The beef currently between the US and Europe should be observed, because it’s instructive for the pending beef between the US and South Africa – which has yet to start. What’s happened so far is only the ignition of the beef machine. At some point in the future it will rev, and then it will accelerate.
Europe is in an unenviable position, entirely of its own making. Polls reveal that fewer than 15% of young, fighting-aged men between 18 and 24 from the UK, Germany, and France would accept military conscription. Roughly 80% of women between the ages of 17 and 34 claim they’re not satisfied with life. The birth rate of native Europeans (and the UK) has stalled, but it’s the opposite for Muslim communities, where the continent’s population is expected to be just under 40 million by 2050 – but that figure is almost certainly too low, as it doesn’t account for the now frequent surges of new arrivals.
More ridiculous for the UK is that the number of people who don’t speak English in England has just passed the 1m threshold.
Very ‘ANC-like’ things are happening on the continent. After last month’s German elections, Chancellor-elect Friedrich Merz of the uni-party emerged shortly after the results were announced to clear something up: “During the campaign,” he said, “I made many promises about improving border control. But I’m afraid to say that’s not going to happen.”
In the UK, the sentencing council has released updated guidelines recommending that lenience be considered for perpetrators from ethnic minorities. In France the leader of the country’s far-left La France Insoumise, with over half a million members, has declared that white people are being replaced by Creole peoples, and it’s a good thing.
Periphery
These things are happening on the periphery of its current preoccupation: the terror of a full-blown Russian invasion. But decades of over-bureaucratisation and over-feminisation have created bizarre and unnecessary obstacles to a response. Take one of the first line items from its luxury beliefs agenda. In recent years European nations – with the full support of the EU – have been stealthily encouraging de-banking “verticals” they claim do not share their “values”.
So now, at a time where the continent needs to gear up rapidly, its munitions manufacturers are trapped in financial, legal, and administrative turmoil. These companies are expected to move swiftly to the occasion, despite being impeded, harassed and smeared by (mainly) green political parties, some of whom exist in governing coalitions.
Not a second of this has escaped America, even before November’s election. Europe’s open-border policies, the suppression of free speech, and wider “de-personing” (a model that also includes de-banking), its preoccupation with the most radical interpretation of climate change and identity engineering may appear to be the sources of the beef, but the core issue is economic imbalance. An asymmetrical defence-spend arrangement now inhabits cultural nuance. One of the reasons why Europeans consider themselves culturally superior is because they work less and retire earlier than their American counterparts.
The only reason why this has happened, despite Ronald Reagan’s efforts to rehabilitate the continent from its addiction to welfare, is because of America’s dollar. No more accurate explanation for the seething indignation exists.
Everywhere you look today the decline of the “rules-based international order” is lamented – from Marianne Thamm in the Daily Maverick to Michael Gove in The Spectator. But in recent years the only thing it succeeded in accomplishing was perverting instinct and making for frustration.
Reasonable to conclude
It’s reasonable to conclude that this order may itself be partially responsible for the polarisation, relegating it from some grand political technology to an agent of chaos in urgent need of correction.
Although the comparison will horrify them, the ANC is behaving, and has behaved, like irrational Europeans demonised by self-righteousness. A complete, pre-diplomatic triumph is subsequently required in South Africa: convincing the ANC to outsource negotiations with the Americans to other members of the GNU.
To some degree this has already happened, with the DA approaching Washington, but the DA should appreciate that its own behaviour is seen at times as more Dem and more European than driven by common sense. This is evident from its demonstrable enthusiasm for ‘forever war’, and its eagerness to wear silly badges that have nothing to do with rooting out corruption in municipalities.
With most of the smaller parties having gone mad already, the only option left is to appoint Gayton McKenzie to lead South Africa into discussions with Washington. What is emerging between the US and Europe could not be clearer: to work with this administration you need Mac’s Motorcycle Club thinking – Mike Bolhuis and Mikey Schultz, not Michael Gove.
Dismissing a radical overhaul to a diplomatic approach is tantamount to ignoring a reality unfolding in real time. Keir Starmer, despite being accompanied by supposedly the most sophisticated diplomacy, has failed. Emmanuel Macron too. London and Brussels are panicking to the point where their media supporters are openly declaring that the US is the enemy of the West.
Trump’s administration respects strength and street smarts, not INSEAD degrees or the lunatic grievances of Azanian Critical Theory. The era of snooty, sophisticated orders and entitlement is rapidly drawing to a close. While Thamm and her accomplices are prepared to wallow in the hopeless sentiments of the US commentator Chris Hedges, there are deals to be made and within those, a chance for this country to be treated as a legitimate equal, if for the first time in its democratic dispensation.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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