WHY EUROPEAN CRITICISM OF THE US AFGHANISTAN PULLOUT IS SO REFRESHING:
It’s nice to hear from countries that on occasion bother to return the favor when their leaders humiliate them in front of the world. But then the guilt sets in and you remember that we went and did the Brits dirty yet again. Not only did we fail to communicate our Afghanistan withdrawal, Biden apparently took a good 36 hours to return a call from British prime minister Boris Johnson. News of this promptly cued up a montage set to David Guetta’s ‘Without You’ of all the other times Biden has left a jilted Boris sitting by the phone, starting with just after his inauguration, when he decided to ring the hot girl from Canada first.
The Special Relationship’s Mugsy can’t seem to stop accidentally blowing up its Rocky. Yet so far as Europe writ large goes, the problem cuts both ways. If the Europeans want to check our power — rather than just complain about it — they need to show that they can. And it’s here that we arrive back at Nato. Because it is wrong to say the alliance is just America. The alliance is also Turkey, which fields the second-largest military in the bloc. Most of the European members don’t even meet the 2 percent of GDP they’re supposed to be spending on defense. In Germany, it’s a paltry 1.3 percent.
It isn’t that Europeans are wrong to gainsay America’s control-alt-delete foreign policy. They are sometimes wrong, as with Libya in 2011, but then they’re also sometimes right, as France and Germany were over Iraq in 2003. Personally I’m a committed multilateralist. I don’t like to so much as go to the grocery store without a Brit, a Frenchman and a German in tow, if only so I can flaunt America’s cultural superiority by way of Double Chocolate Fudge Pop Tarts. Nationalism or internationalism? Both, please. Having good friends is in our national interest.
But then those pals, if they want to have equal say, need to start helping out more with our collective defense burden. Looking at you, Germany, which is where our troops ought to come home from next, 75 years after World War Two ended. Because he who detonates the most MOABs gets to call the shots, as Sun Tzu once put it. And right now, the American whim is to be sick of wars we can never seem to win.
Flashback: Biden Freezes Trump’s Withdrawal of 12,000 Troops From Germany.
But hey, no mean tweets!