In his Wall Street Journal column Walter Russell Mead cautions the Biden Administration about the Europeans:
For starry-eyed American liberals—in whose rich fantasies Europe’s chancelleries are inhabited by committed idealists—this may come as a shock. Europeans aren’t from Mars, and some may hail from Venus, as Robert Kagan put it in his 2004 essay “Of Paradise and Power.†But those who rule the Continent come mostly from Pluto, a cold and remote planet named for the ancient god of the underworld—and of wealth.
It’s a mistake to see Europeans as idealists merely because they like multilateralism and discount the importance of military power. Multilateralism is a realist program for Europe, not an idealist one. Even the largest European states know that they are too small to figure as great powers on their own; they must work together if they want to sway Washington and Beijing. As Mr. Kagan noted, they also understand that a rules-based international order grounded in multilateral institutions increases European world influence.
which you may notice echoes things I’ve been saying around here for some time. I honestly don’t know what American Europhiles and internationalists are thinking. Do they believe it’s just a coincidence that, regardless of what our European cousins may say, what they actually do invariably furthers their own national interests? Not to mention their domestic political considerations?
Who are these p[eople so enamored of Europeans that they fail to see they have their own interests?
Steve
European cousins may say, what they actually do invariably furthers their own national interests?
Does that include liberal immigration policy towards Islamic male economic migrants? Or are their minds so open their brains progressed right on out the door?
That’s an issue of some controversy among the various European countries. The Germans, operating under a false premise, were looking for more workers to do the jobs that Germans wouldn’t do. Some Swedes thought they were accepting needy asylum seekers rather than the migrants they actually received. The consequences have resulted in a massive reorientation of the Swedish legislature. The Hungarians and others didn’t want them at all.
One of the few advantages of having recently been liberated from the Soviet bloc is in not having an awareness of their white privilege.
IMO “white privilege” is a category error. Power does not belong to groups but to individuals In the U. S. there are probably more whites who have no power of any notable sort than there are blacks in total.