The EU Has Been America’s “Foe” Since the End of the Old Cold War
Trump turned heads this week when he described the EU as a “foe”.
The “politically incorrect” and previously unthinkable remark came after last week’s testy NATO Summit during an interview that the US President gave to CBS News. Trump, when asked to describe the US’ “biggest foe globally right now”, jaw-droppingly said that “Well, I think we have a lot of foes. I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now, you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.” He soon thereafter qualified his unprecedented statement by saying that “I respect the leaders of those countries. But, in a trade sense, they’ve really taken advantage of us and many of those countries are in NATO and they weren’t paying their bills”, though the damage was already done.
A recent poll indicated that two-thirds of Germans believe that Trump is “more dangerous” than President Putin, and the German Foreign Minister declared on Monday that his country “can no longer completely rely on the White House”. The Mainstream Media is portraying all of this as the disastrous self-inflicted destruction of the US’ traditional transatlantic relationships and hinting that Trump betrayed America’s closest allies, but the situation is much more complicated than that simplistic explanation would make it seem.
Trump’s “America First” ideology is completely contradictory to the globalist one of the ruling EuroLiberal elite, and the billionaire businessman won’t allow his taxpayers to continue to unfairly foot most of NATO’s bills while the Europeans freeride on their financial sacrifices. Furthermore, there’s no way that he would accept the existing tariff imbalance between the US and the EU either, though his response to this has been manipulated through skillful perception management tactics as an “unprovoked assault against free and fair trade”, when the reality is that it was never truly free nor fair to begin with, but that was the point all along. The US was supposed to subsidize the EU’s “socialist welfare utopia” because of Old Cold War considerations, though this outdated rationale nevertheless continued for unipolar globalist ends.
Just like Russians in the Soviet Union eventually grew restless with their government redistributing resources from their republic to other ones within the country and further beyond to Eastern Europe and even Moscow’s “Global South” allies in Africa and Asia, so too are Americans feeling the same way about what their government has been doing for decades vis-à-vis the Europeans and even the Chinese through lopsided trading arrangements. The long-term national security implications of indefinitely continuing this literal extraction of wealth from the US is why Trump referred to the EU as a “foe” because it’s the most clear-cut characterization of the economic-strategic competition between these two so-called “frenemies”, no matter how surprising it might have been for the Europeans to finally be called out on this scheme by none other than the US President himself.
