicated to upholding bureaucratic mush. If it is to have
a single purpose, yes, someone must lead it. But there is too much
sibling rivalry among its nations to permit any of them to lead from
within. It can only be led from without, the way Christianity did for
centuries of strife and glory, or the way the United States did in the
Cold War, with results that, one must admit, look ever more equivocal.
Christopher Caldwell
For the record, I voted Libertarian. That being said, here's what Trump
said about the US getting ripped off.
Donald Trump has frequently declared that the U.S. has "stupid trade"
rather than free trade, arguing that countries like China, Mexico, and
the European Union have been "ripping us off" by state owned means of >production, undercutting U.S. labor, rigging trade rules, and
maintaining large trade deficits.
Trump maintains that whenever the U.S. buys more from a country than
that country buys from the U.S., the U.S. is being taken advantage of.
Trump has famously used terms like "looted, pillaged, raped and--
plundered" to describe the global trade system, enacting aggressive, >sweeping tariffs to force other nations to renegotiate terms in
America's favor.
"It's the economy, stupid!" - Bill Clinton
On Mon, 18 May 2026 10:25:23 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/18/2026 8:28 AM, Julian wrote:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggests to a classroom full ofFor the record, I voted Libertarian. That being said, here's what Trump
youngsters that Donald Trump has been rCLhumiliatedrCY by his war in Iran rCo
and the President cancels deployment of the long-range missile systems
around which Germany had planned its defense strategy for the coming
decades. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S|inchez observes a strict
neutrality on Iran, declaring his countryrCOs bases out of bounds rCo and >>> Trump urges Spain be kicked out of NATO. British Prime Minister Keir
Starmer hesitates to sacrifice his countryrCOs navy in a war on which he >>> wasnrCOt consulted rCo and Trump mocks him in public for a week. No casual >>> observer of the Atlantic alliance in the 18 months since Donald Trump
returned to power would believe his White House thinks of Europe as the
bedrock of American military and economic security.
But, strangely, it does.
Two factors have combined to make a disaster of the transatlantic
relationship. The first is psychiatric. Donald Trump lacks the mental
discipline to do what he thinks he is best at: cut deals. The second is
world-historic. The Europeans have long been restless. Declaring their
independence from an overbearing and arbitrary ally is a project of
decadesrCO standing. This is particularly true of those politicians keen >>> to suck the vitality out of EuroperCOs historic nations in order to build >>> up a European Union with its capital in Brussels. Right now, the
temporary, tactical danger that Trump poses is driving Europeans toward
the more permanent, strategic danger that Brussels poses.
There is a delusion at the heart of the EU. Its leaders believe that
they played a huge part in saving Western civilization during the Cold
War (which is quite true) and that they did so by constructing the EU
(which is demonstrably false, since the Maastricht Treaty which
established the Union was not even passed until years after the Cold War >>> had ended). As the Trump administration sees it, NATOrCOs victory was a
real achievement of nation states; the EU is an academic utopia that
serves no one except the politicians who run it. Even when Trump is
baying at the moon, he gets the better of this particular argument.
The rupture can be described in another way. J.D. Vance laid out the
basic Trumpian project at the Munich security conference in 2025:
protecting the West against invasion, political correctness and
electoral corruption. VancerCOs speech horrified NATOrCOs leaders. In a
recent essay, two policy analysts at the German Marshall Fund, Jackson
Janes and Markus Ziener, explained why: it sounded like Washington was
offering alliance members rCLa civilizational club based on shared
ancestry,rCY whereas the Europeans wanted to base their collective defense >>> on rCLshared democratic values.rCY
These are notes that Brussels has been sounding for a long time. TheyrCOre >>> not sufficient to explain the present impasse, or any sustained
disagreement. rCLValuesrCY is just a name for ideology. Asked to choose
between an ideology and a civilization, most free people would choose
the civilization. ThatrCOs how the West won the Cold War: our civilization >>> beat their ideology. Civilizations are bigger than values. WhatrCOs more, >>> itrCOs okay if theyrCOre based on shared ancestry. The North Atlantic Treaty
Organization is not a World Treaty Organization rCo though it has, at its >>> most irresponsible, behaved like one. The rCLNorth AtlanticrCY in its name >>> reflected that the United States understood itself as a displaced
European civilization.
