"Europe's Rupture With America"

 

The first of a two-part published in the Wall Street Journal (!) came out earlier this week, and with the help of a gift article, we have a disturbing look at what our European allies of decades -- if not centuries -- are doing in the wake of the disastrous start of the Malignant Fascist's second term in office.  Here are some lengthy excerpts, but please take advantage of the opportunity to read the entire piece:

It was almost midnight in Brussels and the leaders of Europe were locked in their fifth hour of an emergency meeting with a single theme for discussion: how to manage a breakup with America.

The new year was only three weeks old and President Trump, after removing Venezuela’s autocratic strongman, had briefly threatened to seize Greenland from Denmark. Around a circular table in the European Council headquarters known as “The Space Egg,” heads of government were venting so emotionally about the 47th president that some of the nearly 30 leaders present would later call the session “therapy night.” There were no cameras or recordings and each of the presidents and prime ministers was told to come alone, no phones allowed, for a moment to speak candidly.

“We are drawing a line here,” began Emmanuel Macron, president of France, according to several leaders present and their most senior aides. For a year, America’s closest allies had tried to placate Trump with a mix of flattery and concessions on mutual-defense and trade issues, hoping to buy time. Now, French soldiers were in Greenland, alongside Danish special forces equipped for a shooting war with America. The French president repeated an argument he’d been pressing for years, with mounting urgency: that Europe’s overreliance on America was a security risk. “There is no going back,” he said. 

A clutch of European leaders chimed in to complain that the administration seemed more interested in mining and energy deals than upholding America’s traditional role in the world. Europe risked becoming “a miserable slave” to the U.S., groused the prime minister of Belgium. The conservative prime minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, dissented, telling the roomful of more-liberal leaders that while they might not like President Trump, he could still be reasoned with, according to people present. 

To Meloni’s left sat Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen, trying to maintain composure. After a week of brinkmanship with Trump, the Danish prime minister looked so shaken that German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took a moment to ask how she was holding up: “You OK?”

Hours passed as people talked over each other in a conversation with such seismic implications it seemed surreal: In its 250th year, had America, protector of Europe, now become a threat? 

____________________

American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.

Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.

More recent U.S. actions are only stiffening the Europeans’ resolve. By the time European Council leaders met again at the Space Egg in March, Trump’s airstrikes on Iran had spiked fuel prices across the continent and Chancellor Merz was furious. Russia, he said, would be the only winner of the Middle East’s newest war, according to leaders present. Several participants began a wry debate over whether a JD Vance presidency would be preferable. Even Italy’s prime minister conceded she was revising her view of the American president. Trump, Meloni lamented, “is not reasonable.”

To understand this historic shift, The Wall Street Journal spoke to heads of government, their ministers and top aides to reconstruct the closed-door meetings where the alliance began to splinter. The Journal was able to review detailed notes taken by some participants as well as classified assessments that European intelligence agencies gave leaders struggling to navigate the new Washington. 

One assessment, from Southern Europe, reads: “You are not dealing with an administration that has processes, you are dealing with a single volatile individual.” Britain’s MI6, struck by the climate of fear in Washington, offered Prime Minister Keir Starmer a more allegorical warning: Trump’s second White House, it said, “is ‘The Crucible’ meets ‘Wolf Hall,’” referencing two fictional works about the Salem Witch Trials and the court of England’s ill-tempered Henry VIII.  The British spy agency instructed its staff not to broach the subject of the president with their CIA counterparts.

The article goes on to describe Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's role in convincing European leaders that they could no longer count on America to be as it once was, with the Malignant Fascist and his MAGA movement in charge;  the allies' shock at the disturbing deference the MF plays to war criminal Putin;  and the role of NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in enabling the MF with a policy of flattery to the detriment of the alliance.  As this first part concludes:

The fragile consensus on flattery was starting to splinter, a trend captured by Britain’s MI6. That form of diplomacy, per an assessment from the spy service, was “subject to the law of diminishing returns.”

Like it or not, if there was ever such a thing as "the American Century," Putin's puppet the Malignant Fascist has strangled it with his short, vulgarian fingers.

Kudos to the Wall Street Journal for doing that rare thing called "journalism."

BONUS:  Also read Robert Farley's piece on how this debacle results from the Malignant Fascist acting out of frustration and weakness.

(Photo: the MF with his band of incompetent fascist advisors / USA Today)