"'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over,' it says. There are echoes of a speech by JD Vance, the vice-president, in Munich in February that stunned European leaders by warning that the continent’s greatest danger came not from Russian aggression but from within, with the erosion of traditional values. 'Economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilisational erasure' in Europe, it states, targeting the 'European Union and other transnational bodies that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence...."
From "Europe facing ‘civilisational erasure’, warns Trump/A new US security plan warns European allies may falter in Nato, urging nationalist renewal as Washington positions itself between the continent and Moscow" (London Times).

71 comments:
A Milton Berle show had guest comedians conspiring to prove that Berle steals jokes, and constructed one ostensibly about Marilyn Monroe whose punch line revealed it was about the Monroe doctrine. They lock the joke in a safe, declaring that if Berle steals this this proves not only that he steals jokes but that he steals really bad jokes.
Vance just states, what is to me, the obvious. And the European leaders were "stunned" to hear this?
Nato, not NATO? Maga, not MAGA?
Anyway, there is a growing realization that the EU needs to go. NATO is not there to protect nations that don’t share the same western values. Censorship, mass immigration, trans nonsense, etc. are destroying the alliance from within. Putin smiles.
"Nato, not NATO?"
I'm going to guess that the British rule is that if you only do all caps when you want the letters to be spoken as letters — e.g. USA, ACLU. If you want it said as a word — that is, if it's an acronym — then you indicate that by writing it as if it's a word.
My favorite Milwaukee Somali was Mohamed Noor
"Mohamed Noor shot Justine Ruszczyk Damond as she approached his patrol car to report a possible rape behind her Minneapolis home in July 2017."
A DEI hire whose IQ was not even functional. An early warning about the facts of life.
There are some acronyms that Americans don't capitalize, such as "scuba."
Others are: radar, sonar, laser, taser, modem.
OTAN Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord,
Breezy is correct. The problem is not NATO per se, it's the attempt to create a European nation-state that 'counterbalances' the country which provides the majority of the foreign policy muscle for the same. The Euros want to control US foreign policy in order to control our military, we want to control (actually, via NATO, we effectively do) control the EU military in order to keep their foreign policy in line. It means we are constantly at loggerheads with even less possibility of coordinated compromise than during the Cold War.
People will see NATO or MAGA and pronounce each as a word already. Not sure we need lower case help from an LT writer on that.
Thought experiment: What happens if nationalists win in every EU country? It could happen. Would the EU then just dissolve itself? Or once in, would the temptations to keep things going as is be too great, as apparently has happened with Meloni? CC, JSM
Even NATO members act extremely adversarial lately. Europe as it is now is a cautionary warning, if the multi-culti immigrant enthusiasts prevail. The third world is colonizing civilization and the anti-colonialists are all for replacing citizens with subjects. In France only one third of people work for private employers, the rest are bureaucrats or welfare recipients.
Simon says that unsustainable orders don’t in fact last forever.
…many Americans don’t need this constant reminding their system is superior to whatever you want to call European Socialism but we do have to spend a disturbing amount of effort from defending our system from enemies foreign and domestic….
Just suck it up and start paying your own way you sniveling twits.
Most of EUROPE (ha) is failing, with the UK leading the way. Mark Steyn has been banging this drum for a decade or two. European socialism has led to financial ruin. Add in millions of third world illegals to the cauldron, while destroying the energy sector and your future looks cold and bleak.
The problem with NATO flexing like that comes down to the real world summation: the USA can survive without NATO but not the inverse. Without our military NATO is a paper tiger unable to function.
Don't forget fubar!
we should leave Europe to the people that live there..
that is: leave Europe to the Muslims
The document was impolitic, but it contains a great deal of truth. In a way, I feel bad for Europe. they don't have the resources in the ground there to maintain the life to which they have become accustomed by looting other countries through their overseas empires, and Biden (we) talked them into cutting themselves off from cheap Russian resources, which are now going to China.
A German manufacturer just opened a chemical plant in China because it had relied on the cheap natural gas feed stock from the Nord Stream pipeline, well, that cheap gas is going to China now. Europe is in a depression (certainly this is what we would call if we suffered four years of negative, or microscopic growth) because 400 years of cheap resources garnered through world dominating empires is coming to an end.