That began to change with President Lyndon JohnsonrCOs immigration reforms >>> in the mid-1960s, which repudiated European identity. Johnson called the >>> ethnic criteria in US immigration policy rCLa cruel and enduring wrong in >>> the conduct of the American Nation.rCY As LBJ saw it, rCLThe land flourished
because it was fed from so many sources.rCY ThatrCOs a misunderstanding, >>> although you can see what herCOs getting at. The land flourished because >>> it was originally fed by the one particular current of European
civilization rCo 18th-century English Whiggery rCo that was genuinely open >>> to the commercially minded and hard-working people of all nations.
The neutral national identity LBJ proposed was not popular. Indirectly,
it brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. Europeans donrCOt like rCLvaluesrCY-
based migration policies either. TrumprCOs electoral insurrection was
similar to the one Britain underwent earlier this month in its local
elections. From the two council seats it had won in 2022, the anti-
immigration Reform party saw its representation increase to 1,454,
bringing a collapse in the two establishment parties. Old-school parties >>> on the continent are not faring much better, with Merz in Germany
polling at historic lows. The Alternative for Germany may well
capitalize on TrumprCOs Iran blunder to take power in Sachsen-Anhalt next >>> September.
Europe, moreover, is mercurial. One of the great mysteries of modern
diplomacy is how European leaders, reluctant warriors back when Joe
Biden was trying to rally them to the defense of Ukraine against Russia
in early 2022, have become a band of Rambos. At their summits, they vent >>> their rage that Trump will not do more for Kyiv. They have a formal,
propagandistic name for what Russia did to Ukraine, which they almost
never deviate from. They call it the rCLfull-scale invasionrCY rCo as if >>> invading Ukraine were something Russians do to some extent every day.
Ukraine is mostly a pretext. The seismic lurch away from consensus and
toward coercion did not come out of the blue in February of 2022. After
the Cold War, tremendous opportunities fell to the entire West. The
United States began budgeting for a global-empire-sized role, not a
regional-hegemon-sized one. It was Bill Clinton, not Vladimir Putin, who >>> reintroduced the European continent to interstate warfare for the first
time since 1945, with a 1999 bombardment of Belgrade that aimed to wrest >>> Kosovo from the hands of Christian Orthodox Serbia and deliver it to
Muslim Albania. Western European peoples werenrCOt clamoring for that.
Americans couldnrCOt find the Balkans on the map. Congress, pressed by
Clinton to approve the operation, refused. But there was a class of
establishment politicians and intellectuals who were well served by such >>> empire-building.
Today it is the Baltic countries that are the most gung-ho for the
ruthless prosecution of the Ukraine war. Not out of national interest:
It does not make sense for Estonia, which has fewer people than Maine,
to provoke and insult Russia across their common border. But it may make >>> sense for EstoniarCOs politicians, like the EUrCOs top diplomat Kaja Kallas.
Whenever defense matters come up, Estonia is not a pipsqueak country but >>> a co-equal member of NATO and the EU, and EstoniarCOs leaders are the
peers of Merz and Starmer and Macron. The Ukraine war has brought about
this rCLBalticizationrCY on a larger scale rCo a way for Merz and Starmer and
Macron to pass themselves off as Trump and Xi.
It might have worked had Trump been an ordinary negotiator. But, in
Janes and ZienerrCOs memorable phrase, the President has turned the United >>> States into a rCLsubscription-based security provider.rCY And even that
oversells what Trump is offering. Who would be fool enough to make any
deal with him at all? He threatens the people he negotiates with. He
forgets his promises before he leaves the negotiating table. When he
remembers them, he reneges on them.
The world is thus in a period of acute danger. But to say that the
danger is acute is to say that it will pass. There is no sizable
constituency for TrumprCOs non-stop adventurism. No American expected it >>> from him, and nobody likes it now that herCOs doing it. The raid to abduct >>> Nicol|is Maduro and his wife from Caracas, for all TrumprCOs prideful
boasting, did not move his popularity ratings in the slightest. Iran has >>> cost Trump not just his popularity but his presidency. And should he
decide to further rough up a Cuba that he is trying to starve into
reform, no one outside of South Florida will thank him for it.
