Commentary: America Leaving NATO Would Be Good for Itself and Europe

NATO

Donald Trump resumed his role as the “wise fool” in recent, off-the-cuff remarks about NATO. He suggested that free-riding NATO members who do not pay their fair share might have to fight Russia on their own. National security hawks and Trump’s media enemies responded with lots of pious talk about our sacred NATO obligations. Joe Biden even said Trump was “un-American.”

Trump is not the first to suggest NATO partners should pay their fair share. But unlike his predecessors, he is willing to employ some leverage to make it happen. The real dirty secret here, as evidenced by how long this situation has gone on, is that enabling the Europeans to neglect their own defense is a feature and not a bug of America’s dominance over the NATO organization.

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Commentary: Far-Left Drives 44 Percent Hate Crime Increase Against European Christians

Anti-Christian hate crimes in Europe have risen by 44 percent in just one year, with far-left groups behind a majority of the attacks, according to a shocking new report.

Published in October, the Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination Against Christians in Europe’s Annual Report detailed a wave of violent attacks, church arson, and rising extremism battering Europe’s historic Christian communities.

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NATO Countries Talk Big About Beefing Up Defense Spending, But Most Haven’t Backed Up Pledges

Most NATO countries have failed to meet pledges to inflate defense spending made in reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine despite voicing concerns about the intense security environment in Europe, according to The Wall Street Journal.

NATO countries on the eastern flank, most notably Poland, are girding for war as the conflict in Ukraine shows no sign of abating in the near term, prompting renewed commitments to beefing up their own and Ukraine’s militaries in line with the U.S., according to the WSJ. Others believe that Russia’s poor performance in Ukraine, illustrated in recent days by an incursion of pro-Ukrainian partisans into a Russian border territory with little initial resistance, means there is less urgency to increase spending on weapons and military equipment than previously imagined, according to the outlet.

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‘Extreme’ Gender Ideology Pushes U.S. to Provide Children Greater Access to Transgender Treatment than in Europe

The prevalence of radical gender ideology in the United States has driven the nation to offer children greater access to transgender medical interventions than is available in Europe, a study by Do No Harm has found.

Compared to the United States, “Europe goes a safer and more scientific route,” states Do No Harm, a diverse group of physicians, healthcare professionals, patients, and policymakers seeking to “protect healthcare from a radical, divisive, and discriminatory ideology.”

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Pete Buttigieg Vacationed in Europe amid Rail Strike Crisis

While the country was facing a possible supply chain crisis due to the looming threat of a massive rail strike earlier this year, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg was vacationing in Portugal.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, Buttigieg was in Porto, Portugal in September, a tourist destination over 3,500 miles away from Washington, D.C., that is best known for its wineries. He began his vacation on August 29th, just one week before Amtrak started canceling long-distance trips ahead of a likely strike due to failed attempts to negotiate a deal that satisfied the rail workers’ unions.

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Commentary: Europe Shows a Clear Link Between Immigration and Crime

Violent crime is becoming common in Sweden, shocking residents of the famously placid Scandinavian nation, where horrific acts of violence have become “all too familiar,” according to Common Sense Media, part of a Swedish nonprofit organization.   

Since 2018, Swedish authorities have recorded an estimated 500 bombings, while what they describe as gang shootings have become increasingly common. The country reported a record 124 homicides in 2020 and many residents were shocked in April when violent riots injured more than 100 police officers.  

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German Authorities Fear Nord Stream Pipelines May Be Permanently Unusable Following Sabotage

German security officials believe that both Nord Stream 1 and 2 could be damaged beyond repair as large amounts of corrosive saltwater flowed into pipelines following multiple leaks that were discovered on Tuesday, The Telegraph reported on Wednesday.

European countries found significant gas leaks at three separate locations in the Baltic Sea which caused the pipelines’ pressure to drop, forcing the pipelines to go offline. German authorities are concerned that the saltwater’s damage to the pipelines could make them permanently inoperable which would further cut fuel supplies to an energy-starved Germany, according to The Telegraph, which cited the German outlet Tagesspiegel.

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Commentary: Europe’s Industrial Might Is Collapsing While Its Elites Deny Reality

Germany, widely known as Europe’s industrial powerhouse, is now leading the continent in an alarming new trend — rapid de-industrialization.

