Posts Tagged ‘europe’

Greenland — America Pays a Big Price — And Gets Nothing

January 24, 2026

An Albany Times-Union editorial called Trump’s Greenland threats “insane” and “madness;” and said the European Union must impose harsh economic sanctions against the U.S., urging readers to support them.

Wow.

Then Trump claimed to have made a deal, getting everything desired. Standard Trump bullshit. In fact, this supposed “deal” — there’s nothing on paper — merely gives us what we already had before this mess. That is, the option to have bases and troops in Greenland, to bolster its defenses (against Russia or China), pursuant to a 1951 treaty. Trump’s insistence on owning the island, and his tariff threats, are forgotten. (For the moment, at least.)

So, issue resolved, no harm done?

Wrong.

Huge harm. Though we get nothing new, it’s costing us dearly. For all Trump’s babble about our “security,” he’s undermined it, by wrecking our already fraught relations with our (former) key allies, and making us globally reviled. His Greenland nonsense now compounded by his belittling NATO nations having fought beside us in Afghanistan, where great numbers of their soldiers were killed.

All this has led key European leaders (and notably Canada’s Prime Minister Carney) to make clear that they’ve finally had enough. No more appeasement and butt kissing; instead telling America, once and for all, go fuck yourself.

Because Trump’s threats against Greenland (and them) shockingly violated a key element of the world order that America itself had stood for. At least since Woodrow Wilson, in the wake of WWI, enunciated the principle of national self-determination — barring the conquest of any land against its people’s wishes. WWII’s Atlantic Charter institutionalized this.

Greenlanders did not want to be U.S. subjects. That should have been the end of it. But Trump never even considered this. Taking Greenland by force would have been a crime against its unwilling inhabitants, and its fellow NATO countries, sworn to defend each other. The threats made America a rogue outlaw nation, shredding our moral credibility in the world. Backing off doesn’t restore it. And remember it’s not just Trump; we Americans insanely elected him. Europeans realize that even if our next president returns to sanity, the one after could reverse that. We can no longer be trusted.

All this also eludes Stephen Miller, in his idiotic pronouncement that the world works by power and force. Posturing as the tough “realist.” In fact he and Trump are naive fools. Knowing no history, clueless how the world order America built after WWII, with our system of steadfast alliances, and the principle of inviolate borders, prevented major power warfare over three quarters of a century, to the great benefit of humankind — and our own benefit above all.

If Greenland could be seized by force, then so can Ukraine, or Taiwan. Not a recipe for the kind of world we should want to live in. Instead, the law of the jungle. Not good for anyone’s national security, including ours.

This is indeed “insane” and “madness” — self-mutilating — deeply sick.

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America’s Suicide Note

December 20, 2025

America’s new official “National Security Strategy” unfriends Europe and turns our back on NATO. Historian Anne Applebaum, a tribune for democratic values, calls this our suicide note.

Trump’s mind fixates on strength. Many Americans voted for him with a similar mentality. Strength is a good thing when paired with good values. But not when it’s strength in evil. That’s how Trump goes so wrong, bedazzled by the “strength” of a Putin, like a moth to a flame.

And for all his bluster about strengthening America, Trump is so clueless he’s weakening us in myriad ways. The “National Security Strategy” is a shocking blueprint for national decline.

It’s not because of anything Europe’s democracies have done against us that we’re tearing up our longstanding alliance structure. It’s a cultural thing, which we’ll get to. Though Trump does say the European Union was created “to screw” America. Typical bizarre nonsense. The EU made Europe a stronger partner for us.

Being leader of that powerful partnership enabled America to shape the world to our liking and our benefit. Mainly making it more prosperous and less violent — a better neighborhood for us to live in. Other nations growing richer made us not poorer but richer too.

All that Trump throws away. For what? The NSS burbles about better ties with Russia. As if we now have more affinity with Russia than Europe? There’s no way we can benefit from coziness with such a bad actor.

The NSS hardly mentions China. Whose strength Trump has also ignorantly, contrary to all his rhetoric, actually boosted. The emerging “Trump doctrine” seems to be letting China, and Russia, rule in their neighborhoods, bullying nearby nations as if by right. With America confined to being warlord of just our own near-abroad. Thus much diminished.

This might account, sort of, for our hostilities with Venezuela. It would be pretty to think the aim is to oust dictator Maduro and restore democracy. As if Trump cares about democracy. No, it’s just to show who’s boss in our claimed zone of influence. (Trump doesn’t idolize Maduro like other tyrants because he made the mistake of labeling his regime “socialist.”)

