By Conrad Black
Even in Europe, which generally likes weak American administrations devoted to endless collegiality with its balky and condescending European allies, there are signs of relief at the approach of a renewed Trump presidency. The Europeans are naturally wedded to the idea that the Western Alliance must move in unison, and the United States must remain a part of it, but not an indisputable leader, other than when authentic crises require a show of strength that only the United States is capable of making credibly.
It was the Europeans who, with the complicity of the Bush and Obama administrations, reduced NATO to “an alliance of the willing,” which effectively meant that the other 26 members would graciously accept an American guarantee of their territory and would contribute to NATO initiatives not involving their own security as enthusiastically as they judged to be appropriate on a case-by-case basis. This was no alliance at all and it only was shaped back into a potentially viable alliance by President Trump‘s demand that those seeking the promise of American assistance if it became necessary make a reasonable contribution to their own defence.
Almost all of them celebrated the replacement of Trump by Joe Biden, until the unimaginable disgrace of the abandonment of America’s allies and the West’s supporters in Afghanistan in a shameful, disorganized, pell-mell retreat reminiscent of the American departure from Saigon in 1975, but without the excuse of Saigon falling because of the vagaries of the Byzantine politics of Watergate America. In Afghanistan, there was not remotely such an excuse, and for the first time in history, the conduct of an American president was considered by the House of Commons of the United Kingdom to be “disgraceful.” The same house nearly 250 years before, considered the conduct of General George Washington to be treasonable, (though many dissented), but not disgraceful.
But it seems only now that Europeans who follow American affairs are realising that the United States came perilously close to crashing through the guardrails of constitutional democracy, like a derailed express train. Donald Trump‘s enemies’ perversion and politicisation of the justice system and the intelligence agencies, the colossal fraud that he had colluded with the Russian government in the 2016 election, that he was a “Russian intelligence asset,” that his call to the president of Ukraine, asking if there had been any improprieties in the Biden family’s commercial activities in that country constituted an impeachable crime, and that the hooliganism of extremists attached to the hundreds of thousands of his supporters who met near the White House on January 6, 2021 constituted an insurrection planned by Trump; all of this monstrous assault upon constitutional government is finally being seen by sensible European observers as the attempted overthrow of American democracy that it was. (On January 6, 2021, Trump warned the Speaker of the House and the Mayor of Washington that there could be some lawbreaking and offered 20,000 national guardsmen, a suggestion that was declined in order to enhance the likelihood of such an incident as occurred.)
Europeans who tended to take seriously the various criminal indictments launched against Trump in the run-up to the election campaign cannot fail to note that these indictments were without legal merit and could not have had any other motive than the removal of a force of reform seeking to smash the corrupt political bipartisan post-Reagan log-rolling establishment, and enfranchise the scores of millions of Americans who felt that they had been passed over in favour of Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and despised as “deplorables…preoccupied with guns and religion.” (Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama). Discerning observers have noted that the fact that the total number of votes in the 2024 election is four million fewer than four years before, despite a mighty effort to turn out the vote and an increase in the population of the country by seven million, indicates that the 2020 election was won by the exploitation of unconstitutional changes in voting and vote counting rules supposedly to facilitate voting during the Covid pandemic, but in fact permitting the Democrats to harvest and cast millions of unverifiable votes, many delivered by helicopter to rural drop boxes in the middle of the night after election day.
Donald Trump succeeded in evoking to a jury of 154 million voters, not only the questions of his own criminal guilt or innocence, but the entire self-loathing agenda of the American bearers of what Malcolm Muggeridge called “the great liberal death wish.” The green terror, the monstrous falsehood that the United States is “systemically racist,” the abuses of diversity and inclusion, the anarchic violence of Black Lives Matter, a racist organisation that is essentially a giant tax fraud: all of it has been debunked and rejected by the majority of Americans, despite the fact that Trump was outspent two to one by his moronic opponent, and opposed by 95 per cent of the national political media. The American legacy media has been revealed in its ghastly ethical infirmity as being very widely distrusted and detested by the American public.
In democracies, saviours are not sent over by typecasting studios; they are often improbable personalities, few in American history more so than Donald Trump. But history will soon record that against heavy odds, and notwithstanding his trivial stylistic infelicities, he has rescued constitutional government in America from the corruption and hypocrisy of the American Left and its craven and flabby appeasers.
Three-quarters of the world’s problems in the last four years are the result of a vacuum in the capital of the world’s only real superpower. The American people have filled that vacuum and most of those problems will now start to progress toward resolution. There is a lesson in this for Europe, as the governmental breakdowns in Germany and France, and the floundering of the new Starmer government in Britain indicate.
First published in the Brussels Signal
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One Response
“the other 26 members would graciously accept an American guarantee of their territory and would contribute to NATO initiatives not involving their own security as enthusiastically as they judged to be appropriate on a case-by-case basis. ”
That’s how it should be. Strictly, there should be NO NATO initiatives at all other than for the defence of Europe against Russia. That’s all it was or is for.
Every other thing it has been used for has been a poorly run mistake.