Why is the UK part of this shift, and not France? The US considers France and the EU unreliable with respect to China because of their special relationships. Germany and France have pushed the EU-China comprehensive agreement on investment just before Biden’s inauguration. Germany runs massive export surpluses with China that it wants to protect. Armin Laschet and Olaf Scholz are both in favour of extending the bilateral relationship. Europe has also left a door open to Huawei for its 5G networks. It was only the UK that really cut the links. The Chinese ambassador in the UK reacted with unbridled fury. His colleagues in Paris and Berlin, by contrast, stayed quiet. I assume that they have received reassurances through back-channels.
The UK is clearly the junior partner in Aukus. But it is the only European country the US can trust in the pursuit of its strategic interests in the Indo Pacific.
Given the quality of US leadership, I’m not sure how junior. Plus:
The UK’s strategic realignment was not inevitable. It is to a large extent the result of how the EU conducted the Brexit talks. The EU leadership never missed an opportunity to criticise Brexit. Donald Tusk, former president of the European Council, aligned himself to the second referendum campaign in the UK. The EU could have, but did not, support MPs in the UK who sought compromise, like Kenneth Clarke or Stephen Kinnock.
The second mistake, even worse than the first, was the intent to force the EU’s regulatory system on the UK as a price for a free trade deal. At no point did the EU even consider what kind of strategic relationship it wanted with the UK after Brexit. The EU let anger over Brexit get in the way over rational decision-making.
The enormous cost of this stupidity is slowly becoming apparent. The UK will not flood the EU with cheap goods, as France had feared. The UK’s strategy is more subtle. It will gradually cut off from European security policy. It will also cut off from the GDPR data protection regime and financial regulation. The UK has invested more into artificial intelligence than any EU member states. It is a permanent member of the UN security council and the G7. What on earth was the EU thinking?
And no, Biden is not going intervene on the EU’s behalf in the current standoff over Northern Ireland. EU leaders have always underestimated Boris Johnson. And they always overestimated Joe Biden.
Well, it’s easy to overestimate Joe.
Also: “The EU’s diplomacy is driven by emotion and a superficial understanding of US politics, and UK politics for that matter. Why did the EU place so much hope, so publicly, into regime change in Washington last year? Donald Trump was loud and crass, but all he ever did to the EU, other than insult them, was impose tariffs. Europe never experienced anything nearly as hostile as Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan or the Aukus deal. But all of this was perfectly foreseeable.”
“It’s not about Brexit any more, at least not primarily. It’s about whether we remain a democracy in the fullest sense. Our system depends on unwritten conventions and precedents. We expect winners to show restraint and losers to show consent. We expect our officials – including judges, civil servants and, not least, the Commons Speaker – to be impartial. We expect the electorate to be the final umpire. All these norms are coming under pressure as the campaign to reverse Brexit intensifies.”
Something that should be read and
absorbed VERY carefully paying full attention to its warnings. But for the
grace of God there goes the USA as we know and love it. As of the last election
some, as we see, some
of this has already begun so beware, and make your
vote count!
Here's what has already happened to England within a few years
of opening their borders without any entry control:
How the British have passively succumbed to the Muslim invasion:
Mayor of London .. MUSLIM
Mayor of Birmingham ... MUSLIM
Mayor of Leeds ... MUSLIM
Mayor of Blackburn ... MUSLIM
Mayor of Sheffield ... MUSLIM
Mayor of Oxford .. MUSLIM
Mayor of Luton .... MUSLIM
Mayor of Oldham ... MUSLIM
Mayor of Rochdale ... MUSLIM
All the following achieved by just 4 million Muslims out of the
66 million population:
Over 3,000 Muslim Mosques
Over 130 Muslim Sharia Courts
Over 50 Muslim Sharia Councils
Muslims Only No-Go Areas Across The UK
Muslim Women...78% don't work and are on FREE benefits/housing
Muslim Men...63% don't work and are on FREE benefits/housing
Muslim Families...6-8 children planning to go on FREE
benefits/housing and now all UK schools are ONLY serving HALAL MEAT!
And we (the USA) and (CANADA) can't decide on an immigration
policy???
One of the ways to combat this is to keep circulating
information such as this e-mail around our United States and Canada to inform
the uninformed who mainly only listen and read the left leaning US &
Canadian radio/TV/papers. I have not seen this in the US or Canadian media,
have you?
