Europe Walks Into the Corner

How did the European prepare for this summit? On the eve of the NATO summit, The Wall Street Journal published a piece they've been working on for months. They describe a secret marathon meeting in Brussels back in January where nearly 30 European leaders debated well past midnight about whether America, the protector of Europe, had become a threat. The man giving instructions wasn't even in the room. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the central banker, had been messaging Europe's leaders from his London phone number, from his London days, insisting that Europe had to deal with the fact that the old America isn't coming back. And that article even reports that MI6 intelligence service has been providing profiles on how to manage Donald Trump now. The net result of all of this is that the Europeans have marched into the NATO summit with a splendid new defense posture unveiled by Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary General Margot. They released it in a co-signed article in The London Economist. Of course, and then in Ankara, Rutte and Wonderleyen declared that Europe is going to stand on its own without the United States. They said the era of outsourcing Europe's defense is over and the new resilience, they talk about a stronger European defense that can produce at scale and speed now. Coverage of this kind of spills the beans on the real purpose with a headline that reads, NATO agrees to $50 billion in defense spending to placate Trump. MI6 wrote that headline, but there's just one problem. Reality has already left Europeans behind. Carney and the Europeans behind. And keep the real question in front of you. What do Erdogan and Putin understand? Backup singers can watch when the resiliency slogan meets the real world. Conservative treehouse, the state economy, with this chart showing the collapse of German industrial production. And that collapse is only going to accelerate. If Volkswagen's expected July 9th announcement delivers on the threat that 100,000 will be cut and four plants will be closed down. Great Britain, having shut down its longest virgin steel furnaces in 2024 is a single plant, which is on government life support. It could soon be the only country that can't make its own virgin steel. The steel, by the way, for warships and submarines. And Mark Carney, who's lecturing the world about middle powers standing on their own, just announced a prospective $20 to $30 billion dollar submarine contract to Germany. So deindustrializing Germany is buying submarines from deindustrializing Germany. Talk about that roared and Carney also revealed what his middle power alliance actually amounts to. A bank. He launched the defense and resilience. There's that bank, which is headquartered in Canada. Bankers answer a hollowed-out industrial base isn't a furnace or a shipyard facility. And Carney also established a new lending facility with Ukraine. So the financial architecture is going up, but the industry it's meant to serve is coming down. And how did they get here? Well, they did it to themselves. Carney's "globalism 2.0" still clings to the very policies, green energy, free trade and open borders, which have already made their industries and their cultures disappear. That's the bankruptcy of Carney's middle powers. They announce that defense industrial production is to deterrence. That VW announces massive layoffs and shutdowns, promising a war economy. They have the means to build. Which brings us back to the question we started with. What do Erdogan and Putin understand? Europe doesn't.