WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Amazing Blinkered European Elites.

Reading the article, one simply cannot understand how the European authorities could have worked themselves into such an obvious and massive set of errors. Nothing could be more obvious to a child than that mass immigration to Europe from war-torn regions convulsed by serial waves of radical Islamist ideology would create a massive threat.
Yet the EU essentially went about its business of bureaucratic infighting, process-worshipping, and complex institutional ballets without any real sense of urgency. Even today the EU has not developed an effective method of securing its frontiers. And control over your frontiers is the essence of sovereignty and the first element of any kind of internal security. This isn’t some arcane secret of statecraft; anybody who doesn’t understand this is massively unqualified to participate in governance.

The radical populists across Europe are wrong about many things, but they are right about this: governments that can’t protect their frontiers aren’t worthy of the name. Effective border control is what states are all about. Ask the Romans or the Chinese.

The failure of the Democratic and Republican establishments to understand that public concern over the security of America’s frontiers opened a pathway to victory for Donald Trump; the failure of European leaders to ‘get’ the vital importance of border control and, yes, immigration limitation is opening the door to massive political change in Europe.

European voters, like Americans, are patronized by their inferiors.