What just happened is a watershed moment in the history of the nation. It marks the end of the process begun by Woodrow Wilson of integrating the United States into the European world order.
Wilson dreamed of having the world run from Brussels, all paid for and defended by the American economy and military muscle. What he began with his dragging us into WWI and the League of Nations, continued uninterrupted through FDR and the United Nations, Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson, Ford, Carter Reagan, Clinton, Bushes 1 and 2, and reached its zenith under Obama/Biden. None of our Republican presidents, not even Nixon or Reagan, seemed to understand the danger of their full aims. They all dragged us inexorably into deeper relationship with the old order in Europe, making us the guarantee and backstop on the European way of life while we spent our blood and treasure policing the world for them, bending the global economy to their benefit. Europe's enemies became our enemies. Europe's causes, from snooty intellectualism with atheism, socialism and environmentalism, to suicidal immigration policies and deindustrialization, infected our institutions.
That all ended today. In one stroke, Trump masterfully pulled the wool from eyes on both sides of the aisle. With Zelensky as the perfect avatar, he awakened the instinctual American loathing of all things preening and European. He blew on the ashes of the irradicable American desire for world peace through minding our own business.
We will once again, in the words of our founding Declaration, say of Europe and its bickering millions: "We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends." |