In the future, Americans will likely repress their memory of Trump rCo
even those who think of him as a necessary corrective to a period of
decadence and drift. It was one of TrumprCOs most steadfast defenders, the >>> classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who in his book The Case for Trump
(2019) laid out the most likely account of what the presidentrCOs long-
term position in the hearts of his country will be. Americans will be
embarrassed by the crudity and corruption they had to ignore in the
course of putting things back on the right track, and will not want it
called up as a precedent. So they will purge him from memory, the way
the townspeople forget their reliance on their deadly protector in the
old Western movie Shane. ItrCOs not unlike what Spain did with Franco or >>> Chile with Pinochet. The Euro-American divergence in rCLvaluesrCY may heal >>> on its own, making evident that rCLcivilizationrCY was what mattered all along.
Eventually the European Union will have to face up to a paradox that has >>> been central to its construction. Europe has historically been great as
a collection of fractious sovereign states. It is not great as a
confederation dedicated to upholding bureaucratic mush. If it is to have >>> a single purpose, yes, someone must lead it. But there is too much
sibling rivalry among its nations to permit any of them to lead from
within. It can only be led from without, the way Christianity did for
centuries of strife and glory, or the way the United States did in the
Cold War, with results that, one must admit, look ever more equivocal.
Christopher Caldwell
said about the US getting ripped off.
Donald Trump has frequently declared that the U.S. has "stupid trade"
rather than free trade, arguing that countries like China, Mexico, and
the European Union have been "ripping us off" by state owned means of
production, undercutting U.S. labor, rigging trade rules, and
maintaining large trade deficits.
Trump maintains that whenever the U.S. buys more from a country than
that country buys from the U.S., the U.S. is being taken advantage of.
So all countries should refrain from international commerce with each
other to avoid one or the other being taken advantage of.
Trump has famously used terms like "looted, pillaged, raped and
plundered" to describe the global trade system, enacting aggressive,
sweeping tariffs to force other nations to renegotiate terms in
America's favor.
"It's the economy, stupid!" - Bill Clinton
On 5/18/2026 10:32 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:As became clear following bonking Biil's biggest blunder in allowing
On Mon, 18 May 2026 10:25:23 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:You can't compete in a free market with countries that support state
On 5/18/2026 8:28 AM, Julian wrote:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggests to a classroom full ofFor the record, I voted Libertarian. That being said, here's what Trump
youngsters that Donald Trump has been rCLhumiliatedrCY by his war in Iran rCo
and the President cancels deployment of the long-range missile systems >>>> around which Germany had planned its defense strategy for the coming
decades. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S|inchez observes a strict
neutrality on Iran, declaring his countryrCOs bases out of bounds rCo and >>>> Trump urges Spain be kicked out of NATO. British Prime Minister Keir
Starmer hesitates to sacrifice his countryrCOs navy in a war on which he >>>> wasnrCOt consulted rCo and Trump mocks him in public for a week. No casual >>>> observer of the Atlantic alliance in the 18 months since Donald Trump
returned to power would believe his White House thinks of Europe as the >>>> bedrock of American military and economic security.
But, strangely, it does.
Two factors have combined to make a disaster of the transatlantic
relationship. The first is psychiatric. Donald Trump lacks the mental
discipline to do what he thinks he is best at: cut deals. The second is >>>> world-historic. The Europeans have long been restless. Declaring their >>>> independence from an overbearing and arbitrary ally is a project of
decadesrCO standing. This is particularly true of those politicians keen >>>> to suck the vitality out of EuroperCOs historic nations in order to build >>>> up a European Union with its capital in Brussels. Right now, the
temporary, tactical danger that Trump poses is driving Europeans toward >>>> the more permanent, strategic danger that Brussels poses.
There is a delusion at the heart of the EU. Its leaders believe that
they played a huge part in saving Western civilization during the Cold >>>> War (which is quite true) and that they did so by constructing the EU
(which is demonstrably false, since the Maastricht Treaty which
established the Union was not even passed until years after the Cold
War
had ended). As the Trump administration sees it, NATOrCOs victory was a >>>> real achievement of nation states; the EU is an academic utopia that
serves no one except the politicians who run it. Even when Trump is
baying at the moon, he gets the better of this particular argument.
