Our fight, it is no exaggeration to say, is the civilized world’s fight. It is a fight for reason and comity in the affairs of nations, against an administration whose worldview, and behaviour, is increasingly that of an aggressive dictatorship, in all its crudeness and its thuggery.
Mr. Trump, as the Prime Minister has said, aims to “break us,” a phrase with historic echoes. He has to now, or others will follow our lead. If he succeeds, then the world will be governed by nothing but force in the end, in trade as in other matters. But if we prevail, then “broad and sunlit uplands” must surely await.
I wish European politicians would finally find their balls and stop kissing Trump’s boot every time he uses it to kick the continent, and instead follow Canada’s lead.
The problem is that EU member states have different interests and priorities. For example, Poland don’t want to rile up Trump because Poland is reliant on the US military to deter Russia. And trying to wean off from US is risky because many EU members themselves are reluctant to invest more on homegrown European defense like Spain.
Another example is Ireland. We are too fucking balls-less to decouple from American multinationals and we’re all too happy to be a tax haven. Even after the EU court ruled that Apple has to pay the back taxes to Ireland, the Irish government is reluctant to actually pursue Apple. We’ve also become a Trojan horse for corporate surveillance. Our data protection commissioner was a Meta employee. No conflict of interests there! We are closer to Boston than to Berlin, indeed!
This is a dated mindset though. Poland has really fallen for the USA’s divide and conquer tactics, but surely even they must now see that the USA is never going to back them against Russia?
I guess from the Polish point of view, Europe is not offering an alternative for US protection. At the moment they are playing the balancing act between hoping that the US will stay and telling Trump to buzz off.
Edit: wording
They are using US weapons at the moment, though.
They are, and they’ve been bending over backwards to simp for Trump. Gotta course-correct quickly in my opinion.
Meloni was the worst. She learned nothing from Mussolini’s mistake with the Nazis.
Von der Leyen, Kallas, Merz—the list of spineless leaders goes on. Even Macron and Sánchez just talk the talk, but when it comes to action, they don’t step up either. None of them seem to get that the era of the U.S. as allies is over.
All that was led by Von Der Leyen. He actually contracted psychologists and had EU convinced that if they just stroked Trump’s ego, Trump would reward Europe. This was the advice from some shit university psychologist (pick any one, they are all full of shit). All that did we make Europe seem submissive to Trump and so he went harder. The same thing happened in Canada. Carney decimated Canadian environmental polices, got rid of the digital tax and the carbon levy to align with Trump’s administration, then Trump pushed harder when he realized Canada could be dominated.
Kissing Trump’s ass accomplishes nothing, it was counter-productive. Japan will learn the hard way.
Sánchez told trump to fuck off from Spanish airspace at least. That was a good start. France, Spain and Germany are also in the process to migrate away from US IT service dependence, which is another step in the right direction. More is urgently needed to un-vassalize the economies and the militaries.