It was to put off this inevitable day that Western Europe has been invading Russia for centuries.
Europe is run by an unelected board that has zero accountability to the people, their leaders are unimaginably unpopular. How popular is Trump with Democrats? That's how unpopular Macron is with the French as a whole. Same with Starmer, same with Mertz, and they lecture us on "democracy" Fred Mertz is a twofer comedy wise, there is the name, but give him a monocle, and bingo, Col Klink. (I could be arrested in Germany for that joke.)
Europe needs to decide whether it’s America’s friend or America’s foe
"Europe is in a depression (certainly this is what we would call if we suffered four years of negative, or microscopic growth) because 400 years of cheap resources garnered through world dominating empires is coming to an end."
Europe is in a depression because it has chosen to abandon affordable power. It is self inflicted.
Read a sad story last night about Paris cancelling their New Year's Eve celebrations because of security concerns. So sad.
The problem is in Europe by way of ethnic Springs and catastrophic anthropogenic immigration reform. The problem is the revival of left-wing wicked solutions, particularly planned parenthood. The problem is the Green blight and progressive, unreliable energy generation over brown land, blue seas, and gray skies. The problem is climate change forced by sociopolitical fetuses... features. #HateLovesAbortion
Europe is run by an unelected board
Super delegatea, judicial monarchs, the Democratic/dictatorial duality. Secular religious delegation of Choice to perform human rites for social, clinical, criminal, political, and climate progress.
Althouse: great point about the acronyms. (I take a grammarian's delight at explaining the difference between them and "initialisms"). Carry on. TY for your attention to this matter. Let 'er rip! And so on!
Then there’s Flir, the former acronym with another former acronym embedded in it.
Europe needs to decide whether they face threats to their security or not. If they do face threats to their security, it’s primarily their responsibility to address them. They need to invest the money to build up their militaries and train them properly. The US can and should be a partner, but the primary responsibility for their defense remains with Europe. If they decide there is no threat to their security, then it isn’t our place to protect them.
Democrats don’t realize, but their big problem in 2026 and 2028 is Europe. We only need to look there to see what Democrats will do to the United States.
https://johnkassnews.com/why-are-democrats-protecting-narco-terrorists-like-maduro/
The Europeans have thought, with some justification, that America is in service to European security, because it has been thus since WWII. But true to their history, they have ceded power to insidious progressivism in an incremental way that now threatens to overtake and subsume their culture, replacing it.
Their leaders correctly see populist leaders becoming a powerful political force, and have tried, with some desperation, to make populism illegal, to throw a cover over it - a European form of 'lawfare'. I don't think it will work. And while the EU's leaders are contemptuous of Trump, they won't dare to call his bluff, because he ain't bluffin'. He knows their hand is weak, and they know he knows.
I think JD Vance has done pretty well at expressing his own ideas on the matter too - although it hasn't garnered much official attention.
For anyone with common sense, its hard to take these hysterical European leaders seriously. "Russia is going to eat us, they" screech. "Help us America while we rearm".
All you have to do is look at the numbers of people and GDP of Russia and compare it to the EU. Its like a 200 lbs linebacker complaining that woody allen is going to beat them up and rob them.
And of course, all his hysteria over "Putin gonna invade Europe" is alternated with sneers that Russia is about to collapse, and demands we give Zelensky more weapons because he's on the verge of taking Moscow..
NATO's reason for existance ended when the berlin wall fell. IRC, Putin actually requested to join NATO in the 2000s and was denied. Its time for us to leave. The Euros can take care of themselves.
Of course, the real reason for the hysteria is money. Isn't it always at the bottom of everything? American troops spending $$ in Europe. American subsidizing European defense. ANd in the USA, defense contractors making $$. Who wants the gravy train to end?
It's fascinating to watch a pre-eminent superpower surrender this way and embrace an unforced siege mentality.
It's an unforced retrenchment and surprising given the network of alliances and, frankly, a system of powerful vassal states available to it.
