The costs of Trump’s contempt are starting to show
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
I was recently in Shenzhen, the heart of China’s industrial machine, talking to one of that country’s legendary businessmen. I asked him about the Iran war and his response surprised me. “For us, Trump’s attack on Iran is less consequential than his threat to attack Greenland,” he told me. “When he did that, to America’s oldest allies, I knew that Europe would not follow America’s approach to China.”
In the United States, President Donald Trump’s periodic insults hurled toward Europe tend to get treated as routine tantrums, part of the reality TV show that is now the White House. But in Europe, the accumulation of abuse has reached a tipping point. “The war in Iran ... has forced Europe to grow a spine,” Daniel DePetris recently wrote in the U.K. edition of The Spectator, a conservative and (usually) ardently pro-American magazine. “European leaders are no longer interested in dropping to their knees and groveling to stay on Trump’s good side.”
Europe is moving from words to actions. The European Union’s ReArm Europe/Readiness 2030 plan is to invest some 800 billion euros (about $935 billion) in defense in the coming years. The old model was that the U.S. took care of European security and Europeans spent generously on U.S. arms. Now Europeans want more of their money to stay at home, to build European firms and supply chains, and thus gain strategic autonomy from Washington.
It goes beyond Europe. In Canada, Prime Minister Mark Carney has explicitly set out to reduce his country’s dependence on the U.S. market. He has already signed more than 20 economic and security deals, including with China, to grow exports beyond the U.S. Canadians for their part are buying less American and vacationing less in the U.S.
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Me too Kafka, me too ...
Good for them! Now maybe a certain NT member can shut his pie hole that Europe does nothing for itself regarding defense.
That will never happen.
That's because some can't see the truth even if it's slapping them in the face
There is no doubt that today's geopolitics is driven much less by ideology and more by transactional competition. This transition away from the Great Powers ideological struggles of the 20th century may be the result of large global issues, such as climate change, and that the developing economies of the 20th century have matured to middle tier 21st century economies.
Geopolitics has shifted away from cooperative alliances that depended upon shared, common ideological priorities. In some ways the 20th century model of cooperative alliances was built upon a foundation of mutual distrust of the ideological other. Today's geopolitics is being shaped more by middle tier economies that diplomatically pursue fair competition and transactional agreements that prioritize utility rather than ideology. While this emerging geopolitical dynamic may not be fully considered mutual trust, it certainly bears the hallmark of mutual respect.