The rupture can be described in another way. J.D. Vance laid out the
basic Trumpian project at the Munich security conference in 2025:
protecting the West against invasion, political correctness and
electoral corruption. VancerCOs speech horrified NATOrCOs leaders. In a >>>> recent essay, two policy analysts at the German Marshall Fund, Jackson >>>> Janes and Markus Ziener, explained why: it sounded like Washington was >>>> offering alliance members rCLa civilizational club based on shared
ancestry,rCY whereas the Europeans wanted to base their collective
defense
on rCLshared democratic values.rCY
These are notes that Brussels has been sounding for a long time.
TheyrCOre
not sufficient to explain the present impasse, or any sustained
disagreement. rCLValuesrCY is just a name for ideology. Asked to choose >>>> between an ideology and a civilization, most free people would choose
the civilization. ThatrCOs how the West won the Cold War: our
civilization
beat their ideology. Civilizations are bigger than values. WhatrCOs more, >>>> itrCOs okay if theyrCOre based on shared ancestry. The North Atlantic >>>> Treaty
Organization is not a World Treaty Organization rCo though it has, at its >>>> most irresponsible, behaved like one. The rCLNorth AtlanticrCY in its name >>>> reflected that the United States understood itself as a displaced
European civilization.
That began to change with President Lyndon JohnsonrCOs immigration
reforms
in the mid-1960s, which repudiated European identity. Johnson called
the
ethnic criteria in US immigration policy rCLa cruel and enduring wrong in >>>> the conduct of the American Nation.rCY As LBJ saw it, rCLThe land
flourished
because it was fed from so many sources.rCY ThatrCOs a misunderstanding, >>>> although you can see what herCOs getting at. The land flourished because >>>> it was originally fed by the one particular current of European
civilization rCo 18th-century English Whiggery rCo that was genuinely open >>>> to the commercially minded and hard-working people of all nations.
The neutral national identity LBJ proposed was not popular. Indirectly, >>>> it brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. Europeans donrCOt like
rCLvaluesrCY-
based migration policies either. TrumprCOs electoral insurrection was
similar to the one Britain underwent earlier this month in its local
elections. From the two council seats it had won in 2022, the anti-
immigration Reform party saw its representation increase to 1,454,
bringing a collapse in the two establishment parties. Old-school
parties
on the continent are not faring much better, with Merz in Germany
polling at historic lows. The Alternative for Germany may well
capitalize on TrumprCOs Iran blunder to take power in Sachsen-Anhalt next >>>> September.
Europe, moreover, is mercurial. One of the great mysteries of modern
diplomacy is how European leaders, reluctant warriors back when Joe
Biden was trying to rally them to the defense of Ukraine against Russia >>>> in early 2022, have become a band of Rambos. At their summits, they
vent
their rage that Trump will not do more for Kyiv. They have a formal,
propagandistic name for what Russia did to Ukraine, which they almost
never deviate from. They call it the rCLfull-scale invasionrCY rCo as if >>>> invading Ukraine were something Russians do to some extent every day.
Ukraine is mostly a pretext. The seismic lurch away from consensus and >>>> toward coercion did not come out of the blue in February of 2022. After >>>> the Cold War, tremendous opportunities fell to the entire West. The
United States began budgeting for a global-empire-sized role, not a
regional-hegemon-sized one. It was Bill Clinton, not Vladimir Putin,
who
reintroduced the European continent to interstate warfare for the first >>>> time since 1945, with a 1999 bombardment of Belgrade that aimed to
wrest
Kosovo from the hands of Christian Orthodox Serbia and deliver it to
Muslim Albania. Western European peoples werenrCOt clamoring for that. >>>> Americans couldnrCOt find the Balkans on the map. Congress, pressed by >>>> Clinton to approve the operation, refused. But there was a class of
establishment politicians and intellectuals who were well served by
such
empire-building.
Today it is the Baltic countries that are the most gung-ho for the
ruthless prosecution of the Ukraine war. Not out of national interest: >>>> It does not make sense for Estonia, which has fewer people than Maine, >>>> to provoke and insult Russia across their common border. But it may
make
sense for EstoniarCOs politicians, like the EUrCOs top diplomat Kaja
Kallas.
Whenever defense matters come up, Estonia is not a pipsqueak country
but
a co-equal member of NATO and the EU, and EstoniarCOs leaders are the
peers of Merz and Starmer and Macron. The Ukraine war has brought about >>>> this rCLBalticizationrCY on a larger scale rCo a way for Merz and Starmer and
Macron to pass themselves off as Trump and Xi.
