Europeans get nervous when America is too hot or too cold in its determination to fight for Europe. Only when America is just right in conforming its defense attitudes to European current worries are Europeans calmer.
Europeans are frightened that America's foreign policy will hurt them:
America, too, is different nowadays: less influential, more inward-looking, and increasingly different from the America I've reported on for my entire career. Now, very much as in the 1920s and 30s, it wants to concentrate on its own national interests.
Even if President Trump loses a lot of his political strength at next year's mid-term elections, he may have shifted the dial so far towards isolationism that even a more Nato-minded American president in 2028 might find it hard to come to Europe's aid.
That interpretation of American policy is delusional. What is going on has nothing to do with isolationism. America is not in any way doing what America did between the world wars. Is this really isolationism? Or this? Surely, multiple peace initiatives aren't isolationism, right? What we are seeing are different priorities and more narrow levels of involvement abroad.
Europeans are complaining because America isn't doing what they want at the moment. That expectation can change on a dime. As Europeans have always complained, frankly. For their own reasons.
Europeans should be grateful that America values their freedoms; and that America and the USSR no longer struggle for Europe with the threat of escalation to a Soviet-American theater nuclear war--in Europe--looming over them.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
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NOTE:I made the image with Bing.