Dr. Harry D. Fair, Director
Institute for Strategic and Innovative Technologies
"History does not entrust the care of freedom to the weak
or timid." -Dwight David Eisenhower
It was quite the scene in Buenos
Aires Saturday night. President Trump and a few trusted advisers sat on one side of
an ornate table. Across from them sat Chinese President Xi Jinping, also
flanked by his aides.
And
after everyone finished dessert and all Venmo requests were sent, the two
sides agreed to a temporary cease-fire.
The details:
The U.S. will not hike tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese
goods for 90 days (the current rate is 10%...the new rate would've been
25%).
China will buy a "very substantial"
amount of American industrial, energy, and agricultural products, per
the White House.
China will consider approving
Qualcomm's $44 billion bid for NXP Semiconductors. That deal fell
through in July after it didn't get the green light from Chinese
regulators.
Zoom out: The agreement isn't necessarily a
major de-escalation
of the trade war...but a pledge to notescalate further.
That's good news in the short term and a W for both leaders, but the
fundamental differences between the U.S. and China aren't going anywhere.
Here's one example: The U.S. and China released their own independent
versions of the deal. And let's just say not everything overlapped.
Give us the hot takes
already
President Trump: "It's an incredible deal.
It goes down, certainly, if it happens, it goes down as one of the largest
deals ever made."
Bloomberg: "For most of the past year, the
U.S. and China have failed to make
significant headway in resolving issues at the heart of an escalating trade
war. Another 90 days is unlikely to change much."
Evercore ISI political analyst
Terry Haines: "This
is a strongly market positive result
for the short term, since over the past few days markets have been nursing
hopes that a tariffs pause of this kind would happen."
Save the date: March 1, 2019, when that 90-day period
will expire.
On Friday,
George H.W. Bush—the 41st President of the U.S. and father of its 43rd—died at
age 94. And although Bush was best known for international affairs and his idea
of a "kinder, gentler" America, this is a business newsletter...so let's examine his economic playbook.
Bush, long
considered a moderate Republican, pivoted to the economic right after getting
the keys to the White House. And that started with taxes.
Does "Read my lips: no new taxes," ring any bells? Bush made the promise, but a
struggling U.S. economy and ballooning federal deficit held him back from
keeping it.
In 1990, Bush approved measures to
raise some taxes. That contributed to him losing his party's favor and,
eventually, reelection.
Fast forward: Markets will close Wednesday for a National Day of Mourning.
And Bush's
D.C. funeral could sidetrack congressional leaders' plans to greenlight a
spending bill this week (in order to avoid a partial government shutdown when
seven other
spending bills expire next weekend), per the WSJ's sources.
So? Look out for a short term patch instead.
In France
this week, authorities are dealing
with the fallout of the worst unrest the country's seen in a decade—a string of
demonstrations dubbed the "Yellow Vest" protests. Saturday's riots in
the capital city alone could cost Paris $1.7 million.
What's going on? It's (at least partly) about gas prices. Starting last month,
French drivers began holding demonstrations across the country to push back
against rising taxes on gas and diesel.
French
President Emmanuel Macron announced those taxes earlier this year in a bid to
slash the country's reliance on fossil fuels.
The taxes will increase the price of fuel by about 30
cents/gallon to start.
Now,
France is considering instituting a state of emergency...just
in time for holiday tourists. Protests have damaged popular visitor meccas from
the Arc de Triomphe to the Tuileries Garden.
Zoom out: What started as a protest against climbing gas prices has
evolved into a full-fledged objection of Macron's economic reforms (which many
claim disproportionately favor the rich).
Thanks to the European decision to invite in the Islamists, not only won’t we always have Paris, we won’t have the rest of Europe either. Europe is dying.
Bruce Bawer, a gay American man who moved to Europe only to be mugged by Islamic reality, is a clear-headed thinker and a marvelous writer. Today, FrontPage Magazine published an essay he wrote about the change in thinking about Islam amongst European elites. Back in 2007, when Bawer was invited to speak to these elites about rising concerns on the ground regarding the growing Islamic presence in Europe, the elites were shocked — and greatly offended — that some little upstart would insinuate that their pro-Muslim policies might change Europe’s face:
It’s easy to read an audience. As I spoke, I could feel the snappily dressed, self-impressed-looking crowd growing restive. When I was done and they were invited to ask questions, I didn’t get questions but incredibly condescending razzes, remonstrations, and reproaches. A German envoy reacted angrily to my account of some recent incident – I don’t remember what – that had taken place in her country. Her colleagues from a couple of other countries had similar bones to pick. “These are just anecdotes!” one diplomat thundered dismissively. I tried to engage them in a reasonable give-and-take, but they weren’t having it.