The US-led global order may have failed eventually given the rise of China and Russian revanchism, but it seems the US is accelerating it without even attempting to give preservation of their hegemony a good attempt. Absolutely fascinating and without any historical precedent I'm aware of.
Easter island is the closest I can think of.
Moronic "strategy" based on what ever appeals to dear leader at the moment and a basic misunderstanding of history.
In 3rd grade we all learned what a great thing the Monroe Doctrine was, stopping European imperialism. Later some of us figured out that it was also an excuse US domination, benefitting a few. Trump still has the 3rd grade understanding, Rubio and Vance's masters, know better.
The “Monroe Doctrine,” as originally conceived, wasn’t directed toward other countries in the Western hemisphere, declaring that the U.S. can do as it pleases.
It was directed toward the European colonial powers, warning them to stay away.
Are the Republicans in Congress ever going to do something?
Of course the way to deter Russian and Chinese influence in places like Venezuela is to show them who is boss in Ukraine. Which is to say the democratically elected government supported by liberal democratic allies. This never needed explaining to anyone. But it's lost on Hegseth.
It really speaks to the depth of intellectual rigor in policy making positions that simplistic and one-dimensional strategy can find such acceptance.
I honestly cannot fathom how we've gone from trade war with China, to lets sell them our advanced AI and not look to compete with them anymore.
The amount of absolute fundamental shifts in foreign policy in this administration is incomprehensible, to the point that Americans should be shocked. I really think there's an urgent need for multiple stories on the 180 that has been done on China in particular.
The US seems to be Putins puppet, even as Putin is Xi’s puppet. Beijing manipulating it all.
Trump is their instrument.
"'The days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over'" Correct. Of course, the propping up was always a bit of a Potemkin exercise. But US now lacks capacity, will, and need. China is an equal rival. We can't afford to have Russia be full China ally. Europe is facing civ erasure and getting weaker. Hence, rational recalibration is necessary.
"...All you have to do is look at the numbers of people and GDP of Russia and compare it to the EU. ..."
Good luck with the common-sense approach. I was saying exactly the same thing about Russia / Ukraine 5 years ago.
Breezy said...
"Nato, not NATO? Maga, not MAGA?"
Yeah, they can't even spell "civilizational" correctly.
“ It was directed toward the European colonial powers, warning them to stay away.”
We just-added Russia, and especially China, to the colonial powers we don’t want in our backyard. Cuba was bad enough, but the contagion was contained, because it was an island, and easily isolated. Venezuela is a bigger problem because it is much harder to isolate. They are, essentially allied with Russia, China, and Cuba, and of those Cuba is essentially a non-entity because they are so poor. Russia is focusing on Ukraine, and to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe, leaving China. It should be a match made in heaven, trading Venezuelan oil for Chinese cash, arms, and fentanyl precursors. But the Trump Administration keeps intruding there.
"...urging nationalist renewal..."
Because "no nations" is working out so well for them. (/s) What is "Europe" if there are no nations?
Are the people who want a Palestinian "state" nationalists? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Let's Drop the Big One - Randy Newman
EU (excludes UK) 450 million people. GDP = 21 trillion. Russia 146 million people. GDP = 2.5 trillion.
IOW, EU (without UK) has 3x as many people. And 9x the wealth. So, they don't need the USA.
"It's an unforced retrenchment and surprising given the network of alliances and, frankly, a system of powerful vassal states available to it."
Our "powerful vassal states" can't whip up the moxie to go into Ukraine to save Odessa unless we agree to dive in when, not if, when, they get their ass handed to them by the Russians. They can yap about it until the cows come home, though.
"I honestly cannot fathom how we've gone from trade war with China, to lets sell them our advanced AI and not look to compete with them anymore."
We can't make F-35s without the rare earths that China has a virtual monopoly on the refining of. It took them decades to develop this tech, and they can shut it off at any time. Holland just seized a Chinese chip design firm, and oops, they forgot that the chips were actually made in China, and China choked off the supply chain for the actual chips, pushing manufacturers in Europe and the US to the brink before the Netherlands returned their factory, and now the chips cannot be paid for in dollars, but must be paid for in Chinese Yuan.
