Europe abandoned ship a while ago. That’s why it’s creating it’s own European Army as an answer to the Russian and Middle East threats. America has been infiltrated, destabilized from within and is becoming unreliable on the world stage. Ask the Saudis why they created their own islamic NATO.
Europe is facing a convergence of the worst crises since World War II, and the overwhelming consensus among officials and experts here is that the U.S. no longer has the will or the ability to play an influential role in solving them.
At the Munich Security Conference, the prime topics are the refugee crisis, the Syrian conflict, Russian aggression and the potential dissolution of the European Union’s very structure. Top European leaders repeatedly lamented that 2015 saw all of Europe’s problems deepen, and unanimously predicted that in 2016 they would get even worse.
“The question of war and peace has returned to the continent,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier told the audience, indirectly referring to Russian military interventions. “We had thought that peace had returned to Europe for good.”
What was missing from the conference speeches and even the many private discussions in the hallways, compared to previous years, was the discussion of what Europe wanted or even expected the U.S. to do.
Several European officials told me that there was little expectation that President Barack Obama, in his last year in office, would make any significant policy changes to address what European governments see an existential set of crises that can’t wait for a new administration in Washington.
“There’s a shared assessment that the European security architecture is falling apart in many ways,” said Camille Grand, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. “There is a growing sense that this U.S. administration is focused on establishing a legacy on what has already been achieved rather than trying to achieve anything more. Yet the problems can get much worse.”
During the first day of the conference, the U.S. role in Europe was hardly mentioned in the public sessions. In the private sessions, many participants told me that European governments are not only resigned to a lack of American assertiveness, they also are now reluctantly accepting a Russia that is more present than ever in European affairs, and not for the better.
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Many in the audience noted that Kerry has little leverage with which to pressure Russia to abide by any cease-fire. There’s little faith among European officials I spoke with that Russia has any plan to end the fighting, unless it is on Moscow’s own terms. Lavrov spoke after Kerry and reiterated that Russia would continue to bomb the “terrorists” in Syria, and that Russia’s view of “terrorists” was expansive.
“Kerry is coming in there telling them this is what he hopes they will do, without having a way to elicit a response to them,” said Mead. “That looks like a negotiation, but that’s not actually a negotiation.”
Full article: Europe’s Convinced U.S. Won’t Solve Its Problems (BloombergView)
Global Geopolitics 