It might have worked had Trump been an ordinary negotiator. But, in
Janes and ZienerrCOs memorable phrase, the President has turned the
United
States into a rCLsubscription-based security provider.rCY And even that >>>> oversells what Trump is offering. Who would be fool enough to make any >>>> deal with him at all? He threatens the people he negotiates with. He
forgets his promises before he leaves the negotiating table. When he
remembers them, he reneges on them.
The world is thus in a period of acute danger. But to say that the
danger is acute is to say that it will pass. There is no sizable
constituency for TrumprCOs non-stop adventurism. No American expected it >>>> from him, and nobody likes it now that herCOs doing it. The raid to
abduct
Nicol|is Maduro and his wife from Caracas, for all TrumprCOs prideful
boasting, did not move his popularity ratings in the slightest. Iran
has
cost Trump not just his popularity but his presidency. And should he
decide to further rough up a Cuba that he is trying to starve into
reform, no one outside of South Florida will thank him for it.
In the future, Americans will likely repress their memory of Trump rCo >>>> even those who think of him as a necessary corrective to a period of
decadence and drift. It was one of TrumprCOs most steadfast defenders, >>>> the
classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who in his book The Case for Trump
(2019) laid out the most likely account of what the presidentrCOs long- >>>> term position in the hearts of his country will be. Americans will be
embarrassed by the crudity and corruption they had to ignore in the
course of putting things back on the right track, and will not want it >>>> called up as a precedent. So they will purge him from memory, the way
the townspeople forget their reliance on their deadly protector in the >>>> old Western movie Shane. ItrCOs not unlike what Spain did with Franco or >>>> Chile with Pinochet. The Euro-American divergence in rCLvaluesrCY may heal >>>> on its own, making evident that rCLcivilizationrCY was what mattered all >>>> along.
Eventually the European Union will have to face up to a paradox that
has
been central to its construction. Europe has historically been great as >>>> a collection of fractious sovereign states. It is not great as a
confederation dedicated to upholding bureaucratic mush. If it is to
have
a single purpose, yes, someone must lead it. But there is too much
sibling rivalry among its nations to permit any of them to lead from
within. It can only be led from without, the way Christianity did for
centuries of strife and glory, or the way the United States did in the >>>> Cold War, with results that, one must admit, look ever more equivocal. >>>>
Christopher Caldwell
said about the US getting ripped off.
Donald Trump has frequently declared that the U.S. has "stupid trade"
rather than free trade, arguing that countries like China, Mexico, and
the European Union have been "ripping us off" by state owned means of
production, undercutting U.S. labor, rigging trade rules, and
maintaining large trade deficits.
Trump maintains that whenever the U.S. buys more from a country than
that country buys from the U.S., the U.S. is being taken advantage of.
So all countries should refrain from international commerce with each
other to avoid one or the other being taken advantage of.
owned means of production.
On 5/18/2026 10:32 AM, Noah Sombrero wrote:As became clear following bonking Bill's biggest blunder in allowing
On Mon, 18 May 2026 10:25:23 -0700, Dude <punditster@gmail.com> wrote:You can't compete in a free market with countries that support state
On 5/18/2026 8:28 AM, Julian wrote:
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz suggests to a classroom full ofFor the record, I voted Libertarian. That being said, here's what Trump
youngsters that Donald Trump has been rCLhumiliatedrCY by his war in Iran rCo
and the President cancels deployment of the long-range missile systems >>>> around which Germany had planned its defense strategy for the coming
decades. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro S|inchez observes a strict
neutrality on Iran, declaring his countryrCOs bases out of bounds rCo and >>>> Trump urges Spain be kicked out of NATO. British Prime Minister Keir
Starmer hesitates to sacrifice his countryrCOs navy in a war on which he >>>> wasnrCOt consulted rCo and Trump mocks him in public for a week. No casual >>>> observer of the Atlantic alliance in the 18 months since Donald Trump
returned to power would believe his White House thinks of Europe as the >>>> bedrock of American military and economic security.
But, strangely, it does.
Two factors have combined to make a disaster of the transatlantic
relationship. The first is psychiatric. Donald Trump lacks the mental
discipline to do what he thinks he is best at: cut deals. The second is >>>> world-historic. The Europeans have long been restless. Declaring their >>>> independence from an overbearing and arbitrary ally is a project of
decadesrCO standing. This is particularly true of those politicians keen >>>> to suck the vitality out of EuroperCOs historic nations in order to build >>>> up a European Union with its capital in Brussels. Right now, the
temporary, tactical danger that Trump poses is driving Europeans toward >>>> the more permanent, strategic danger that Brussels poses.
