WE ARE always being told by the more idiotic European and British political commentators that Donald Trump and his administration have betrayed something precious.
We are told that they have betrayed ‘the international rules-based system’. We are told that they have betrayed ‘the democratic norms’. We are told they have betrayed Nato. And we are told that they have betrayed their European partners.
The first of these ignores the fact that the international rules-based system has always been a partial one, often defied by nations outside the cosy tent of Western liberal democracy and of course meaningless to Communist countries, whether the Soviet Union of the past or the China of the present. Even arch-globalist and Donald Trump hater Mark Carney, the banker selected to carry the Canadian torch dropped by Justin Trudeau, admitted that the much-vaunted ‘rules-based system’ that he and other bureaucratic-minded apparatchiks of the globalist way so love has always been riddled with hypocrisies.
In the anti-Trump speech that he delivered at the last Davos gathering, Carney said: ‘For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
‘We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
‘This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
‘So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.’
The remarkable thing about Carney’s new ‘honesty’ in politics is what a sleight of hand it is. He acknowledged that ‘international law’ and the ‘rules-based system’ was a lie, a fiction, all along, backed solely by American power and European convenience. Yet think about how deeply contemptuous you have to be towards actual democracy to say this (we were always lying to you, you know), about being able to say that the rules-based system is a total fiction . . . but then lament its end and mark Donald Trump as the person to blame. The message is essentially this: ‘I am honest. The rules we told you were moral were always a lie and a fiction. We must oppose Donald Trump because he has ended the lie that we had great affection for.’
Globalists, the woke and Trump-haters everywhere loved that speech. They said it embodied what they were about. And in a way they were right, because the cognitive dissonance – the experience of holding two conflicting beliefs at the same time – underlines almost every globalist position you can think of on any topic you care to mention.
It also underlines each of the ‘betrayals’ that are so often cited against Trump by European leaders as well.
We are told that Trump and his administration break democratic norms when they insist on free and fair elections without fraud, or when they ask Europe to respect votes (on Brexit and many other things) which go against them. Such norms surely should include elections being limited to legitimate citizens and ensuring elections aren’t won by fraud or dismissed by activist and partisan judges or by an EU which punishes any electorate that tries to vote its way out of globalist rule.
Those Europeans condemning Trump’s ‘betrayal of democracy’ see it as perfectly normal to levy fines against European nations whose elected leaders defy EU policy (Poland, Hungary), or to enact punitive trade chastisements on nations that elect to leave a supposedly benign and voluntary trading bloc (the UK). These same Europeans increasingly deny their own populations the free speech on which democracy depends, and react with fury to Americans pointing this out. They talk openly about banning parties that don’t follow a globalist line (like the AfD in Germany) or have compliant judges who simply reverse election results they didn’t like (EU and judicial collusion in Romania).
Similarly, the Trump betrayal-of-Nato rhetoric comes from countries which for decades refused to set aside even 2 or 3 per cent of their spending on defence, which let their own military forces dwindle to pathetic irrelevance, and which expected the vast bulk of the cost of Nato, in both yearly treasure and potential blood, to come from the United States alone. Trump insisted that Europeans share the burden, increase their military budgets and stop freeloading from the US as they had done for the 80 years since the end of the Second World War. It’s a strange kind of betrayal that points out that Europeans must build up their defences to help strengthen Nato.
Finally we are told that the Trump administration has betrayed its European partners. How, exactly?
Primarily, by embarrassing them. By what they call ‘rocking the transatlantic relationship’, by telling them truths they do not want to hear, by not living by lies, by doing what a real friend should do – telling them that they are making catastrophic mistakes.
This is what the Trump administration has done on the climate crisis hoax, the Net Zero economic and energy measures of insane self-destruction, the windmills and hot air of the entire fraudulent Green hysteria so beloved by European leaders that they are prepared to utterly wreck their industrial bases and economic performance in a flagellant frenzy of self-punishment. This, after all, is why the once mighty German economy is in such trouble, and one of the reasons why Keir Starmer’s Britain is struggling.
It is what the Trump administration has done on a range of other topics too, from reminding Europeans rattling illusory sabres at Russia that they should at least try to negotiate a peace first, to reminding them that the protection of Europe includes the protection of its borders, its culture, its identity, and its entire civilisation. All this, the Americans have pointed out, is threatened most gravely by mass migration of peoples who hate their host countries and by the creed of multiculturalism to which European nations cling in spite of daily evidence that it is a disaster.
In Part 2 Daniel Jupp considers Spain, France and Britain’s mendacious condemnation of the US and Israeli air strikes on the brutal Iranian regime, their mass migration and Islamic appeasement policies, and what this means for the continent.