What made the experience especially striking was that over the course of the previous year or so I’d given a number of talks about the same subject in Europe and North America. The audiences had been composed not of credentialed foreign-policy experts but of ordinary citizens. All of them had recognized that what I was saying was true. During the Q&A sessions, they’d been eager to express their gratitude that someone was talking about these matters, eager to recount their own horrific experiences with the consequences of mass Muslim immigration, and eager to vent their frustration at political leaders who refused to listen to them, to care about their sufferings, or even to acknowledge the plain objective facts.
In sum, in 2007, Bawer was a mean-spirited and stupid racist to think that Islam could affect Europe in any way.
Fast forward to 2018:
As it turns out, it’s not Europe but Islam in Europe that’s been moving from strength to strength. As the number of terrorist atrocities, mass car burnings, and gang riots and rapes across Western Europe climbs relentlessly, it’s harder and harder to hold up Europe as “a new lamp unto the nations.” Consequently, the elite’s message about Islam in Europe has begun to shift. Only the day before yesterday, it seemed, they were telling us – and many of them, to be sure, are still telling us – that it’s preposterous to suggest that Western Europe’s present order is on the verge of being undone. But now at least some of them are starting to sing a different tune. Yes, they admit, Islam is taking over Western Europe – but hey, there’s no reason to worry about it!
[snip]
Case in point: on March 28 of last year, the Dutch newspaper Trouw ran an interview with Maurice Crul, a professor at the Free University of Amsterdam who “has been conducting research on migration and integration for twenty-five years.” Since only every third Amsterdammer under age fifteen is of Dutch descent, noted Crul, ethnic Dutch people will soon be a minority in that city. The same holds for other major Western European burgs. For Crul, the lesson here is obvious: integration “now works in two directions.” Meaning what? Meaning that Western European natives who have been complaining for years about the failure of immigrants to integrate will themselves henceforth be obliged to integrate into the new, multicultural urban landscapes.
I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s fascinating and depressing. What really got me were the statistics Bawer cites:
Crul isn’t alone. This past August 6, the German newspaper Tagesspiegel published a column by Barbara John, a retired 80-year-old politician who belongs to Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union Party. John noted that in some major German cities, people with foreign backgrounds already outnumber native Germans. In Frankfurt, for example, 51.2 percent of the population is non-German. This trend, John pronounced, “is irreversible.” It “awakens fears,” she added. “But they are unfounded.” She held up Rotterdam and Amsterdam as examples of immigrant-heavy cities that are doing just dandy. “After all,” she stated, the new majorities in those cities consist of “many immigrant groups, which differ enormously in education, ethnicity, religion, culture and finances,” and are thus divided from one another, and from ethnic Dutch people, in many ways.
Yes, there are people from all kinds of backgrounds in Western Europe’s largest cities. But only one of those backgrounds is problematic. At this point, no one needs to be told why. At present, Muslims make up about 17% of the population of Antwerp and Brussels, 22% of Birmingham, 25% of Marseille, 11% of Amsterdam, 13% of Rotterdam, and 13% of Frankfurt. Immigration patterns and demographic trends indicate that those numbers will increase steadily in the years to come, and eventually, I repeat, all of Western Europe will be under sharia law. Or, as John puts it so prettily, “many things will be different and some things will be better.”
So what do those numbers mean in terms of life in Islamicized Europe? Let’s take Paris as an example:
You can call these Muslim immigrants (both legal and illegal) freeloaders. You can call them conquerors. You can call them culturally different. What you can’t call them, though, is people anxious to assimilate to and become a part of Western culture. The ugly reality, the one the elites refuse to acknowledge when living in their clean, bright, gated suburbs, is that when you get a big enough group of unassimilated, hostile people within your country, you don’t have a country anymore.
But wait, if that video’s not enough for you, there’s more:
A man armed with “several knives” killed his mother and sister and seriously injured another woman in a town near Paris on Thursday, officials said. The man, who police said had been on a terror watch list since 2016, was later shot and killed after confronting police in Trappes.