There is a delusion at the heart of the EU. Its leaders believe that
they played a huge part in saving Western civilization during the Cold >>>> War (which is quite true) and that they did so by constructing the EU
(which is demonstrably false, since the Maastricht Treaty which
established the Union was not even passed until years after the Cold
War
had ended). As the Trump administration sees it, NATOrCOs victory was a >>>> real achievement of nation states; the EU is an academic utopia that
serves no one except the politicians who run it. Even when Trump is
baying at the moon, he gets the better of this particular argument.
The rupture can be described in another way. J.D. Vance laid out the
basic Trumpian project at the Munich security conference in 2025:
protecting the West against invasion, political correctness and
electoral corruption. VancerCOs speech horrified NATOrCOs leaders. In a >>>> recent essay, two policy analysts at the German Marshall Fund, Jackson >>>> Janes and Markus Ziener, explained why: it sounded like Washington was >>>> offering alliance members rCLa civilizational club based on shared
ancestry,rCY whereas the Europeans wanted to base their collective
defense
on rCLshared democratic values.rCY
These are notes that Brussels has been sounding for a long time.
TheyrCOre
not sufficient to explain the present impasse, or any sustained
disagreement. rCLValuesrCY is just a name for ideology. Asked to choose >>>> between an ideology and a civilization, most free people would choose
the civilization. ThatrCOs how the West won the Cold War: our
civilization
beat their ideology. Civilizations are bigger than values. WhatrCOs more, >>>> itrCOs okay if theyrCOre based on shared ancestry. The North Atlantic >>>> Treaty
Organization is not a World Treaty Organization rCo though it has, at its >>>> most irresponsible, behaved like one. The rCLNorth AtlanticrCY in its name >>>> reflected that the United States understood itself as a displaced
European civilization.
That began to change with President Lyndon JohnsonrCOs immigration
reforms
in the mid-1960s, which repudiated European identity. Johnson called
the
ethnic criteria in US immigration policy rCLa cruel and enduring wrong in >>>> the conduct of the American Nation.rCY As LBJ saw it, rCLThe land
flourished
because it was fed from so many sources.rCY ThatrCOs a misunderstanding, >>>> although you can see what herCOs getting at. The land flourished because >>>> it was originally fed by the one particular current of European
civilization rCo 18th-century English Whiggery rCo that was genuinely open >>>> to the commercially minded and hard-working people of all nations.
The neutral national identity LBJ proposed was not popular. Indirectly, >>>> it brought Donald Trump to power in 2016. Europeans donrCOt like
rCLvaluesrCY-
based migration policies either. TrumprCOs electoral insurrection was
similar to the one Britain underwent earlier this month in its local
elections. From the two council seats it had won in 2022, the anti-
immigration Reform party saw its representation increase to 1,454,
bringing a collapse in the two establishment parties. Old-school
parties
on the continent are not faring much better, with Merz in Germany
polling at historic lows. The Alternative for Germany may well
capitalize on TrumprCOs Iran blunder to take power in Sachsen-Anhalt next >>>> September.
Europe, moreover, is mercurial. One of the great mysteries of modern
diplomacy is how European leaders, reluctant warriors back when Joe
Biden was trying to rally them to the defense of Ukraine against Russia >>>> in early 2022, have become a band of Rambos. At their summits, they
vent
their rage that Trump will not do more for Kyiv. They have a formal,
propagandistic name for what Russia did to Ukraine, which they almost
never deviate from. They call it the rCLfull-scale invasionrCY rCo as if >>>> invading Ukraine were something Russians do to some extent every day.
Ukraine is mostly a pretext. The seismic lurch away from consensus and >>>> toward coercion did not come out of the blue in February of 2022. After >>>> the Cold War, tremendous opportunities fell to the entire West. The
United States began budgeting for a global-empire-sized role, not a
regional-hegemon-sized one. It was Bill Clinton, not Vladimir Putin,
who
reintroduced the European continent to interstate warfare for the first >>>> time since 1945, with a 1999 bombardment of Belgrade that aimed to
wrest
Kosovo from the hands of Christian Orthodox Serbia and deliver it to
Muslim Albania. Western European peoples werenrCOt clamoring for that. >>>> Americans couldnrCOt find the Balkans on the map. Congress, pressed by >>>> Clinton to approve the operation, refused. But there was a class of
establishment politicians and intellectuals who were well served by
such
empire-building.
