Europe Is No Longer Worth Defending – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Monday morning’s edition of the RealClear Politics news aggregator contained a very interesting manifestation of their usual juxtaposition of left vs. right thought pieces. It looked like this…

The articles themselves were no less notable in their approach to the dissipating relationship between a MAGA Revivalist America and a globalist declining Europe.

The Nathalie Tocci Guardian piece, as a statement of the European position, is filled with emotional and hyperbolic gushing forth about the American re-examination of the cross-Atlantic relationship. A taste…

The “Signalgate” scandal confirmed what Europeans already knew. The Trump administration’s disdain for Europe is deep and the transatlantic fracture is structural. While our leaders publicly play down the significance of the unravelling that is manifestly under way, few actually sound as convinced in private.

Hopes persist that Europe can prevent the most extreme manifestation of the collapse in the relationship, be it an invasion of Greenland, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Europe’s NATO member states or an all-out trade war. Most urgently, European leaders are focused on ensuring that if (or perhaps when) the U.S. throws Kyiv under the bus, it is Europe collectively that will somehow succeed in securing a free, independent and democratic Ukraine. But there should be no illusion that this will happen by working in synergy with Washington or even with its tacit approval.

They actually believe Trump will order an invasion of Greenland, apparently, which is comical. It’s quite obvious what’s going to happen in Greenland at some point in the near future: the Greenlanders will vote to declare their independence, and when they do, that will be followed by negotiations which will produce an economic and military alliance with the United States that will amount to a protectorate of sorts.

This is obvious, because a country the size of Greenland with a population of just 56,000 can’t possibly protect itself, and the terms Trump will offer to the Greenlanders will be generous on a scale that Denmark, to whom Greenland is currently (and less-than-satisfactorily) wedded, cannot match. (RELATED: Greenland: America’s Arctic Imperative)

What Tocci doesn’t bother to note in her drive-by reference to Greenland is that what security the Danes do offer the Greenlanders comes almost completely courtesy of Denmark’s membership in NATO — and by extension, America is already protecting Greenland with no direct benefits from doing so.

We have a couple of bases there, but if we want to pursue mineral exploitation or other economic development opportunities in Greenland we have to do so at the pleasure (at least to some extent) of Danish bureaucrats whose pursuits of various Eurocentric agendas — climate change, most notably — do not align with our own.

Signalgate was both unsurprising and shocking. It was unsurprising because the personal animosity towards European countries on display in the U.S. national security team’s supposedly confidential group chat is not very different to what administration officials have said publicly. Think of JD Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February, the U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff, in his interview with Tucker Carlson, or Donald Trump himself in his ceaseless declarations and social media posts. There is remarkable consistency between the private and public pronouncements: Washington considers Europe to be obsolete, arrogant and parasitic.

Because Europe is obsolete, arrogant, and parasitic.

That Europe refuses to recognize its sins along these lines does not expiate them. (RELATED: Five Quick Things: Our National Crazy Eurotrash Girlfriend)

And if Tocci is any barometer of European thinking, that refusal is coupled with a great deal of projection…

What is shocking, nevertheless, is that the U.S. does not just view Europe as moribund. Trump’s officials seem to want to contribute to its death. Regardless of what one thinks of the Houthi threat in the Red Sea, it is U.S. policy that attacking the pro-Iranian militia is in its national security interest. But as Vance and Pete Hegseth made clear on the group chat, the U.S. also thinks that attacking the Houthis would benefit Europeans, and this is reason enough to question any attack. Helping Europeans, in other words, is seen as such a downside it could outweigh the direct upside for the U.S. itself of dealing with a perceived threat. It is the visceral hatred of Europeans contained within this twisted train of thought that is shocking.

This active disdain has three major policy implications for Europe. First, trade. This week, Trump is set to launch his trade war on countries he believes are “screwing” the U.S. economy. No amount of sympathy or historic friendship will mitigate the U.S.-EU dimension of this war. Quite the opposite. However, managing trade policy for the 27 governments is the EU’s legal responsibility and the bloc has a combined economic weight the U.S. cannot ignore. There will be pain, but in a tit-for-tat conflict it will be reciprocal. If Europeans stick together on trade, as on the regulation of technology, the U.S. will be unable to behave in a predatory way, however irrational its hatred. Washington will be forced to act transactionally when it comes to Brussels and it will eventually make a deal.