Trump came a decade too late, and every move he makes to shore up US manufacturing, like tariffs in Chinese steel, to include "Canadian steel" which is just Chinese steel with a couple of holes punched in it, or whatever by Canadians. We missed the window.
Just because you don't think it's over until the nukes detonate, doesn't mean that you are right. Our weapons are being defeated in Ukraine, or maybe you haven't heard. Rubio just admitted that we give them a Patriot battery, and two weeks later it's destroyed. If you think that drones are a problem, imagine the stockpile of drones the Chinese are probably manufacturing and building right now. Trump came a decade too late, and profit obsessed people like Kak have run our industrial base into the ground, replacing it with a financialized economy, that leaves a tiny percentage of people very wealthy indeed.
“ boatbuilder said...
"...urging nationalist renewal..."
Because "no nations" is working out so well for them. (/s) What is "Europe" if there are no nations?”
In practice if not yet in words, the EU sees itself as the People’s Democratic Republic of Europe. They have government without elections or accountability. The one thing they excel at is creating crippling bureaucracy. If bureaucracy and regulations led to strength, the EU would be a global superpower. Alas, it does just the opposite. Given their expanding demand for censorship, up to and including sending people to prison for saying or writing unapproved words, Western Europe is on my no travel list. The former Warsaw Pact nations of eastern Europe are more free than many of the legacy NATO countries. I do hope to visit them one day.
Kak and his ilk have eaten the cake, racking up huge profits sending US manufacturing overseas, high US skilled wages were 'economic inefficiencies' and now they want to use the base we don't have to smack around Russia and China.
Good luck.
Thank you Jaq for the Randy Newman shout out. I've always thought that song was great.
We have access to rare earths but we have had straight jackets on restraining them
Venezuelas assymetrical warfare is a direct threat to us
NATO’s big success is that it kept Europeans from physically slaughtering each other in another senseless war for 80 years. Now they insist on going big with economic and cultural suicide instead.
A distinction without a difference.
Germany is defacto in charge of Europe so they ultimately won the wars
Jaq said..."Let's Drop the Big One - Randy Newman"
One of the very few songs I know all the words to.
FredSays said...
NATO’s big success is that it kept Europeans from physically slaughtering each other in another senseless war for 80 years. Now they insist on going big with economic and cultural suicide instead.
This.
But the European member Nations never lost their taste for invading Russia.
They are just using NATO to do it now.
Kakistocracy said...
Are the Republicans in Congress ever going to do something?
Of course the way to deter Russian and Chinese influence in places like Venezuela is to show them who is boss in Ukraine.
LOL.
Could you possibly string together a collection of words on this subject that were any more stupid than this?
"We can't make F-35s without the rare earths that China has a virtual monopoly on the refining of."
We can and we must.
Rather than assembling all your friends for an intervention to save one, it's become like trying to conduct an intervention alone for all of your friends after they all have gone off the deep end.
Bruce Hayden said...
“ It was directed toward the European colonial powers, warning them to stay away.”
We just-added Russia, and especially China, to the colonial powers we don’t want in our backyard. Cuba was bad enough, but the contagion was contained, because it was an island, and easily isolated. Venezuela is a bigger problem because it is much harder to isolate. They are, essentially allied with Russia, China, and Cuba, and of those Cuba is essentially a non-entity because they are so poor. Russia is focusing on Ukraine, and to a lesser extent, Eastern Europe, leaving China. It should be a match made in heaven, trading Venezuelan oil for Chinese cash, arms, and fentanyl precursors. But the Trump Administration keeps intruding there.
This was obvious at the start but I was called a Putin puppet for saying it.
The natural path for the United States is to ally with Russia against China.
Russia is too small to fuck around in our backyard and is naturally antithetical to China. Russia would much rather work with the US than with China.
But that leaves our "allies" in Europe who we have given trillions of dollars to having to fend for themselves.
Russia and Saudi Arabia would be a much better allies for the US than Europe.
At least the Europhiles have stopped pretending this is about democracy or freedom. Now the "war" in Ukraine is going to come to a calamitous end. Hopefully Trump can salvage a detente with Russia out of this.
