If Vice President J.D. Vance hoped to earn respect among international leaders with his speech in Germany last week, it wouldn’t work, according to one senior diplomat.
If Vice President J.D. Vance hoped to earn respect among international leaders with his speech in Germany last week, it wouldn’t work, according to one senior diplomat.
It didn’t “backfire”. The insults were the point. Why does whoever wrote this think he hoped to earn their respect when the trump regime has no respect for them and doesn’t give a flying fuck what they think? They want fear, not respect.
That doesn’t make sense. Nobody fears them here in Europe.
As the article said, this just led to European leaders intensifying the decoupling from dependencies onto the US, which makes its current bully administration less powerful and less able to hurt Europe.
Hoping that friends of the resistance abroad boycott every American product that crosses their dash. I mean it, everything from Google to orange juice.
We will ask American companies what they were doing in the 2020s just like we ask German companies what they were doing in the 1930s
I agree it doesn’t make sense, it’s much better to have friends and allies that stand together. For some reason it makes sense to them to alienate our allies–I guess since they have no moral ideals and all they care about is enriching themselves, they find it more conducive to their aims to align with corrupt regimes. But I do think there is fear being generated by this, not the “oh no I hope they don’t start a war with us” (though maybe that should also be felt) but more like “oh no the longstanding system of alliances and institutions like NATO that have kept Europe at peace since WWII are no longer viable and how are we going to deal with that?” Here, like everywhere, their strategy is to sow chaos and confusion.
“fear” is too strong a word…“uneasiness”, maybe some “anxiety”, but definitely not “fear”.
there’s some uncertainty, but overall consensus seems to trend toward a joint European Army, which has been an ongoing discussion for a long time now.
recent events will likely accelerate this movement, but the momentum has been building since before the Ukraine war.
it just makes strategic sense to unify the armed forces of the EU/EWR/Schengen.
they’ve already been training together for decades, might as well formally unify!