Trump is punishing Germany for not enough appeasement |
Despite what Western mainstream media, think-tanks, and some propagandists with academic titles have been telling us, NATO-EU Europe has never “appeased” Russia.
In reality, the NATO-EU European elites, with Germany among the leaders, have certainly appeased the US. Because you don’t end up with the Nord Stream scandal and US President Donald Trump’s Turnberry tariff diktat without a policy of irrationally self-damaging submission driven by shortsightedness and fear bordering on panic – that is, appeasement.
And what has all that fear been about? In essence, a very simple thing: being abandoned by Uncle Sam, because NATO-EU European elites have a breathtakingly perverse relationship with the US, the greatest abuser of the sovereignty of their countries and spoiler of the prosperity of most of their citizens.
During last century’s Cold War, which ended almost four decades ago – in 1987 with the INF Treaty’s unprecedented elimination of an entire class of nuclear weapons – Western Europe’s dependency on Washington could at least claim some kind of rationale. It was dubious, but plausible on its own terms. But there is no remotely reasonable or good-faith explanation for the European elites’ failure to emancipate their countries from America after 1987 or, at the latest, 1991 when the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist.
That is why what is happening between the US and Germany now is one of those ironies of history so implausible you’d never dare invent them. And yet it’s true: Washington has just announced the largest drawdown of US troops in Germany – it’s single biggest and most important base in Europe – since the end of the great post-Cold War re-adjustment.
In the 1980s, there were still 250,000 American troops in what was then West Germany. After the end of first the old Cold War and then the Soviet Union, by 2005 that number had decreased to somewhere between 35,000 and 40,000. Which is where it has, in essence,........