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| Europe |
| Americans Are Done With Feckless, Useless, and Weak Fake Allies |
| 2026-04-09 |
| [It's Kurt] Give Donald Trump credit for his ambition — he’s not only taking out America’s longstanding enemies, but he’s redefining the entire post-war world order. No biggie — he’s just changing everything about the world that we all grew up in. But we’re conservatives, so when you change something, you generally need to demonstrate a good reason to do so. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, and so on. But the old order was broken. Disastrously so. The behavior of the formerly great Western European powers during this existential struggle against the Muslim Marxist murder mullahs — the Iranian government is shockingly super-deep into faculty lounge campus communism (listen here) — only confirms it. Trump didn’t cause this reality; Trump saw this reality and acted, thereby becoming the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan. Yes, his actions are destroying the world order as we knew it and grew up with, but not all destruction is bad. There’s creative destruction, where you clear out the deadwood and the inflammable underbrush that could fuel an inferno. That’s what Donald Trump’s doing. And that’s what the old version of NATO has been trying to stop. Remember the classic formulation of NATO’s role: keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Well, the Germans aren’t getting up anytime soon. They’re too busy hamstringing themselves. They’ve ensured that they can’t rely on their own energy generation by closing down their nukes and buying fuel from their enemies. And they’ve imported a third-world fifth column both out of existential guilt and the desperate need to make up for the birth dearth among the broken and exhausted people of their country. Germany is dying, and a majority of Germans believe it should. As for the Russians, until they invaded Ukraine, they had become merely a hypothetical threat since the end of the Cold War. That’s why the Bundeswehr was not too long ago practicing maneuvers with broomsticks; it couldn’t rustle up an armor division to save its life, literally. NATO’s other role was to keep the Americans in, but also to keep them down. Yeah, they wanted America there, carrying the bulk of the defense of Western Europe, spending massive amounts of money on bases and infrastructure — those of us who were stationed in Germany are fully aware of how much American cash energized the local economy. But NATO membership implies multilateralism, that we Americans weren’t going to do anything big without our allies. And this gave our allies a tremendous ability to keep us in check. Remember that the entire post-war foreign policy system was not simply about keeping the Russians at bay. It was also designed to control the Americans. Allowing countries like Cuba to continue to plague us, enforcing international law that only serves to limit American action, and tying America to operating with allies all acted as a brake on the USA’s pursuit of its own interests. This was a feature for the globalists, not a bug. But Trump wasn’t going to play that. Trump wasn’t interested in having America’s interests held in check by foreigners and by America’s own foreign policy establishment. Remember, their ideology eschews parochial patriotism. Their primary loyalty is not to the United States — why do you think Secretary of State George Shultz would bring a new ambassador, point to a globe, and ask them to find their country, with the right answer being the USA? Many of the Foggy Bottom types failed that test. Opponents try to portray Trump as crazy or even treacherous because he refuses to adhere to the old world order, but Trump’s patriotism is actual patriotism. He sees foreign policy not as an academic exercise or a necessary effort to keep those dumb, greedy Americans under control, but as a business in which it is natural to use one’s strengths to one’s advantage. Just look at the tariffs issue — before he came along, did you realize just how unfavorable our tariff deals were to the United States? The New York City real estate developer can’t conceive of a reason why we would accept less than whatever we are strong enough to take. One of the things that made the old world order work was that NATO could seize the moral high ground, in the sense that the Western powers were the good guys and that it was worth the costs imposed on the United States to protect like-minded democracies. But as their culturally, socially, and politically exhausted ruling classes clung to power long after change had become overdue, they lost that moral high ground. In Great Britain and Germany, you can be arrested for saying things. Why again are we promising to put blood and treasure on the line to defend countries that don’t recognize free speech from... a country that doesn’t recognize free speech? Nor did it help that, for generations, the Europeans have blatantly failed to carry their weight within the alliance. America picked up the rucksack, and they picked up purses. The formerly great powers allowed their militaries to wither to such an extent that, even if they were inclined to assist the United States in the current conflict, they couldn’t meaningfully do so. The front-line states are different. The Finns and the Poles can fight, but they lack the luxury of frivolity that the UK, France, and Germany share. They look across the border and see Russians. The UK, France, and Germany invite in a bunch of Third World barbarians and tell themselves they are our moral superiors. We’ve been telling them for decades they’ve got to pick up the pace, that we can’t subsidize their Third World welfare states by allowing them to outsource their defense to our wallet. And they haven’t listened. In fact, they’ve laughed at us. That is, until Ukraine, and they expect us to fix that, too. Shaming them are other allies that actually do perform. Look at Japan, which is picking up its responsibilities in the Western Pacific. And, of course, there’s Israel, which is actively integrated into the Iranian campaign. It’s fighting as an American peer. No NATO country can do that. No NATO country can even come close to doing that. Little Israel provides more raw combat power, not to mention technological, cyber, and intelligence dominance, than all the other countries of NATO combined. No other NATO country could pull off the great F-15 recovery mission; the ship on the upcoming Townhall cruise will generate more combat power alone than most NATO navies. |
| Posted by:Grom the Affective |