This writer argues that America needs the European Union:
The United States needs strong allies in Europe. The United States also needs European unity. This has been a recurrent theme in Barack Obama’s foreign policy since the start of his campaign for the presidency in 2007. It is a theme he borrowed from the second administration of George W. Bush. It is also one of Obama’s greatest disappointments in shaping U.S. relations with the outside world.
From the outset, both Obama and his predecessors have been explicit that the United States needs Europe’s strength to promote world order and uphold democratic values. U.S. foreign policy is most effective when it works in concert with Europe. It is least effective when coordination across the Atlantic falters or when Europe is divided or distracted. Future U.S. Presidents will struggle to adapt if European division and distraction becomes the norm. In fact, that may be happening already. Despite the strong language of his 2015 National Security Strategy, President Obama seems to be moving in a direction that relies less on trans-Atlantic cooperation.
I think the author makes a major error by confusing geographic Europe with political "Europe."
We have a long history of working to prevent a hostile power from controlling the vast economic, demographic, and scientific power of Europe which could mobilize that strength into military power that could then project power against our shores.
We fought the Kaiser, Hitler, and the Soviets to prevent this from happening. This is our basic objective.
And we do need Europe in friendly hands for active objectives. Their location provides a base to project power to defend Europe from hostile forces and to reach an arc of crisis from West Africa to Central Asia.
European military help is a bonus. But a political Europe as the European Union (EU) is that gives the central transnational ruling elite the power to prevent America from organizing coalitions of the willing among Europe's actual military powers is a bad thing.
While getting some Europeans to send troops is helpful diplomatically more than militarily, just preventing Europe from working against us is the basic objective.
And for this, I think that the European Union is a potentially hostile political entity.
As I've written, European states can be our friends. The European Union--a non-democratic imperial Soviet Union Lite--cannot be our friend.
I disagreed with the Bush administration for promoting this folly. And I'm relieved that the Obama administration apparently isn't doing enough to promote it.
Sure, when the Soviet Union was on the Elbe River, a case could be made that a European Union could better organize Europe's military potential to resist the USSR's massive military.
But what justifies this risky nonsense now that Russia is far weaker and pushed back to Smolensk?
European elites seem far more hostile to America than to Russia, despite the whole Ukraine issue that these Euros would like to go away.
We surely need European states friendly or neutral, in numbers strong enough to block hostile states. We should not want a unified Europe that could decide to make Europe in its entirety friendly, neutral, or hostile.
We should strengthen NATO--which we are the main player in--rather than the EU which we are excluded from, in order to keep America in Europe, Russia out, and the EU down.
If it was up to me, I'd work against the European Union rather than simply neglect it and hope it falls apart on its own.