Astronomical natural gas prices are forcing heavy industries, from smelters to fertilizer plants, to shut down or curtail production. Germany’s fabled “Mittelstand” — the collection of mid-sized firms that form the backbone of its economic might — is buckling under the weight of terrible decisions made by climate obsessed politicians going back decades.

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Natural Gas Prices Hit 14-Year-High After Biden Signs Dems’ Climate Bill into Law

The price of U.S. natural gas futures reached its highest point since 2008 as gas demand continues to spike amid the worldwide energy crisis and the passage of the Democrats’ climate bill, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Natural gas futures for November, December and January each surpassed $10 per million British Thermal Units (BTUs) on Monday, reaching highs that have not been seen since 2008, according to the WSJ. High prices are largely due to the strong demand for gas in Europe amid uncertainty surrounding Russian natural gas flows, the WSJ reported; furthermore, the Democrats’ new climate bill includes regulations that will hike expenses for natural gas producers.

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Putin Promises to Keep the Gas Flowing to Europe – for Now

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Russia would continue to supply Europe with natural gas, but warned that deliveries via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline could become constrained if sanctions prevent further maintenance on the pipeline, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Putin asserted that the pipeline’s owner, the Moscow-controlled energy firm Gazprom, will honor and fulfill its responsibilities to Europe in remarks that he made late Tuesday after his visit to Tehran, reported the WSJ. Putin’s comments come amid the reduced flow of natural gas into Europe due to sanctions and other supply chain disruptions caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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Commentary: Energy Myths Are Triggering a New Dark Age in Europe

Europe has an energy crisis. Factories are halting operations in the face of soaring energy prices; families are paying 50% more for heating (or opting to freeze in their homes), and  Europe as a whole continues to destabilize its political position by making itself dependent on Russia for natural gas.

Europe shows what happens when you adopt policies based on false ideas—myths about energy that all but guarantee high prices, power blackouts, and a crashing economy.

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Commentary: Sweden—Once Mocked for Its COVID Strategy—Now Has One of the Lowest COVID Mortality Rates in Europe

Early in the coronavirus pandemic, I asked a simple question. Could Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the coronavirus actually work?

Unlike its European neighbors and virtually all US states, the Swedes had opted to not shut down the economy. The country of 10 million people took what was at first described as “a lighter touch.”

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Amid Global Energy Crunch, Biden on Track to Boost Iranian Oil, Impede Israeli Gas Exports to Europe

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown the global energy market into a state of turmoil, forcing the U.S. and Europe to look for substitutes for Russian oil and gas. In that process, the Biden administration has turned to Iran as a potential supplier — just two months after effectively killing an Israeli pipeline project that would have supplied natural gas to Europe.

The administration’s decision to engage Iran, a decades-long adversary of the U.S., about supplying energy while opposing a close ally’s energy project is feeding concerns among experts that he rewards foes and punishes friends in the Middle East.

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Russia Reverses Gas Flow via Key Pipeline Serving Europe

Part of a key pipeline transporting natural gas from Russia to Europe suddenly reversed its flow direction Tuesday, Reuters reported.

Flows in the Yamal-Europe pipeline, which sends natural gas to Germany via Poland, were recorded going eastward away from Europe on Tuesday morning, data from the European firm Gascade showed, Reuters reported, citing data from German network operator Gascade. Flows leaving Germany were moving at a whopping 4.3 million kilowatt-hours per hour at one section of the pipeline.

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Commentary: Russian Roulette in Ukraine

Kamov Ka-52

I admit, I was surprised by Russia’s attack on Ukraine. I thought Vladimir Putin had decided, instead of invading, to recognize the separatist republics and send in “peacekeepers.” Given the binary choice of invading or losing face, Plan C seemed the most clever, something similar to the limited “hybrid” campaign in Crimea. Instead, he has launched a massive, multipronged attack on Ukraine with the goal of “demilitarizing” the country. 

The best analogy is the Russian attack on Georgia in response to its attack on the separatist province of South Ossetia in 2008. There, Russia surprised the West with its swift, decisive, and effective action against the pro-Western Georgians. Russia succeeded in its aims to degrade Georgia’s military and strengthen the separatists. These actions sent a message to Georgian leaders and its neighbors that a dalliance with the West may come at a high cost if Russia perceives it as a threat.

A war of some kind has been going on for eight years in Ukraine. While the West is now hyper-focused on the Russian invasion and its costs, the people of Donetsk have been shelled nearly every day by Ukrainian forces since 2014. And the so-called Revolution of Dignity was the culmination of a months-long violent riot in Kiev. 

