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Victor Davis Hanson: Europe’s Fall to a Second-Class Continent

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Europe is upset. They’re very angry. They’re always angry, but the last two weeks they seem to be particularly angry. There are reports at their winter EU summit, they voiced extreme anger at the U.S. in general and Donald Trump in particular. 

And we know the causes. They were angry that tariffs were applied to them. They didn’t mention that they were running a huge trade surplus with the United States. They were angry of Trump’s chauvinistic and bombastic talk about annexing Greenland. Bombastic though it was, he had a point, didn’t he? That this is a critical piece of real estate in North America that is a colony of distant Denmark, and which was lost to Denmark in World War II, which was restored by the United States and handed back over to Denmark because it could not protect the strategic real estate in World War II. During the Cold War, we protected it, had bases there, and now we are the only power strong enough to prevent Chinese and Russian infiltration in there. 

So there was a, there was a both-sides argument to that controversy. They’re very angry because Donald Trump is going to pull troops out of NATO. Not a lot, just a few, and maybe some air wings, and redeploy them, not to the United States, but to the Pacific and Asia, where he feels the existential threat is not Russia, but China. 

So, why are they so angry? The obvious reasons are that the United States has shouldered about 16 to 20% of the actual NATO budget, but when you look at overhead, logistics, intelligence, the nuclear deterrent, it’s more like 50%. We’re going to be spending a trillion and a half per year, and Europe altogether won’t get close to that number. 

Their argument is that we are now facing Russia, and you don’t understand that Russia may go into the Baltic states, it may go into Poland. We understand that. We have over 70,000 troops there, and they remain under the American nuclear shield, and Trump has already........

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