He also stabbed a third victim, a female passerby, who was gravely injured in the attack. France’s interior minister Gerard Collomb told reporters the attacker had “serious psychiatric problems”, and said the attack was not being treated as terrorism.
Despite providing no evidence, the Islamic State group claimed the attack via its propaganda channel.
The attacker, 36, reportedly shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the rampage, and was shot dead by police after the assault in a residential street.
The authorities insist that what happened wasn’t terrorism. I kind of agree. The Allahu Akbar murders of Mireille Knoll or Sarah Halimi, both elderly Jewish ladies brutally slaughtered by young Muslim men, weren’t terrorist attacks either. Terrorism implies a subset of formal warfare. For Europe’s newest immigrants (legal or not), these Allahu Akbar killings are just business as usual. Kill the Jews. Kill the Christians. Kill your own women. Rape the kafir women. It’s what they do.
Not all Muslims do this, obviously, but a large enough percentage are programmed through their religion to engage in this behavior to make it a very unhealthy choice for a country to allow indiscriminate Muslim immigration, whether legal or illegal. Once it happens, you can wave good-bye to all the trappings of civilization, everything from the rule of law, to free speech, to clean streets, to women’s rights, to gay rights, good plumbing. They will destroy everything.
But hey, that’s France and . . . you know, it’s France. Except of course it’s not just France. In Holland, the Dutch government is prosecutingsomeone for saying mean things to Erdogan, the Turkish dictator for life:
A 64-year-old man from Sittard will face the court in The Hague on Friday for insulting Turkish president Recept Tayyip Erdogan. In 2016 the man sent multiple offensive emails to the Turkish embassy in The Hague in which he compared Erdogan to Hitler and called him a “goat fucker”, among other things, 1Limburg reports.
In one email he wrote: “Erdogan, you fucking goat fucker, burn in hell.” An attachment added to the email showed Hitler and Erdogan, with a swastika between them and the text: “There’s no difference”. In another email he said: “Erdogan takes the whole world hostage with his pernicious ideas. More than seventy years ago, a similar dictator made exactly the same mistake. I regret the Turkish people with this idiot, you do not deserve better.”
According to the newspaper, the Dutch man is facing charges of insult, insulting an official, and insulting a friendly head of state. The Sittard man’s lawyer did not want to comment to 1Limburg about the case. “It is not in my client’s best interest to respond at the moment.”
Please note that the man wasn’t threatening Erdogan. He was just calling him names. In turns out that, in 21st century Europe, there’s no difference between living in Holland or living in Iran (or Turkey, for that matter) when it comes to saying mean things to a Muslim leader. Either way, you’re in trouble with the law.
The only thing for which the Dutch man can be grateful is that, in Holland, he’ll still just be imprisoned, rather than actually executed. But even that’s not quite true. As Tommy Robinson’s ordeal in a British prison showed, if they can’t execute you directly, they’ll still try to do it indirectly. Otherwise, why would the authorities, after he was illegally imprisoned, have transferred him from a non-Muslim controlled prison to a Muslim-controlled prison, and then refused to take any steps whatsoever to protect him from everything from direct threats, to feces attacks, to poisoned food?
The Netherlands, once the world’s most free country (and I’m going all the way back to the 17th century when I say this) has now not only invited in the Trojan horse, it’s given it a nice stable and is keeping it comfortable with hay and water. The same is true for England, which was probably the second most free country in the time of the Enlightenment. And the French always pretended to be something sort of free, didn’t they? What a joke.
But that’s just Holland, France, and England. Surely there isn’t a problem in other European nations? Daniel Greenfield has numbers that say there’s a problem in all European nations:
Last year, Austria had 503 anti-Semitic incidents.
That’s impressive considering that the country only has around 9,000 Jews. There has been 1 anti-Semitic incident to every 18 Jews in Austria.
That same year, Germany had 1,453 anti-Semitic incidents to approximately 100,000 Jews.
In Bonn, Germany, a Jewish professor from Baltimore was assaulted by a Muslim yelling, “No Jew in Germany!” When the police arrived, they assaulted the professor. There was a protest march. A videotaped attack by a Syrian Muslim refugee in Berlin had led to another protest march and a slap on the wrist for the assailant. 10 Syrians attacked a man wearing a Star of David while screaming anti-Semitic slurs. A Jewish teen was assaulted in a Berlin train station. “I’ll slit your throat, you f***ing Jew.”
