Credit: Nicholas Kamm/AFP
BERLIN — Since Jan. 20, 2017, European leaders have managed U.S. relations with one eye on the clock, anxiously counting down the hours until President Trump’s term is up and hoping the core of the Western alliance isn’t too badly damaged in the meantime.
But as Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward America’s closest allies has evolved into hostile action this spring, a new fear has swept European capitals.
Trump may not be an aberration that can be waited out, with his successor likely to push reset after four or eight years of fraught ties. Instead, the blend of unilateralism, nationalism and protectionism Trump embodies may be the new American normal.
“It is dawning on a number of European players that Trump may not be an outlier,” said Josef Janning, head of the Berlin office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “More and more people are seeing it as a larger change in the United States.”
Even before Trump was elected, Europeans sensed that Washington’s traditional role as guarantor of the […]
I never thought that we should be the “policemen” of the world, when we have many infrastructure problems we could more wisely spend the money on, rather than the Military Industrial Complex, who just waste so much money that they do not even know where it goes. I read a piece recently that stated that since 1989 the Pentagon has lost as much as 20+ Trillion dollars. That’s $20,000,000,000 that could have been spent on free college, and new roads and bridges, and many other civilian things here in America, including higher Social Security payments and a larger Social Safety Net, to make up for the loss of jobs in the USA, which would be the moral thing to do with that wasted money which was “lost” by the Military.