The NSS does fault Europe on freedom of speech. Which might be a fair point, but for the Trump regime’s own war upon a free press and other media, browbeating universities, and perverting our justice system to persecute political foes.

However, as noted, it’s mainly for reasons of culture that the NSS unfriends Europe — deemed to be courting “civilizational erasure” — referring to traditional Western Christian culture. Which it says is being undermined (not invigorated and enriched) by immigrants.

This reflects the xenophobic MAGA hatred of non-white people in general and immigrants in particular. The NSS even lauds Europe’s MAGA-like extremist right-wing populist political parties — Farage’s Reform UK in Britain, LePen’s National Rally in France, and the “Alternative for Germany.”

All anti-immigrant and smiling at Russia. Germany’s AFD is neo-fascist, whitewashing Nazism, and anti-semitic. (The U.S. regime endorses it while supposedly battling anti-semitism on our campuses.) Our supporting these parties unthinkably intrudes in European countries’ internal affairs. And those parties gaining power would make for a poorer, nastier, more dangerous world.

What has heretofore bound America and Europe in alliance has not been a (false and dying) religion, nor shared ethnicity but, rather, fundamental values: democracy, freedom, rule of law, humanistic tolerance, mutually beneficial trade, and a world order where nations are secure within their borders, not one where might makes right and the weak are at the mercy of the strong. Russia and China stand against all that. This is the meaning and importance of Russia’s Ukraine aggression, which Trump refuses to understand.

Indeed, standing too now against that enlightened world order is America itself, pursuant to our new “National Security Strategy.”

Trump derides Europe as “decaying.” While his sick regime — and our electing it — shows that it’s America sinking in moral decay.

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The French and British Nightmares

October 17, 2025

America is not alone in going haywire. What is it with the French? Such a great cultural history — but when it comes to politics — Mon Dieu!

They’re now on their Fifth Republic. That tells us something. The first, after the 1789 French Revolution, removed the king, which was good. But then removed thousands of other heads, not so good. Followed by more kings interspersed by more republics and more revolutions.

The Fifth Republic (since 1958) has so far managed to avoid electing some grotesque president. (Unlike a certain other country.) But long stalking France has been a nasty racist right-wing party started by Jean-Marie Le Pen. His reaching a presidential run-off in 2002 occasioned moral panic, but he was soundly beaten.

Then daughter Marine Le Pen took over the party, rebranded it, cancelled her dad, and has striven to sane-wash it. She too has made it into presidential run-offs.

Enter Emmanuel Macron. A centrist technocrat and outsider, elected president at 39 in 2017, a breath of fresh air. He’s tried to get to grips with what chronically ails French governance. Headlined by his efforts to raise the pension age, so necessary for economic sanity, and to otherwise tame an out-of-control budget. Naturally, the bloody-minded French would have none of it.

No politician is ever a perfect package, and Macron exemplifies that. Casting himself as a “Jupiterian” president — not a good look for a nation of cynics. He got re-elected in 2022 because France wasn’t ready for a President Le Pen. However, in the parliamentary election soon after, Macron’s new centrist party fared only so-so against Le Pen’s rightist RN and the “Unsubmissive France” party of “left-wing firebrand” (The Economist always so labels him) Jean-Luc Mélanchon.

Macron might have muddled along with the resulting stroppy parliament, for the five years of its term and his. However, in mid-2024, he opted for a snap parliamentary election. What an unnecessary rash blunder. Was he clueless about the public mood? His party took a drubbing, producing a parliament with a paralyzing three-way deadlock among the center, left, and right, the latter two groups being irreconcilable extremists.

So one Macron-appointed prime minister after another has failed to survive parliamentary votes. The latest lasted less than a month; his cabinet literally only hours. Now Macron has reappointed him. Neither left nor right in parliament sees much reason to help out, leaving Macron politically impotent, his approval ratings at rock bottom. Calling another parliamentary election would wipe out his party.

He can’t run for a third term in 2027. Le Pen has been barred due to conviction for embezzlement. We’ll see if that holds. Her RN party’s candidate may be her slick 30-year-old protege, Jordan Bardella, without the baggage of the Le Pen name. They evidently now see power within their grasp.

French voters seem to be losing their horror at what that could entail. Increasingly disdainful of responsible conventional politics — the romanticized cry “To the barricades!” beckons. And throughout Europe, a rightward political wind has been blowing.

