December 7, 2019
Citizens of France. To arms! Man the ramparts. The American barbarians are coming. They shall not pass!
Le Trump’s threat to France’s splendid wines and Roquefort cheese are the gravest menace France has faced since the Germans invaded this fair land in 1914. Burgundy wines and France’s 300 fromages form the very soul of la Belle France.
Trump does not know or care that France saved America from British mis-rule. He wants revenge because France – which taxes nearly everything – seeks to tax US IT firms like Google and Amazon. Trump considers this a personal affront. Besides, he dislikes wine and lives on desiccated burgers made with petrochemical cheese, washed down by acidic Diet Cokes.
On top of this outrage comes the squabble over NATO. Trump used to scoff at the Alliance, saying it was ‘obsolete’ as well as under-armed and short of money. The president and his backers really dislike France and all it stands for, including wine and cheese.
Even more important, Trump and his Bible Belt supporters want to keep ‘ungodly’ Europe under Washington’s thumb. NATO is the instrument of America’s domination over Europe. Confused president Trump fails to understand that the NATO members are supposed to devote up to 2% of their budgets to building their own military forces, not to paying off Washington for protection.
Most European nations have sharply reduced their military budgets since the end of the Cold War. In spite of warlike talk from some NATO leaders, most Europeans, aside from the Poles and Baltic states, see no threat from the old foe, Russia. Modern Russia’s armed forces have seriously shrunken. While impressive on paper, they must defend a vast territory from Poland to the Bering Strait. Worse, the drop in world oil prices has cut Russia’s military budgets.
Unlike 1980, Europeans have little fear that 40,000 Soviet tanks are about to crush all before them and race for the Channel ports. The most important European power, Germany, has grown militarily feeble. German tax-payers, like most other Europeans, see no need to spend billions of hard-earned euros against a non-existent threat from the East. The Poles are arming against Russia, and the Greeks against Turkey, but these local squabbles should not be NATO’s primary concern.
France’s President Emmanuel Macron called today’s NATO brain dead, invoking the ire of Trump. What Macron meant was that the alliance has no coherent strategy or world view. The US wants to use NATO as a Europe-based police force to support its imperial operations in the Mideast, Africa and, most lately, against China. Most Europeans say that these far-flung regions have nothing to do with European security and want no part of a growing conflict with China. It was bad enough the US forced NATO to get militarily involved in Afghanistan, Syria, Libya and Iraq. Trump wants his European Foreign Legion; Europeans say no.
Aside from France, which is deeply involved in a nasty, neo-colonial misadventure in West Africa, most Europeans have no interest in such ‘little wars.’ Their military industrial complexes do not drive government policies, as in the United States. Though, an interesting exception is Britain. It was just revealed that commandos of Britain’s Special Boat Service have been actively involved in Yemen’s bloody civil war to assist Saudi-backed forces.
As President Macron has been rightly saying, the European Union, a greater economic power than the United States, should have its own unified military forces. It’s absurd that the so-called European Union has neither armed forces nor centralized command. The United States is happy to fulfill this role because it preserves American domination of Europe that dates back to the 1940’s and assures a large market for US arms makers.
And, yes, many Europeans don’t want to pay the price for real military power. Who cares about squalid little wars in the Mideast, Africa and West Asia? There’s no way Europe will get into a military confrontation with China over two-by-nothing islets no one has ever even heard of.
Copyright Eric S. Margolis 2019
Its time for the EU to form its own armed forces. The technology and funds certainly exist. Frankly, it would be better for Europe to have an integrated military with representatives from all of its countries, than having large American forces stationed there. The US needs to find a way to reduce its military spending, and this would be a good start.
For the sake of the world, the American rogue state has to be stopped.
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Dik
I would not hold my breath, hoping to find anything other with the French than FULL cooperation with the (U.S. and UK based) NWO cabal. They just voted on a law to make “speaking against Israel” “a form of antisemitism”, so they can throw the book at you. There is no substitute for doing once homework.
MrSoso
The Netherlands
Eric alludes to part of the reason the US maintains its forces in Europe, which is to preserve a large market for the US armaments industry. That’s the same reason or Trump to advocate strongly for NATO members to boost their military spending to at least 2 per cent of those countries’ GDP. He assumes that more defence spending by most NATO members would lead to increased arms purchases from US manufacturers. Obviously, Trump is happy to be a shill for the US arms industry, whose companies and employees contribute heavily to the Republican Party. In the past, US ambassadors have acted as shills for that industry, by pushing their host countries to boost their defence spending.
It might be correct, “there is no way Europeans will get into a military confrontation with China over two-by-nothing islets no one has ever even heard of.” But they may not be able to avoid the consequences. World wars start locally.
https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Funny how America invades countries all the time and overthrows democracies that aren’t pro American big business enough, creates and supports terrorist groups, spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined, has over 1000 military bases around the world, is the world’s biggest supplier of weapons, but all the media claims Russia is the aggressor in the world.