Donald Trump is on a mission. His goal? Destroy the post-WWII institutional order that has outlived its usefulness.
And there have been a number of major moves that fundamentally tear at the fabric of that order. In a span of a day we’ve had the following things occur in quick succession.
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French President Emmanuel Macron holds a press conference calling for a new “strategic relationship with Russia and Turkey.”
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At the same time he softened the EU’s stance on Russia’s reunification with Crimea, saying Russian – EU relations needed “to be brought up to date.”
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On the trade and tariff war with Trump, Germany called Trump’s bluff about free trade on cars by offering to scrap all import tariffs on theirs in exchange for the U.S. lifting them on light trucks and pickups, which Trump promptly rejected.
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Trump then called the EU “Worse than China” and threatened to pull the U.S. out of the World Trade Organization.
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Ayatollah Khamenei put pressure on the EU to stand up to Trump over the JCPOA, clearly threatening a return of their nuclear program.
Just last week German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, clearly frustrated with Trump’s endless dollar belligerence called for the EU to develop, like Russia and China, it’s own electronic interbank payment system to skirt U.S. sanctions.
So in one week we’ve had the Germans threaten SWIFT, the French question the validity of NATO and Trump threaten to leave the WTO.
All against the backdrop of the end of the Syrian Civil War and the potential withdrawal of U.S. troops from there while the Taliban arrive in Moscow to discuss peace terms with the Afghan government.
Is it just me or are things about to look very different very soon.
If we take Trump at his word then we were supposed to believe Trump wanted peace and free trade with the EU. In this case his word was this tweet from July 24th where he said:
The European Union is coming to Washington tomorrow to negotiate a deal on Trade. I have an idea for them. Both the U.S. and the E.U. drop all Tariffs, Barriers and Subsidies! That would finally be called Free Market and Fair Trade! Hope they do it, we are ready – but they won’t!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 25, 2018
Oops, Donald. They were. And as I said above, his big bluff on this was called. Trump doesn’t want free trade with Germany. He rejected the offer to scrap all automobile tariffs because “their consumer culture doesn’t buy our cars.”
Yes, because our cars suck, frankly. And they’ve sucked for a long time. And you can’t mandate they buy them.
But, I digress.
This sequence of events highlights exactly what I said about Trump last week, that he is purposefully driving a wedge between Europe and the U.S. to end NATO, among other things.
By driving a wedge between Germany and the U.S. over NATO and attacking the foundations of the German economy Trump is ensuring the current rapprochement between Germany and Russia?
Merkel, for her part, has been so terminally weakened by her immigration policy and strong-armed approach to dissent that this whirlwind weekender by Putin was as much for her benefit, politically, as his.
The implication being that if Merkel wants to stay in power with her weakening coalition and poll numbers it’s time for her to reverse course. And if that means cozying up to Russia then so be it.
Merkel will continue to talk a good game about Crimea and Ukraine while Putin will speak directly to the German people about ending the humanitarian crisis in Syria as a proxy for ending the threat of further immigration.
He knows most of the people who are behind the opposition to his Presidency are the same people driving the globalist bus, those I call The Davos Crowd.
He knows that Merkel and Macron both work for them. And The Davos Crowd are hell-bent on destroying the multiplicity of cultures that make Europe what it is.
So, Trump doesn’t want a solution to this trade spat. He wants to inflict maximum pain on them to force a radical realignment while extricating the U.S. from subsidizing their march towards centralized tyranny from Brussels.
At the same time this gives Macron and Merkel all the breathing room they need to patch things up with Russia while the Brits fume over not being able to destroy both Trump and Putin, since MI6 and the British Deep State are the ones doing the dirty work to undermine Trump and Putin at every turn.
Macron’s statement about Crimea was the first made by a major European leader that didn’t explicitly mention the Minsk II agreement as a prerequisite for normalizing relations with Russia.
Trump has pushed the EU into a corner, essentially saying, if you want to choose Russia, China and Iran over us, you’ll do so without our money and our banks.
Trump has all the subtlety of a wolverine in rut, but he’s pretty clear about what his intentions are if you are listening.
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