Today it is the Baltic countries that are the most gung-ho for the
ruthless prosecution of the Ukraine war. Not out of national interest: >>>> It does not make sense for Estonia, which has fewer people than Maine, >>>> to provoke and insult Russia across their common border. But it may
make
sense for EstoniarCOs politicians, like the EUrCOs top diplomat Kaja
Kallas.
Whenever defense matters come up, Estonia is not a pipsqueak country
but
a co-equal member of NATO and the EU, and EstoniarCOs leaders are the
peers of Merz and Starmer and Macron. The Ukraine war has brought about >>>> this rCLBalticizationrCY on a larger scale rCo a way for Merz and Starmer and
Macron to pass themselves off as Trump and Xi.
It might have worked had Trump been an ordinary negotiator. But, in
Janes and ZienerrCOs memorable phrase, the President has turned the
United
States into a rCLsubscription-based security provider.rCY And even that >>>> oversells what Trump is offering. Who would be fool enough to make any >>>> deal with him at all? He threatens the people he negotiates with. He
forgets his promises before he leaves the negotiating table. When he
remembers them, he reneges on them.
The world is thus in a period of acute danger. But to say that the
danger is acute is to say that it will pass. There is no sizable
constituency for TrumprCOs non-stop adventurism. No American expected it >>>> from him, and nobody likes it now that herCOs doing it. The raid to
abduct
Nicol|is Maduro and his wife from Caracas, for all TrumprCOs prideful
boasting, did not move his popularity ratings in the slightest. Iran
has
cost Trump not just his popularity but his presidency. And should he
decide to further rough up a Cuba that he is trying to starve into
reform, no one outside of South Florida will thank him for it.
In the future, Americans will likely repress their memory of Trump rCo >>>> even those who think of him as a necessary corrective to a period of
decadence and drift. It was one of TrumprCOs most steadfast defenders, >>>> the
classicist Victor Davis Hanson, who in his book The Case for Trump
(2019) laid out the most likely account of what the presidentrCOs long- >>>> term position in the hearts of his country will be. Americans will be
embarrassed by the crudity and corruption they had to ignore in the
course of putting things back on the right track, and will not want it >>>> called up as a precedent. So they will purge him from memory, the way
the townspeople forget their reliance on their deadly protector in the >>>> old Western movie Shane. ItrCOs not unlike what Spain did with Franco or >>>> Chile with Pinochet. The Euro-American divergence in rCLvaluesrCY may heal >>>> on its own, making evident that rCLcivilizationrCY was what mattered all >>>> along.
Eventually the European Union will have to face up to a paradox that
has
been central to its construction. Europe has historically been great as >>>> a collection of fractious sovereign states. It is not great as a
confederation dedicated to upholding bureaucratic mush. If it is to
have
a single purpose, yes, someone must lead it. But there is too much
sibling rivalry among its nations to permit any of them to lead from
within. It can only be led from without, the way Christianity did for
centuries of strife and glory, or the way the United States did in the >>>> Cold War, with results that, one must admit, look ever more equivocal. >>>>
Christopher Caldwell
said about the US getting ripped off.
Donald Trump has frequently declared that the U.S. has "stupid trade"
rather than free trade, arguing that countries like China, Mexico, and
the European Union have been "ripping us off" by state owned means of
production, undercutting U.S. labor, rigging trade rules, and
maintaining large trade deficits.
Trump maintains that whenever the U.S. buys more from a country than
that country buys from the U.S., the U.S. is being taken advantage of.
So all countries should refrain from international commerce with each
other to avoid one or the other being taken advantage of.
owned means of production.
| Sysop: | Amessyroom |
|---|---|
| Location: | Fayetteville, NC |
| Users: | 65 |
| Nodes: | 6 (0 / 6) |
| Uptime: | 02:51:29 |
| Calls: | 862 |
| Files: | 1,311 |
| D/L today: |
10 files (20,373K bytes) |
| Messages: | 264,422 |