Having been so happy to be Uncle Sam’s passengers on a joyride, Western European leaders find themselves scrambling for the wheel
Having been so happy to be Uncle Sam’s passengers on a joyride, Western European leaders find themselves scrambling for the wheel
EU officials are almost begging Trump not to bend them over a barrel. Biden didn’t have to since they assumed the position for him voluntarily.
While waiting for the US presidential election results to roll in, Washington’s viceroys in Europe – ambassadors from London and Paris to Brussels and Berlin who risked getting turfed out if Trump won – apparently opted for a quiet evening of singlehandedly stress-eating buckets of Ben and Jerry’s on the couch instead of hosting soirees and running the risk of choking on caviar if Trump ended up winning.
One senior American diplomat told Politico, “I don’t think there was appetite to watch another Trump victory,” calling the last one in 2016 “calamitous.” This kind of makes it sound like the place ended up looking like a frat house after a night of alcohol poisoning from drowning their sorrows.
Their EU establishment pals weren’t in much of a mood to celebrate, either. They’ve been acting like they’re facing imminent divorce from a marriage that everyone can see is toxic except them, behaving like a split from establishment Washington under Biden is about the worst thing that could happen to them. Right – because the EU is doing just so great right now, so is their riding shotgun with Uncle Sam on Ukraine. And on top of everything else, they’re really sticking it to Putin, who’s no doubt wiping his tears with Chinese yuan instead of euro now. And they’re not at all getting screwed on trade already with pricy American liquified natural gas to replace the cheap Russian gas. Life is just wonderful. Just ask all the Europeans who are voting the European establishment out in successive elections from France and eastern Germany to Austria and Slovakia.
But they figure that, if they’re forced into a transatlantic marriage with this Trump guy, then they’ll miss all the good times when the Biden administration was actually just gaslighting the heck out of them while the EU mistook it for goodwill. Pro tip: Friends don’t muse, mafia-style, right in front of you (and the press), about ending your economic lifeline. They don’t adopt “green” policies that just happen to offer incentives to lure away your imploding industry as a result of Nord Stream getting mysteriously whacked. They don’t cheer you on in adopting anti-Russia sanctions that destroy your own economy while theirs doesn’t have nearly the same exposure – and then say that they’ll help you out by selling you pricier energy replacements.
The fact that Western Europe is even lamenting Biden’s exit and Trump’s arrival sounds like it’s dealing with more of a clinical situation than a political one, particularly the way they’ve willingly assumed the position, yet again, despite fearing that they’d be made to.
For example, Britain’s Labour Party Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s relations with Trump were qualified recently as warm, probably just because of the flames from their bad bet going up in smoke. That would be the gamble of Labour going all-in against Trump with its operations director posting a shout-out on LinkedIn for volunteers from the UK to go pound the pavement in the US for Trump’s Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, whose campaign would pay for their hotel stay. Guess they were betting on Trump not noticing. He did though. And even called it foreign election meddling.
Trump also may or may not have noticed Labour officials barely coming short of calling him the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. “Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long. It is because I cherish and champion those values that this Friday, I will march with London against Donald Trump,” Tottenham Labour MP David Lammy said over the summer, according to Time magazine.
But after Trump’s re-election, Starmer congratulated Trump, calling their relationship one of “closest of allies.” Guess all they can really do now is hope that he won’t remember any of this stuff, or ever bring it up again to use against them at an inopportune time. Like, for instance, when trying to score a US-UK post-Brexit trade deal despite the fact that their beloved Joe Biden couldn’t even be bothered putting a ring on it.
Meanwhile, over in Brussels… “I warmly congratulate Donald J. Trump. The EU and the US are more than just allies. We are bound by a true partnership between our people, uniting 800 million citizens. So let’s work together on a strong transatlantic agenda that keeps delivering for them,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on social media. Back in 2021, this unelected, de facto queen of Europe, heading up the battalion of desk bureaucratic jockeys that dictates EU policy, and whose role is perhaps best described as micro-managing Europe’s decline, was openly suggesting that the democratically elected Trump was a threat to democracy.
Even those who aspire to a seat aboard this sinking ship have joined in. The world’s most famous model of lawn care workwear, Vladimir Zelensky (aka the president of Ukraine), suggested to the BBC over the summer that dealing with Trump would mean that he’d have to apply an Uno reverse card to all sucking up that he’s used to receiving from the West, and start personally practicing his puckering – or as he calls it “hard work.” He added that perhaps Trump doesn’t really understand what goes on in Ukraine – as though anyone else has a clue either, given that Zelensky himself recently said that only about 10% of US military aid is even making it to the front lines. If anyone can see through BS, it’s probably lifelong New York real estate mogul, Trump. So that work would probably involve trying to bamboozle him. Good luck with that.
But in the wake of Trump’s victory, any suggestion that he was perhaps a dimbulb, who couldn’t appreciate the finer points of the war racket, vanished. Instead, Zelensky wrote a post that was so long it could be the social media equivalent of War and Peace, reminiscing about their “great meeting” back in September, and how he’s looking forward to “personally congratulating” Trump. He sounds like a high maintenance guy who would blow up your phone and camp out on your lawn after a first date.
Without Washington setting the GPS for the transatlantic alliance, the EU clown car is totally lost. And now that anti-establishment Trump has won again, they’re freaking out about being taken on a joyride. Or even that Trump may bail on their mutual Ukraine adventure and leave them broken down and stranded at the roadside along regime-change highway.
Perhaps it’s starting to dawn on them that it’s the Biden administration that took them so far down that road in the first place. Because EU leaders are now talking like maybe they need to start planning their own road trips – or lack thereof – totally independent of Washington, now that Trump is in charge.
Still, it’s hard to see anything but white-knuckle driving days ahead for the EU leaders to get control of the wheel after going all-in on the American-led agenda and against their own people’s interests on everything from Ukraine to their own economy – all under the totally delusional pretext that, if they crashed, Uncle Sam would always be there to give them a free ride.
In any case, they can’t say that their own people didn’t warn them, screaming from the backseat for them to stop before they launched themselves over a cliff.
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