Trump’s trip to Europe was an absolute disaster

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 U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands during a joint press conference after their summit on July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland.   Trump, facing an onslaught of bipartisan fury over his glowing remarks about  Putin, said Monday he had misspoken during his news conference with the autocratic Russian leader.
U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin shake hands during a joint press conference after their summit on July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. Trump, facing an onslaught of bipartisan fury over his glowing remarks about Putin, said Monday he had misspoken during his news conference with the autocratic Russian leader.

By Guy Verhofstadt

US President Donald Trump’s European tour, much feared by European leaders and NATO powers alike, was an unmitigated disaster.

In Brussels, he slammed Germany and other countries for their lack of spending on defense and again questioned the role of NATO. In the UK, he trashed a sitting British Prime Minister and pushed for a disastrous hard Brexit.
In Helsinki, he sided with Russian President Vladimir Putin over his own intelligence agencies and failed to raise the concerns of European or NATO leaders.
For decades, US policy has been to underpin a rules-based world order and secure peace in Europe, in part through its military might; in part politically by supporting the creation of the European Union — a projection of traditional US values of liberty and democracy.
This longstanding policy has now been reversed. Historians will view this visit as the moment the post-1945 world order was upended.
Trump’s fawning press conference with Putin will unsettle many Europeans, in particular the people of Ukraine and those EU countries bordering Russia.
Disgracefully, Trump failed to condemn Russian meddling in the democratic processes of free countries.
There was no insistence that the Kremlin desist from its hacking of European infrastructure; no demands that Putin be held accountable for the murder of British citizens on European soil; no warning that further assassinations on European soil will be met with renewed US sanctions. There was no rebuke to Putin for his murderous foreign policy in Syria, which has exacerbated Europe’s refugee crisis.
The Russian President was effectively given a free pass by a sitting US President to continue his hybrid war against the West.
The European Union’s response was best highlighted by the German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, who said: “We can no longer fully rely on the White House.” Europe can take some solace from the anger expressed by many Democrats and Republicans with Trump’s European nightmare, but it is far from clear they will be able to influence the American President’s policy.
Europe’s resistance to Trump’s re-engineering of the world order must be founded on a recalibration; not necessarily of our policies towards US citizen or institutions outside the White House, but rather of our need to create, as the German foreign office has already stated, “a united, confident and sovereign Europe.”
Militarily, Europe must do more with less and work to build a more effective and coordinated defense capacity, guided by capability and outcomes rather than spending for the sake of it. A European pillar of NATO would go some way to delivering European security independence.
Trump railed against Germany over its support for the Nord Stream pipeline and reliance on Russian gas. On this at least he had a point. Putin has long used the reliance of some European countries on Russia’s vast energy resources as a tool by which to foster dependence and further his foreign-policy objectives. The EU is implementing proposals to reduce reliance on energy imports, by setting energy efficiency and renewable targets. These must now be stepped up.
The EU’s existing sanctions regime against the Kremlin must be safeguarded and new sanctions prepared as a deterrent to future Russian aggression. Here, the role of the UK and France will be vital. Nationalist populists, politically supported by the Kremlin — for example the Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini — are already calling for EU sanctions to be annulled. Their attempts to further the interests of the Kremlin must be resisted, as they were at the G7 meeting.
At the same time, the European Union must deliver a credible strategy to engage with Russia beyond sanctions. We need a proactive strategy to get the EU-Russia relationship out of its current stalemate and to motivate Russia to start behaving in a more responsible manner — a strategy of “conditional engagement” with Russia, inspired by the Helsinki process of the ’70s.
We must be tough on corrupt Russian officials, but make sure that law-abiding Russian citizens are not punished by sanctions against the regime.
Perhaps most importantly, supporters of liberal democracy must now win the battle against political nationalism in Europe. By backing Boris Johnson and his delusional vision of a hard Brexit and seemingly motivating his ambassadors to promote nationalist movements in Germany, Trump is interfering in European politics with the aim of supporting right-wing populism, just as Russia does.
The European Union is Trump’s greatest foe, as he suggested in Scotland of all places, not because it is an economic competitor to the US, but because it is a project conceived to weaken the populist nationalism that his movement endorses.
While it is far from perfect and needs reform, the European Union has proven astonishingly effective at promoting liberal democracy and its values in its neighborhood and globally.
The battle is now on to defeat Steve Bannon’s sick dream of a right-wing populist revolution in Europe and a retreat to the murderous nationalism of Europe’s past.
This ideological battle will not be won by placating right-wing populists, but rather by challenging their divisive narrative, tackling their tactics head-on and offering a positive vision of a more united, tolerant, free and democratic European continent based on values and fundamental rights.
European leaders must dare to offer a vision of a united Europe that can lead the free world.
CNN
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8 responses to “Trump’s trip to Europe was an absolute disaster”

  1. Secret State Department report: there are 20,000 Faliestinian “refugees” left in the world http://freebeacon.com/national-security/congress-demands-state-department-release-secret-report-busting-myth-palestinian-refugees/

  2. Niemals Avatar

    Watching RT.COM now or reading Hindlers https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/c43fde29215e494a2cebeaa46a818054681003d28a1e0db6b4a8c34213341e21.jpg
    is amusing since they do everything possible to remind us that 100 Years Ago the Jewish Communists (not the Christian Communists) Slaughtered the Tsar, his Wife, Children, Relatives, and Servants, and the Major Memorials are All Week Long
    Now the Russian need to change the approach made to Donald ‘Teflon’ Trump promising garanti for the well being of the Jewish state of Israel in the future.

    1. Niemals Avatar

      More important than Hindlers tweeting about the Russian Tsar, is the 100 years since Mandela was born. (July 18th, 1918)!

