Oh, Trump has it in for "Europe?"
George W. Bush observed in 2003, “Since the end of World War II, the United States has strongly supported European unity as the best path to European peace and prosperity.” That was a precisely accurate statement. From Truman through Obama, America’s European policy has been strikingly consistent: The United States has supported a democratic and united Europe joined to Canada and the United States by nato. “We recognize we will benefit more from a strong and equal partner than from a weak one.” Those words happen to have been pronounced by Bill Clinton. They could as easily have appeared in a speech by any of his predecessors or successors—until now.
Please. This author relies on the Euro elite notion that the primitive knuckle-dragging people of Europe have to be prevented from pushing European rulers to waging war on each other by suppressing that latent nationalism under the net of rules spread by Brussels that puts the dangerous people safely under the control of enlightened pan-European elites writing ever more onerous cheese regulations (and everything else--you wonder why Britain is having more trouble escaping the EU than eastern Europeans had escaping Soviet dominance that foolishly relied on tanks and secret police?).
Maybe it was understandable to risk an empire to get the Europeans to pull as one team when the EU was weak and the Soviet threat was strong.
But a lot has happened since Bill Clinton spoke well of European integration. And I never liked Bush's verbal support for the EU. So join the 21st century, eh? The 1980s called and they want their European unity policy back.
As the preface to the article inconveniently has to note, Trump expressed strong support for NATO just prior to publication. Inconvenient, that. I never worried that Trump would abandon NATO despite the lamentations of people who never gave a damn about NATO until they saw its fate as a way to club Trump.
A strong NATO is the way to protect Europe and keep it free. As NATO has proven.
A strong European Union is the way to get another Soviet Union Lite (and perhaps not so "lite" in the long run) that will be hostile to America, hostile to democracy, and an unstable larger version of the Austro-Hungarian multi-ethnic empire that was neither democratic nor strong.
So I hope that Trump truly wants to destroy "political" Europe in order to save "geographic" Europe--and the Europeans who live there, of course, with a strengthened NATO.
The EU can die with festering boils. The faster the better.
