EUROPEANS WOULD BE BETTER OFF IF THEY HAD LISTENED TO TRUMP. President Donald Trump is back in the United States, tending to urgent political matters, including the upcoming midterm elections. But as usual, when he travels to Europe, Trump leaves a lot of turbulence in his wake. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, many European leaders appeared to flip out over Trump’s designs on Greenland.
“I think we are past Munich now,” one unnamed European diplomat told Politico, referring to Britain’s 1938 appeasement of Adolf Hitler. The diplomat continued, “We realize that appeasement is not the right policy anymore,” apparently suggesting that Europeans must stand up to Trump, who they see in the role of the new Hitler. Another European diplomat anonymously told Politico, “Our American Dream is dead. Donald Trump has murdered it.” Others, only slightly less dramatically, warned of “dark times” to come.
Trump backed down from his demand that the U.S. be allowed to buy Greenland, but that did not appear to lower the temperature among the Europeans. Indeed, some observers saw the episode as a turning point. “[Trump’s] erratic bullying has forced European leaders to recognize that they need independence from unreliable America,” the Washington Post‘s David Ignatius wrote from Davos.
But Ignatius noted that the Eurocrats realized they need to do more than declare independence — they also need to “break with their own moribund economic and security policies.” Ignatius went on to explain that over the years, Europe has undermined its own security by skimping on defense spending, and then stifled its potential for economic growth by overtaxation and overregulation. Trump’s rough treatment of them in Davos, Ignatius said, was a “wake-up call.”
Here’s the thing. If Davos was a wake-up call for European leaders, it was a wake-up call to tell them they should have listened to Trump for the last decade. On four of the most important issues facing Europe over that period, Trump has given Europe sound advice, which the Europeans at times ignored, dismissed, or even ridiculed.
First, Trump told Europe: You’re killing yourself with mass migration. Stop. Second, Trump told NATO: You’ve got to spend more on your own defense. Third, Trump told the European Union: You’re hurting yourselves with draconian regulations. And fourth, Trump told former German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others: Don’t build the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. It’s a terrible idea to depend on Putin’s Russia for your energy.
Trump was right about each of those things. Many Europeans still refuse to recognize that. But others see some positive effect from Trump. NATO Secretary Mark Rutte credits Trump for many countries’ increases in defense spending. “Would it ever have happened if President Trump had not been reelected as President 47 of the United States? Absolutely not,” Rutte told Fox News’s Bret Baier on Wednesday.
Will Europe really change? The Post‘s Ignatius, a fundamentally anti-Trump article — he called Trump’s Greenland play a “putsch” — still noted that Europe has to realize that it has huge problems of its own making. Will they also realize that they would be in better shape if they had followed Trump’s advice — not everything Trump ever said, but his counsel on the big issues — over the last several years? That seems highly unlikely. But they would be.