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Talking about European leaders being morons while you have a dummy like trump as a president is top comedy.
While I don't think I'd call many European leaders morons, over the past few decades many of them have shown themselves to be quite unserious. Sweden tried to launch a "feminist" foreign policy in the 2010s. Germany dismantled their nuclear power supply for no good reason and became dependant on Russian gas. Leaders in countries like Spain and Ireland larp as third-world revolutionaries with their Palestine support. The UK is trying to pay Mauritius to take the Chagos Islands from them. And so on. For all of Trump's weird antics his mercenary nature is at least better suited to how the world actually works.
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Can you name one accomplishment or intelligent thing the big Euro leaders have achieved or done in the last decade? I can’t.
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The better way to frame it is that they think they're weak morons. Their ridiculousness comes from the disconnect between their pomposity and seriousness and their inability to manage without America.
The basic Trumpian view is that Trump may be crass but America can at least handle its own business or face the consequences. You get more leeway if you can pay your own tab.
Trump(ism) is all about power or the appearance thereof.
They haven't needed to manage without America because America managed for them in return for supremacy , that is the way of the post war order. The fact that Trump doesn't understand that and is clearly a bully in love with Putin is the main problem. The European politicians are a result of this state of affairs, a weak continent paying protection to someone else.
It's a weak continent that cannot break free of US hegemony, is reluctant to pay part of the toll of said hegemony (maintaining militaries at a certain level of potency) while fantasizing about pulling away and having an independent foreign policy and doing things that both annoy its hegemon (like Germany's sidling up to Russia for energy, which they laughed at Trump for criticizing*) and perhaps even make wars that its hegemon must fight more likely. And is unwilling to shoulder sole responsibility for said wars.
The "deal" left dissatisfaction on both sides because there's no coherent bargain in ink, because Europe is a bunch of different factions. It's essentially a sort of cowardly/lazy slide into American dependence paired with wishful thinking about an independence that would not require reconciling these contradictions.
* What person who acknowledges the supremacy of the another does this btw?
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