The second thing I'll add is Breton Woods. You'll often hear Europeans waxing nostalgic about how great Breton Woods was. Yeah, it was great....for them! We adopted a fixed rate exchange system and set the rates of exchange at a time when Europe's economies had been flattened. They locked in extremely low exchange rates against the dollar. Then as their economies recovered, they still remained locked in at that lower rate. This made European goods much cheaper on the US market and American goods much more expensive on the European market. Along with the Marshal plan, Defense, the huge subsidy in Pharmaceuticals and medical devices, the US was allowing them to trade with us on extremely lopsided trade terms in their favor.
Trump has been doing what we really should have done in the 1960s and started weening us off of all that. They're fully recovered. We don't need any more giveaways to them.
Having lived in 4 European countries, the most galling thing to me was not even that they were freeloading. It was that they were incredibly snotty putting on airs about how their socialism at home was oh so superior to American "brutal capitalism". I told them over and over again that if we were not subsidizing them massively, they would not be able to pay for the socialism at home.....ie the "European Social Model." It wasn't superior. It was a freaking charity case.
All of the above is true. I would add a couple more. America allowed very one sided trade deals. How many Fords or Chevys do you see on European roads? Why not? During the 1950s when the US was trying to get European economies back on their feet, we allowed them to protect their markets against American goods but simultaneously gave them unfettered access to our markets.
We didn’t do it out of charity. There was a real concern that they could have gone communist, even without the Red Army. The Communists were very popular in France and Italy, and they almost took over.
In Paris, right after liberation, the Communists seized control of the city, and were eliminating their opposition by accusing them all of being collaborators with the Nazis. DeGaulle came and put a stop to it, just in time.
So true - and now we reaching the end point of that snotty, preening false moral superiority facade
It’s really over the top for Merz to be criticizing America as a place he cannot send his children when his political party has turned Germany into cesspool of dangerous no go zones where native Germans are in fear of their lives from the millions of violent third world phony “migrant refugees “ that have flooded Germany and who are collapsing the EU social welfare systems
100% agree