Meantime in Great Britain, after the 2016 Brexit vote, elections in 2019 gave a big win to Boris Johnson’s fully brexitized Tory party. Then the system spit out that disreputable chancer. But the Tories couldn’t shake the stink of fecklessness. The next election, in July 2024, gave Sir Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party a giant parliamentary majority — though on only 37% of the vote, the rest splintered among several parties.

Already Starmer’s government (like Macron’s) is the most unpopular ever. Unable to manfully bite any bullets as public services crumble and so do the public finances to pay for fixing them. Economic growth is stifled by nimbyism, which Starmer pledged to smash through, but he backs down at any hint of resistance.

Now leading the polls is the new “Reform” party of Nigel Farage — Britain’s Le Pen. Even though Brexit, which he’d championed, is today seen as a huge mistake. But Farage nevertheless rides that rightward political wind, promising, basically, to re-whiten Britain.

Watching such sagas unfold, over time, on the world stage, beats anything in fiction. Being, of course, more consequential besides. And happy endings are still possible. Brazil’s Bolsonaro will spend the rest of his life in prison, with his Trumpy political movement sinking. And a massive Kremlin effort to subvert Moldova’s election failed, voters seeing through it and giving Maia Sandu’s pro-European party a decisive victory.

Yet I’ve learned that there are never final chapters. The story, with twists and turns, always continues.

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Georgian Dream — Georgian Nightmare

December 30, 2024

Ukraine tests whether one country can snatch another’s territory by force. Like in olden times — but the world seemed to have progressed beyond that. Until Putin came along.

He’d already succeeded, in 2014, in grabbing Crimea, and we muffed our chance to put a stop to it right there. Previously he’d also got away with it in Georgia. So Ukraine now presents our third and probably last chance to beat down this really dangerous threat to global stability. Stopping the carnage would be good, but shouldn’t distract us from the bigger issue — aggression mustn’t be rewarded.

Back to Georgia, it was part of the Soviet Union, gaining independence when that “dungeon of nations” sprang open in 1991. Not under the thumb of an old-guard mafia like some other ex-Soviet states, Georgia emerged as respectably democratic. Looking westward, aiming to join Europe, seen as a guarantor of democracy and progress.

But Russia soon meddled, splitting off two Georgian border locales, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, whose phony nationhood no one else recognizes. Then in 2008 Russia invaded the rest of Georgia. Nothing much came of that — except to show the West didn’t really care. Thus prefiguring the Ukraine incursions.

Still, Georgia remained free. Until the advent of Bidzina Ivanishvili, a secretive billionaire (he made his money in Russia) and his Georgian Dream party, campaigning as the “party of peace.” To be gained by appeasing Russia, with Ukraine cast as a cautionary tale, falsely blaming that horror on the West. Georgian Dream promised to spare the country another invasion — by handing it to Russia without one.

Georgian Dream gained power and enacted a ban on any organization receiving foreign financial help, copying Putin in Russia, a repressive gimmick to quash independent voices. Now they’ve extended their control, through elections widely considered thoroughly fraudulent, and have halted Georgia’s bid to join the European Union.

These developments sent citizens into the streets, protesting, in their thousands. The regime has responded with maximal, brutal violence. Yet the protests continue, with astonishing bravery.

Georgia since 2018 had a pro-Western president, Salome Zourabichvili, who’s denounced the electoral fraud, and everything else. Her term expiring, parliament has installed a successor, whom she refuses to recognize as legitimate.

Putin’s dream is to restore the Soviet empire. His assault upon Ukraine is the most blatant manifestation; his efforts to bring Georgia into his orbit are another, showing there’s more than one way to skin a cat.

We in the West had been lulled into complacency, thinking the new world order secure. Forgetting what I’ve called the power imbalance between good and evil. Good people are constrained by scruples; bad ones unconstrained. And we’ve repeatedly seen the global bad guys’ skill in developing shameless methods to sustain and extend their power. Including sham elections with fake results.

Yet they’re not invulnerable. Lately, Bangladesh’s and Syria’s autocratic regimes collapsed quite suddenly. How will things go in Georgia? Perhaps courage among the good can redress the noted power imbalance. What might spur them on is promise of a clear fast track to EU membership. However, Eurocrats seem too timid for anything like that. Not matching the protesters’ gutsiness, and spotlighting a power imbalance between evil and quivering jello.

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