Europe is very upset about President Donald Trump’s decision to start blowing up drug boats in the Caribbean. Very upset. Recently, French President Emmanuel Macron launched a shot across Trump’s bow. On a visit to Mexico, Macron implicitly critiqued his American counterpart, saying that while “the fight against drug traffickers is one that unites us all,” it must be “governed by the cooperation between sovereign nations and the respect for the sovereignty of each one.”
Not to be outdone, the United Kingdom has now reportedly stopped intelligence sharing with the United States (as far as drug boats are concerned) because – according to CNN – they believe the attacks may be “illegal”. The European Union, via foreign policy “chief” Kaja Kallas, also decided to critique the United States via a statement, saying “international law is very clear…you can use force for two reasons: one is self-defence, the other one is the UN Security Council resolution.” She neglected to say whether she thought Trump’s moves were legal, but one can surmise she is not a fan.
Europe’s teeth gnashing is two things: Purposefully public, and entirely, unequivocally, unserious.
It’s not exactly shocking to say that President Trump is not the most popular person in Europe, thanks to his efforts to make Europeans actually spend on their own defence, as well as an incredibly anti-Trump media. Critiquing Trump, or even going as far as to limit intelligence sharing with the United States, is basically free positive publicity for any European leader, and therefore should be seen through that lens.
But even if it wasn’t – if Trump had something like a 50/50 disapproval – it would still be unserious. That’s because Europe has, for its entire existence, done the exact same things that Trump is doing now.
Let’s consider what Trump is doing first. The United States has, for the past few months, been sporadically targeting drug running boats and submersibles believed to be associated with drug traffickers. So far, roughly 20 such vessels have been targeted. The Trump administration has released some photos and videos of the strikes, and the Dominican Republic even announced that it had found packages which contained about 1,000 kilograms of cocaine floating in the water in the aftermath of one strike. Anti-Trump media have attempted to portray Trump as striking fishermen, and the Associated Press even ran a story trying to argue that nine of the men who were struck were not narco-terrorists, but were forced to admit that they were all running drugs.
What the complaints of family members of the slain, and European leadership, centre around is that the men were not arrested. They did not “have their day in court,” one person quoted by the Associated Press said. And as Kallas implied, and the UK reportedly believes, such strikes are therefore illegal.
The response to this should be obvious: Firstly, the importation of drugs is arguably something that qualifies for self-defence. A nation is its people, and a people addicted to drugs is an injured one.
The attempts at sympathy for those who were struck also ring hollow. These are people who did not care if the drugs they were running ruined lives; they did not care if thousands of people got addicted, or overdosed, on the drugs they were pushing. European leaders should wipe away their crocodile tears.
And they are indeed crocodile tears, because Europe has participated in plenty of dodgy operations in living memory. Just a few years ago, mysterious entities blew up the Nord Stream pipeline, a blatantly illegal act under any definition of international law (hard to argue that it falls under self-defence, and the UN certainly approved no mission there). There’s still no certainty over who did it; Kallas herself merely said that Europeans “need proof” of what happened, and has failed to comment much since, even though Poland is currently harbouring a suspect.
And of course, there have been plenty of illicit French and British activities throughout Africa through decades. To the degree that they have slowed, it’s not out of some newfound good-heartedness: It’s because they can’t.
This goes hand-in-hand with the myth, propagated by European establishmentarians, that Europe stopped fighting wars after World War II, reborn by the horror. The UK and France fought plenty of wars afterward. France fought hard to keep its colony of Algeria. France and the UK sought to effectively re-colonise Egypt a full ten years after the war ended. But Europe stopped fighting those wars because…they kept losing. France failed to keep Algeria, and the UK and France were definitively usurped as top dogs of the West by America after Suez.
Sure, there were plenty of other operations here and there — Belgium likely had Patrice Lumumba killed in the early 60s, for example, and Britain wasn’t only active in Africa in James Bond films – but by and large, they slowed because Europe simply shrank its world. Though first miffed, they became content with America cleaning up their messes for them (even when Europe blew up Libya in 2011, America was still “leading from behind”), and have now learned weakness.
In essence, the idea of actually stopping drug runners by blowing them up – instead of failing to do so or, at best, arresting them and engaging in years of trials – is horrific to European establishmentarians in the same way exercise seems horrific to an obese man: It’s something they haven’t really engaged in for years, and the thought terrifies them.
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