An annual security conference where Western allies have long forged united fronts erupted Saturday into a full-scale assault on the Trump administration’s foreign policy. European leaders, would-be Democratic challengers and even the president’s Republican backers took the floor to rebuke the president’s go-it-alone approach.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel — habitually cautious about provoking Trump — led the charge, unleashing a stinging, point-by-point takedown of the administration’s tendency to treat its allies as adversaries.
The speech appeared to provide much-needed catharsis. Trump’s antagonistic behavior has bred two years of accumulated grievance in much of Europe but has been met with few substantive answers on how to effectively challenge it.
Merkel accused the United States of strengthening Iran and Russia with its plans for a speedy military pullout from Syria. She expressed shock that the Trump administration would deem BMWs made in South Carolina a threat to national security.
And she lamented that the U.S.-led global order “has collapsed into many tiny parts.”There at the conference, continuing the "Reassurance Tour" led by the late Sen. John McCain at the 2017 conference, was Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a number of Congressional Democrats, as well as former VP Joe Biden. They were they to reassure the Europeans that Trumpism did not represent America's beliefs about the relationship and would not last.
The crowd gave the German chancellor an extended standing ovation — a rare display at the normally button-down Munich Security Conference. The customarily reserved Merkel beamed as she took her seat. Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a top adviser, looked on from the crowd, stone-faced. (our emphasis)
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA):
“I think that we can go a long way to satisfying our allies that support for the relationship is not only strong, but it is bipartisan, even if it is not always reflected in the Oval Office,” said Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee.Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI):
“The real reason I’m going there is to make sure that we send a strong signal, a bipartisan signal from both sides of the aisle, from both houses of Congress, that our allies are important to us, that they fight alongside of us, they die alongside of us,” she said of Munich. “So that they know that the next generation that’s coming up also deeply believes in reassuring allies.”Joe Biden:
Biden himself offered the crowd a warmly received assurance that Trumpism won’t last and that a more familiar strand of American leadership will return: “As my mother would say: This too shall pass. We will be back. We will be back. Don’t have any doubt about that.”Our allies in Europe and elsewhere are tired of pretending that Rump is a leader in any sense of the word and are increasingly standing up to the ignoramus. They see the clock ticking on his aberrant (and abhorrent) regime, and they're standing up for the values our American government used to promote when it was at its best.
