Oh please, just stop pretending you people want America in Europe:
“We will be back.”
With those four words, uttered at the 2019 Munich Security Conference, Joe Biden warmed the hearts of Europeans despairing at the erratic, indifferent and at times openly hostile foreign policy of U.S. President Donald Trump.
But even if the Democratic presidential contender wins the election (an increasingly likely “if” should Biden prove able to maintain his advantage in the polls), it’ll take more than warm feelings to get the transatlantic relationship back on track.
With or without a reliable partner in the White House, the European Union and Europe’s leading powers will have to learn to live in a world in which Washington may still be the ultimate guarantor of the Continent’s security, but won’t have the bandwidth to fix all the region’s many problems.
It's Trump's fault, they say. But if Biden wins the relationship won't be healed?
Well then it isn't Trump's fault, is it?
And the last paragraph is even bigger BS.
First, nice moving of the goal posts there. Since when has America been the source of fixing all the region's many problems? We had two basic missions. Keep Europe free from Soviet conquest and keep European countries free and democratic. Saying now that America is of less value because we can't solve their many problems is BS. That's not our job. And it never was. As if the Euros would want America to have that power!
On defense, yes, in the Cold War America was the ultimate guarantor of free Europe's security and the foundation of hopes for freedom behind the Iron Curtain. The issue today is a matter of getting Europe to pay for their own defense once the serious threat of a Soviet invasion evaporated. Europe can handle the Russian conventional threat if they try, especially because the Russians have to start from a position much farther east.
And don't think European NATO states were eager to defend themselves during the Cold War. There was always a thread of European worry that if they spent too much on defense that they'd be a conventional battlefield for a third time in the 20th century. So the Europeans skimped on defense to make it more likely that America would have to escalate to strategic nukes to prevent the Soviets from taking Western Europe. The Europeans hoped that would deter war between America and the USSR.
In the post-Cold War world, European defense spending and capabilities cratered. Even the Obama administration noticed and managed to get NATO to agree to a 2% of GDP floor. Trump has been more vocal and blunt about Europe's failure to spend, but it was a point of friction prior to Trump extending back many decades.
And despite the bluster, America is actually reinforcing NATO directly and not just pushing Europe to share the burden.
Face it, the EU is working hard to eject America from Europe by weakening NATO, the instrument of American influence in Europe:
The US is not in fact turning its back on NATO as the author claims. Too often in the past, it has been Europeans who threatened NATO. The US has been reinforcing the frontier of NATO and is sending a signal that Germany is a wealthy freeloader even as the U.S. retains its core infrastructure in Germany. If anything, Trump is saving NATO.
The hand wringing about the state of trans-Atlantic relations is all about making the EU a multi-ethnic empire, as the author of the linked article basically admits:
[Europeans] should also step up their common defense efforts to complement NATO with a stronger European pillar[.]
To be clear, that means Europe building up an independent EU defense institution. That isn't about "complementing" NATO to defend Europe. It's about destroying NATO which will reduce American influence in Europe.
Europeans already spend too little on defense. Defunding NATO and diverting scarce and grudgingly appropriated money to building EU armed forces is a means to completing the evolution of the EU from free trade bloc to imperial state.
Don't let the European Union propagandists distract us from the value of NATO in defending Europe from Russian threats--and keeping Europe itself free from the weight of its darker autocratic history--as I warned:
We think Europe is free because that is how we've seen it in our lifetime. First expanding within Western Europe and then flowing into the former Warsaw Pact and into the former Soviet Union itself. But the Europe we see is the Europe we built after World War II during the Cold War. Western culture gave birth to political and personal freedom but is not synonymous with it. That's a British innovation given a huge boost by America. And without the big Soviet threat to get Europeans to accept our influence as the price of their defense, that American (and British) influence is waning.
The European Union is anti-democratic and anti-liberty, and so naturally tries to wreck NATO in order to push America and our influence out of Europe, to let them return to their autocratic roots.
For our own good we should defend and strengthen NATO. A Britain safely out of the EU where it won't be infected or overwhelmed by the continental statists but able to promote NATO as a force for freedom is a good thing.
America needs NATO to prevent any hostile power from controlling the continent, whether that threat is Russia or the EU. Right now the biggest threat comes from the EU. So just ignore their fake anguish over problems in the trans-Atlantic relationship.
If the proto-imperial EU ever discards that prefix, it will be a disaster for the free West.
