As Professor Michael Desch said, for good or for bad, the United States does not have shared interests with a certain set of countries, or even a set of common values, the way it did 50 years back. Time has changed, geopolitics have changed, and with that, the balance of power is also changing. China is a far bigger threat to the United States than Russia is, and with the terrible cost of nation-building in the Middle East, the relative power of the United States is equilibrated with other powers.
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The leaders of the European Union are currently dominated by social democrats and green parties, which are substantively former internationalist Euro-Marxists from the Cold War days and somewhat instinctively anti-American. That indicates an inevitable clash with any American administration. Under President Obama, a closeted internationalist, there was a subtle systemic effort to tie up the United States under global governance. Obama consistently mentioned the need to voluntarily reduce and constrain unilateralism and American hard power.
Trump and his administration, on the other hand, take an old-fashioned unilateralist and sovereigntist approach. Pompeo’s tour and Pence’s speech both highlighted a “my way or the highway” approach consistent with the fundamental geopolitics of the region. It reflects the balance of power as it currently is. If America provides security for Europe, Europe would need to side with America with regards to other rival great powers like Russia and China. While that might seem like crude conservative realpolitik in a foreign policy establishment dominated by idealists, in Machiavelli’s words, it is far more prudent in politics to be respected and obeyed than loved.
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The leaders of the European Union are currently dominated by social democrats and green parties, which are substantively former internationalist Euro-Marxists from the Cold War days and somewhat instinctively anti-American. That indicates an inevitable clash with any American administration. Under President Obama, a closeted internationalist, there was a subtle systemic effort to tie up the United States under global governance. Obama consistently mentioned the need to voluntarily reduce and constrain unilateralism and American hard power.
Trump and his administration, on the other hand, take an old-fashioned unilateralist and sovereigntist approach. Pompeo’s tour and Pence’s speech both highlighted a “my way or the highway” approach consistent with the fundamental geopolitics of the region. It reflects the balance of power as it currently is. If America provides security for Europe, Europe would need to side with America with regards to other rival great powers like Russia and China. While that might seem like crude conservative realpolitik in a foreign policy establishment dominated by idealists, in Machiavelli’s words, it is far more prudent in politics to be respected and obeyed than loved.