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Trump’s shock therapy for Europe

5 0
tuesday

President Donald Trump’s national strategy document “upends” America’s long-standing policy toward European nations, which have been this country’s closest allies for a century or more.

The president and his lieutenants focus on Europe’s feckless immigration policies, chronic unwillingness to pay for its own defense, its weakness in defending the Western values that undergird democratic freedom, and even its moves actively to undermine them and erase their identities and cultures.

As the Wall Street Journal noted, Trump’s biggest target is not the individual nations but the European Union itself, the bureaucratic superstructure weighing down and increasingly dictating bad policy to its constituent countries.

Trump’s approach has been widely excoriated but is largely welcome, for it holds out what had previously been a forlorn hope that Europe’s nations might again act as robust sovereign countries rather than allowing themselves to dwindle into ailing frogs slowly cooking in a Eurocratic sous vide.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as the EU changed from a trading bloc into an “ever deeper” political union — the language is the EU’s own, not........

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