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Russia Cuts Off Key Gas Pipeline to Europe Amid Rising Tensions

The flow of natural gas through a key Russian-controlled pipeline suddenly stopped Wednesday as tensions continue to increase between Russia and the West.

The Yamal-Europe pipeline’s liquified natural gas (LNG) flows, which are operated by Russian state-run firm Gazprom and have usually been pumped westward from Russia to Germany through Poland, were halted early Wednesday, European data showed, according to Reuters. The sudden stoppage reportedly represented a setback after leaders expected the pipeline to return to its normal flow pattern.

In December 2021, Gazprom slowed the pipeline’s gas flows, which represent 10% of the region’s supply, and the company reversed the flow direction from westward to eastward. The sudden reversal sent natural gas prices, which had already spiked amid a European energy crisis, even higher.

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Commentary: Biden Is Making Russia Great Again

Under former President Donald J. Trump, for the first time in decades, the United States became a net exporter of natural gas and oil. That helped to keep global energy prices relatively low. It also gave the United States leverage over the international system in ways it had not enjoyed since before the 1970s.

Alas, the propagation of the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, along with the ceaseless lies of the Western “mainstream” media made such a prosperous and secure future under Trump an impossibility.

In the eight months since assuming office under a cloud of controversy, Joe Biden has done more to harm America’s inherent strategic advantages in the global energy market than any U.S. rival could have imagined. Under Biden, the United States has gone from being a net exporter of global energy to begging the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to produce more oil for the world to consume.

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Biden’s Past Criticism of COVID Travel Plans Boomerangs as He Imposes His Own

President Joe Biden was forced to confront his own past criticisms of travel bans on Friday when he imposed his own travel restrictions on mostly African countries where a new and concerning COVID-19 virus variant has emerged.

Back in 2020, then-candidate Biden derided then-President Donald Trump as ’xenophobic’ and argued travel bans wouldn’t ‘stop’ the pandemic I after the Republican candidate placed restrictions on travel from China and Europe amid the earliest COVID-19 outbreaks.

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European Economies Grew Faster Than U.S. As Inflation and Supply Chain Delays Crippled the Country

European economic growth outpaced the U.S. and China as COVID-19 restrictions eased and vaccination rates increased, but supply chain disruptions and inflating prices will hold back expansion in the near future, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Gross domestic product in the eurozone increased at a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 9.1% in the quarter ending in September, according to the WSJ.  In comparison, the U.S. economy grew at a 2% rate and China grew at just 1%.

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Commentary: America Gone Mad

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.”

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

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Italy Shuts Down Four Regions as Europe Tries Lighter Lockdowns

Luxury fashion boutiques, jewelry shops and most of Milan’s flagship department stores were shuttered Friday, as the center of Italy’s vibrant financial capital fell into a gray quiet on the first day of a partial lockdown in four regions aimed at stopping the coronavirus’s resurgence.

The new restrictions — which led to closures of a patchwork of nonessential businesses — allow a great deal more freedom than Italy’s near-total 10-week lockdown that started in March, but nonetheless brought recriminations from regional governments that feel unfairly targeted. In particular, the south, which was largely spared in the spring, chafed the most, despite concerns that its weaker health care system was especially vulnerable.

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Never Flagged as a Danger, Nice Attacker Traveled Unimpeded

The 21-year-old Tunisian behind the attack that killed three in a Nice, France, church had small-time run-ins with the law as a teen, but nothing that alerted Tunisian authorities to possible extremist leanings.

That missing red flag meant that when he eventually was served an expulsion order from Italy, which he reached illegally by boat, he was basically free to go where he pleased. So Ibrahim Issaoui then traveled apparently unimpeded to France.

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Europe, US Reel as Virus Infections Surge at Record Pace

Coronavirus cases around the world have climbed to all-time highs of more than 330,000 per day as the scourge comes storming back across Europe and spreads with renewed speed in the U.S., forcing many places to reimpose tough restrictions they had eased just a few months ago.

Well after Europe seemed to have largely tamed the virus that proved so lethal last spring, newly confirmed infections are reaching unprecedented levels in Germany, the Czech Republic, Italy and Poland, and most of the rest of the continent is seeing similar danger signs.