One statistical survey listed the number of anti-Semitic incidents in Germany rising by 60% in 2017.
In the UK, there were 1,382 incidents to 263,346 Jews. In Italy, there were 109 incidents to some 28,000 Jews. In the Netherlands, there were 113 incidents to 29,900 Jews.
Spain’s having a few problems too. Here’s a story from yesterday’s WaPo (which really, really wishes it didn’t have to report these kind of dark things showing democracy dying overseas):
A group of around 300 migrants stormed fences separating Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta from Morocco on Wednesday, and 116 of them made it onto European soil, authorities said.
Seven policemen were burned by acid and quicklime, a skin irritant, allegedly thrown by some of the migrants as they overran border defenses, the Guardia Civil said.(Emphasis mine.)
That report isn’t about a few immigrants slipping over the border. It describes a full-fledged invasion, complete with deadly weapons. Nor is it the first. As I said, that was yesterday’s news. Three weeks ago, this video emerged from an African assault on the Spanish border:
And a month ago, a mob attacked Spain’s presence in Africa:
As many as 800 African migrants stormed a Spanish border outpost in North Africa, breaching a security fence and attacking guards in an attempt to gain entry to migrant shelters inside, police said Thursday.
The migrants used bolt cutters to rip open holes in the barbed-wire fences and then hurled feces and quicklime, a skin irritant, at police who were trying to beat back the onrush, Spain’s Guardia Civil said in a statement. About 600 migrants managed to break through police lines in the attack, which left 15 officers and 16 migrants injured, the Associated Press reported. (Emphasis mine.)
As Daffy Duck would say, “You realize, this means war.” Except the Europeans haven’t twigged to that fact that they’re on the receiving end of all out war. They’re still anxious to play the gracious host to millions of people who want to finish what the Holocaust started (kill Jews, because it’s part of their core religious doctrine) and then continue the conquest, enslaving the rest of the European people.
Europe’s dying and it deserves to die. In some ways it’s very painful. After all, some of the most beautiful sites in the world are in Europe: Gorgeous churches (empty), magnificent palaces, charming towns, gracious landscapes, beautiful art. All of that, of course, will be destroyed under Islam’s not-so-tender-loving-care.
I’m desperately sorry for the ordinary Europeans, the ones who are being sold out by the elite who hide behind fenced estates in expensive enclaves, but the reality is that too many Europeans have become inert due to decades of socialism. As long as the elites kept promising ordinary people free things (funded in significant part by hard-working Americans during the Cold War), the descendants of Europe’s serfs and peasants were going to keep voting for the same people who have always kept them under dainty and expensive heels.
Unless the ordinary Europeans want to have their own American-style revolution, one based on individual liberty rather than free stuff, they’re going down in Islamic chains. Moreover, those chains are wrapping around them with ever-increasing speed. It’s doubtful, at this point, whether anything can stop them.
The economy is stagnant, unemployment hovers around 25% and is twice as high for young adults, taxes are rising, and wages are falling. Half of Greek homeowners can’t make their mortgage payments and another quarter can’t afford their property taxes, according to the Bank of Greece.
“All these years, I’ve heard dozens of promises from the current and the previous governments on creating new jobs and bettering conditions in the country, but I never believed anything of what I heard,” said Nikos Theodoridis, 57, who became homeless during the economic crisis that began in 2007.
“Homelessness and the crisis are still here, despite all that politicians are saying,” said Theodoridis, who makes a paltry living hawking magazines on the street.
On July 5, 2015, voters soundly rejected the terms of a proposed bailout with international lenders because the plan demanded too much austerity. Yet, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing Syriza Party ignored the referendum results and signed a third bailout deal that would provide nearly $100 billion in loans the country desperately needed to avoid collapse.
Tsipras, whose party gained power on a pledge to resist further austerity requirements, reversed itself and adopted more budget and pension cuts. In June, he negotiated the latest payment of $9.7 billion.
Many Greeks now are resigned to living in poverty under the deal. “It’s our fault,” said Vasiliki Gova, 52, a cleaning woman who gained national attention by staging a two-year protest outside the Ministry of Finance where she had been laid off from her job. “People were looking for hope and put all their hopes on politicians. But no messiah will come save us.”
