Give Donald Trump credit for his ambition – he’s not only taking out America’s longstanding enemies, but he’s redefining the entire post-war world order. No biggie – he’s just changing everything about the world that we all grew up in. But we’re conservatives, so when you change something, you generally need to demonstrate a good reason to do so. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it, and so on. But the old order was broken. Disastrously so. The behavior of the formerly great Western European powers during this existential struggle against the Muslim Marxist murder mullahs – the Iranian government is shockingly super-deep into faculty lounge campus communism (listen here) – only confirms it. Trump didn’t cause this reality; Trump saw this reality and acted, thereby becoming the most consequential president since Ronald Reagan.

Yes, his actions are destroying the world order as we knew it and grew up with, but not all destruction is bad. There’s creative destruction, where you clear out the deadwood and the inflammable underbrush that could fuel an inferno. That’s what Donald Trump’s doing. And that’s what the old version of NATO has been trying to stop. Remember the classic formulation of NATO’s role: keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down. Well, the Germans aren’t getting up anytime soon. They’re too busy hamstringing themselves. They’ve ensured that they can’t rely on their own energy generation by closing down their nukes and buying fuel from their enemies. And they’ve imported a third-world fifth column both out of existential guilt and the desperate need to make up for the birth dearth among the broken and exhausted people of their country. Germany is dying, and a majority of Germans believe it should. As for the Russians, until they invaded Ukraine, they had become merely a hypothetical threat since the end of the Cold War. That’s why the Bundeswehr was not too long ago practicing maneuvers with broomsticks; it couldn’t rustle up an armor division to save its life, literally.

NATO’s other role was to keep the Americans in, but also to keep them down. Yeah, they wanted America there, carrying the bulk of the defense of Western Europe, spending massive amounts of money on bases and infrastructure – those of us who were stationed in Germany are fully aware of how much American cash energized the local economy. But NATO membership implies multilateralism, that we Americans weren’t going to do anything big without our allies. And this gave our allies a tremendous ability to keep us in check. Remember that the entire post-war foreign policy system was not simply about keeping the Russians at bay. It was also designed to control the Americans. Allowing countries like Cuba to continue to plague us, enforcing international law that only serves to limit American action, and tying America to operating with allies all acted as a brake on the USA’s pursuit of its own interests. This was a feature for the........

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