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Positive COVID-19 Cases Drop in No-Lockdown Sweden, Marking the Lowest Rate Since the Pandemic Began

Sweden’s positive coronavirus cases dropped after the country carried out a record number of COVID-19 tests recently, Reuters reported Tuesday, citing Swedish health officials.
The country saw only 1,300 positive cases out of 120,000 tests last week, representing a 1.2% positive rate, Sweden’s health agency said Tuesday, according to the Reuters report. The low number of cases is the lowest Sweden has seen since the pandemic, which originated in China, first emerged in Europe, the report noted.

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Commentary: Trump Does Not Threaten Europe’s Sovereignty, He Asks Them to Embrace It

For a perfect illustration of Europe’s collapse as a serious political force, one could do no better than to read a February 27 article by former German Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. In “The West’s Final Countdown,” Fischer warns the U.S. presidential election in November “will have an overwhelming and decisive impact on the future” of all of Western Europe and of the West generally. So far, so clichéd.

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Itxu Díaz Commentary: Dear America, Preserve These Things for the Love of God!

Itxu Diaz

They say that in Europe our things are tiny and that in America your things are super-sized, and that’s a dangerous statement, prone to error when referring to anything other than the size of our Coca-Colas.

Any further debate could lead to a conflict of unprecedented proportions and distract us from the real issue: Here in Europe we are jealous of a lot of what you have in the United States of America. In particular, three things: God, liberty and civil society. In the social democratic Europe we live in, these three pillars have all but disappeared like the sun setting at the dusk of a civilization. In their stead we are left with secularism, conditional freedom and an all-encompassing state that demands money from us day and night in the form of taxes, while all we can do is shrug our shoulders, pay up and say, as did Bartleby: “I’d prefer no to.”

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The Poorest 20 Percent of Americans Are Richer on Average Than Most Nations of Europe

A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has discovered that after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and Food Stamps – the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members. In other words, if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest.

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SURVEY: NATO Countries Want US Help but They Don’t Want to Help the US

by Mary Margret Olohan   A survey released Thursday reveals that while the majority of NATO members are content to rely on the American military for defense, they may not be willing to reciprocate and assist the United States. According to The Charles Koch Institute, the survey was conducted by YouGov and released by both the Charles Koch Institute and RealClearPolitics. The survey polled citizens of the United States, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom and Germany in honor of NATO‘s 70th-anniversary on April 4. The survey also found NATO members are unsure that military intervention in Afghanistan has been successful. “People in key European NATO countries seem to want the military benefits of the alliance but aren’t so excited about meeting its most important obligations,” said Vice President of Research and Policy at the Charles Koch Institute, William Ruger. “While they are happy to have the U.S. come to their defense, a striking number of respondents thought it would be bad to be asked to assist the U.S. if it were attacked.” Our new survey with @RealClearNews, conducted by @YouGov, polled citizens of the United States, Turkey, France, the United Kingdom, and Germany in advance of #NATO’s 70th anniversary. Learn…

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While Know-It-Alls Lecture on Tariffs Against China, Trump Dials Up New Trade Deals with UK, Europe and Japan

by Robert Romano   While President Donald Trump continues to bring the pressure to China, so far with 10 percent tariffs on $200 billion of Chinese goods shipped to the U.S., rising to 25 percent in Jan. 2019, which comes atop another 25 percent tariff on $50 billion of goods from China, he is dialing up new trade deals with traditional U.S. allies. Trade agreements with South Korea, Mexico and Canada are already going to Congress, accounting for a combined $1.4 trillion in trade with the U.S. And now, Trump has notified Congress of his intent to negotiate deals with the UK, Europe and Japan, with whom the U.S. carried on a combined $1.7 trillion in trade. These were supposed to be mutually exclusive things, according to all the experts. Trump could either put up more trade barriers or lower them, but he could not do both. Instead, Trump is proving that the U.S. can walk and chew gum at the same time as it pursues the Trump trade agenda. If nations act fairly and reciprocally with the U.S. to lower trade barriers, they can get a good deal. If not, like China, then they face tariffs. “Under President Trump’s…

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Europe Under Siege: Venetian Mayor Pledges to Send Terrorists ‘Straight to Allah’

Mayor of Venice Luigi Brugnaro isn’t taking any chances when it comes to protecting The Floating City from radical Islamic terror. The controversial mayor has ordered Venice police to shoot on sight anyone who shouts “Allahu Akbar” in public and has reportedly ordered permanent sniper nests to be stationed around the city’s famed St. Mark’s Square.…

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