When America Grows Tired of Being the World’s Punching Bag...

The United States is enemy number one in the eyes of freedom’s foes whether they hail from the far left, the far right, assorted dictatorships, or religious fanaticism. And in those hate-soaked cultures where that isn’t quite the case, the USA still lands a strong second in the league tables of irrational loathing, right after Israel, a country ringed by states where hardly anyone would choose to live voluntarily. By all appearances, the United States has learned to live with a world that works out its insecurities at America’s expense, but nothing lasts forever.

The first paradox that jumps out at me is that the allegedly “hated” United States remains the single most popular destination for migrants anywhere in the world each year, while practically no one is clamoring to move to the nations that bash America the loudest. And before you dig up a few genuine desperados who headed from the West to, say, Russia, remember: they were either exposed spies or people on the run from legal trouble. The second paradox is that Europe’s self-styled „intellectual and political elites“ often speak down to the U.S., deriding it as the world’s policeman and preaching that Europe must “emancipate” itself and prove it can get along without America. Yet the instant someone in U.S. politics suggests the country should concentrate on its own domestic problems first, a frightened squeal erupts: how dare those impudent Americans, even think of it? After all, without them Europe would face a security crisis. That contradiction Europe wanting American security guarantees funded by the U.S. taxpayer while simultaneously doing business with its biggest adversary is nothing new. Angela Merkel and her Russian Trojan horse called Nord Stream spring immediately to mind: under the banner of “green” policy it aimed to swap zero-emission nuclear plants for gas-fired ones burning Russian fuel. Lest we forget, supposedly rational German strategy has produced plenty of such useful idiots over the years; from recent history, Willy Brandt pops up off the top of my head.

Willy Brandt served as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) from 1969 to 1974. True to his socialist leanings, he focused above all on cultivating good relations with the communist bloc, even though that bloc was then in the throes of its greatest territorial expansion and had just demonstrated its “peace-loving” nature to West Germans by invading Czechoslovakia a year before Brandt took office. Yes, living in peace with one’s neighbors is laudable, especially when you carry a certain burden of guilt, which both Germanies surely did a mere twenty-five years after World War II. Hearing the German chancellor occasionally apologize for Nazi atrocities was therefore welcome. What was decidedly not welcome, however, was Brandt’s eagerness to strike business deals with a communist dictatorship, deals that funneled fresh money and modern technology to the Soviet Union, which promptly used them to arm itself and pursue its goal of undermining the free world.

Under the Erdgasröhren project, best summed up as a “pipes-for-gas” swap, West Germany paid for construction of the Druzhba gas pipeline and, for the first time since the war, chained itself to dependence on Russia (then operating under the trade name “the Soviet Union”). Unsurprisingly, the United States, busy containing communist aggression around the globe and underwriting West Germany’s security, found the scheme unpalatable; National Security Adviser (and future Secretary of State) Henry Kissinger spoke of it in strikingly undiplomatic terms. Even so, President Richard Nixon let the deal proceed, and badly needed hard currency began flowing from Bonn to Moscow.

Fortunately, less than a year after the gas started flowing, it emerged that one of Brandt’s closest confidants, Günter Guillaume, his personal assistant and the architect of many of his political initiatives, was an East German secret-service spy. Brandt was suddenly unable to press ahead with some of his more curious ideas. Nevertheless, as so often happens with politicians whose fine words outshine their concrete deeds, he still received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Things played out much the same in June 2020, when President Donald Trump announced at a White House press conference that the United States planned to cut its troop presence in Germany from roughly 34,500 to 25,000 men and women. In a flash, every “progressive” politician and journalist forgot their long-standing worries about the American cop on the beat and began fretting over Trump’s alleged isolationism. Lost in the argument was the fact that Trump was reacting to Germany’s and several other European NATO members’, failure even to meet the alliance’s minimum spending commitments for collective defense. No one seemed eager to note that Germany was also leading the charge to accommodate an aggressive Russia, which by then had occupied part of Georgia for twelve years and had been waging an undeclared war against Ukraine for six. Europeans love to point to their advanced social-welfare systems and free, accessible health care far more generous than what most Americans enjoy but they seldom add that this is possible in part because the United States has underwritten their security for decades. One has to wonder how much longer Americans will be willing to foot the bill.

