A glance at Western European media is all that is needed to be reminded once again of how little Europe understands America. It is almost inconceivable for a serious North American to imagine how anyone who has any concern for the security and prosperity of the Western world or even of their own part of it, could fail to see how Tuesday’s presidential election in the United States is a reaffirmation of traditional American values of constitutional democracy and the rejection of an administration that was a failure in every significant policy area. Even slightly informed Europeans are presumably aware that the outgoing administration wilfully admitted illegally over ten million destitute and desperate people, including scores of thousands of identified violent criminals. Most European countries deal with this problem with varying levels of effectiveness, but none simply hurls open its borders to a full-dress rehearsal of a partial re-enactment of the inundation of the Western Roman Empire by Eurasian barbarians in the fifth century A.D.
The whole Western alliance was appalled at the debacle in Afghanistan, leaving all of us among America’s allies in the lurch and abandoning $85 billion of military hardware to one of the world’s premier terrorist groups. Joe Biden was a decayed servitor undermined by senescent dementia, but never very impressive even in his prime as a party wheel-horse in a rotten pocket borough little state (Delaware). Of most pressing interest is Ukraine, where the European commentariat seems spontaneously to embrace the fatuous idea that, as one representative Guardian writer put it, Trump will “stab Ukraine in the back.”
Of all the innumerable scurrilous defamations of the president-elect, the comparison of him with Mussolini is one of the most egregious. He has made it clear that he does not accept Putin’s terms for peace but he will bring the war to an end by telling Putin what Trump will accept, (Russian annexation of most of what Ukraine has not been able to regain), and that if Putin does not accept those terms, he will arm Ukraine with weapons that will bring this aggressive war in which Russia routinely fires rockets into Ukrainian residential areas with the full means to retaliate against the Russian civilian population. If Putin then offers his familiar refrain about nuclear weapons, Trump will remind him that the leader in the Kremlin should not behave like a jackass and that any such recourse to tactical nuclear weapons will receive an equivalent response. Once those terms have been agreed, he will advise the Ukrainian president and urge him to accept four-fifth of a loaf.
Ukraine never existed as a jurisdiction prior to being established as one by Lenin in 1919. It is very mixed ethnically and about one sixth of its population is Russian-speaking and as an independent country, prior to the Russian invasion in 2022, Ukraine was effectively a failed state. Trump’s proposals will provide an absolute Russian and NATO guarantee of Ukraine’s reduced frontiers. These will be ironclad guarantees and not the phony guarantees given by the major powers when Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Belarus decommissioned the nuclear weapons that they inherited after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Trump will entrench the principle that NATO will decide who is in NATO and not anyone else and will sponsor the candidate membership for NATO of Ukraine. A substantial period would be allowed for all present and past Ukrainians to move in order to be within either Ukraine or Russia as they preferred. The massive military assistance Ukraine has received would be largely translated into reconstruction aid and Ukraine would be fast-tracked into the European Union.
Instead of panicking about Trump, European commentators should recognize that he is one of the few Western statesmen who recognizes that in the Ukrainian War the Western alliance has two objectives: one is the preservation and reinforcement of Ukraine as a legitimate, universally recognised sovereign state, if in moderately reduced borders, and of almost equal importance is the avoidance of driving Russia permanently into the arms of China and of making a peace in which it would then be possible for the West to exercise its undoubted ability, without compromising its principles or embarrassing itself, to outbid China for the goodwill of Russia. If Russia had succeeded in conquering Ukraine, it would have substantially reversed the great and almost bloodless strategic victory which the West won with the disintegration of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. If it were to drive Russia so irreversibly into the Chinese orbit that the Chinese transported tens of millions of its surplus population to Siberia and extracted the strategic resources of that vast area in exchange for a royalty to the Kremlin, the United States and the West would be facing a vastly more powerful and dangerous China than they do today. Trump will avoid all this and if the other elements of Ukrainian agreement were in place, he would probably be prepared to sponsor a nonaggression pact between Russia and the West.
In the Middle East, Trump will end he US government’s requests that Israel accept a cease-fire in which Iran is free to rearm the shattered remnant of Hamas and Israel is committed to total withdrawal from Gaza — a recipe for perpetual war. Trump has always accepted, unlike most of the Western European leaders, that the war in Gaza is not just another border skirmish but a war to achieve peace by the complete elimination of a terrorist force that has made it clear that it will never accept the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state. Further, both Prime Minister Netanyahu in his address to the United States Congress two months ago, and President Trump himself in his debate with his former election opponent in September, clearly stated that they would not accept a nuclear military Iran. Since Western Europe has thrown in the towel on this point and actually supported Obama’s greenlight nuclear deal with Iran, which made the Chamberlain-Daladier performance at Munich look like the greatest European diplomatic triumph since Disraeli at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the Western Europeans will soon be able to count among their blessings the fact that the president of the United States will not tolerate the severe danger to the peace and security of the world that would occur if the medieval, totalitarian, theocrats in Teheran had nuclear weapons to play with.
Apart from that, the United States will become a force for lower taxation, fair trade, an end to the self-impoverishment of green zealotry, and a generalised prosperity. Davos man and the auto-bureaucrats in Brussels in particular, may sulk but the rest of Europe should be applauding the disappearance of the most incompetent American administration since before the US Civil War.
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