Greeks spent a lot of money they didn’t have, then the bill came due. Greece has been down this road before, but never so far. Belonging to the eurozone allowed them to borrow at the same low rate as thrifty Germans — like giving dad’s Platinum American Express to a reckless teenager. Needless to say, they ran up some big bills. Even worse, their attachment to the euro means that this time they can’t devalue their way out like they have in previous debt crises.
Another case of “bad luck,” I suppose.
Germany’s negative attitude toward the U.S. long predates the rise of Trump.
Berlin — Germans do not seem too friendly to Americans these days.
According to a recent Harvard Kennedy School study of global media, 98 percent of German public television news portrays President Donald Trump negatively, making it by far the most anti-Trump media in the world.
Yet the disdain predates the election of Trump, who is roundly despised here for his unapologetic anti–European Union views.
In a 2015 Pew Research Center survey of European countries, Germany had the least favorable impression of America. Only about 50 percent of Germans expressed positive feelings toward the U.S. Former president Barack Obama, who visited here last week to lecture the world on diversity and tolerance, never changed negative attitudes much from the unpopular George W. Bush years.
Germans apparently do not appreciate that fellow NATO member America still subsidizes their defense. Nor do they seem appreciative of their huge trade surplus ($65 billion) with the United States.
Germans seem to have forgotten that American troops for 45 years kept the Soviets from absorbing all of Germany. The Berlin Airlift is now premodern history.
Why, then, do confident Germans increasingly dislike the United States?
It is complicated.
Since 1989, Germany has worked hard on its post-unification image as a largely pacifistic country. It is eager to teach other nations how to conduct themselves peacefully and to pursue shared global goals such as reducing global warming or opening national borders to the world’s refugees.
Implicit in Germany’s utopian message is that postmodern Germans know best what not to do — given their terrible 20th-century past, with the aggressions of imperial Germany and later the savagery and Holocaust perpetuated by Hitler’s Third Reich.
Yet being guilt-ridden does not equate to being humble (never a German strong suit).
The same conceit of an ethnically, linguistically, and culturally uniform state that drew Germany into conflict with the U.S. (whose late entry into both World War I and World War II helped ensure German defeats) has never quite disappeared.
Instead, German condescension merely has been updated.
In international finance, Germany de facto runs the European Union on a mercantile system. It manipulates the euro as a weaker currency to swarm export markets in a way that would have been difficult with the older and higher-valued Deutsche mark.
When poorer southern European countries bought too many German goods on easy credit only to default on paying for them, the Germans gave them informed but self-important lectures on their need for Germanic thrift and industriousness.
A similar German hubris was true of recent immigration into Europe.
Berlin often virtue-signals the world how morally superior it now is, while also searching for ways to import cheap labor. One result is German chancellor Angela Merkel’s disastrous open-door policy of welcoming in millions of unvetted immigrants from the war-ravaged Middle East at a time of heightened worries over jihadist terrorism.
But Germany did not just flood its own country with impoverished, hard-to-assimilate newcomers. It also dictated that other European countries do the same — whether they wished to or not.
In matters of international relations and trade, Germany’s sense of superiority occasionally resulted in old-style cheating. To increase imports of Volkswagens into the U.S., the company tried to cheat emission tests to skirt expensive regulations. Germany’s Deutsche Bank was caught money-laundering the profits of Russians in Vladimir Putin’s crony cabal. And reports indicate that to convince soccer’s international governing body, FIFA, to award Germany the 2006 World Cup, German officials resorted to bribery.
Germans brag about their generous social-welfare state and often compare it to a supposedly cutthroat capitalist America. But it is quieter about shirking its NATO membership requirements for defense spending to free up cash for its own citizens — and making mega-profits from exporting pricey luxury cars to a hyper-capitalist American elite.
We should all feel gratitude to Germany for turning its undeniable talent and energies from war to peace. Its huge economy understandably makes Berlin influential in the European Union.
Yet if German haughtiness works on a dependent Europe, it certainly does not always impress a wary America.
The United States is still far larger, wealthier, and more powerful, just as it was in 1918, 1945, and 1989. It does not necessarily listen to German sanctimoniousness on climate change, immigration, trade, or the occasional need for the use of force.
Instead, America more or less does what it believes to be in the best interests of itself and its allies.
Germans find such American independence cowboyish and insubordinate — and believe they can teach Americans about the dangers of such misplaced chauvinism. Americans usually ignore these weary sermons.
Instead, many of them believe that whenever Germany sticks to worrying only about Germany, the world is a far safer place — both now and in the past.
