President Trump’s trip to Europe was truly historic.
He left our most important allies there so uncertain about America’s commitment to their security from Russia and to shared values on trade and climate change that German leader Angela Merkel was prompted to tell her countrymen that Europe’s days of relying on America are “over to a certain extent,” and therefore Germany and its European allies “really must take our fate into our own hands.”
No U.S. president before had ever put a crack in the Atlantic alliance on his inaugural tour. Historic.
.. We’re the new U.A.E.: the United American Emirate.
.. We have an emir. His name is Donald. We have a crown prince. His name is Jared. We have a crown princess. Her name is Ivanka. We have a consultative council (Congress)
.. Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay no price, bear no burden, meet no hardship, support no friend, oppose no foe to assure the success of liberty — unless we’re paid in advance.
.. The Trump doctrine is very simple: There are just four threats in the world:
- terrorists who will kill us,
- immigrants who will rape us or take our jobs,
- importers and exporters who will take our industries — and
- North Korea
no matter how unsavory you are as a foreign leader, you can be the United American Emirate’s best friend if you:
1.) Pay us by buying our weapons. I warn you, though, Saudi Arabia has set the bar very high, starting at $110 billion.
2.) Pay us in higher defense spending for NATO — not to deter Russia, which is using cyberwarfare to disrupt every democratic election it can, but to deter “terrorism,” something that tanks and planes are useless against.
.. Now, if you do any one of these six things the United American Emirate’s commitment to you — and it’s ironclad — is that you can do anything you want “out back.” You can deprive your people of whatever human rights you like out back. You can be as corrupt as you want out back. You can steal as many elections as you like out back. Just keep the arms purchases coming, the NATO dues rising, the phony trade concessions flowing and the compliments gushing — or be Vladimir Putin — and anything goes.
.. But how much is Germany spending to absorb one million Syrian refugees so they won’t be joining ISIS? How much security is that buying the world? The U.S. took 18,000 Syrians.
.. “Let all who enter this embassy know: We don’t do alliances any more. We only do Master Limited Partnerships
Why does Trump keep getting basic facts wrong?
Three tweets from the past three days display this startling lack of knowledge.
.. Trump called on Republicans to get rid of the filibuster to pass two key pieces of the party’s agenda: “The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy.”
.. Trump called on Republicans to get rid of the filibuster to pass two key pieces of the party’s agenda: “The U.S. Senate should switch to 51 votes, immediately, and get Healthcare and TAX CUTS approved, fast and easy.”
The American Health Care Act — which Trump celebrated the House’s passage of with a big Rose Garden photo op — cuts Medicaid by more than $800 billion. Trump’s own budget adds another $600 billion in cuts on top of that. Again: Has his staff not briefed him what the AHCA does or what his budget calls for? Or has he been told and forgotten?
.. “We have a MASSIVE trade deficit with Germany plus they pay FAR LESS than they should on NATO & military. Very bad for U.S. This will change.”
.. But Germany, as a member of the European Union, can’t negotiate a trade deal with the United States by itself. As Trump’s Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the very same day, “The E.U. is one of our largest trading partners, and any negotiations legally must be conducted at the E.U. level and not with individual nations.
.. When the German chancellor visited Washington in March, a senior German official told the Times of London that “Ten times Trump asked [Merkel] if he could negotiate a trade deal with Germany. Every time she replied, ‘You can’t do a trade deal with Germany, only the E.U..’ On the eleventh refusal, Trump finally got the message, ‘Oh, we’ll do a deal with Europe then.’ ” In other words, the head of another government corrected the president on a basic fact (after multiple efforts!) and within a few weeks, he is making the exact same mistake.
.. But there’s a third possibility: He was told, but he wasn’t listening. After all, Trump’s troubles with focus are well-known. The president’s attention span is so short that briefers have to insert his name more to keep his attention.
.. “My attention span is short,” he wrote in 1990.
Trump Sells Out NATO!
Well, no, but a Trump speech triggers another overwrought uproar.
.. Consider the uproar on Thursday because the President supposedly did not explicitly endorse NATO’s Article 5 commitment that an attack on one ally is an attack on all... By speaking at an event commemorating Article 5, and explicitly citing and praising Article 5’s invocation on 9/11, Mr. Trump was really trying to send a message that he doesn’t believe in Article 5? Who knew Mr. Trump was capable of such messaging subtlety?.. Critics say this implied that the U.S. won’t come to Europe’s defense until all of NATO’s members spend at least 2% of their national GDP on the military, as NATO’s guidelines demand... The reason that Article 5 was included in the NATO charter in the first place is the threat from Russia, and Mr. Trump mentioned that threat... Mr. Trump started his credibility problem on NATO with his campaign comments that the alliance was “obsolete.” We criticized him at the time. But as President he has walked at least 90% of that back—by supporting Montenegro’s entry into the alliance despite Russia’s furious opposition; by following through with new NATO deployments on the alliance’s eastern front ..
Trump’s Trip Was a Catastrophe for U.S.-Europe Relations
Angela Merkel has served formal notice that she will lead the German wandering away from the American alliance.
.. The Soviet Union offered to withdraw the troops that then occupied eastern Germany and to end its rule over the occupied zone. Germany would be reunited under a constitution that allowed the country freedom to choose its own social system. Germany would even be allowed to rebuild its military, and all Germans except those convicted of war crimes would regain their political rights. In return, the Allied troops in western Germany would also be withdrawn—and reunited Germany would be forbidden to join the new NATO alliance.
.. Again and again through the Cold War they would probe for ways to split Germany from the West, and especially from the United States. They probably came closest in the early 1980s, when millions of Germans marched in the streets against NATO nuclear missile deployments
.. it was the George W. Bush-Gerhard Schroeder split over the Iraq war in 2003 that definitively ended German deference to American leadership.
.. Merkel ignored Obama’s pleas to reflate the German economy after the financial crisis of 2008 and the euro crisis of 2010. The Snowden revelations—including exaggerated claims that the United States had tapped Merkel’s ubiquitous personal cellphone—poisoned the mood even more deeply.
.. Since the war, German politics has been founded on two fundamental commitments: to liberalism at home; to Atlanticism abroad.
.. So long as the Germans most hostile to the U.S. alliance espoused various shades of fascism and communism, then the mighty German middle would cling determinedly to the U.S. alliance as a bulwark of stability and liberalism.
.. Polls show that German confidence in the United States, already lowered under Obama, has collapsed under Trump to a level barely better than Putin’s Russia.
.. Join those words to Trump’s ostentatious refusal to endorse NATO’s famous Article 5, the guarantee of mutual defense, at the NATO summit, and it’s hard to imagine that the messaging of Trump’s first trip could have been more perfect for Vladimir Putin if he’d written the script himself.