Europe’s combined economic weight declines precipitously each year, something hardly lost on Trump and his team. Idiotic policies of the continent’s ruling elite — Net Zero carbon emissions pursuits being the most obvious example, and systematic, unassimilable mass immigration from Third World countries to add to the welfare rolls and create such massive tax burdens on the diminishing productive classes in those countries that economic competitiveness becomes impossible being another — create a righteous disdain on the part of the U.S. administration. (RELATED: How Does an Entire Continent Fail?)

And Tocci is whistling past the graveyard with respect to the trade war she decries, just as the Euros are speaking unseriously about assuming the burden of defending Ukraine. Somehow, there is no ceasefire in that ridiculous war despite the clear compelling interest on both sides to stop the killing, and none of Europe’s ruling elite seems to have the courage to join Trump in pursuing a solution.

Instead, we get preening promises that countries that have no intellectual, technological, industrial, or even biological (on account of staggeringly tiny birthrates) ability to positively affect Ukraine’s war effort will intervene on their behalf and drive Russia back to its 2014 borders.

There is a not-insignificant body of thought among beleaguered non-elite native Europeans that their governments — Germany is now floating the idea of reinstating a military draft — wish to send all the native young men off to die in Ukraine and therefore make their native population completely at the mercy of the unassimilable immigrants roaming their streets. Call that a tinfoil-hat theory, but it has wide circulation particularly among the anti-globalist parties ascendant there. Consider that as part of an analysis of the sustainability of a European boots-on-the-ground war effort in Ukraine.

Similarly, exactly why should anyone believe that a trade war with Trump’s America won’t result in a further de-industrialization of Europe?

Other than with respect to anchored agricultural products like champagne or Scotch, exactly why would a European country faced with significant tariffs on one side and economic-development overtures on the other not simply move production to the United States?

Mercedes-Benz makes cars in Alabama already. BMW makes them in South Carolina now. Why manufacture industrial equipment, airplanes, steel, or ships in Leeds or Dresden or Marseille, where electric power can run 50 to 200 percent higher in cost with less reliable availability, than in Toledo, Gulfport, or Boise?

Bear in mind that this “trade war” that Tocci claims will ultimately bring America to our knees is based on reciprocal tariffs. Reciprocal means tariff rates might come down as well as go up, and any dispassionate analysis of Trump’s actions should at least recognize them as a possible invitation to more free trade across the Atlantic rather than less. What reciprocal tariffs do ensure is that a one-way trade relationship, such as we’ve allowed the Euros to enjoy, is at an end. (RELATED: The Tariff Reckoning: America’s Economic Resolve in Trump’s Second Act)

Why wouldn’t we objectively consider an alteration to the current unsatisfactory trade relationship, given the poor state of European economic competitiveness? Why wouldn’t we bleed them dry rather than subsidizing them?

It’s plain to see that it isn’t hatred that is driving Team Trump’s disdain for Europe and our relationship with the EU. It’s self-interest. The current leadership of the United States is taking stock of modern Europe and seeing a very meager return on a very large investment in its defense.

And so when Vance notes that some 40 percent of European trade flows through the Red Sea corridor that Houthi terrorists interrupt with rockets, while only a nominal amount of American trade is threatened by the Houthis, it isn’t “hatred” that drive his questions about strikes in Yemen to take out the bad guys. It’s a cold calculation of America’s interests. (RELATED: America Alone, and We Can Handle It)

That this never penetrates Tocci’s conscience should tell you that if America’s assessment of Europe as obsolete, arrogant, and parasitic, well … we aren’t quite wrong, are we?

As for Schmitt’s post at the American Conservative, it contains a lot less bluster. Schmitt is instead engaging in the kind of cold analysis of the relationship that is decades overdue.

From the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall, American foreign policy was oriented toward a singular goal: defeating Soviet communism.

In the 21st century, however, the greatest threat to core American interests is no longer located on the borders of Europe. Instead, it resides in the Indo-Pacific, where the People’s Republic of China is the United States’ most formidable adversary, both economically and militarily. It has been nearly a decade since Beijing debuted its Made in China 2025 initiative, by which China aims to supersede the United States in nearly every critical industry and sector imaginable. Communist China is our challenge.

