Why in hell can’t Germans just be content to run their own country? They always have this outward looking crap that they have to lead, dictate, set the rules, be first among equals, etc.
Germany, for once in your control freak history as a nation state, please STFU.
Mr. Mercat and I, trapped in a Super8 Motel in Mound City MO, watched an original Star Trek episode where Kirk, Spock and McCoy are flung back in time to 1930. They know that McCoy did something to disrupt the space time continuum. After a series of classic adventures, Spock builds a computer and a TV and they realize that the girl Kirk has fallen in love with has to die and that McCoy saves her in one time line. In the alternate time line she becomes a peace advocate and delays the entry of the US into WWII and Germany gets the bomb and wins the war. Weird comparisons to today.
What a strange, non-informative, emotional article.
What are the “values” the professor speaks of? They are not at all clear.
He obviously knows little of President Trump.
I could make little of what was said, except “Trump bad, EU good!”
They're going to virtue-signal themselves into oblivion.
Maybe they can get ahead of the wave by putting themselves into concentration camps.
They can call them "gated communities" (bewachte Wohnanlagen).
He sounds like a Brit who would have been among those who favored Hitler in the 1930s, believing “unity” in Europe was itself a top principle, on any terms.
While NATO “unified” western Europe in a security sense, beyond the “common market” the other political additions to the EU’s writ were neither essential or necessary except for centralizing political power, period, and zip, zilch, nada else.
I question the strategic value of today’s Europe...what does the US get in return for providing these socialist thumb suckers a security blanket anyway?
Germans are pacifists simply because Germany was so badly bombed and beaten in WW2.
Many German cities were bombed nearly flat.
The rise of the right is mainly because of the needless pilfering of wallets and purses.
People are also scared of losing their democratic voice, so they vote to keep the right to an effective vote.
It was ignorant and ahistorical for Donald Trump to say that the EU will dissolve. He is a man of very little historical understanding.
That translates to "his historical understanding is different from mine." It isn't the sort of a thing an intelligent commentator would say. And this:
Trump also has no idea that for 70 years, it has been U.S. policy to support those who want to unite Europe. It is very dangerous that he is turning his back on Europe now.
That is a very shallow description of U.S. policy. The preference for unification over that 70 years of policy has favored European solidarity in the face of an exogenous threat, the Soviet Union, and whether Putin may be properly characterized as a "bully" is irrelevant. The undeniable fact is that conditions have changed very much since 1989, and so, one would hope, would policy.
However, that principal is very much still in effect although it may not be apparent to Professor Glees: what characterizes Trump's take on it is the appreciation that an exogenous threat in the form of Islamic expansionism now exists that European leadership stubbornly refuses to recognize, and that the U.S. is being tasked for paying for a remedy that European leadership insists is neither welcome nor needed. There is a description other than "pacifism" for that, it's blindness and stupidity.
Nor is this a case of turning anyone's back on Europe unless that serves to shake the lotus eaters out of their trance. The truth is that Trump and the Brexiteers are Europe's best friends at the moment. "Recognize the threat or go under" is not a rejection, it's an admonition.