Few things could illustrate more clearly the total failure of the Euro-federalists to understand the legitimate political and strategic interests of the United States than the very widely disseminated address in the French Senate last week of Claude Malhuret. In a fiery eight-minute irruption, he said that the White House has become “the court of the Emperor Nero,” the civil service is directed by a “drugged-out buffoon” (Elon Musk), that the United States now supports dictators and will precipitate the Chinese invasion of Taiwan as Trump has capitulated to democracy’s enemies. This obscure and overwrought French senator accuses Trump of trampling the Constitution, assaulting democracy and launching the United States on a course and timetable that bears comparison with the swift degeneration of the German Weimar Republic into the Third Reich in 1933.
Malhuret takes some solace from the fact that “the United States is starting to protest.” Trump’s polls are “plummeting” and Fox News has deserted him. Trump has done more damage in one month than Biden did in four years because he is a “traitor” supporting dictators, and the “draft dodger” has told the president of Ukraine to submit or resign and has halted assistance to Ukraine in an act of “treason“ that is a return to Yalta, where Churchill and Roosevelt “gave half of Europe to Stalin.” The United States has voted with Russia and North Korea at the United Nations and is proposing a regime of spheres of influence dividing the world with Russia and China. Trump has committed the “greatest wartime strategic error in history” and is trying to replace Zelensky, “Ukraine’s de Gaulle” with a ”Petain named by Putin.” The Western Europeans “who defeated the Nazis” must regroup and help defeat the Russians in Ukraine.
The relevant facts stated in the sequence of the falsehoods and fantasies to which they respond, are that President Trump is operating the most efficient, productive, and imaginative administration since Franklin D. Roosevelt and he does not drink, does not play the fiddle, and Washington is not burning or crucifying Jews. Elon Musk is the wealthiest person in the world because although he is eccentric, he is highly talented and there could be no better qualified person to identify and eliminate waste in government than he. Trump prefers democrats to dictators but recognizes that he has to deal with the people who rule in foreign countries, and though Zelensky is a brave and effective war leader, he is no pillar of democracy. Trump has been the victim of the greatest unconstitutional harassment of any president in US history. The comparison of the United States today with the degeneration of Weimar Germany into the Third Reich is a scandalous profanation.
President Trump’s polls are rising, Fox News continues to be fair and most of its commentators continue to be pro-Trump and Trump has accomplished extraordinary progress in repairing the terrible damage done by the dyspeptic and deracinated, somnolent, Biden kleptocracy the Europeans so enjoyed. The description of Trump as a traitor is outrageous and would be defamatory without the cover of parliamentary privilege, as is the description of him as a draft-dodger. Zelensky has already composed his differences with Trump, and the minerals accord will proceed and Ukraine accepts the British proposal of a 30 day cease-fire in the air and cyberspace. This can scarcely be described by any sane person as “treason.” It was agreed at Yalta that all liberated countries would be swiftly vacated by the liberating armies (apart from Germany), and that there would be absolutely free elections in all of them. The Western allies performed their obligations exactly and Stalin did not, provoking the Cold War. This, along with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the German emperor’s campaign of submarine warfare against the neutral American merchant marine in 1917, are the greatest wartime strategic errors in modern history, although France’s conduct of its own defence in 1940 is a good candidate. The Western Europeans did not defeat the Nazis, the Americans and the British and the Canadians did.
President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer both complimented President Trump when they visited him two weeks ago on starting a Ukraine peace process. No one had done that in the previous three years and Trump is the only prominent statesman who has consistently recognized that the West has two principal objectives in Ukraine: one is absolutely to prevent the Russian military reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia and to establish Ukraine as a legitimate sovereign state albeit in somewhat revised borders. The other is to create the conditions in which the West, without compromising its principles or its interests, can gradually attract Russia back to the West where the culture of Tchaikovsky and Chekhov and Tolstoy belongs, and out of the potentially deadly embrace of China. Trump’s threat to increase sanctions on Russia from the porous facsimile of the Biden sanction regime illustrates his even-handedness, which is what peacemakers must do, even though in this case Trump has made it abundantly clear which side is morally correct and it was he and not Obama or the French or German governments that initially gave Ukraine the Javelin missiles it had to have to stop the early Russian offensive.
Pompous and mendacious claptrap like that in the French Senate last week and the almost delirious reception it has had in many circles shows how far the thinking of many Europeans has degenerated into construing the Western alliance as the sage and seasoned Europeans holding the leash and giving the instructions while the Great American St. Bernard does the work and takes the risks. Trump won’t stand for it any longer and the American public and sensible Europeans rightly support him. If Europe wants to be taken seriously it has to become serious, in the international correlation of forces and in the clarity of its strategic conceptions. Senator Malhuret’s farrago of nonsense last week showed how far a large part of Europe is from meeting those criteria.
Before Trump, no one had a plan to bring Ukraine war to a conclusion