In his first term, US President Donald Trump scared the bejesus out of the feckless EU by threatening to pull American defences from NATO unless European countries started to pull their weight. As Trump pointed out, despite being required by the treaty to spend at least two per cent of GDP on defence, almost no EU country had met even that minimum.
Instead, they’d welched on their responsbilities, comfortably assuming that America would always be there to protect them. Instead, they blew their money on cradle-to-grave welfare states that did nothing but attract swarms of human blowflies from Africa and the Middle East. When Big Daddy America threatened to walk, EU countries crapped themselves.
Publicly, they sneered, but, almost immediately, EU defence spending jumped. Sort of: from 1.9 per cent to just over the bare minimum of treaty obligations. The European mendicants are still spending almost the least they have on defence in since the 1960s. And still spending twice as much on welfare.
Once again, the Trump administration is calling out their dangerous addiction to welfare over defence. The latest National Security Strategy lays bare the sheer recklessness of Europe’s civilisational death-wish.
The 30-page document painted European nations as wayward, declining powers that have ceded their sovereignty to the European Union and are led by governments that suppress democracy and muzzle voices that want a more nationalistic turn.
It says the continent faces “civilisational erasure” through immigration that could render it “unrecognisable” in two decades – as well as turning several North Atlantic Treaty Organisation allies into majority “non-European” countries. It concludes the region could grow too weak to be “reliable allies.”
Well, where is any of that wrong? EU countries know it, too.
The document landed like a bucket of cold water in European capitals. European leaders reading the document need “to assume that the traditional transatlantic relationship is dead,” said Katja Bego, a senior researcher at Chatham House, a think tank in London.
Timothy Garton Ash, a prominent British historian, described the document “as the mother of all wake-up calls for Europe.”
“We’re in this extraordinary position where the US is still objectively an ally of Europe, but subjectively at least in the Trump administration and the view of many Europeans we’re no longer seeing each other that way,” he said.
And why should they? Americans know they’ve been used and abused by Europe for 80 years. America not only spent a river of blood and treasure to save Europe from itself in WWII, it spent even more rebuilding Western Europe, via the Marshall Plan, which included rebuilding a Germany which had done nothing to merit such largesse. For the next 80 years, American taxpayers paid the vast bulk of the defence cost of keeping communism from overrunning Europe.
In return, Europe treated America to eight decades of sneering, including the Germans who’d plunged the continent into the most devastating war in history.
No wonder Americans are sick of their shit.
Many points in the National Security Strategy echo critiques that Vice President JD Vance first made weeks into the administration, at a security conference in Munich in February. They amplify criticisms of Europe levelled by MAGA supporters and highlight transatlantic differences.
“It essentially declares outright opposition to the European Union,” said Garton Ash. “It’s JD Vance’s notorious speech in Munich but on steroids, and as official US policy.”
The EU deserves outright opposition. After the UN, it’s one of the most corrosive entities in the Western World.
The strategy says the EU – an institution that the US helped establish decades ago – and other transnational organisations “undermine political liberty and sovereignty.” It also accuses many European governments of “subversion of democratic processes,” though it doesn’t spell out what it means by that.
Oh, we can all answer that: the stifling of free speech, the suppression of dissenting movements, including the wholesale arrest of opposition parties.
Every Western European country scores higher on the global ranking of freedom and democracy than the US does, according to Freedom House, a US-based non-profit that ranks countries according to measures such as election process, rule of law and individual rights.
Well, we can judge how accurate that is by the fact that it ranks New Zealand second in the world. Feeling free, are we, Good Oil readers?
Even more ludicrously, the UK is climbing up its ‘freedom’ ladder, even though the country arrests people for legal speech and even has literal thoughtcrime laws (numerous Christians have been arrested by UK police for ‘silent prayer’).
So, we’ll treat Freedom House’s word with the contempt it so clearly deserves.
Rather than presenting a more isolationist America – as many in the MAGA movement have advocated – Bego at Chatham House said the document shows the Trump administration wants to actively reshape Europe in its own image.
No, it wants to keep Europe as actually European, not a gigantic Western caliphate-cum-police state.
“Our goal should be to help Europe correct its current trajectory,” the strategy says. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilisational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation” […]
A spokeswoman for the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, declined to comment on the whole document but pushed back against the assertion that Europe backs harmful migration policies or undermines free speech.
To prove it, they’ll arrest you if you post anything saying otherwise on social media. Then they’ll demand you turn over your spare room to a Somali illegal immigrant.
And don’t even think about going to the police if you get raped by a Muslim illegal immigrant: the poor men are just suffering a ‘sexual emergency’.