But defense isn’t the only field riddled with contradictions. Historically, the United States has also lived with lopsided tariff schedules on a long list of industrial goods. Right after World War II that imbalance made perfect sense: Washington wanted to jump-start Europe’s industrial recovery, including that of defeated Germany. The reasoning was straightforward: people who live comfortably at home have little appetite for dying in senseless wars. Everyone still had the ill-fated Treaty of Versailles in mind a settlement that, in several ways, empowered German politicians bent on staging a “round two” they intended to win. U.S. planners calculated that if America shared a slice of its wealth with Europe, American soldiers wouldn’t have to cross the Atlantic a third time to rescue a continent that had once again set itself ablaze.

Set aside the Marshall Plan, officially the European Recovery Program, which funneled the present-day equivalent of roughly $130 billion into Europe, mostly as grants. Another pillar of help was ultra-low tariffs. What was reasonable in the mid-1950s is far harder to defend today. Import a passenger car from the U.S. into Europe and you pay a 10 percent duty; motorcycles carry a 6–8 percent tariff on top of a punishing value-added tax that runs anywhere from 19 to 25 percent across the EU. Send the same goods the other direction and the duty is just 2.5 percent on cars, 0–2.4 percent on bikes, and the United States has no VAT at all. Yes, individual states levy sales taxes, but those range from zero to “as high as” 7 percent, hardly comparable to Europe’s 25 percent VAT. Again, one has to wonder: how much longer will Americans keep tolerating this?

A fascinating chapter in all this is the United Nations, that peculiar club where gentlemen wield the same clout as barbarians, and, let’s be honest, there are plenty of barbarians on the roster. In modern history the UN was the second attempt at a platform where dignified diplomats could wisely hammer out solutions to the world’s problems. The first try was the League of Nations, and it ended in tragedy: the barbarians of the day, Nazi Germany and its pals, the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan, first sabotaged its work and, once it no longer suited them, simply walked away. The League also failed in no small part because the United States never joined. After World War I, America alone had the economic and military muscle to play “world policeman,” but it wanted no part of the role and assumed Europe had learned enough from the Great War’s slaughter to avoid another. Europe being Europe, however, positively revels in creating problems and devising foolish fixes—such as sagely advising invaded nations that the best response to an aggressive neighbor is to surrender a slice of territory, after which eternal peace will surely follow. That was the counsel offered to Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938, and to Ukraine at Minsk in 2014.

I love America, though I probably liked Ronald Reagan’s America better than Joe Biden’s, but it’s still one of the few places on earth where people go to build a better life, including VIPs from regimes that publicly hate the United States, Russia being a prime example. “Birth tourism,” where pregnant Russians fly to the U.S. so their babies can be born American citizens, hasn’t slowed down even after Moscow launched its current war.

America is the lone country that guarantees the security of every EU nation, Japan, South Korea, Israel to a degree, and a host of smaller states most Europeans would have to hunt for on a map. That doesn’t mean Washington never blunders; it does. I still take issue with the second Gulf War, the ill-conceived effort to implant our brand of democracy in Afghanistan, and the backing of the Arab Spring that shattered the Middle East. Yet it’s only fair to admit that the Arab Spring was chiefly egged on by Europe, and America tagged along so the Continent having overestimated its own clout yet again, wouldn’t lose face.

It’s equally fair to note that far more instability comes from Russia, Turkey, North Korea, or the ham-handed post-colonial policies of Britain and France. I wish our politicians showed more empathy for American anxieties and for what weighs on ordinary Americans. Paying everyone’s bills while serving as the world’s punching bag won’t amuse them forever. And when the U.S. finally tires of it, we already have historical precedents for what happens to the UN, to NATO, and ultimately to Europe, and none of them ended well.