      1. Hind Abyad Avatar
        Hind Abyad

        To retarded broken record Zionist trolls squatters talking between themselves!

        Christian haters and Christian killers.

        “Tsar Nicholas and Tsarina Alexandra, their daughters Olga (22) Tatiana (21), Maria (19), Anastasia (17) and Alexei (13) fell under a hail of bullets. In a ritual of evil the family’s corpses and those of three loyal servants and the family doctor were then stripped naked, mutilated, disfigured, burned with petrol and acid and secretly buried. So fell Christian Russia, which had for over 900 years resisted both the Mongol-Tartar hordes from the East and the Catholic-Protestant hordes from the West, keeping the balance in the world from these extremists.The so-called Russian Revolution was a coup similar to most other Western-engineered ‘regime changes’ before and since. Jacob Schiff, (1847-1920), the Wall Street banker who had financed Japan during the Japanese War against Russia (1904-1905), publicly boasted of his success in bringing about the coup, with the help of mainly aristocratic Russian traitors and apostates.

        Imperial Christian gold reserves weighed 1,311 tonnes: they went to the West and not to the people. In 1911 the St. Louis Dispatch had published a cartoon by Bolshevik insider Robert Minor. His published cartoon portrays Karl Marx with a book entitled Socialism under his arm, standing amid a cheering crowd on Wall Street.

        Gathered around and greeting him with enthusiastic handshakes are characters identified as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, John D. Ryan of National City Bank, Morgan partner George W. Perkins and Teddy Roosevelt, leader of the Progressive Party. Western corporations moved in for the kill; Ford, General Electric, International Harvester, Caterpillar etc. Gulag slaves, whom Trotsky-Bronstein dubbed White Negroes, worked harder and cost less than those employed in the West. Over 1,000 Gulag camps were scattered across the bankster colony. The United States and Britain invested heavily in the blood-soaked Soviet regime.” https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/6dfc13f7ce308528eb56b87665189f65d24348287370bfef79f5cc0766711602.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2f9a25060d521aa493eff84d6712465608f00205a3d267843be95be0f2888d3e.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/617dab31dced4949f0cc993b843fb2761ab243f132edd5ab9a6860727d7410e7.png
        Sickos

    2. Niemals Avatar

      YEKATERINBURG, Russia: Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill led some 100,000 people in a nighttime procession Tuesday to mark 100 years since the Bolsheviks murdered tsar Nicholas II and his family, amid a simmering conflict between the state and the Church over their remains.

      The Kremlin planned no official commemorations although officials from culture and defense ministries were scheduled to take part in a memorial event in Moscow.

      The regional authorities said the popularity of the annual event has grown steadily over the past years, adding that just 2,000 people took part in a similar procession in 2002.

      The Russian Orthodox Church is still divided over the authenticity of the remains of the family, whose members were all made saints in 2000.

      The bones of Nicholas, his wife and three of their children were interred in Saint Petersburg in 1998 but the Orthodox Church refused to give them a full burial service.

      http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Life/Living/2018/Jul-17/456885-tens-of-thousands-mark-100-years-since-murder-of-last-russian-tsar.ashx

      1. Hind Abyad Avatar
        Hind Abyad

        “Lebanon’s storied Daily Star shut down in 2009-
        Usefulness imbecile!. it’s LosAngelesTimes (MSM)

        ‘Syrian opposition lawyer, three colleagues are kidnapped’
        December 10, 2013
        http://articles.latimes.com/2013/dec/10/world/la-fg-wn-syrian-opposition-lawyer-kidnapped-20131210

        ‘Pro-Assad Syrian political analyst killed in Lebanon’
        Mohammad Darrar Jammo is shot to death in Sarafand, apparently the latest example of violence from Syria’s civil war spilling into Lebanon.
        http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/17/world/la-fg-syria-assassinate-20130718In

        ‘Syria, rebel assassinations and executions of officials, journalists and others seen as sympathetic to the government occur regularly. The brazen killing of Jammo indicates that such attacks have crossed the border.’

        The Daily Star quoted Lebanese Interior Minister Marwan Charbel as denouncing the killing of Jammo as a “political crime.” “What is happening in terms of assassinations, bombing attacks and car bombs are the result of this boiling political atmosphere,” Charbel said”

  3. Niemals Avatar

    Trump plays higher than any president before him when he declares that he believes more the arch enemy of Russia’s Putin than his own intelligence service.
    But this game can help him to win – even if the price is a major damage to American democracy.

    Furthermore it seems that Trump action in moving the US Embassy inspired some Israeli organizations in Sweden, during the political week in Almedalen, a call was made to move Sweden’s Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

    The name collection will take place throughout the year and the lists will be submitted to the new government in early 2019. According to an Israel friendly Christian News Source.

    A new swedish government seems to be a powerless government, judging from the fact that the leading party (SD) is a member of the Europe of Freedom and Democracy (EFD).

  4. Niemals Avatar

    According to RT.com Russian Communist Party seeks major probe into Bolshevik role in Romanovs’ killing Edited time: 24 Jul, 2018 06:30
    A Russian Communist Party MP has asked for the deaths of Russian tsars and other royals to be investigated, saying that the probe of the 1918 killing of the Romanovs is currently being used for propaganda purposes.
    In his letters to the Investigative Committee (the Russian Federal agency that investigates especially important crime or crime that receives a lot of media attention) and the Prosecutor General’s Office, MP Valery Rashkin demanded that all information on the killing of the Romanov family is disclosed and called for an investigation into murders of other Russian tsars. The lawmaker also made similar requests to the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Russian History and the Institute of Archaeology.

    Rashkin asked the researchers and law enforcement officers to start investigation of the violent deaths of various Russian monarchs, like Ivan VI, Peter III, Paul I and also Feodor II Godunov.

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