Europe’s “leading nations” have become jihadist infested, antisemitic, effete absurdities who think to redeem themselves by poking The Bear - if there is a Bear.
Obama said rightly that Russia will always have escalation dominance in Ukraine because Ukraine is a core interest of Russia's and on its border and a peripheral interest to the United States and on the other side of the world. Although that exact quote isn't really easy to find, for some reason.
Maybe if Zelensky hadn't mused about obtaining nuclear weapons while the troops were on his border, or maybe if somebody in the Biden Administration had pushed back hard on him, the war would not have happened. Instead Biden just let Zelensky threaten Russia with nukes.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/admiral-told-lawmakers-everyone-alleged-drug-boat-was-list-military-ta-rcna247767?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-us
New York Post on X: "National Guard shooting suspect’s close military ties with accused Afghan ‘suicide bomber’ arrested in Texas revealed https://t.co/VL0PS6ZNsb https://t.co/ygHucUuSBM" / X https://share.google/ZMzRvrIsMnj41Sjbx
Since World War II, the US has sat in the middle (and apex) of a multilateral network of democracies promoting a freer trading and more open global system. This gives scope to the democracies' comparative advantage based on competitive market-based capitalist economies. A key competitive requirement for operating such a system is diplomatic leadership skills.
Trump is restructuring America's foreign policy orientation to a transactional hub-and-spoke system of bilateral relationships and the systemic enervation of international multilateral institutions.
Strategic failure is inevitable. American strength rests on leadership of the democracies who produce about 60 percent of global nominal GDP, of which the US is about one-third. So with one-third of the democratic GDP the US exercises suzerainty over the other two-thirds through its security alliances and guarantees and its ability to project global military striking power. This is institutionally the most potent and influential leadership leverage in the world today. That is also what is being trashed by cutting tawdry corrupt deals with petrol states while humiliating loyal partners of almost a century's duration.
One can see that the US is now under the direction of a corrupt plutocracy that controls all of the entire institutional structure in the nation's capital Washington. Special interest rent extraction to further plutocratic wealth concentration is the function of today's Washington. One needs neither diplomats nor skilled civil servants to execute today's Washington; lobbyist trained toadies will do fine.
Interesting that FDR used special envoys extensively, Harry Hopkins being the notable example, for diplomatic purposes to build the international multilateral order that won the war and went on to secure the multilaterally based peace in the 1940s. Roosevelt was avoiding the obstructionism of a reactionary, racist, and exclusionary State Department of the 1930s and early 40s to create the new, more inclusive, and pragmatically internationalist architecture of the postwar world.
Like the uss quincy deal with ibn saud
Kak: "Interesting that FDR used special envoys extensively, Harry Hopkins being the notable example, ...avoiding the obstructionism of a reactionary, racist, and exclusionary State Department"
Isn't that what Trump is doing? Sending his son-in-law, non-experts like Witkoff, and guy-who-owes-nothing-to-the-deep-State-Dept Rubio to cut deals? CC, JSM
Trump’s 'Donroe Doctrine' is cynical, self-interested and money-grabbing. He is no longer pretending that America aspires to be Reagan’s “shining city upon a hill.” Instead, he’s hanging out a blunt new sign: “Open for business—anybody, anywhere, especially if there’s a deal to be made.”
The marshall mission that tried to get chiang and mao together
Transactional = mutually beneficial. What Kak wants is for us to beat other countries over the head with a club and take their stuff. I prefer transactional, and I don't get why it is supposed to be an insult. I think it is the best approach.
The Rand Corporation wrote a paper about the things we would have to do before a war with China, and one impediment in the way of such a war was that our economies were too intertwined... Hmmm. There are two ways to look at that statement.
Kak is an ideologue who thinks that the US is the natural master of the world. I would like him to provide an example from history where expanding an empire across the world didn't eventually lead to the destruction of the country that started the empire.
"I would like him to provide an example from history where expanding an empire across the world..."
The empire is having a hard time managing Minnesota, seems to me. Based on recent news, it looks like Somalia is calling the shots there.
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