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| Europe |
| Foreign-policy sleepwalking: Wake up to Germany no longer being such a good ally |
| 2020-09-17 |
| [The Hill] A line in the sublime Hilary Mantel trilogy of Henry VIII’s fixer, Thomas Cromwell, perfectly encapsulates the highest aspirations of the political risk profession. The goal must be always to "Study the world without despising it. Understand the world without rejecting it. Have no illusions, but have hopes. Do not sleepwalk through life." During my decade in senior Washington foreign policy circles, during the bad old days of the Iraq War and the bipartisan utopian efforts at nation-building that followed, just such intellectual sleepwalking fast became a nightmare. The besetting sin of our foreign policy elite is intellectual sclerosis — that what once worked during the halcyon days of our Cold War supremacy is carved in stone, forever being the way for America to operate. The strong, usually unspoken belief of our foreign policy blob remains the misguided notion that foreign allies invariably will knuckle under to American blandishments and do as we say. To put it mildly, after living and working for the past 14 years in Europe, this is simply not the world I wake up in every day. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #5 Former East European nations are better allies because being under the bears paw is still fresh in their memories. Plus, they are first inline if there is a Russian Empire re-incarnation. |
| Posted by: AlmostAnonymous5839 2020-09-17 17:33 |
| #4 US should have helped establish a Neutral East European alliance to act as a buffer between paranoid Russians and Western Europe. Then walked away. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2020-09-17 15:53 |
| #3 Aside from good beer, what does Germany provide us that we can't more easily obtain through our alliance partners Poland and Romania? |
| Posted by: Omavick Sproing6629 2020-09-17 15:00 |
| #2 There is another country the USA also needs to decouple from. |
| Posted by: Thong Bumble1096 2020-09-17 14:47 |
| #1 Well since the wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, they haven't really had any reason to align themselves completely with the US. We were asking why the hell we were still over there and NATO existed in '93 when I was in the military. I bet a lot of Germans felt the same. |
| Posted by: DarthVader 2020-09-17 14:38 |