European Defense, by Angelo M. Codevilla.
The notion that Europeans and Americans were full partners in the NATO alliance and that this “kept the Russians out…etc.” was always a fiction, albeit a useful one. Today it is dysfunctional, an obstacle to all sides’ understanding of what useful cooperation may yet be possible. …
The ensuing plans for a gallant common stand at the Fulda Gap with conventional weapons were fantasies based on hope, and on willful ignorance about Soviet military doctrine. Transferred East German Air Force war plans show that, as Soviet military literature had made clear, the Soviets would have precluded such a clash by opening the conflict with nuclear strikes on NATO storage sites and troop concentrations, confident that the Americans would keep the nuclear war local and one sided. …
The European Union never became either an element of strength, or a mechanism by which the U.S. could practice “one stop” policy in Europe. Instead, it is a bureaucratic entity with its own substance, an additional complication for dealing with member states, its decisions — often bad for America as well as for Europe — bidding for the status of customary international law. It has been the primary means for expressing Western Europe’s contemporary international identity.
Accommodation with the Muslim world and hostility to Israel have been its primary hallmarks. The Trump administration is deemphasizing relations with it — including downgrading its diplomatic status in Washington — and dealing with member states bilaterally as much as possible. That includes holding out a U.S.–British trade deal as an incentive for Britain to follow through with Brexit. …
Germany is gone, whites in Europe are going:
The underlying reality is that the Europe with which America has dealt is waning demographically, ceasing to exist culturally, and is dead politically, never to return.
Today, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, etc. are disappearing biologically: In Germany, for example, 42% of all births in 2017 were to migrants from the Middle East or Africa. That percentage is already set to rise. Natives’ birth rates are far below replacement levels (Italy’s is 1.34 births per woman), together with the migration of young Middle Eastern/African people, well-nigh guarantees the end of Europe’s biological character, fast. Its cultural character is changing even faster. We can only guess the extent to which Europe may be able to maintain a European identity in the face of migration.
Europe has been betrayed by its elite:
Current European elites’ inability to control their countries’ invasion by people from the Middle East and Africa, the migrants’ offenses against public safety, and the strictures imposed on native populations on the migrants’ behalf, are not least of the reasons why political Europe as we used to know it has ceased to exist. Other reasons, including the elites’ contempt for ordinary people’s way of life and manifold incompetence, are legion. Hence, the traditional parties are discredited, and the ruling classes are under siege by disaffected populations, especially the young. Without constituencies outside the establishment, they fear elections. Their very capacity to marshal people for any common purpose whatever is already gone. Their disappearance is only a matter of time.
The internal political cohesion of all European states having collapsed, the levers and buttons in the Atlantic Alliance’s control rooms are connected to nothing. The titled officials with whom Americans deal represent only themselves.