President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance have long understood these geopolitical realities. An America-First foreign policy is one based on prioritizing tangible American interests — not empty abstractions. For decades, American leaders have told European leaders what they want to hear, not what they need to hear. The kid-glove treatment is over.

The foreign adventurism of the last 30 years has not been “conservative” at all. It’s Wilsonian liberalism in new clothes. The Wilsonians — neoconservatives and neoliberals alike — used to dominate both party establishments. They saw the world in terms of abstract “values,” and insisted that those values — rather than concrete, tangible national interests — must direct American foreign policy. In other words, America was compelled to be everywhere, all at once, all the time.

American realism requires tough choices and recognizes scarcity, meaning that we cannot, in fact, be everywhere, all at once, all the time.

As President John Quincy Adams famously said, “America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

This is quite right. It was Washington who cautioned us to “make no permanent alliances.” And Schmitt notes that if the Europeans don’t like the perceived loss of interest from U.S. policymakers in providing them with American protection, they might at least note we are returning to our policy roots, as our current circumstances indicate that we must…

American realism asks many important questions when considering intervention, investment, or increased interest, but centers on one core question: Are American core strategic interests at stake? It’s critical that we preserve American blood and money for interventions or efforts that either directly benefit American core interests or protect American core interests.

Fortunately, this White House understands that America’s resources are finite. The nature of the threats we face today and the revival of American realism demands a more resilient Europe that can defend its own sovereignty in a real, tangible way.

Relying on protection from a government with $37 trillion in debt, thanks to, among other things, 80 years of coddling Europe, is childish and parasitic by any definition. (RELATED: Vance in Munich and Foreign Policy Realism for the Modern World)

In his Munich speech, Vance warned Europe that this re-examination of the relationship is accelerating not just because of Ukraine but also because we question the commitments of the continent’s ruling classes to the “shared values” NATO was built on.

Values like democracy and free speech, not to mention the preservation of Western civilization and culture. (RELATED: Free Speech Restrictions Are a Problem)

How’s that going? Well, over the weekend we saw the conviction and two-year prison sentence of French National Rally party leader Marine Le Pen, the clear favorite to take over that country’s presidency in the next election. Le Pen is charged with “embezzlement” for, essentially, having members of her European Parliament staff double as party officials at National Rally, something that is apparently a common practice among European MPs across party and national lines. It’s almost universally recognized as a purely political conviction; the anti-Le Pen commentariat, in fact, argues that it’s a good thing in order to diminish the political prospects of a “far-right nationalist.”

And given that this also happened in Romania, where a “far-right nationalist” actually won an election but was imprisoned rather than allowed to take office, and similar anti-democratic shenanigans have befallen non-elite politicians in Moldova and Turkey, while in several countries anti-globalist parties have been denied parliamentary government representation despite strong showing in recent elections — the plight of Germany’s AfD being the best example — it’s certainly worth asking whether there is any democracy left in Europe. (RELATED: Europe’s Deep State Election Meddling Threatens NATO)

In Ireland, most amazingly, that country’s most famous celebrity, legendary MMA fighter Conor McGregor, is being threatened with expulsion from the roster of potential presidential candidates due to his less-than-complimentary views of the effect of mass Third World immigration on his country.

There is nothing left to defend in Europe. We’ve spent trillions of dollars rebuilding and securing the continent from threats of fascism and communism, and it’s nonetheless descending into the same failed state it seems destined for. Europe’s elites will stick it to its commonfolk, no matter what form — feudalism and serfdom, or fascism and communism, or the modern hydra of wokeness, climate change nuttery, and multicultural suicide — that might take.

And when any alteration of the equation sought by a dissatisfied America bent on throwing off its own globalist shackles is proposed, the woke elitists like Tocci scream that it’s driven by “hatred” and “disdain.”

No, Nathalie, we’re just not interested anymore in assisting Europe’s suicide. You can do that all by yourself. We’re starting to recognize that salvaging what value Europe’s corpse might offer is the best way to recoup our lost investment.

It’s not personal. It’s just business.

And if Europe doesn’t like it, then it’s up to Europe to change.

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