OUTRAGED cries and calls for US President Donald Trump to apologise for saying that ‘Europeans . . . stayed . . . a little off the front lines’ during the war in Afghanistan are still rebounding off the walls of Westminster days later. His statement was undoubtedly wrong and appeared to be crassly ill-informed. By late yesterday afternoon he had backtracked.
Trump’s generalisation was difficult to parse and therefore easy to condemn, so the truths in what he may have been thinking and what prompted his ire went unreported. Not least his patent disgust with ‘Europe’ for thwarting his peace-keeping efforts in Ukraine and Gaza.
Britain had the most reason to be aggrieved by his casual but deeply ill informed comment. British forces led operations in Helmand Province, southern Afghanistan, for most of the war. This was the most valuable and deadliest province. British forces lost 457 dead in Afghanistan, second in the coalition only to US forces which led more provinces and lost 2,461 dead.
Downing Street said Trump was ‘wrong to diminish the role of Nato troops, including British forces, in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks on the US.’ Everyone else joined in from Kemi Badenoch to Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe
But the context of his irritated comment in the globalist lions’ den of Davos, surrounded by sneerers, towards the end of a week of peak negotiation and frustration with European countries’ response to his threat to annex Greenland from Denmark – nations who had just sent troops to Greenland in a clear gesture of defiance (a force so minuscule as to be incapable of any defence) should not be ignored. By ‘European’ countries he surely meant those that he had identified as most obstructive to his claims on Greenland, including Britain.
Yet Trump also often refers to ‘Europe’ as the continent, in common with many Americans and many Britons. So it is possible that in his comments on ‘Europeans’ in Afghanistan Trump did not mean to include Britain, a country for which his affection is marked.
However such considerations were not likely to stop the Labour government and the British anti-Trump MSM from exploiting the remarks to the full in peak outrage mode to score points about collective security.
Nor could the word ‘Europeans’ have softened remarks that came across as so deeply offensive to British veterans, and their families, even if he meant to exclude Britain. Britain’s absolute number of deaths were higher than any other European country though the Danes suffered the highest rate of casualties proportionately. One Danish veteran told the media, ‘We were on the front lines the same as the Americans.’
According to coalition data, about 3,486 Nato troops died in Afghanistan of whom about 1,000 were European. Nato Secretary-General Mark Rutte was quick to point out: ‘For every two Americans who paid the ultimate price, there was one soldier from another Nato country that did not come back to his family.’
In Poland, Defence Minister Wladyslaw Kosiniak-Kamysz emphasised that Polish soldiers had ‘participated in missions in Afghanistan and Iraq’ shoulder-to-shoulder with allies, and paid ‘the ultimate price’. A retired commander of Polish special forces in Afghanistan and Iraq told Reuters: ‘We expect an apology for this statement.’ Trump has ‘crossed a red line’, he added. ‘We paid with blood for this alliance. We truly sacrificed our own lives.’
What else might Trump have been thinking? The day before, during his address to the World Economic Forum at Davos, he told Europeans that without the US they would all be speaking German, and how Denmark capitulated to Germany in six hours. The real scandal which he forcefully repeated was Europe’s ingratitude, evidenced in Europeans’ reluctance to spend anywhere near as high a proportion of GDP on defence or to NATO. This was but part of his despair of what felt to be a deeply personal despair about Europe:
‘I love Europe, and I want to see Europe go good, but it’s not heading in the right direction. In recent decades, it became conventional wisdom in Washington and European capitals that the only way to grow a modern Western economy was through ever increasing government spending, unchecked mass migration and endless foreign imports.
‘The consensus was that so-called dirty jobs and heavy industry should be sent elsewhere, that affordable energy should be replaced by the Green New Scam, and that countries could be propped up by importing new and entirely different populations from far-away lands.
‘This was the path that ‘sleepy Joe’ Biden administration and many other Western governments very foolishly followed, turning their backs on everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong – and there’s so much potential in so many nations.
‘The result was record budget and trade deficits and a growing sovereign deficit driven by the largest wave of mass migration in human history. We’ve never seen anything like it. Quite frankly, many parts of our world are being destroyed before our very eyes, and the leaders don’t even understand what’s happening – and the ones that do understand aren’t doing anything about it.’
His condemnation of Europe’s political leadership only got stronger as the speech went on. ‘They have to get out of the culture that they’ve created over the last 10 years. It’s horrible what they’re doing to themselves.’ Going on to say he wanted strong allies not weak ones.
This speech was prepared – albeit with what looked like some added colour. But Trump tends to go into interviews unprepared, talks fast, ignores context and forgets to qualify himself. He’s also prone to mix his terms. In his speech too, he talked about ‘Greenland’ as ‘a big piece of ice’ and finally ‘Iceland’ as if they were the same. But it was in his interview on Fox News that extent of his resentment about Europe’s antipathy to him split out: ‘Will they be there, if we ever needed them? And that’s really the ultimate test. And I’m not sure of that. I know that we would have been there, or we would be there, but will they be there?’ It revealed a total lack of confidence in and anger with ‘Europeans’, in their loyalty to America and their contribution to Nato.
He is surely right to ponder it when the same leaders – Starmer, Merz, Macron, Rutte – have done so little to disguise their contempt of him, have undermined his peace initiatives in both Ukraine and Gaza and remain obtuse as to his concerns about Europe’s declining economies, assaults on free speech and mass migration destabilisation.
