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| This is such a shot for a 1950s movie poster, isn't it. From the White House state dinner in April, photo by AFP/Getty. |
Trump's making the US irrelevant, forcing the rest of the world to figure out how to do things without us. It's a good thing in some places, as I've said with reference to South Korea, which has taken to managing its own foreign policy because they can't trust Americans to be consistent or coherent, but I'm not sure about others. Very cool column by David Ignatius/WaPo interprets the Armistice Day events in Paris in this light:
Last weekend’s events in Paris offered a dramatic demonstration that “other things being equal” is not a safe assumption. The world is moving to adapt to the reality that Donald Trump is president of the United States. Our friends and allies may hope his election eventually will be reversed, and maybe they think the United States turned a corner with the 2018 midterm elections. But they can’t count on it, so these countries must consider that the United States may be a different country from what they had believed.
French President Emmanuel Macron articulated this reality last week. In one of his World War I remembrances, he told a French radio station that Europe needs a “true European army” at a time when the United States is a less reliable ally. “We have to protect ourselves with respect to China, Russia and even the United States of America,” Macron said.
Trump blasted Macron’s comments as “very insulting,” and he continued to complain in tweets Tuesday about French ingratitude and claimed that Macron was trying to distract from his “very low” approval ratings. But joining Macron on Tuesday was German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who told the European parliament that she shared others’ view that “a common European army would show the world that there would never again be war in Europe.”That—Macron suggesting a "European army"—seems to have been a major part of what triggered Trump's weird behavior beginning over the weekend, alongside dawning realization that he just lost an election, bigly, and as we're told that Corsi and Stone and apparently Junior himself are getting busted, and that his brilliant maneuver of planting his own personal agent at the attorney general's desk to protect him is a failure, and maybe even, Steve suggests this morning, a crash from some prescription high.
